Thanks for all the Recs and comments, and above all for your interest!
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Two UPDATES a/o Thursday, March 27, 6:58 a.m.:
1) DER SPIEGEL:
Private Data and Passwords of Senior U.S. Security Officials Found Online
Donald Trump's most important security advisers used Signal to discuss an imminent military strike. Now, reporting by DER SPIEGEL has found that the contact data of some of those officials, including mobile phone numbers, is freely accessible on the internet.
Phones that they might have used in the "SignalGate" chat. Or data that could compromise them otherwise.
2) Malcolm Nance, former signals intelligence with NSA, on exactly why he calls "SignalGate" the worst security breach in U.S. history (and denies hyperbole).
This is about 35 minutes, and I wish there was a transcript to save you time, but by 10 minutes in, my hair was standing on end (hyperbole).
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This is dynamite if true. (And also, basically, just what I suspected.)
F.P. (Fred) Wellman is not trad media like The Atlantic.
He is one of 14 current video podcasters on MTN (Meidas Touch Network), with about 100 "On Democracy" videos in his playlist, and as well, a blog on Substack, with the same title. He is also on Bluesky. His bio describes him as an Iraq War veteran and political consultant. He was formerly executive director of the Lincoln Project.
So, not trad. Nevertheless, he has an exclusive story just out on Substack that could blow the so-called SignalGate "singular fuckup" claim right out of the water.
I'll mostly summarize and hope you check out the original for yourself.
First off: Wellman got this from a single individual who requested anonymity, whom he describes as "a high level information security source inside the Department of Defense."
In other words the source stipulated, for their own safety, when supplying this information, that they must not be identified or identifable from the story. And as a journalist, Wellman should have established (and presumably did) to his own satisfaction the bona fides of that source, whoever that may be.
The source conveyed, according to Wellman,
that a month ago they were ordered by political appointees to ignore information security regulations and install Signal on government phones for senior leaders." [My emphasis here and elsewhere.]
This put DOD personnel in a difficult spot.
There had already been instances where newly appointed Trump officials attempted to bring their personal phones in secure areas.
They relented on leaving their phones outside the classified spaces but demanded that CIO [Chief Information Officer] install Signal on their government devices. One senior uniformed official told m[y] source that, "they all use Signal and need it to communicate with the White House," which they took to mean its being used on their personal devices already.
In other words, when Hegseth et al. transmitted and read and discussed classified info on a several-days-long encrypted disappearing-messages chat, with among others, a journalist invited nobody-claims-to-know-how...
...they had already become accustomed to using personal phones with Signal as a routine workaround, avoiding creation of official (or other phone/text) records that could be revisited, reviewed, FOIA'd, subpoenaed, or otherwise reveal to investigators whatever the hell they were up to.
Who takes that trouble without something pretty big to push under the rug?
Not only that, they insisted on getting Signal installed on government phones that could be carried into secure areas, in the face of 1) security regulations specifying, no, you can't do that, AND 2) a 2023 DOD policy memo that
prohibited use of mobile applications for even "controlled unclassified information," which is many degrees less important than information about ongoing military operations. (NPR)
Imagine what you could do with such a mobile government phone, with Signal installed, and access while carrying it to classified info in a secure area, if you were (perish the thought), some kind of bad actor. Whose security clearance, for example, had been for some reason waived. :-/
It's unclear from the chat records, as saved by inadvertently-included Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg, just who in the chat was on a personal phone and who might have been on a government phone with Signal installed, Wellman reported.
Marco Rubio's initials appeared twice on the list of participants, suggesting that he might at different times have used both a government and a private phone.
Per Wellman, Trump "special envoy" Witkoff, previously reported to have been in Moscow at the time, has denied taking part in the chat during his trip and says he used his personal phone, and only after returning.
It's been speculated that Hegseth or someone else copied classified plans from a government phone onto a personal phone...though if the chat involved co-mingling of government and personal devices, perhaps that would not have been necessary?
And of course, I would presume, if even one phone in the chat was insecure, then the whole contents of the chat would have been.
Btw, NPR has corrected its original statement that another caution about Signal was circulated the week before SignalGate; that memo actually came out a few days after the incident and according to the corrected NPR story, stated
"Russian professional hacking groups are employing the 'linked devices' features to spy on encrypted conversations." It notes that Google has identified Russian hacking groups that are "targeting Signal Messenger to spy on persons of interest."
Wellman concludes:
All of this informs us that the Trump Administration is using a commercial non-secure disappearing messaging app to communicate to avoid record keeping laws and national security regulations. This means that it is highly likely our enemies are able to monitor the high level communications of our government…in real time.
He also states straight-out that these actions involved violations of the extremely serious Espionage Act. That's the law under which the Rosenbergs were convicted.
Now: when I was working in journalism, the uncorroborated word of a single source, requesting anonymity, was rarely considered enough to ballast a story. Two such sources was the basic rule, or one plus documentary evidence. I would bet Wellman has more corroboration than he found it necessary explicitly to put into the story, but it's also possible he had extremely strong reasons to trust this particular source and judged that to be enough in this case.
Further investigation is urgently needed--via other journalists with access to sources; via any patriotic whistleblowers courageous enough to come forward in the face of--no doubt--threats; via any dismissed or recently retired government personnel with knowledge to contribute; and via Congress members and their staffs...to verify the facts, surface full details, untangle motivations, and determine what laws were broken and what security risks and/or damages may have resulted.
In any other administration, we'd be looking to the FBI, the CIA, leaders of both parties in Congress and the president himself.
But such is the inundation of lies and corruption that has swamped our civil infrastructure, that it might be ultimately down to a handful of Congress members, and We the People.
