I’m sort of surprised Democrats haven’t snapped yet.

¯\(ツ)&#x2F;¯ Plenty of people in Trump&#x27;s own cabinet used private email servers too, but no one cared.As always, it&#x27;s only a problem when a Democrat does it.

Could you please stop using HN primarily for political battle? That&#x27;s not allowed here, regardless of what politics you&#x27;re for or against.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;?sort=byDate&amp;dateRange=all&amp;type=comment&amp;storyText=false&amp;prefix=false&amp;page=0&amp;query=primarily%20test%20by:dang" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;?sort=byDate&amp;dateRange=all&amp;type=comme...</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html</a>(This is not a comment on the current story, or any story.)

This would be unbelievable in a normal administration. The combination of flagrant lawbreaking and incompetence is just so characteristic of these clowns.No, nothing in the Clinton email scandal comes close to cabinet secretaries accidentally real-time texting imminent war plans to journalists using a non-governmental system with auto-deleting messages.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theatlantic.com&#x2F;politics&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2025&#x2F;03&#x2F;trump-administration-accidentally-texted-me-its-war-plans&#x2F;682151&#x2F;?gift=LuC6nXerkXTLQWoEoNhRFXiJBghotdYHXFYNovGnLCM&amp;utm_source=copy-link&amp;utm_medium=social&amp;utm_campaign=share" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theatlantic.com&#x2F;politics&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2025&#x2F;03&#x2F;trump-a...</a>

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;JEYep" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;JEYep</a>

The basic Signal vulnerability even if the protocol is perfectly sound is that they can push effectively silent automatic app updates to do whatever. Presumably they didn&#x27;t want to signup for this but that&#x27;s how app distribution works nowadays, and it&#x27;s certainly not fit for classified information.

Signal is primarily for end-to-end encryption.If a device has been compromised, the database can be extracted with all messages and contacts

&gt; How is that a plus?They could&#x27;ve used Telegram &#x2F;s. It&#x27;s popular with the crypto crowd after all.

How is that a plus? Maybe vs plain old SMS...But, it&#x27;s a flagrant leak of classified info. Using a medium explicitly prohibited by policy. And likely now lost to time (Signal messages can be configured to auto-delete on a timer), when all of this sort of correspondence is legally required to be retained.

This was such a weird news story to read. At least they used Signal? That&#x27;s gotta be a plus at some level.Unrelated, but I wonder how the gray hat market for Signal vulns is doing now?

If you want to put a tinfoil hat on, one could argue external state actors could have convinced the Trump admin their provided forms of communication are tapped, so they should consider alternatives. Such a state actor would know the alternatives are compromised well in advance by them.

From the story:I have never seen a breach quite like this. It is not uncommon for national-security officials to communicate on Signal. But the app is used primarily for meeting planning and other logistical matters—not for detailed and highly confidential discussions of a pending military action. And, of course, I’ve never heard of an instance in which a journalist has been invited to such a discussion.Conceivably, Waltz, by coordinating a national-security-related action over Signal, may have violated several provisions of the Espionage Act, which governs the handling of “national defense” information, according to several national-security lawyers interviewed by my colleague Shane Harris for this story. Harris asked them to consider a hypothetical scenario in which a senior U.S. official creates a Signal thread for the express purpose of sharing information with Cabinet officials about an active military operation. He did not show them the actual Signal messages or tell them specifically what had occurred.All of these lawyers said that a U.S. official should not establish a Signal thread in the first place. Information about an active operation would presumably fit the law’s definition of “national defense” information. The Signal app is not approved by the government for sharing classified information.

Early on they fired the national archivist, and deputy archivist.If what you&#x27;re doing isn&#x27;t wrong, why not record all of it for history?

Yes, it is illegal (because of the auto-deleting messages) and explicitly against the rules that every one of these people mandates for their own employees. All of them know that federal records must be preserved, and you have to manually turn on Signal&#x27;s auto-deletion feature, so this is obviously intentional criminal activity.

Can we stop with the nth-D chess nonsense? This administration proves day by day that no advanced tactics are going on, it’s literally just clueless idiots improvising because they’re way out of their league but are too self-absorbed to step back.

Yes.When you get a clearance, it is inculcated upon you that you absolutely do not leak cleared information. If you THINK something cleared, it&#x27;s best to treat it like it is.It&#x27;s possible that there is some 10D chess happening here, but I wouldn&#x27;t expect details like this to be approved for apps like Signal.

No worries. DNI was in the chat room. Also we have no idea nor can we know if this is the first use of Signal by this or other administrations. We only know because someone goofed up.So, let me say the quiet part aloud, the presence of DNI &amp; NSC heavies indicates to me that Signal is possibly not really a &quot;3rd party&quot;.

Is it wild that a 3rd party app like Signal is used for this type of communication? I feel like that&#x27;s crazy.

Possibly, yes, as these messages leaked details of ongoing military operations.

I never realized before with this photo, but space was actually made to still use the toilet sitting in that room with the tower of boxes 6 inches from your face. Straight out of a comedy sketch, almost too perfectly staged with the gaudy lights, stool colored formica, and $2 walmart shower curtain with the pressure fit rod right into the plaster. A shame for all of us that the photo came out of real life and not satire.

Pardon my ignorance but what’s the context of this picture? I don’t watch the news fwiw.

There&#x27;s a lot of useless junk that&#x27;s cleared by association

Is this worst than using Top Secret documents as toilet paper?<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;d3i6fh83elv35t.cloudfront.net&#x2F;static&#x2F;2023&#x2F;06&#x2F;FyM1h-CWYAEmQ1k.jpeg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;d3i6fh83elv35t.cloudfront.net&#x2F;static&#x2F;2023&#x2F;06&#x2F;FyM1h-C...</a>

&gt; Staggering display of incompetence and carelessness. And unfortunately, one that we’re unlikely to get much transparency about, in terms of how such an operational screwup was allowed to happen.I have a theory that&#x27;s well backed by history: when your sole qualification for applicants for important positions in any organization is how well they fondle your balls, you often miss other important data points: for example, if they can use messaging apps correctly.

&gt;Less than 8h later: “it’s just an oopsie right? No harm no foul- nothing to see here folks” <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.politico.com&#x2F;live-updates&#x2F;2025&#x2F;03&#x2F;24&#x2F;congress&#x2F;mi" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.politico.com&#x2F;live-updates&#x2F;2025&#x2F;03&#x2F;24&#x2F;congress&#x2F;mi</a>...Oh, much worse than that. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;Acyn&#x2F;status&#x2F;1904309995019411933" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;Acyn&#x2F;status&#x2F;1904309995019411933</a>Despite the fact that the NSC already said it appears to be legitimate, Hegseth is going into full attack mode against the &quot;discredited, so-called journalist&quot;.

I&#x27;ve already seen at least two posts on X with claims that this was actually all intentional and that &quot;Trump is playing 5D chess&quot;... and I think they were serious.

