The Trump administration is facing heavy blowback for using Signal, a messaging app, to discuss sensitive military plans. On March 24, officials’ usage of the app was revealed after The Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg published a story titled "The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans," in which Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, among others, discussed upcoming military strikes on Yemen.
The U.S. government previously discouraged federal employees from using the app for official business. Some experts have speculated that sharing sensitive national security details over Signal could be illegal, and Democratic lawmakers have demanded an investigation.
The U.S. government previously discouraged federal employees from using the app for official business. Some experts have speculated that sharing sensitive national security details over Signal could be illegal, and Democratic lawmakers have demanded an investigation.
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00:00So, the messaging app Signal has been dragged into the spotlight after it was revealed that
00:05high-level Trump administration officials have been using the app, which is public and
00:11commercial, for seemingly top-level military strategy.
00:17This was revealed when a top Trump official mistakenly added a journalist from the Atlantic
00:24onto a group chat.
00:25As such, the security and privacy of the app Signal has come under question, with Chuck
00:32Schumer actually saying on the Senate floor, you know, that maybe government secrets are
00:36being peddled over unsecure text chains.
00:39What we have here are senior U.S. leaders, including the vice president and secretary
00:43of defense, having classified discussions of military action over an unsecure app.
00:51Some experts are potentially saying that using Signal for sensitive government information
00:58is potentially illegal.
01:00But there is some nuance that needs to be had here.
01:03Signal actually is one of the most secure apps that exists for commercial purposes.
01:09It's way more secure than iMessage or WhatsApp because it uses end-to-end encryption, which
01:14means it makes it really hard for hackers or third parties to eavesdrop or intercept
01:20messages.
01:22Signal also has functions like disappearing messages or making it very hard to screenshot
01:27messages, which makes the app actually very secure.
01:30And some cybersecurity professionals that I talked to said that even they use the app
01:36for communications that they want to be private.
01:39But those cybersecurity professionals also said that when it comes to the level of government
01:43secrets, Signal is just not good enough.
01:46And it's not as good as the protocols that are already in place.
01:52And this is for a few reasons.
01:53So first, you know, government officials are just not supposed to send out messages that
01:59are sensitive or classified over their phones.
02:02They're supposed to do so either over Cypernet, which is a secure email server that's run
02:09by the DoD, or they're supposed to do it in like controlled locations called skips.
02:15And that's because, you know, say you're using your phone in Signal in a coffee shop.
02:20It could be that Signal is very secure in terms of, you know, when it leaves your phone.
02:25But there are all these other variables that happen.
02:29Somebody could be looking over your shoulder.
02:31Somebody could be viewing your phone in different ways.
02:34These experts also told me that the government methods of communicating could have prevented
02:39what went wrong in this instance, which was human error.
02:42Just the simple human error of someone mistakenly adding an outside party to a message chain.
02:50Government channels, on the other hand, have a much higher level of authentication to ensure
02:54that who is supposed to be there is there and who is not supposed to be there is not.
02:59These channels prevent other kinds of interlopers or hackers from attempting to use phishing
03:03or malware techniques to gain information.
03:06And they also sort of like keep an umbrella or keep a lid on all of the information, whereas
03:12on Signal, especially with disappearing messages, it makes it really hard for the government
03:16to track down all the information that was transmitted over Signal and where it might
03:23be now in the world.
03:25Signal also has existed for a while in murky territory when it comes to US government use.
03:32The Pentagon and various other agencies have discouraged use of the platform for government
03:37employees.
03:38And actually just days after all of these top Trump officials were using Signal to talk
03:44about this imminent Yemen strike, the Pentagon issued an advisory warning its employees not
03:50to use Signal because it said that Russia was trying to target the app with phishing
03:55and malware attempts.
03:57It's because Russia knows that so many American officials and government employees think it's
04:01secure that they're then trying to target it and extract information.
04:06There are a couple of reasons why some experts worry that this type of use of Signal by top
04:10government employees was illegal.
04:12Some cyber security officials have worried that this use violates the Espionage Act.
04:18Other experts have contended that these Trump officials might be violating FOIA or the Freedom
04:22of Information Act, which requires that government records be kept for the public and for full
04:29transparency.
04:30But it seems like, according to The Atlantic, this Signal chat was set on disappearing messages,
04:36which means that these messages could evaporate after a certain amount of time.
04:40All of that to say is that Signal is much more secure than your average communication
04:46and really favored by a lot of cyber security professionals.
04:50But there are reasons why the US government has even stricter mandates and protocols in
04:55place to prevent exactly something like this leak from happening.
05:00Thanks for watching.
05:01Don't forget to like and subscribe.
05:02See you next time.