SignalGate: A Surveillance Arms Race Has Poked Gaping Hole in National Security

Summary

In the weeks since the explosive revelation that top U.S. officials inadvertently shared attack plans in Yemen with a journalist on a Signal group chat, fresh questions about the Trump administration’s lax approach to digital security have continued to emerge. On April 20, The New York Times reported that the security breach is even worse than initially understood: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had also shared many of the same details about the imminent U.S. bombing strike in Yemen in a second group chat with several family members, a personal lawyer, and others, using his private phone.The fiasco now known as SignalGate raises many urgent issues related to national security. Communicating classified information via nonapproved channels potentially violates the U.S. Espionage Act, setting messages to automatically disappear contravenes U.S. federal laws on preservation of official records, and officials’ family members and journalists should certainly not be privy to this kind of information. These are huge lapses. But by focusing on National Security Adviser Mike Waltz’s unwitting inclusion of The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, in the first chat group, much of the debate has downplayed an even larger problem: the very real possibility that a foreign government or other hostile power was snooping on the devices through which those communications were taking place.Convened by Waltz, the first Signal group included not only the defense secretary but also CIA Director John Ratcliffe, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Vice President JD Vance, White House adviser Stephen Miller, and Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff, among others. Every one of these figures is an extremely high-value target for foreign espionage. Moreover, at least some of the participants were communicating on personal electronic devices (as was the defense secretary, and at least some of the participants, in his second group chat), and several were traveling ...