Sadly, were this a different administration, they would have already declared an investigation with a goal to impeach a president. Such a ridiculous double-standard with clear partisanship on display. “Both sides”…

Don’t worry - this massive fuckup will surely spark numerous congressional investigations, resignations, and trigger serious reflection by the administration on their security protocols so they will comply with the necessary recordkeeping laws, confidentiality and proper handling of classified information in the future.Oh who am I kidding.Less than 8h later: “it’s just an oopsie right? No harm no foul- nothing to see here folks” <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.politico.com&#x2F;live-updates&#x2F;2025&#x2F;03&#x2F;24&#x2F;congress&#x2F;mike-johnson-signal-chat-mistake-houthi-strike-00246179" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.politico.com&#x2F;live-updates&#x2F;2025&#x2F;03&#x2F;24&#x2F;congress&#x2F;mi...</a>

No, that was intentional.This incident was an accident.

“People have gone to jail for 1&#x2F;100th of what – even 1&#x2F;1,000th of what Hillary Clinton did.” -Hegseth“How is it Hillary Clinton can delete 33,000 government emails on a private server yet President Trump gets indicted for having documents he could declassify?” - Waltz“Nobody is above the law. Not even Hillary Clinton – even though she thinks she is,” -Rubio

Almost as bad as a private email server being used for governmental business.

No consequences: &quot;Trump stands by national security adviser Mike Waltz despite disclosing military plans&quot; - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nbcnews.com&#x2F;politics&#x2F;white-house&#x2F;trump-stands-national-security-adviser-leaked-military-plans-saying-mi-rcna197944" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nbcnews.com&#x2F;politics&#x2F;white-house&#x2F;trump-stands-na...</a>

Staggering display of incompetence and carelessness. And unfortunately, one that we’re unlikely to get much transparency about, in terms of how such an operational screwup was allowed to happen.&gt; At 11:44 a.m., the account labeled “Pete Hegseth” posted in Signal a “TEAM UPDATE.” I will not quote from this update, or from certain other subsequent texts. The information contained in them, if they had been read by an adversary of the United States, could conceivably have been used to harm American military and intelligence personnel, particularly in the broader Middle East, Central Command’s area of responsibility. What I will say, in order to illustrate the shocking recklessness of this Signal conversation, is that the Hegseth post contained operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing.&gt; …The Signal chat group, I concluded, was almost certainly real. Having come to this realization, one that seemed nearly impossible only hours before, I removed myself from the Signal group, understanding that this would trigger an automatic notification to the group’s creator, “Michael Waltz,” that I had left. No one in the chat had seemed to notice that I was there. And I received no subsequent questions about why I left—or, more to the point, who I was

No, I&#x27;m pretty sure this is actually about shipping lanes and freedom of navigation. Israel doesn&#x27;t need the help.If you read the story, one of their concerns is that if they don&#x27;t act, Israel was going to instead.

J.D. Vance is less of a person and more of a living proxy for the will of Peter Theil.

Co-incidence?<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cbsnews.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;trump-fcpa-anti-bribery-law-executive-order&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cbsnews.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;trump-fcpa-anti-bribery-law-exe...</a>

The US is primarily attacking Houthis to support Israel and not Europe. Vance knows that.J.D. Vance comes of as a rabid anti-Europeanist in his speeches, tweets, and apparently also his private messages. Here in Denmark the authorities reported that his wife, Usha Vance, is tied to an unusual money transfer and upcoming meeting with Greenlandic separatists.

The US has veto&#x27;d ceasefire calls in the UN Security Council which European countries have been in favour of (or at least abstained).Yes, Europe benefits from the strait more than the US, but it isn&#x27;t Europe&#x27;s mess in the first place.

Bailing out europe when us is the cause of so many troubles in middle east (and not only that, or at least contributed to it) is deeply ironic

&gt; So to be clear, when presented with the option to wait a month, they instead explicitly choose to act decisively for political reasons.This feels like a pretty reasonable thing for a nation-state actor to take into consideration, no? Is there any country on earth where the government altering timing of something for political convenience would be surprising?The rest of this story is hilariously egregious. The part about the government discussing its own best interests and acting in them is the least abnormal thing here.

By the bombings taking place at the time specified and the government verifying that someone was indeed added to a chat mistakenly.

It&#x27;s been acknowledged by the government that this happened. They aren&#x27;t denying anything, and are saying it was just a mistake. From WSJ:&gt; House Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.) dismissed questions about whether Waltz should face consequences for discussing the Yemen operation on an unclassified chat group that included a journalist. “Clearly I think the administration has acknowledged it was a mistake and they’ll tighten up and make sure it doesn’t happen again.”<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wsj.com&#x2F;politics&#x2F;national-security&#x2F;trump-us-war-plans-atlantic-editor-c1589558" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wsj.com&#x2F;politics&#x2F;national-security&#x2F;trump-us-war-...</a>

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;JenGriffinFNC&#x2F;status&#x2F;1904221405618577650" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;JenGriffinFNC&#x2F;status&#x2F;1904221405618577650</a>&gt; [National Security Council] statement: &quot;At this time, the message thread that was reported appears to be authentic, and we are reviewing how an inadvertent number was added to the chain. The thread is a demonstration of the deep and thoughtful policy coordination between senior officials. The ongoing success of the Houthi operation demonstrates that there were no threats to our servicemembers or our national security.&quot; - NSC Spokesman Brian HughesAnd from the article, practical verification:&gt; According to the lengthy Hegseth text, the first detonations in Yemen would be felt two hours hence, at 1:45 p.m. eastern time. So I waited in my car in a supermarket parking lot. If this Signal chat was real, I reasoned, Houthi targets would soon be bombed. At about 1:55, I checked X and searched Yemen. Explosions were then being heard across Sanaa, the capital city.And today, confirmation from Trump:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nbcnews.com&#x2F;politics&#x2F;white-house&#x2F;trump-stands-national-security-adviser-leaked-military-plans-saying-mi-rcna197944" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nbcnews.com&#x2F;politics&#x2F;white-house&#x2F;trump-stands-na...</a>&gt; &quot;Michael Waltz has learned a lesson, and he’s a good man,&quot; Trump said Tuesday in a phone interview with NBC News.&gt; When asked what he was told about how Goldberg came to be added to the Signal chat, Trump said, “It was one of Michael’s people on the phone. A staffer had his number on there.”

The wilder thing is people are surprised this is happening.

To me what&#x27;s funnier is that they believe an F&#x2F;A-18F Super Hornet needs divine intervention to go up against Ansar Allah&#x27;s &quot;top missile guy&quot;.

rendered: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mimoo.github.io&#x2F;houthi_signal&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mimoo.github.io&#x2F;houthi_signal&#x2F;</a>what I noticed is that even at the highest level people think prayers can be effective:&gt; JD Vance&gt; I will say a prayer for victory

The whole thread is WILD, and the fact that it was verified is crazy. But the actual text of the thread is horrifying:On one hand, they say they complain about &quot;bailing out Europe&quot;. But on the other hand, they explicitly moved up the timeline so they could move before other actors and take credit.&gt; &quot;If the US successfully restores freedom of navigation at great cost there needs to be some further economic gain extracted in return.&quot;So to be clear, when presented with the option to wait a month, they instead explicitly choose to act decisively for political reasons. And then they want to turn around and extort European allies over it.

