There is a lot going on with the whole situation of a reporter from The Atlantic being added to a Signal text group during discussion, planning, and real-time commentary on a US military action from top Trump administration officials.

The Context

The United States is dropping bombs and shooting missiles at people in Yemen. According to Houtti Rebels via the BBC there were 53 human beings killed in the March 15 attack, including five children. Our national leaders received the news that one of the targets had been killed along with his girlfriend and likely a building full of other people with the solemn gravity of tweens watching Call of Duty on Twitch. 👊🇺🇸🔥

The Houthi are Iran-backed militant extremists. Not a fan. But our leaders are murdering their children by twiddling their thumbs on a phone screen. I can see why they might not like us much. That seems like important background that I haven’t heard much mention of. We are murdering brown people’s children to further our interests. There were more strikes this last Friday (3/27), with no reporters that we know of invited to the planning Signal, Facebook, MySpace, Reddit, or Slack thread.

There are Rules for That

I worked for NASA for about 37 years. I briefly had a Secure clearance, but I never saw a Secret or Top Secret document. The highest level documents I ever saw were what we called Sensitive But Unclassified (SBU). I could easily have lost my job by being sloppy with SBU info. Depending on what it was, criminal prosecution would have been possible.

Stakes go up for higher-level government employees. Senior Executive Service and political appointees are required to keep all the communications they do related to decision making in their position. Those communications are Federal Records. There are retention schedules depending on the content and who is involved that say how long things need to be kept.

The laws cut in two directions. You have to both keep things available for your successors/managers/auditors/historians, and you have to keep them away from those who aren’t authorized to see them. There is a tension between the requirements. I found it frustrating that I couldn’t use Messages on my iPhone even though it had better encryption and a better interface than the official tools – but in fact I could have had conversations over Messages that nobody else could see. I could have been sending secrets to someone. So it wasn’t legit.

It’s hard to get more important than Cabinet level appointees making life or death and tens to hundreds of millions of dollar decisions. 

The government has a whole set of protocols, with dedicated devices (phones, computers, satellite links) to protect and retain the communications. This group purposely avoided that to use a commercial software service, Signal, set so that their discussions would disappear in one week or four weeks. That was a blatant, premeditated illegal act, even if they were just discussing the brand of straws to buy for the White House break room.

I do get that this administration considers itself above the rules and laws of government, so arrogance and willful ignorance mix in with the premeditation. Pretty sure at least JD Vance should know the basic rules, though.

I figure they should be treated with the same amount of grace and forgiveness they have demonstrated toward Hillary Clinton in running her own email server and likely violating both retention and security regulations.

What’s Wrong with Signal?

Signal itself is an application that uses state-of-the-art point-to-point encryption. But it’s consumer software. At least some of these people were almost certainly using personal phones and home computers to chat (Steve Witkoff was on the thread, but mostly missed the conversation because he was with Vladimir Putin and didn’t have access to his personal phone). Having early access to information from these people could be worth millions to billions of dollars. Boeing stock went up 20 points in the week after the attack. Think any Americans might pay to hack their phones? Much less Russian, Chinese, North Korean, Iranian, or Houthi operatives. And how about Canada, Denmark, Panama, France, Germany, and England, at this point? Point-to-point encryption doesn’t help if you have a dozen strangers on each end watching the thread.

So what about the monumental stupidity of adding a journalist from The Atlantic to a thread? Well, up front, had they not been blatantly violating a ton of laws and regulations in creating the chat outside of federal systems, it simply couldn’t have happened. The chat would have been encrypted (probably in a very similar level of technical competence as Signal uses), but it would have required the use of a government ID to decrypt and read it. On devices, and in places, where no one could be watching them type without proper authorization and vetting.

But the group chose efficiency and convenience over safety and security, and decided to use a consumer tool for a nation-state job.

What a boner.

It may turn out that Michael Waltz just fat-fingered an invitation. Or maybe one of his kids did it from Signal on his computer, when Michael was out of the room, just for grinz? Maybe he was showing someone a YouTube on his phone and went to the potty? Or maybe one of twelve different groups that have hacked his phone decided they wanted to embarrass him?

I get that Donald Trump in particular doesn’t like the communication rules exactly because they have held him somewhat accountable. He was recorded extorting Ukrainian officials by withholding military aid until they made up compromising information about Hunter Biden, and when telling a Georgia election official to create votes. Kings don’t like accountability, and neither do his vassals. If the King does decide to crush a used-up vassal, he shouldn’t need facts, anyway. He can just make up damning evidence. The administration’s take is that a dictatorship doesn’t need checks and balances, and rules are for losers. But, actually, though burdensome and sometimes annoying, the rules are there for a reason, to protect even the losers.

Although the incident demonstrated massive incompetence, and the response shows immense hypocrisy, I don’t expect much in the way of fallout. Hypocrisy works as a show of power, and groveling toadies don’t need to be competent as long as they are unwaveringly loyal to their liege lord. There will likely be something more outrageous this week, anyway.