It’s actually kind of a relief to at least confirm that these cronies would work like this. I.e. whatever they have in store they will probably end up shooting themselves in the foot.Well, themselves and the 53 humans who were blown up in a distant country by Star War technology.Actually, now that I think about it, no - this is terrifying and awful and just so so so stupid.

Not just days - months.We saw A1 headlines for months about Clinton&#x27;s emails. Often daily.

To be fair, it broke as an exclusive to the Atlantic about 180 minutes ago. The NYT now has it &quot;above the fold&quot; on their front page. Unlike a story coming directly from a public source, it sometimes takes a bit longer to spin up re-reporting on another outlet&#x27;s scoop like this.

The top story on Fox News right now is &quot;Trump allies move to prevent &#x27;activist judges&#x27; from overstepping presidential authority.&quot; This story isn&#x27;t even on the front page.

Thanks, and also thanks to moderators for offering it

Use <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;active">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;active</a> as your starting point. It&#x27;s not linked from the front page.

Did you read TFA? Operational details were shared on the chat but the journalist, out of concern for exactly what you describe, redacted those details from his report.

They use signal. They added the wrong person to the chat. Oh well. There’s no real disaster here. No real operational details exposed. Just some politicking that surprises no one.

This is an insane story demonstrating extraordinary incompetence, not to mention revealing some rather comical beliefs about American exceptionalism.It&#x27;s on the bottom of the third page, pushed down by flags. During any other administration, such a disastrously, criminally incompetent use of technology would have been top of the front page for days, but this administration is so cosmically incompetent that pointing it out is &quot;partisan&quot; now. Everyone is just tired of people commenting on the fact that this criminal bunch of Fox News host miscreants clearly have zero idea what they&#x27;re doing.Also...but her emails!Who do you think will sponsor the Egg roll? They just need to move the Tesla infomercial out of the way, and maybe Trump can feature some of his garbage shitcoin crypto.Jesus Christ. What a fallen idiocracy.

he said similar thing on his confirmation hearing&quot;My commitment is to not touch alcohol while I have this position&quot;

&gt; In his text detailing aspects of the forthcoming attack on Houthi targets, Hegseth wrote to the group—which, at the time, included me—“We are currently clean on OPSEC.”Simply incredible. This is wild.

I don&#x27;t believe your statement is accurate.[Edit: I interpreted &quot;curated manually&quot; to mean that dang picks each story that is on the front page. tptacek interpreted it to mean that, since users upvote and comment on stories, that&#x27;s &quot;manual curation&quot;. I interpret that as being &quot;automatic curation&quot;, that is, an algorithm picks the front page stories, even though it&#x27;s based on users&#x27; upvotes and comments. I cannot prove which of these two forms belter meant. Naturally, I prefer to think that it was the one I read it as, but I can squint hard enough to see tptacek&#x27;s version.]

It&#x27;s not currently flagged, though.  (Or at least, it&#x27;s not currently marked [flagged].)

As far as I know, if submissions get flagged they get downranked. Not sure about the details.

It does really feel like we are men watching our women and children accosted. We feel impotent as the public currently.

To what end? How is this newsworthy any more? It has the President&#x27;s blessing - that&#x27;s all you need now.If literally storming your government building, threating your representatives and injuring police officers isn&#x27;t punishable any more what is?

That is absolutely wild. How is this not on the front page?

Of course they do, but you can&#x27;t set official government apps to illegally delete messages after a week.Edit: Seems like they are supposed to use Microsoft Teams <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dodcio.defense.gov&#x2F;Portals&#x2F;0&#x2F;Documents&#x2F;Library&#x2F;Memo-UseOfTextMessagesOnMobileDevices-RM.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dodcio.defense.gov&#x2F;Portals&#x2F;0&#x2F;Documents&#x2F;Library&#x2F;Memo-...</a>. Also -&gt; When mission needs or the effective conduct of DoD business cannot be adequately supported by Microsoft Teams Chat, SMS texting may be used in accordance with DoDI 8170.01. In such cases, a complete copy of the record must be forwarded to an official DoD electronic messaging account of the user within 20 days of the record&#x27;s original creation or transmission in accordance with Section 2911 of Title 44 U.S.C, and Component processes. The complete copy of the record includes the content of the message and required metadata, and the record must be retrievable and usable in compliance with the applicable retention schedule approved by the Archivist of the United States. DoD Component heads shall ensure that DoD users are provided guidance on their Component&#x27;s processes for forwarding complete copies of records originating in SMS texts.

&gt; not exactly world war level apps.And what is?

They do, and they are certified for this kind of communication.Is Signal even FedRAMP? I don&#x27;t think it is.

The DoD or Pentagon don’t have their own messaging apps? Maybe our government doesn’t spend enough on tech. To me this is the same as if this were happening on Zoom or Discord, since these are not exactly world war level apps.Finally, the echoes of Dr Strangelove are strong with this one. A veritable board room of talking heads that don’t ever really talk about life or death, but just the material numbers of raw commerce or messaging (deterrence) .

&gt; what else do they illegally delete?Likely everything they can. Rules are for fools in this admin.

The obvious follow up is what else do they illegally delete?If they’re doing it so blatantly to plan for attacks that will eventually be public, contain no conspiracies or illegal activity, and will be used to dunk on Biden, then what else are they automatically deleting?Plus, if China&#x2F;Russia&#x2F;Iran&#x2F;NK weren’t targeting US officials phones and Signal, now they certainly are.

You can already guess what consequences they&#x27;re going to face: none.

Please FOIA the administration&#x27;s process for meeting records requirements while using Signal. People need to call them out on this or nothing happens.

But they are extremely transparent. All of their actions are clearly in furtherance of corruption, stealing, and helping Russia (and China) destroy the United States.Unfortunately we also live in the time with the largest mass media consumption (social media), all but guaranteeing their followers keep rationalizing their actions with a litany of talking points rather than understanding straightforward criticism said by someone on the &quot;other&quot; team.

On the other hand, directly sharing war plans with the press is about as transparent as you can get.

Wait, you’re saying the Trump administration might be breaking a rule? Pretty wild accusation

&quot;But her e-mails.&quot;&gt; It’s best to understand that fascists see hypocrisy as a virtue. It’s how they signal that the things they are doing to people were never meant to be equally applied.&gt; It’s not an inconsistency. It’s very consistent to the only true fascist value, which is domination.&gt; It’s very important to understand, fascists don’t just see hypocrisy as a necessary evil or an unintended side-effect.&gt; It’s the purpose. The ability to enjoy yourself the thing you’re able to deny others, because you dominate, is the whole point.&gt; For fascists, hypocrisy is a great virtue — the greatest.* <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mastodon.social&#x2F;@JuliusGoat&#x2F;109551955251655267" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mastodon.social&#x2F;@JuliusGoat&#x2F;109551955251655267</a>

Trump&#x27;s razor: The opposite of what he says is closer to the truth.

Hahaha...it has always been a farce, just like Twitter and Musk are for free speech and DOGE is about transparency.

SO much for &#x27;the most transparent administration in history&#x27;, not that I bought into that claim in the first place. Seems like a violation of multiple public record-keeping laws.

It&#x27;s the whole point of using Signal and Starlink WiFi.

&gt; Waltz set some of the messages in the Signal group to disappear after one week, and some after four. That raises questions about whether the officials may have violated federal records law: Text messages about official acts are considered records that should be preserved.I suspect that this was the point of their using Signal, to avoid preservation of records.

It only &quot;didn&#x27;t matter&quot; because the journalist had the good sense to keep quiet until after the operation was complete.  And continues to keep some of the conversation secret.  Imagine if Hegseth had accidentally CC&#x27;ed somebody aligned with Iran?

One of my takeaways is that &quot;national security secrets&quot; really aren&#x27;t that important. The Secretary of Defense was in on this. Whatever was in that chat just doesn&#x27;t matter, except to manage the reporting on it.I call on Bart Gellman to dump the Snowden document repository he&#x27;s got. Clearly nothing in it matters, if this was so casually compromised.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;AP0H4" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;AP0H4</a>

Though the channel wasn’t cleared for the level of information that was discussed.WebEx was cleared up to the equivalent of Restricted. The conversation likely reached the level of Secret or Top Secret.Two of the generals were disciplined. (4-figure fine)

A thing using authorized channels that was spied on by a different state has practically nothing in common with this.(Yes, it probably shouldn&#x27;t have been an authorized channel, but it was.)

Reminds me of <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;German_Taurus_leak" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;German_Taurus_leak</a>„Among the topics the officials discussed in their conversation, conducted using standard commercial Cisco Webex video conferencing software, were the presence of UK and US military personnel in Ukraine and the potential use of Taurus missiles to blow up the Crimean Bridge.“

This is true absolutelyOne would hope indeed- I do wonder on that ......There&#x27;s another observation though- Salt Typhoon compromised wiretap infrastructure - before Signal, there&#x27;s no doub&#x27;t some stuff like this occured over text messages-
Because of everyone&#x27;s efforts to go to Signal- even if it&#x27;s for the message disappearing- with this, with military branches pushing it hard- with Sweden&#x27;s Miltary pushing it, etc(for non sensitive stuff)- there&#x27;s so much of that , that the attack surface overall is massively reduced. In short, if there&#x27;s going to be stuff outside of vetted systems- running that sort of stuff Signal- likely still helps. 
(I&#x27;m reminded again, of the JD Vance interviews where he let slip that he&#x27;d been targeted ,and was informed about it by agencies- but that he was good because of his Signal usage. Now, I don&#x27;t know what measures he takes to avoid zero day exploits and whatnot- the TLAs would inform him of that- but from what he was saying, it sounds like they were sure he wasn&#x27;t compromised by that.)(I&#x27;m aware a serious targeted effort would be more intricate than Salt Typhoon&#x2F; Trying to use the country&#x27;s own general Wire tapping capability to target the VP)Edit: Also, this reveals a bit about psyche- J.D.Vance somewhat ribbed the president- there is probably pressure TO use Signal, so a record of him criticizing the President can&#x27;t be found out by the President or those more allied with the President who could then start retribution- I imagine dynamics like that, which are human behavior- -ultimately are what absolutely drive all of this.

Even if we are generous and assume Signal&#x27;s protocols and entire communication infrastructure are 100% safe and cannot be compromised, any one single person in the group chat using Signal on a compromised device invalidates all of that.The fact that Signal was used is less concerning to me personally than the fact that they had this group chat outside of the overall safety umbrella of fully end-to-end vetted systems.Though the use of Signal is still concerning in that any official system they would otherwise use would have (one would hope) made it far harder if not impossible to accidentally leak the conversation to a random third party.

On desktop you can just read process memory and extract all the keys and tokens.

It&#x27;s not that secure. If someone has a desktop signal client it has been possible to just access attachments via the file system; they were stored with obfuscated names but no encryption. They may have fixed this since I tested it ~6 months ago.

&gt; As for subtle push app updates by Signal themselves being a vector- i&#x27;d think the Open Source nature of the app prevent thatThe lack of reproducible builds for Signal’s apps has been a topic of discussion for quite some time:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;signalapp&#x2F;Signal-iOS&#x2F;issues&#x2F;641" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;signalapp&#x2F;Signal-iOS&#x2F;issues&#x2F;641</a>

&gt; A lot of it may be for the auto disappearing messages,except that the conversation in question, and similar such conversations, are required by federal law to be archived.So explicitly choosing a communication channel that violates federal law for conducting federal business is, umm, sketchy?

AI spotted those comments on reddit- note: those were not my words about Eve(which i&#x27;m unfamiliar with!)Point taken though , the commenters who said that were ...obviously..anecdotal, -though possibly still more the norm...)

&gt;&lt;tangent opening line of my comment&gt; From people on Reddit: Something that blows my mind- but is fully true &quot;Hell, I&#x27;ve been in fucking EVE Online alliances that had better opsec than this.&quot; &quot;I&#x27;ll raise you one: I&#x27;ve never been in any EVE alliance that didn&#x27;t have better opsec than this.&quot;That is some seriously selective memory<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;Eve&#x2F;comments&#x2F;4cdmmc&#x2F;wtf_is_going_on_the_answer&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;Eve&#x2F;comments&#x2F;4cdmmc&#x2F;wtf_is_going_on...</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;Eve&#x2F;comments&#x2F;4dvoj5&#x2F;sma_diplosleadership_leaking_shit_all_over&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;Eve&#x2F;comments&#x2F;4dvoj5&#x2F;sma_diplosleade...</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;Eve&#x2F;comments&#x2F;4f3epd&#x2F;a_different_kind_of_chat_log_leak_and_a_message&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;Eve&#x2F;comments&#x2F;4f3epd&#x2F;a_different_kin...</a>And here&#x27;s some more recent ones<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;Eve&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1f6t1vw&#x2F;your_relays_are_not_nearly_as_secure_as_you_hope&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;Eve&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1f6t1vw&#x2F;your_relays_ar...</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;Eve&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1g3p232&#x2F;alcoholic_satan_kicked_from_csm_18_barred_from&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;Eve&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1g3p232&#x2F;alcoholic_sata...</a>Major alliance infrastructure and security is probably better than most US corporations but doesn&#x27;t come close to secure government systems, obviously

&lt;tangent opening line of my comment&gt; From people on Reddit: Something that blows my mind- but is fully true
&quot;Hell, I&#x27;ve been in fucking EVE Online alliances that had better opsec than this.&quot;
&quot;I&#x27;ll raise you one: I&#x27;ve never been in any EVE alliance that didn&#x27;t have better opsec than this.&quot;..I noted Board Games(Secret Hitler, for example) require better opsec. So do card games- it&#x27;s mindblowing to note this too...[Main comment by me - technical outlook]
This is not a surprise at all- there were reports that the first Trump administration was using Signal to communicate, and that it was a a risk as messages can be totally wiped and not kept for records keeping.-From an infosec standpoint- this is more notable than I think people are giving it credit- the fact that the Vice President(Well, maybe not him, he notably admittted in interviews during the presidential campaign, that he&#x27;d been briefed by three letter agencies on Salt Typhoon tageting him, but that he was secure because he used Signal) - the director of national intelligence- and several others- use Signal.it&#x27;s one thing for Congress, Sweden&#x27;s Military, and apparently our own military branches to push Signal heavily for non-sensitive stuff-But when those around three letter agencies -and the groups that would be interested in finding compromises- are using it, that screams to me that it&#x27;s considered not that easy to attack- which is a point towards SignalSo then the final thing to secure are the endpoints- and of course the risk is a zero day exploit targeting someone. As for subtle push app updates by Signal themselves being a vector- i&#x27;d think the Open Source nature of the app prevent that - if the infrastructure for pushing updates is open source as well especially.Again though- if the White House is using Signal- they likely KNOW most of what their own Three Letter agencies can and can&#x27;t do(to a point)- so when people in the know are using it- that is telling.A lot of it may be for the auto disappearing messages, admittedly- but that&#x27;s notable. And yes, I&#x27;m aware Mark Zuckerberg has been known to move conversations off of WhatsApp, to Signal - again, maybe for the disappearing messages(and lack of a report function which would send part of a convo to FB&#x2F;Meta to my understanding)- but possibly, for the security and lack of meta data being better from a attack surface standpoint

The nickname Stupid Watergate will never die

Well I think it&#x27;s very common for representatives to not directly reply after a certain incident, because they don&#x27;t have all the details yet and they want to take time to form a proper response. Don&#x27;t see how this is specific to Trump.

To circumlocute his habitual evasion, try offering an active phrasing: “Do you have a replacement in mind for Secretary Hegseth?” would be one way to prevent the passive-aggressive “I don’t really know Peter B. Hegseth”. When Trump “doesn’t know” someone, it’s a very final thing.

&gt; Trump wasn&#x27;t aware of this leak (or denies knowledge of it) until questioned at a press conference earlier today.Trump routinely denies knowledge of things he doesn&#x27;t want to talk about, even things that he has previously demonstrated knowledge about. It&#x27;s a standard deflection that he never gets called out on or significant pushback on the implications of his claimed lack of knowledge, so he keeps doing it.

By the revealed content of the chat, Trump wasn&#x27;t aware of the decision his subordinates made.  They just intuited Trump&#x27;s wishes and dropped bombs based on that.

Even worse, Trump wasn&#x27;t aware of this leak (or denies knowledge of it) until questioned at a press conference earlier today. And instead of promising an investigation, the best he can do is throw some weak insults at The Atlantic.BUTTERY MALES indeed.

Under US federal law it is generally not a crime for a person without a security clearance to receive or store classified information. The legal problems come in when they solicit it or take some other action to obtain it.

My theory is that he had to balance the journalistic scoop of the century with the risk of being arrested for illegally accessing&#x2F;storing classified information. If they had noticed before he published the story then he could have been vanned and the public told that he had infiltrated a secure channel, and who would be able to say otherwise? MAGA people would cheerfully call for his execution.

My guess is that he was consulting their lawyers during this. IANAL but it might have been a crime if he did not leave the group as soon as he was sure it was real. He keeps mentioning that he was not certain this is real until the first attacks. After the first attack, he could not continue this argument.

He was probably worried about the legal ramifications of not doing so, though these days he may be more likely to get sent off to some El Salvadoran prison for writing the article and exposing their staggering incompetence than he would be for continuing to knowingly listen in on the chat.

So, like the other 18 people in the chat?

Knowingly keeping sensitive US national security data on a personal phone would be a very bad idea.

The fourt cases related to Watergate established that receiving classified information is not illegal, and affirmed 1A rights. I&#x27;d argue it&#x27;s a exactly the same as a journalist overhearing this motley crew discussing the war plan in the halls of the White House without being aware there&#x27;s a journalist nearby. I wouldn&#x27;t bank on the current supreme court to uphold precedence, or the current administration persecuting the journalist for &quot;hacking&quot; into a &quot;secure&quot; government chat group - which is what they&#x27;ll allege without evidence. I suspect the journalist cares more about national security than the cowboys in the chat group, and is acutely aware that they are a target for hacking by nation-states, which would leak classified information.

There should be protection for people that receive information in this manner that is equivalent to whistleblower protection. No law abiding citizen should ever be prosecuted in favor of protecting a government fuck up.

That&#x27;s the part you&#x27;re concerned with? Criminal liability of the journalist while the alcoholic was sending government secrets over a signal group chat to unverified members?

&quot;his continued membership in the channel demonstrates intent to receive the information&quot;Nope. His authority as a journalist prevails. He published the article -- so his intent was to do his job as a journalist, and the public has a right to know.National security or institutional trust was not damaged by the journalist -- only by the ignorance of the politicians now running our military.The information was newsworthy and in the public interest.Publication did not cause harm (and you might argue that dropping actual bombs caused much more harm).The information was obtained legally and without foresight.The journalist has an obligation to report the information if it serves the public interest, especially if it reveals systemic failures, endangers democracy, or impacts public policy.

As soon as he realizes (or a reasonable person would realize) that the group chat is not a hoax, and that he is getting confidential military information over that channel, his continued membership in the channel demonstrates intent to receive the information, which makes anything he writes about it in the future legally problematic. It&#x27;s complicated and it&#x27;s not like just receiving classified information from a source is intrinsically criminal, but it&#x27;ll be the entire fact pattern he&#x27;d be confronted with by prosecutors.

&gt; Sounds like he received the message purposefully and pretends it was an mistake?Why would he have been added to the group? For what purpose would the current National Security Advisor have to bring in an outsider to discussions that ended up involving almost certainly classified data?&gt; 2h is a lot but not that much timeHe was added to the group two days (13 March) before the strikes (15 March), not two hours.

Sounds like he received the message purposefully and pretends it was an mistake?2h is a lot but also not that much time, everything is prepared already it’s more a countdown I would say. What would be a usual timeframe to inform the people you want to inform about an immediate event which is going to happen?

He might serves his country better by waiting for them to incriminate themselves more.

Jeff Goldberg loves his country more than he cares about a &quot;source.&quot;

Might boost their subs. This legit got me to resubscribe to the Atlantic.

What legal ramifications?Are you saying it&#x27;s a crime for someone else to accidentally add you to their chat?

One lawyer I follow on Bluesky mentioned the longer he stayed on more exposed he became to legal ramifications. Also, this involves national security which courts may treat differently than other issues.I am more surprised that he did not save this incident for a future book

Hard to say.  Sharing it may have lead to saving of servicemen lives since it may cause an abort.  Not like it is a self defense mission, attacks on Houthi is totally optional meddling that likely breeds more &#x27;terrorists&#x27;.

He did the right thing. He&#x27;s obviously of a certain political bent, but recognized this kind of leak could lead to the loss of American service member lives. He didn&#x27;t share everything from the chat. I respect him for what he did.And I agree with your assessment. Morons...

Imagine if he stays and obtains some critical information that later happens to get leaked. You&#x27;re now a prime suspect for the leak, possibly facing charges of something like treason. I think leaving was the wise choice.

They&#x27;ve been bombing the Houthis for quite a few days now

&gt; If anything, I&#x27;m a bit surprised that Jeff Goldberg burned this source.&gt; If anything, I&#x27;d suspect that he&#x27;d keep the channel open as long as he could.&gt; Or, he&#x27;s got other channels that work better.The Signal chat group was called the “Houthi PC small group.” It appeared to be a short-term, mission-specific group rather than a long-term, open-ended group. Thus, it&#x27;s unlikely that much more information would be gained in the future. Goldberg&#x27;s inclusion in the chat was the main story here, not the specific details revealed to Goldberg, many of which he kept confidential.

Agreed.Very similar to this case in Australia.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;media&#x2F;2018&#x2F;feb&#x2F;02&#x2F;abc-agrees-to-return-secret-documents-found-in-old-filing-cabinets" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;media&#x2F;2018&#x2F;feb&#x2F;02&#x2F;abc-agrees-to-...</a>The ABC had a public interest duty to publicise everything, instead they left 99% unread and returned the contents to the government.Pathetic.

I&#x27;m betting that Goldberg realized, once it was confirmed real, that his only feasible defense was exiting the chat and going public immediately. Otherwise, someone notices he&#x27;s there, and he&#x27;s arrested by ICE and disappeared to El Salvador, or worse.In many ways, being a public enemy of the Trump Admin is the safest enemy to be.

The Atlantic is not a typical publication. It is run by serious people.

He could have continued for weeks, imho he did the good citizen and responsible journalist thing here. Made the public aware before it really got out of hand.

&gt; I&#x27;ve seen better communications discipline from volunteer open source projects than this.Because those people are likely competent. The problem with hiring mostly yes-men&#x2F;women is competence is secondary.

&quot;If anything, I&#x27;d suspect that he&#x27;d keep the channel open as long as he could.&quot;The real story is that he was added to the channel, so it doesn&#x27;t surprise me that he didn&#x27;t try to lurk indefinitely. I&#x27;m guessing these things are also ad-hoc, so perhaps the well was already dry after the attack?But this is some truly amateur-hour shit. I&#x27;ve seen better communications discipline from volunteer open source projects than this.

I thought that at first, but the group was clearly temporary, intended for this particular military action. There was likely little value to staying, and as other comments note, a nonzero risk of (likely unsuccessful) prosecution.

This is the type of thing that can get you on jail or even (quietly) killed during a normal US administration. I&#x27;m not surprised Goldberg GTFO intermediately.

Dunno, I was surprised how digitally literate these old dudes are to the point of writing long autistic messages in Signal, so long that the author can quote them only as &quot;wrote a lengthy message&quot;. Even normie programmers of all people can communicate only with meat sounds.Who complained here that email can&#x27;t be replaced by messengers, because you can&#x27;t write long messages there? Here&#x27;s a counterexample.

If anything, I&#x27;m a bit surprised that Jeff Goldberg burned this source.If anything, I&#x27;d suspect that he&#x27;d keep the channel open as long as he could.Or, he&#x27;s got other channels that work better.All the same, I mean, wow. These guys are just morons here, there&#x27;s really no other way around it. I&#x27;m trying to think of a charitable way to spin this and I&#x27;ve got nothing.Like, very clearly, these people are going to get service-members killed due to their idiocy

I mean im not shocked by neither the fact this happend nor the content. it portraits the staff exactly as i would imagine them.Tho i still find it kinda amusing that this is the finally proofs that the average security invested joe has a better opsec than the highest ranking us gov officials.

Like the parent said, a tech-related opsec failure at this level is absolutely something a &#x27;good hacker&#x27; would find interesting.

There was a post about George Foreman in the front page the other day so why not this one?

&gt;A shame it is probably getting flamed and downvoted over partisan reasonsIs this the forum for this type of news?<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html</a>...<pre><code> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one&#x27;s intellectual curiosity.

 Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they&#x27;re evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they&#x27;d cover it on TV news, it&#x27;s probably off-topic.</code></pre>

Is there a place where all these rules are written? There&#x27;s so much supposed meta-HN knowledge in the discussions

this site has some governors in place to prevent a flood of low quality engagement. If things rise too fast, they get pushed down a little and cool off and rise back up. No great conspiracy as I found this thread at the top of HN a day later.

People often flag politics-related posts because the comments are invariably of low quality. The interesting discussion is generally about technical issues, but that is usually overwhelmed by political opinions. This happens on both sides of the spectrum.There are lots of other places to discuss politics.

304 votes, 75 comments 3 hours after posting and this is already being thrown all the way back to 134 rank on the front page with some 2-3 day old posts. This is very clearly hacker news: a case of opsec slipup in easily the worst fashion coming straight from the SecDef (or one representing the SecDef). A shame it is probably getting flamed and downvoted over partisan reasons, although I know there are many conservatives here who probably don&#x27;t enjoy these constant leopards eating face moments they&#x27;ve unleashed and am not surprised they&#x27;d be acting out and flagging embarrassing posts.

Is that a SCIF in your pocket or are you just displeased to see me

Film and tv are safe, this was done by political appointees. The civil servants (you know, the &quot;deep state&quot;) are much better about it because it&#x27;s their job.

The most excellent steak can be ruined by an amateur chef easily.I agree with your point on the spin, although I wonder if the Signal angle is the only thing even republicans can agree with to be kinda bad, given that even the most egregious reports on the current administration don’t really cause as much as a raised brow there. So to make it a story that doesn’t just resonate in the liberal echo chamber, include something despicable to both camps.

Sorry are you claiming that the United States intelligence community is incompetent and that anyone who things otherwise is poorly educated?What are you basing this on?

&gt; on the supreme competence, sophistication and wealth of the Pentagon, NSA and CIA.Agencies with no oversight are seen as competent? That&#x27;s news to me. There&#x27;s a definite waste of taxpayer dollars on propaganda to try to make this point publicly but I didn&#x27;t think anyone was poorly educated enough to actually believe it.

&gt; Turns out US military strategy is the same as me and my mates setting up a bar date.Typically these positions are filled by highly qualified people with decades of experience.This administration is not typical. They deliberately chose inexperienced people who would be loyal above all else.Selecting for incompetence was part of the plan, and it’s been obvious from the start.Hegseth was a Fox News host, not someone qualified for this position.This story is stranger than fiction.

This is bad news for entire genres of books, TV shows and movies that are based on the supreme competence, sophistication and wealth of the Pentagon, NSA and CIA.Turns out US military strategy is the same as me and my mates setting up a bar date.It&#x27;s a disturbing leak in itself but i take issue with the journalist obsessing over the tool of choice whilst ignoring the actual strategizing.The casual way in which a mass murder is planned. The emphasis on &quot;messaging&quot; and how to spin this on Biden and Europe. The teenage-like emojis to celebrate acts of war.This administration looks bad from the outside but through this leak we can see that their shocking press moments are still the polished and spun versions of a reality that is far more sick.

&quot;Don&#x27;t make me think&quot; was certainly the guiding principle at play here.

UI could be considered failure if we were talking about casual gossip. Particular UI shouldn&#x27;t be the issue because the App was not supposed to be used for this.
These should be professionals. Issue was between keyboard and chair.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;xpZHl" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;xpZHl</a>

i think this is likely what happened, though i also find it just as plausible that he was fat-fingered or drunk-added into the group (i’ve been added to group chats accidentally by both these “methods”)

I&#x27;ve seen Jamieson Greer as US Trade Representative (same initials) and Jeffrey Kruse of the Defense Intelligence Agency (same first name) mentioned as possibly being the intended invitee.

There is someone with the same initials, not with the same name. I saw someone else point out a potential candidate here but I don&#x27;t recall the exact name.

100%. Let&#x27;s not blame Signal where it&#x27;s on you to only invite the proper potentially anonymous contact you want to communicate with. Very different goals.

Signal could fundraise on new flair for DOGE implants, cabinet members, and folks who have side-loaded FSB certs.

This also highlights why the conversation being held on Signal is so bad. Imagine if &quot;J G&quot; expressed concerns about going forward with the attack. Making actual decisionmaking on go or no go over a non-classified system is insanely stupid.

I mean, I expect the actual approved governmental secure messaging apps would make it much harder to accidentally add a journalist to the thread, so I don’t know if this is a Signal problem per se.

This is what I started thinking last night. Any of the people who were added to the chat could be disgruntled and add a reporter to the chat to leak it. Is there even any log of who added who to a chat? There might not even be any way to pin it on the leaker. If the leaker had been involved in several such chats and knew the intent was to intentionally violate federal recordkeeping laws, not only would this accomplish the leak, but there might not even be any record of who caused the leak.

Goldberg is not a fan of TrumpI did not believe there was any way this was done accidentally...

By default, yes.  You can change the permissions so only group admins can add people.

If they have admin privileges. The person who creates a group has them by default, and can grant them to anyone else, admins can add, remove, and grant or revoke admin privileges and set group name&#x2F;description parameters, and disappearing message configuration. Yes, you could have a group where the founder revokes admin privileges for themselves and then nobody can make changes to the group (although individual members can leave and delete the history on their own devices). Signal users can also delete their own messages.

Can users in a group add&#x2F;invite others in? My firth though was someone doing it on the sly, to leak deliberately.

I think the poster was talking about the shock of the lapse in security, not the shock of houthi air strikes

&gt; Setting aside the obvious shock of the actual subject, I&#x27;m going to try the herculean task of bringing this back to being a HN-related topic...Is that so shocking? I watch often some forums on reddit related to combat footage, not frequently but enough to see various patterns. Before houthis started attacking shipping lanes, there were tons of videos of them kicking ass of Saudi military but way more often some subsaharan African mercenaries in their uniforms. Like, really badly kicking ass, smart ambushes, devastating results even on heavy machinery. The opposite side had almost nothing.Then with change of this, the tone and content turned 180 degrees. Almost always absolutely precise laser guided bomb strikes even if for 1-2 guys seemingly in the middle of nowhere, and a lot of them popping up all the time (to the tune of few every single day). Always titled cca &#x27;Saudi air force doing XYZ&#x27;. Like sure, if you are clueless and don&#x27;t know state of their army, their discipline, level of training and so on you can believe that.I didn&#x27;t believe this since the switch was sharp, US is simply flying there for quite some time, together with Saudi air force. TBH I don&#x27;t care, just sharing observations. No way we can know hard facts obviously, but its easy to connect those very few dots. A bit of failure from opsec point of view - if you do this stuff, at least keep it secret and not broadcasting to whole world so politicians can keep big smiles and grand statements, at least for clueless civilians who barely know where Yemen lies on the map.What others write it matches my observation - “Houthi PC small group”, seemingly short term group about specific attack. US attacks themselves are already happening for a year and something.

Then it&#x27;s a good thing there&#x27;s not an Abdul-Malik al-Houthi in the administration, as they might have included the wrong person on the private group chat.

&gt; This sounds less like a Signal problem than an information organization problem. Signal can only show what&#x27;s in its datastore (your contact list).Signal&#x27;s insistence on punting on the trust&#x2F;identity problem is a Signal problem IMO, particularly when its advocates make such a fuss (when it suits them) about being a properly end-to-end cryptosystem and not just a toolbox of algorithms. Most of the systems it&#x27;s competing with make at least some attempt at providing a chain of trust so you don&#x27;t have to individually verify everyone you want to talk to.

Skype solves it with an invite link. If you want to send an account, you take its invite link and send it, thus making a manual web of trust without search.

This sounds less like a Signal problem than an information organization problem. Signal can only show what&#x27;s in its datastore (your contact list).I just checked on Android - if you try to add someone to a group chat, it shows their name and profile pic.One potential Signal-side wrinkle is that it allows you to add people to a group chat who are in another chat you&#x27;re in, but who aren&#x27;t in your contacts list. There are strangers I was apparently at a dinner party with years ago who are eligible to be added to a group chat. If Jeffrey Goldberg has his Signal profile name set to JG and he wasn&#x27;t in Mike Waltz&#x27;s phone with a more specific name, that could lead to this mistake.

&gt; Most pundits feel like this administration is trying to keep things out of FOIA and discoverability reach which has its own problems.I don&#x27;t think we need to ponder so hard about this.This administration is headed by a man who kept stolen TS&#x2F;SCI national secrets in a bathroom at his house.A fish rots from the head.

<pre><code> &gt; &quot;Came from outside, don&#x27;t trust this&quot;
</code></pre>
meanwhile every company and their dog do this, for 2 lines worth of text you have to go through this litter and &quot;think of the trees&quot; and &quot;if this email was not intended for you we will deny ever having written it&quot; etc...

&gt; Most pundits feel like this administration is trying to keep things out of FOIA and discoverability reach which has its own problems.Similar issues have come up in the UK about Boris Johnson et al using Whatsapp etc during Covid, and one of the things they said in their defence did have some value - at least in relation to the idea of unminuted discussions.ie these chat&#x27;s are what used to be corridor&#x2F;bar&#x2F;cafe conversations - ie unminuted discussions are old as government - it&#x27;s just they are now happening on various messaging apps rather than in person, at much faster pace, and with more people involved.So I think it&#x27;s a mistake to think its reasonable that all discussions should be recorded - the real question here is how to get the right balance - and make sure any decision making meetings are recorded - rather than the chat around the decision.The way it worked in the past - was to get a proper decision you needed all the people in the same room - and so it was automatically minuted as it was an official meeting ( but not the chat at coffee before the meeting ) - now it&#x27;s possible to get people together virtually that distinction is blurred.Not sure what the answer is - but just saying it&#x27;s probably unreasonable to expect all communications to be recorded - people need space to float ideas, or bitch like normal people - however on the other hand it is essential key meetings are minuted - not just for transparency - but for the study of history.

&gt; So either &#x27;Kremlin Free WiFi&#x27; or the local cell tower providing connectivityOr just let someone look over your shoulder?

Entirely possible. Which is why Government services for &#x27;chat&#x27; explicitly don&#x27;t allow contacts to appear who aren&#x27;t already in the government. You&#x27;ve also no doubt seen email as it appears in Government inboxes with the big red banner &quot;Came from outside, don&#x27;t trust this&quot; kinds of things will all the links disabled.Two things that are really troublesome. The first, as Josh Marshall of TPM points out, &quot;No one on that chat asked &#x27;Why are we doing this on Signal?&#x27;&quot; which suggests that it isn&#x27;t the first time Signal was used for &#x27;off books&#x27; stuff and that perhaps there are many such conversations. The second is that the conversation was set up while one of the participants was in the Kremlin waiting to talk to Putin. So either &#x27;Kremlin Free WiFi&#x27; or the local cell tower providing connectivity?Most pundits feel like this administration is trying to keep things out of FOIA and discoverability reach which has its own problems.So yes, tools for Government communications don&#x27;t have this problem, hell even Microsoft Teams on their US cloud get better protection than this.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Jamieson_Greer" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Jamieson_Greer</a>US Trade Representative

I believe they meant to contact Jamieson Greer (JG), and maybe Waltz had both of them listed by initials? That&#x27;s the leading theory.

When adding people to a chat, it shows the contact list from the device, with avatars. It is also possible to manually enter a phone number or username.It&#x27;s very likely that senior government officials have a phone with journalists saved in the contacts. It&#x27;s easy to imagine why there are rules against using the same phone for secret war stuff, yet here we are.

It could happen on Whatsapp. I&#x27;ve seen a lot of groups where everybody is an admin.

I don&#x27;t use Signal, and am unfamiliar with the UI&#x2F;UX.However, it seems more plausible to me that Jeffrey Goldberg is in someone&#x27;s contact list from previous on-purpose leaks (to control narrative, etc, typical &quot;anonymous sources say&quot; stuff) - and was accidentally added to this group.

Agree, though I 100% see it on PC too, when web pages try to override standard scroll behavior to do some visual trick at the expense of well tested platform and browser scrolling support.

I&#x27;m putting my money on somebody fat-fingering the wrong contact. Maybe it&#x27;s just me but I swear every phone I&#x27;ve ever owned has had extremely unreliable UIs, stemming from a combination of phantom touches being detected, and the phone moving buttons around as I&#x27;m trying to interact with it, as if it&#x27;s on dialup line struggling to load somebody&#x27;s Sonic the Hedgehog fanpage on GeoCities one gif at a time in 1996. And it&#x27;s just phones too, this never happens on my PCs.Of course, none of this excuses the failure to verify the identities of everybody in their chat, the choice to use a (probably) unvetted app on a (probably) unvetted personal device, or any other of a number of basic opsec rules that should be obvious to anybody who is vested with the authority to order an airstrike on the other side of the planet.

Setting aside the obvious shock of the actual subject, I&#x27;m going to try the herculean task of bringing this back to being a HN-related topic...My guess is that there is someone named Jeffrey Goldberg in the NatSec team (or high up, it seems like a common combination of first and last name at least), and likely that they meant to add him, rather than the EDITOR IN CHIEF of the Atlantic of all people. Could this be a UI&#x2F;UX thing with Signal? (not differentiating between two Jeffrey Goldbergs on your contact list?).

But the backfire is catastrophic: every leaker in DoD can now claim as a defense that their leak must be a political appointee up there attaching docs to now-expunged Signal chats. That is now both Occam and Bayes rational.

I don&#x27;t think you deserve the downvotes considering that would be very in character for this administration. That said, it does not seem plausible considering the number of officials they&#x27;d have to incriminate to burn Goldberg, not to mention the airing of so much dirty laundry. Seems like a better plan would be to go to him directly with a phony leaker.

And then, the natural course of action is to ban them.

Could&#x27;ve been a setup to get The Atlantic to leak government secrets...

Nothing will happen. If something does happen, it will be an attack on the author of the article.

Colossal fuckup on many levels. Heads should roll. This kind of thing puts people in our military service at undue risk.

A Trump cabinet member doing the same? Not even a slap on the wrist.

Yeah, the next time I have to submit a SAAR form for military network access, and they request my Information Awareness Annual Training certification as an attachment, it&#x27;s going to be hard to not laugh in their face. We were getting scolded about &quot;not even searching the &#x27;Net for the content of the Teixeira leaks because possessing classified info could be prosecuted&quot; and these guys are discussing upcoming strike packages in their Signal chat? Un-fucking-real.

Basically confirming what we knew all along that it is security theater. IMO we should keep the nukes &amp; drone force to secure the borders and make sure that these are competent to maintain security.But the rest of the military&#x2F;DOD&#x2F;ABCD&#x2F;USAID is legacy bloat left over from the cold war and should be cut. Then we can finally get rid of the income tax for most if not all of the country.Edit: I say this as an independent who does not support either &quot;side&quot;.

A normal govvie sending cleared materials to unapproved recipients over unapproved channels? 20 years in federal prison.A govvie with status doing the same? A slap on the wrist.Embarrassing.

In 2023, Hegseth had his own critique of the Biden administration handling classified documents “flippantly”, remarking on Fox News that “If at the very top there’s no accountability”, then we have “two tiers of justice”.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;MattGertz&#x2F;status&#x2F;1904228588414464167" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;MattGertz&#x2F;status&#x2F;1904228588414464167</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;us-news&#x2F;2025&#x2F;mar&#x2F;24&#x2F;journalist-trump-yemen-war-chat-reaction" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;us-news&#x2F;2025&#x2F;mar&#x2F;24&#x2F;journalist-t...</a>

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;u1H02" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;u1H02</a>

More:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theatlantic.com&#x2F;newsletters&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2025&#x2F;03&#x2F;jeffrey-goldberg-group-chat-military-houthi-yemen&#x2F;682160&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theatlantic.com&#x2F;newsletters&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2025&#x2F;03&#x2F;jeff...</a>

Have you read the article? The author mentions this exact concern.

Is there an official statement of this on a government website?

From the article:&gt; Brian Hughes, the spokesman for the National Security Council, responded two hours later, confirming the veracity of the Signal group. “This appears to be an authentic message chain, and we are reviewing how an inadvertent number was added to the chain,”

How can we know this group chat was really comprised of government officials and not some bored teenagers? Signal allows you to set your profile name to anything you like.

U.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat