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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   24148 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 24, 2025

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'Many things are happening, so many things are happening at once that sometimes I have no idea what's going on.'

This is likely an apocryphal quote misattributed to Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian in March 2025 via the memetic slop factory. It's one of the factory's better creations and it captures my feeling this afternoon.

The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans

Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief for The Atlantic, publishes the above account regarding his participation in a special kind of Signal group chat 15 days ago. In this chat strikes against the Houthis were planned, out in the open, with Jeffrey privy to it all. According to the account he gives in the article, Jeffrey was invited by national security advisor Michael Waltz. According to Jeffrey, he was confused, skeptical, and suspicious of this chat.

Seriously, you should read the whole thing.

It immediately crossed my mind that someone could be masquerading as Waltz in order to somehow entrap me...

I’ll say it anyway—that I have never been invited to a White House principals-committee meeting, and that, in my many years of reporting on national-security matters, I had never heard of one being convened over a commercial messaging app.

This group chat led to another group chat-- "Houthi PC small group". If true, I am sure Jeffrey's concerns about entrapment and imprisonment grew as he was, allegedly, joined by the Secretary of Defense, Vice President Vance, Tulsi Gabbard. In total, "18 individuals were listed as members of this group, including various National Security Council officials" as they discussed, coordinated, and monitored strikes against Houthi rebels in Yemen-- and presumably some other things.

We [Atlantic staffers] discussed the possibility that these texts were part of a disinformation campaign, initiated by either a foreign intelligence service or, more likely, a media-gadfly organization, the sort of group that attempts to place journalists in embarrassing positions, and sometimes succeeds.

I had very strong doubts that this text group was real, because I could not believe that the national-security leadership of the United States would communicate on Signal about imminent war plans. I also could not believe that the national security adviser to the president would be so reckless as to include the editor in chief of The Atlantic in such discussions with senior U.S. officials, up to and including the vice president.

Nonetheless, as Jeffrey fretted over his strange-getting-stranger position in a Signal chat group among, allegedly, the highest officials in US public office, these individuals were discussing what to do about the Houthi problem. Jeffrey identifies JD Vance's chat avatar as a cautious, moderating voice on the 14th of March:

The Vance account goes on to state, “3 percent of US trade runs through the suez. 40 percent of European trade does. There is a real risk that the public doesn’t understand this or why it’s necessary. The strongest reason to do this is, as POTUS said, to send a message.”

“I am not sure the president is aware how inconsistent this is with his message on Europe right now. There’s a further risk that we see a moderate to severe spike in oil prices. I am willing to support the consensus of the team and keep these concerns to myself. But there is a strong argument for delaying this a month, doing the messaging work on why this matters, seeing where the economy is, etc.”

Jeffrey Goldberg, in addition to relaying the above and other interactions that went on in the chat he was in, also posted screenshots as receipts-- just in case you thought he was crazy.

In Jeffrey Goldberg's words: "I was still concerned that this could be a disinformation operation, or a simulation of some sort. And I remained mystified that no one in the group seemed to have noticed my presence. But if it was a hoax, the quality of mimicry and the level of foreign-policy insight were impressive."

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.

After the chat, bombs get dropped, Jeffrey confirms the timeline matches what he saw planned, and the chat goes wild.

Some things to talk about as mentioned in the article:

  1. Journalisms. Jeffrey surely had a responsibility to leave this group chat when he figured this was a real thing really happening and he wasn't supposed to be there. As in, legally he shouldn't be privy to classified stuff. On the other hand, if true, this is what journalists are for. If Jeffrey had simply left the chat and reported it as such there's no story. I'm not sure how much I buy the "I'm just a lowly journalist who couldn't believe his eyes if this is real or not" shtick, but also can't really fault the guy for staying in the chat. After all, he was invited.

  2. Security and legal concerns. If the Trump admin is conducting official business on an open-source platform that is supposed to scrub its history this seems probably illegal. It is possible these messages are documented some other way, but it's possible they are not. Just as it is possible Signal is a totally secure, encrypted messaging program, but it's possible it is not.

  3. Goldberg highlights the dialogue that focuses on concerns of US-Euro relations. Wish I could read the full discussions. It seems fine to give Europe a carrot of engaging Houthis -- helping to secure their trade in the Suez -- in addition to the stick as they move to rearm. I don't think the American public has much love for Houthi rebels, though escalating involvement is a concern. I think this supports the idea that this administration is closely wedded to the news cycle rather than strategy or vision. Consideration of what this does for Europe should be second to deterring disruption to global trade-- which should have been priority from the beginning. We are missing lots of context.

  4. What if Elon Musk was gas lighting and trolling journalists with the power and resources of the United States Government behind him?

The level of ineptitude in OPSEC failure for this article to be real is staggering. It blows my mind. Which, as Jeffrey also suspected, makes one wonder if it wasn't intentional. Maybe Jeffrey was invited to one chat to be leveraged for something else, then accidentally invited to the Houthi PC chat. He might have been supposed to be in all those chats to leak it all. Comparisons to Crooked Hillary and her e-mail server abound.

To end, VP Vance reportedly typing “a prayer for victory” after a course of action was decided upon. Followed by two of our nation's best adding "prayer emoji" reactions. All of it is a bit on the nose for Clown World Simulation theory. Exciting times!

This situation is comically stupid, even by the established standards of the Trump admin. I don't even really see much of a problem with them using Signal for sensitive communication, in theory (it's not like they were using Telegram); yes, the government should have its own internal secure platform for something like this but I would not be surprised if, in practice, that secure platform is just "email" which would be such a pain in the ass as to make me sympathetic to the signal-using officials. But, good lord, literally inviting a journalist into your government chat? What??? How did none of them notice he was in the chat? Clown world indeed.

Honestly, I don't buy the theories that this leak was intentional (or at least that the leak was intentional on the part of the Trump admin as an entity, it could've been intentional with the goal of embarrassing them) -- what would they stand to gain? They just look like a bunch of idiots. And the "intentional leak to embarrass the cabinet" theory doesn't make sense either since the invite came from the goddamn National Security Advisor. Therefore I have to conclude that this comes from simple gross incompetence. Defenses of this from sympathetic right-wingers are pretty weak as well, just compare it to the (justified) furor about the Hillary Clinton email server... this might not be worse in terms of practical effect, but that's mostly because the journalist himself chose not to do anything with the information he received until after the strikes took place. I'm a little surprised there isn't even more outcry from Democrats but I guess they don't tend to get riled up about national security the way Republicans do.

If I were President in this situation I would, honestly, fire the guy who invited the journalist on the spot. Everyone else involved here is breaching protocol, yes, and they really should have noticed that "hey, one of these guys isn't a government official", and sure, it's just one simple mistake -- but fat-fingering the invite for a group chat such that you leak the details of an upcoming military operation to the press seems to me to be so profoundly dumb (and utterly oblivious to any notion of OPSEC) as to disqualify you outright from serving in any sensitive position. If he had done it intentionally, this would arguably be treason.

If nothing else, it's terrible PR for the administration. I will be surprised if Waltz keeps his job longer than the next few days, especially given Trump's reputation for turnover.

My conspiracy mind wonders if there’s some secret switch in Signal which only gets enabled (by who?) for journalists, so they can view chats unseen in “spectator mode” for reporting purposes. This would explain why nobody saw JG in the chat. If true, Signal would need to be dumped ASAP by everyone.

Less sensationally, there may be another Jeffrey Goldberg [or (JG) generic user icon] who Waltz meant to invite, perhaps someone with top secret clearance in an intel agency who wasn’t expected to weigh in, but was supposed to stay informed. J is the most common first initial in America, and G is in the top ten last initials: https://blogs.sas.com/content/iml/2011/01/14/two-letter-initials-which-are-the-most-common.html

there may be another Jeffrey Goldberg [or (JG) generic user icon] who Waltz meant to invite, perhaps someone with top secret clearance in an intel agency who wasn’t expected to weigh in, but was supposed to stay informed

Yeah, I think this is plausible. I recall seeing that there is, in fact, a reasonably-high-up intelligence official with initials JG who could perhaps have been an intended invitee, although I can't remember the name off my head. Even so, that's still a very stupid/sloppy mistake to make given the subject matter.

Is this really a big deal? I mean, by a competent administration it would certainly be, but this is well within the bounds of buffoonishness we've come to expect from Trump and those he employs. I'd say the long-term damage Trump has done to US foreign policy is a far greater issue, although I suppose R's can squint and say "that is helping us, actually, it's 4D-chess" for all that, while accidentally inviting reporters to your classified meeting is more plainly indefensible.

Still, this is really blowing up in ways I didn't expect. Even Hillary has been risen from the dead to opine on it.

Still, this is really blowing up in ways I didn't expect.

Is it blowing up with anyone whose opinion might sway the administration or their supporters? In a normal administration, Hegseth and/or Walz would be going under the bus for this (in a normal administration, Hegseth wouldn't be SecDef), but that sort of thing is mostly driven by intra-elite norms and the only norm Trumpist elites care about is in-group loyalty. The general American electorate (and especially Trump's base of support) is too disengaged and too prone to facile cynicism to care about something as niche as bad opsec or the implications of senior political leaders working through Signal.

It's blowing up sufficiently that somebody might get fired over it. One of the big unwritten rules of the Trump administration is "don't cause bad headlines on cable news", and while I haven't watched Fox specifically, the fact that I keep seeing this all over the news sites I watch on day 2 is indicative that it's something that Trump could get pissed over. Mike Walz's ass could be on the line, and Hegseth and even Vance could be in hot water to some degree. That's a pretty significant level of disruption for a scandal in the Trump admin.

I'm sure we'll probably have forgotten about this in a month, though.

but this is well within the bounds of buffoonishness we've come to expect from Trump and those he employs

It's honestly hard to tell because the goalposts move at lightning speed whenever a new form of buffoonishness is unleashed.

Seems like the real screw-up here is that USG does not actually have an encrypted secure internal chat that they can use for cross department collaboration. With USG's intelligence budget, that is absolutely inexcusable. Goldberg in the article says that they should have used a SCIF which they all have installed at their home. That is utterly impractical, trying to coordinate two dozen officials to all be home or at the office in their SCIF at the same time is just not going to be possible. So if the option is 1) communicate over something highly secure but imperfect and with a lousy UX that makes it hard to quickly see who everyone is and that mixes internal and external contacts or 2) simply don't communicate at all, it's not actually obvious to me that 1) is worse. Ultimately, even as bad as this mistake was ... nothing actually bad happened as a result of accidentally adding Goldberg and so it's not clear to me that it would have been better if these officials had simply never had the conservation at all.

The old quote comes to mind.

"Do you not know, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed?" - Axel Oxenstierna

Parts of the article made me laugh out loud. The emojis!

Jeffrey surely had a responsibility to leave this group chat when he figured this was a real thing really happening and he wasn't supposed to be there. As in, legally he shouldn't be privy to classified stuff.

Hard disagree. Both morally and (I think) legally responsibility to keep classified information classified rests with the people who have security classifications. Private citizens should not commit illegal acts to obtain classified info (unless there is a moral imperative to let the public know, as with Snowden), so if he had hacked Waltz phone, then he would be in the wrong. Also, Washington leaks classified info to the press all the time, and journalists generally report on it.

Him not tweeting about it before the bombs fell is already going above and beyond what would be reasonable -- normally you negotiate confidentiality boundaries before you give a journalist info. Of course, there is no way to authenticate the chats as real, it could also just be one insider playing with sock puppets.

It was leaked on purpose to show European 'powers' that the administration is not just publicly making noise about big needed changes but genuinely dissatisfied

One fact to support this theory is who is doing the leaking. Jeffrey Goldberg is an editor who has been at The Atlantic a long time. He did a bid in the IDF as a young pup and written articles such as "Is It Time for the Jews to Leave Europe" in response to terror attacks. It is unlikely Goldberg would want to help the Houthis or hammer the admin on Houthi beating. Which he doesn't. He is seasoned and at least partly aligned on the topic of discussion. Both of these make him more likely to understand (or suspect) what his role is here despite the confusion and it appears he is carrying out his duties. This would be big 5D chess if unnecessary and reckless.

Why not just leak stuff the good ol' fashioned way? This form of leak probably maximizes the amount eyeballs, but are those necessary? Perhaps foreign parties have reason to doubt how tapped into the admin the media apparatus is as the admin seems keen on beating on it rather than filling it with juice. Might be that Trump doesn't like his cabinet using the Fake News traditional messaging apparatus, so this is technically a way to work around that. Wading into pure conjecture any which way. I'm not sure if there's a more sensational way to leak stuff if that is what occurred here.

This leak makes Hegseth look like a fool, and his crying about it afterwards and suggesting it wasn't real even after the White House confirmed it made him look like a clown. I don't think he (or any other politician in his position) would be willing to do that just to make a more convincing leak.

This suggests that Hegseth didn't know and did not consent to it, but that doesn't necessarily mean it wasn't set-up by someone else. I'd guess Waltz is most likely since he sent the invite. But yeah, there's a large number of less embarrassing ways to leak information to journalists to write a story. I'm not at all convinced on planned or intended. It's a remote possibility. Bad practice and incompetence is leading the race for me.

But if it is understood as being leaked on purpose then it becomes just more public noise.

If it wasn't gross incompetence, and I personally will not rule that out, then this is the motive I'd expect. Even if you take this as sincere incompetence, then the similar sincerity of Euroskepticism in the chat is as much / more concerning than the use of the chat.

Why? The Euroskepticism was perfectly appropriate, unlike the use of Signal. The Euros probably already know that's how the Trump administration (and honestly, likely Democratic administrations as well) think about them. Releasing it makes the mutual knowledge into common knowledge (that is, it's saying the quiet part out loud), but Trump doesn't seem to care about that in general even if it wasn't on purpose here.

This is such a big screwup I have to wonder if it isn't intentional. I mean Yemeni goat herders aren't going to be listening in to group chats and they can't exactly stop the bombs if they are.

It was likely intentional. Remember that Trump is a showman.

Also Waltz wasn't disciplined nor is he likely to be.

Yeah, I think it was intended to reach the euro literati.

I was skeptical but hearing that nothing is going to happen to Waltz makes it very likely. Also, when Hegseth was quizzed about it he gave a real song & dance routine, obviously anticipating it, to reinforce the message.

They can, however, move out themselves and their stuff out of the blast radius, which actually does make a difference.

Meh. Was the strike intended to kill people or to make a point?

A strike that doesn't kill the people it's aimed at doesn't make a point (or at least, it doesn't make the point you'd want to make by launching it).

We've been bombing the Houthis to Make a Point; it would seem charitable to assume that these strikes were intended to inflict material losses, not simply remind them that we still have airplanes.

The US/UAE/Israel droped a tactical nuke on a Yemen city a few years back ( yes complete with camera CCD scintillation ). So at this point anything's possible.

  • -18

On line I find stories which claim this. Some claim there is CCD scintillation... but none shows it and there's at least one which says it's there and then that it isn't. Whether the people claiming this could distinguish radiation effects from plain overload from too much light I doubt also.

Yeah, I think conventional explosions could still cause blindness, assuming sufficient yield, no neutrons necessary.

[citation needed]

Particularly with the UAE having a nuke- I have no doubt that the UAE, Saudi, etc could buy a paki nuke for money, but the likelihood they would do so to use against some goat herders is low. Israel, likewise, had no reason to care about the Houthis until recently. And while the USA sold Saudi weapons, we weren’t involved in the war.

I think the proposition that the US and allies secretly used a tactical nuke in combat (on a mostly-civilian target, in the 21st century, with no outcry from the UN, Russia, China, watchdog NGOs, or anyone else) falls firmly in the realm of “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” So, let’s see it. Because on its face this claim is ludicrously implausible, to put it mildly.

Could you please Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be.?

The atmospheric detonation of nuclear weapons is impossible to hide from any industrial nation which chooses to investigate or any number of NGOs. Any theory which claims a nuke was dropped on the Houti would also need to explain why this did not lead to Iran and Russia making claims to that effect, and why fricking Greenpeace as well as dozens of other Western NGOs decided to sweep it under the rug. By the time you have added all the required epicycles, you might as well claim that the nuclear strike was coordinated by lizardmen who were combating space aliens.

Also, scintillation is a process in which ionizing radiation excites (roughly visible wave-length) photons in a material. What happens in CCD sensors is different, you get pixel noise as gamma rays, neutrons or charged particles produce electron-hole-pairs in the pixels which lead to a depletion of the charge of the pixel, just as light does. The camera acts as a semiconductor detector.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=6LDFD02-Utc

https://youtube.com/watch?v=9QSi0R2HEcs

Can't find the exact videos with the little dots as the explosion happens, some of the ones I had saved seem to have been scrubbed from youtube. Belive me. It was there, I was watching that shit as it unfolded and videos were posted on 4chan and other sites. The little dots were hitting the cameras, the artefacts centered around the explosion point.

Edit: Specifically, there was a video from much closer to the explosion, with a woman wailing that showed the little particles striking the ccd at and around the center of the explosion.

Context please.

What?!

Seconded. This sounds like bullshit.

This seems like too big of a fuckup to put in just "whoopsie we made a mistake" territory. If a journalist can just get accidentally added onto it without them constantly doing security checks then what about all the highly motivated and talented bad actors from foreign nations?

China or Russia isn't going to tell us "Oh yeah we have eyes on X and Y private conversations because they're incompetent and don't actually check things." They're gonna sit there and eat their free lunch and just like seeing one cockroach means you need to be ready for more hiding around, one basic security mistake is a strong reason to worry about others that haven't been revealed.

And it apparently being done through improper channels is even worse because it incentivizes people who fuck up to keep silent about it cause they just don't have the fuck up to contend with but their own improper choice they have to answer for as well. It's also the complete opposite of any smart Cover Your Ass strategy because now any failure is on you because you went around the proper and official path.

This seems like too big of a fuckup to put in just "whoopsie we made a mistake" territory. If a journalist can just get accidentally added onto it without them constantly doing security checks then what about all the highly motivated and talented bad actors from foreign nations?

I figure this only happened because Goldberg was already in Waltz's contacts and he selected the wrong name by mistake. Maybe had a brainfart and mixed him up with somebody else who did belong in the chat - maybe just clicked the wrong option in a slide. Who knows. Either way, not that big of a security concern unless there are foreign spies on Waltz's speed-dial.

It doesn't necessarily matter how it happened so much as that it happened and speaks to a wider failing in OPSEC procedures. They're sending sensitive information across the internet without even verifying who the recipients are.

A career government employee who misclicked in a way which resulted in classified information being unintentionally shared with a journalist would lose their job and security clearance. I expect MAGA would be calling for criminal charges, although they wouldn't stick because the Espionage Act has a mens rea requirement.

"Lol I misclicked but no harm no foul" doesn't cut it.

A career bureaucrat has one primary job: follow bureaucratic process, so yeah, of course they would be fired for that. Top-level officials by nature must have a lot more flexibility in their jobs and they can't be sitting at a SCIF all day long and following processes is not their primary job requirement or part of their life-long training. (This is among the reasons why I didn't think Hillary should have been charged for a crime). And this goes five-fold for officials who were specifically selected by the American people for being outsiders.

I'm not saying it's all good or that the guy shouldn't get heat over it, just that in practical terms this isn't necessarily a massive security hole that Chinese spies could walk into by the dozens.

I strongly disagree. If this guy was stupid enough to let in not just a journalist, but one part of an organization that is an ideological enemy of the administration, who's to say he can't be spearphished by an adversary with a passing knowledge of the English language?

It is an enormous fuckup.

Radical transparency. We're in a new golden age!

No discussion yet of this nugget, apparently from Vance?

I am not sure the president is aware how inconsistent this is with his message on Europe right now.

Vance and Trump usually seem pretty united publically. Is there an interpretation I'm missing here that doesn't show a rift between them? This doesn't just say, "hey there will also be these other consequences." This says the president is inconsistent and is not aware of his own inconsistency. And further implies Vance can't just bring it up with Trump for clarity either. And that this group he's messaging (or the group he thinks he's messaging) already knows that.

Combine this with Vance steering Trump during the televised Zelenskyy debacle. I think Trump is really just governing based on raw emotional energy—these Houthis are causing us trouble, so let's fuck 'em over. And then it falls on Vance, Hegseth, etc to figure out how to actually do that. The details don't concern the big man.

Vance is smart and EHC, and it's likely that he understands Trump is a total buffoon who needs to be shepherded to reasonable goals. His reaction to Trump back in 2016 was his genuine opinion. Eventually he decided that sucking up to Trump was better to gain power, but he still sees Trump as an idiot.

I think Trump is really just governing based on raw emotional energy

Correct. Always has been. There is no plan, only vibes. This is what the American people demanded.

What does EHC mean in this context?

There does seem to be much more talk this time around about vibes and less talk about 4D chess.

Elite Human Capital. Hanania has written some posts about it, and has a full book coming at some point. He's the type of person who could have started an anonymous substack and had it do reasonably well. He could come on to a place like this and hold his own in a discussion. If e.g. Trump tried to do either of those things, he'd fail pretty miserably.

Vance said that he was out doing an economic event in Michigan in the group chat. So it seems more like he just didn't have the opportunity to bring it up with Trump.

Something I found more interesting is speculation as to why Waltz had Goldberg already added in signal. Seems possible he might've already been leaking to the press and accidently added the journo instead of opening a chat with him. He's probably the least "team Trump" member of Trump's administration other than Rubio.

I enjoyed all the direct quotes! Very fun.

Is there an interpretation I'm missing here that doesn't show a rift between them? This says the president is inconsistent and is not aware of his own inconsistency

Could be. I don't think it is impossible that Trump, at some level, recognizes he benefits from some brakes, and he may find Vance suitable for this role. I don't think these quotes suggest some massive rift rather than topic disagreement or the reality of their different roles. In the sausage factory is one thing, but the misalignment going public is another matter. The media is already trying to drive a wedge. Now Trump doesn't like being seen as undermined, so Vance may now have to grovel a bit to not be seen as embarrassing the big man.

Vance advocating for taking some more time to build up a narrative-- Trump wants it done if it can be done. If Vance is considering a 2028 run, then ideally he maximizes all the positive Trump association while minimizing the negative Trump association in order to grow his support. This would make some disagreement desirable. If Vance was worried about narrative and optics, as he is quoted, then I think he was wrong. US bombs dropping on Houthis was overdue. Putting Suez back into full business is also overdue, but who knows if that's achievable with bomb droppings.

JD's phrasing is exactly how an underling should disagree with his boss before a final decision is made. I've used similar phrasing before, even to my boss's face and it is entirely appropriately to do so in private (sausage factory) communications.

It isn't disrespectful, it provides an alternative point of view ('have you considered these ramifications..?') and he was very clear that he would support the consensus decision. This is exactly the type of thinking you want in committees like this.

Consider the alternative; pure Yes-manning. Would a leader want a sycophant in his camp? Ok, Trump might, but not in a position like VP. If Vance was like that behind the scenes, trump would not respect him and not delegate power to his VP in the way that Vance has been assigned this administration.

I agree. I suppose it doesn't matter - the NPCs are going to read a headline instead of the conversation, and I doubt any of them have functional relationships with their bosses. But this seems like a total nothingburger. No way Vance actually shits on the president with 17 of his other closest advisors.

As a purely practical matter, if Trump makes dire threats to the Houthis and bombs them without achieving results then that seems clearly worse than doing nothing

The bombing is a result. If you engage in piracy you eat bombs. This should be the expected result of engaging in piracy. It's the least you can do. This might be insufficient to dissuade these particular Islamic martyrs from engaging in piracy. They may require some other demonstration or diplomacy, but they should receive no exemption from the first expected result. It may also be a valuable demonstration for other non-martyrs that might consider piracy.

What if getting bombed is the goal? So far the only thing bombing has achieved is making the Houthis look indomitable and costing the American taxpayer several billion dollars.

Yes, they want to impose costs on the rest of the world which includes the costs of bombing them. That's fine. There is still risk of escalation, but if we want to bomb them in perpetuity and they want to impose costs on the rest of the world in perpetuity so be it. If this is the reality then we live in world that's a little less functional. So be it. It won't be in perpetuity I hope!

I would not describe Houthis as indomitable, although they do have a very high tolerance for eating bombs. The alternatives are to refuse to engage -- which does cost less money with no boats in Red Sea -- or formally accept a new status quo. Or, if you take them at their word, make Israel do something? The world could also reward them with some sort of official designation and hope that buys them off, but I agree with the global order here. You don't get rewarded with shooting and looting civilian ships. Not without some pain or, in this case, the lives of their martyrs.

They are the big dog in Yemen. Woof! They dislike Jews, Sauds, UAE, the US, and they like Iran. Great. These are unpleasant people that would happily lob my head off. Bombing theocratic Islamic fundamentalists, or most any other dedicated piratical states is a reasonable thing to do in response to their piracy. That's a sensible world.

So to sum up, American taxpayers must fund several dozens of fully furnished hospitals or schools worth of munitions to blow up some fanatic who eats one piece of dirt per day with no prospect of stopping said fanatic's friends from doing what they would have done anyway because, uh, something something global order?

If the "global order" is what you care about then the far simpler solution for America would be to crack down on Israel, a country currently invading half of its neighbors and flagrantly defying every post-war international institution which also happens to be entirely dependent on American support to sustain said invasions. We don't need to "take the Houthis at their word" because there have been two ceasefires and in both cases the Houthis ceased fire, something that can't be said about the Israelis.

A sensible world would be one where we don't waste billions of dollars on a strategy we know won't work when we could save billions on one that we know would work

You said no prospect, not me. It is true the US could have considered imposing costs on Israel in response to her and Europe's arms being twisted by America's (mutual) adversaries. I think this would likely encourage further arm twisting and also doesn't seem quite as simple as you say. You sound very certain that America could have easily ended Israel's incursion into Gaza and lifted Israel's decades long naval blockade from Gaza (was also a demand I'm not sure if they dropped that one) and avoided [this] cost. Perhaps American limitations do not end in the Red Sea with the Houthis. The US might be unprepared or unwilling to bomb Israel hard enough to appease requests of a ceasefire. Maybe sanctions of arm sales aren't heavy enough to stop a response in October, November, or December of 2023.

The Houthi's grand humanitarian mission started on the 19th of October, 2023. It has involved hundreds of ballistic missiles and drones being fired at Israel. They have attacked some 100 different merchant vessels. I don't know how many times they've fired at American warships, but probably a few.

Coordination requires understanding. "Don't do a piracy to twist my arm" is a pretty good understanding. "Don't invade other countries" is also an understanding, but at least when Israel invades other countries these days it is mostly its neighbors and doesn't tax Italian and Egyptian shipping. It's unfortunate Houthis are only in a position to play one card, are beholden to the interests of larger nations, etc. We all face limitations.

I'm not really interested in litigating Israeli's war justifications, US obligations to Israel or vice versa, or to which great honor we can bestow on Houthis or Israel. Or America for that matter. It's been done a million times. You can consider any or each as evil and duplicitous as you wish. You'll read smarter people than I. I am but a simple, sensible ""global order"" (double scare quotes, double scary--- if I go triple you're donezo) enjoyer.

I don't think you should trust any nation or, at least, take any nation's stated justifications at face value. Least of all Iran, Israel, or Islamic fundamentalists. It'd be nice if we could trust each other not to shoot at merchant shipping and agree to punish people that defect from this agreement. That's all, really.

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Putting aside the colossal screw up and perhaps criminal negligence, the actual content of the conversation was surprisingly exactly what I might have expected. That itself is rather alarming because I shouldn't be in a position to form accurate expectations about how these conversations should go, right? I appreciate the transparency of the Trump administration, but this is a bit much. Heads should roll. Although we're unlikely to get an honest explanation for why Signal was been used for these communications, I would really like one. Worst case scenario is that they don't trust more official channels.

It makes sense in the modern age that a signal type app would be very useful for this type of coordination. What doesn't make sense is that some dept like the NSA hasn't developed one already.

Also, there are some conversations that should still be reserved for SCIF's. Hegseth should not have sent any operational details for instance.

Still a huge screw up, but rather than fight the tide the government should create its own app for executive comms like this.

This is exactly my thought. Building an encrypted message chat with superior data retention and querying capabilities for real-time comms like this is... not optional?

Why are they spawning off special chats for this one operation, for instance? That alone is a security/ops hole. My org has an entire policy to ensure our real-time messaging stays meticulously organized to ensure leaders and doers aren't overwhelmed with threads, context is maintained, the whole nine yards. Yet the executive branch has to hack with something like this?

The hypocrisy of Hillary's email whining is a bit strong. But it begs the question of how exactly government officials are supposed to communicate in real time, given the inadequacy of email as a format.

I don't think the Trump admin would trust using a secure message system developed by the NSA.

I wonder if that's exactly why they're using a standard-issue commercial app.

This really drives home why the Republican Party has been making inroads with blue-collar workers. These guys aren't acting. They talk about bombing the Middle East like it's the group-chat for subcontractors installing a new HVAC unit.

And they got the unit installed right on time too!

“Hegseth HEAT and Plumbing: We Deliver Worldwide”

Confirmed. It doesn’t surprise me. A honeypot this elaborate, and with no obvious enforcement mechanism, would have made even less sense.

Sharing classified information is not generally a crime. Not unless you’ve signed the corresponding SF-312 and accepted the obligation to protect it. What are the odds that anyone in this chat had done so?

In any other administration, this would be a perfectly respectable scandal. Perhaps a little higher up than usual. It’s normally staffers who mishandle communications. Today, though, I don’t expect anything to come of it. Let me make a quick check of which step we’re on in the narcissist’s prayer. Yup, we’re still on “…and if I did, it wasn’t that bad.”

20% that anyone from the group chat faces a criminal charge.

Sharing classified information is not generally a crime. Not unless you’ve signed the corresponding SF-312 and accepted the obligation to protect it. What are the odds that anyone in this chat had done so?

Everyone in the chat except Vance and Goldberg should have done - everyone in the Executive Branch, no matter how senior, is subject to the executive orders regarding classified information except the President (who doesn't have to obey his own orders) and the VP (who is kinda sorta part of Congress as honorary President of the Senate).

Although in this case that doesn't matter for criminal liability - if the disclosure of military secrets to an unauthorised person was wilful, it is criminalised by the Espionage Act, which predates the modern system of classification and doesn't rely on it. If it was negligent, then it is an employee discipline matter and not a criminal one in any case.

It seems like this was obviously “leaked” on purpose. Nothing they’re saying here is in any way secretive and it sounds like regime taking points, not planning.

"I, however, knew two hours before the first bombs exploded that the attack might be coming. The reason I knew this is that Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, had texted me the war plan at 11:44 a.m. The plan included precise information about weapons packages, targets, and timing."

Were the journalist to report things not described in the article as he learned of them -- times, dates, places, and targets before the action was carried out -- do you think it would have been no big deal? I would consider it a very big deal, a major breach of OPSEC, and probably treasonous. These do not seem like the kinds of things you tell journalists prior to a military strike.

It would be unwise to tell journalists these details even with an explicit understanding not to report on these details until after the plan is carried out. Which doesn't seem to have occurred here. It would be extra reckless to only have a tacit understanding with a journalist as to what or when he can report on the things he learned of. Which, by his account, doesn't appear to have occurred either. This was a journalist accidentally learning things he should not have known and, wisely, not reporting them. These are the kinds of things that, if the enemy learns of them, can get men killed.

The journalist says he has these, but what are they, specifically?

“We could probably hit them with a $big_cock_american_missile as earlier as tomorrow morning given that the USS American president is off the coast of goatherdistan” is specific timeframes, weapons packages, etc. and doesn’t say anything that isn’t also publicly available.

Call me skeptical.

It's ridiculous to expect a journalist to publish specific military plans that would probably get him jailed for publishing. The fact that he didn't publish them isn't evidence that he didn't see them.

Even if there wasn't anything classified on its own (despite the reporting certainly suggesting there is), a lot of information can still be sensitive if you gather it in one place because it can allow foreign agents to build up and intuit the classified info from context. Known as classification by compilation Likewise insight into how they make plans and act on them can be useful tools for our enemies.

The more little bits of information you can gather and the more context you can put them in the more dangerous a piece of information becomes, even if on its own it might be public knowledge.

And you'd be surprised how many seemingly unimportant details get tracked by journalists and foreign agents, pizza deliveries going up during big news (people were staying later than normal or celebrating or whatever else was a trend noticed back in the 90s. All because it's just one tiny little hint helping to build up context.

and doesn’t say anything that isn’t also publicly available.

What do you mean? None of this was publicly available until today. It's only available now, because a journalist reported it. In my opinion, a journalist should have never been in a position to report this story or any details they did not report on. I do not find solace that the journalist either chose not to, or was unable to, report precise mission details to the public. If I was an adversarial journalist writing a story about this administration in these circumstances, then I would also not print mission details.

A contribution to the successful mission was the journalist, who should not have been there, didn't go to Twitter and scream from the rooftops that JDAMs were falling on Target 3 in Aden from 15,000 feet at 12:00PM local time. This was good for the journalist, because the journalist would be in jail most likely. I would not expect detailed flight plans or powerpoint mission briefings were shared by the Secretary of Defense in a big group chat, but it seems very reasonable to me that targets, times, weapons were shared with these individuals, and it seems reasonable to me that these are things you do not want to go public. Since journalists have a job to make things go public officials should be careful what they share with them. It does not seem like they were particularly careful in this instance.

For myself, "we probably could not have been hurt that bad from our colossal fuck up" is about as comforting as "well nothing bad happened so it's fine." Procedures are created to minimize colossal fuck ups and bad happenings. Next in line is "well the enemy is small and weak and can't harm us anyway." I think this is a stupid, dangerous mindset to humor when doing something as serious as warfare, and there are many historical examples of this mindset contributing to defeat.

But it doesn't say that. In fact, when they talk about any actually sensitive military planning type things, they explicitly refer anybody in the group to an appropriate channel:

At 8:05 a.m. on Friday, March 14, “Michael Waltz” texted the group: “Team, you should have a statement of conclusions with taskings per the Presidents guidance this morning in your high side inboxes.” (High side, in government parlance, refers to classified computer and communications systems.) “State and DOD, we developed suggested notification lists for regional Allies and partners. Joint Staff is sending this am a more specific sequence of events in the coming days and we will work w DOD to ensure COS, OVP and POTUS are briefed.”

That's how they started out. But the article later says people (including SECDEF) are posting clearly sensitive info, including the exact time of the strike. Which is a known hazard of trying to discuss unclassified parts of classified things in an unclassified environment, which is why in general that's discouraged (though political appointees in particular probably do it all the time).

Well today we had congressional testimony where they claim there was nothing secretive shared, and that signal was approved for the type of use they were doing.

So maybe everybody is lying. Certainly everybody involved here has an incentive to lie.

As others have pointed out, several of the people in the chat (including the SECDEF) are the original classification authorities for the informations shared, so in some sense if they say it isn't classified it isn't, even if it's the sort of thing that would typically be classified. But that's a technicality; it may make it legal (as far as classified information goes) but it doesn't make it not-stupid. As for using Signal, my understanding is that's a violation of the Federal Records Act (because it doesn't keep records), but I'm not familiar enough to say there isn't a loophole.

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The most likely explanation is that they just fucked up. There is no possible benefit to deliberately leaking the info to Goldberg that would make up for the embarrassment of him going public with how he obtained the information.

To end, VP Vance reportedly typing “a prayer for victory” after a course of action was decided upon.

To me this is kind of funny given the enormous discrepancy in power between the USA and the Houthis. It's kind of like if a grown man prayed for victory just before getting into a fist-fight with an infant.

The grown man failed to win in the last fist fight. We already had the whole 'Houthis fucked around and now they're gonna find out' arc a year ago where everyone thought the combined might of NATO and the US fleet would quickly crush them. But Red Sea shipping remains 50% below what it was and we got all these articles about how the ships were firing million dollar interceptors at drones costing 100th of the price.

Have you considered that a prayer for victory Is Just What You Do?

To be fair to Vance, the historical track record of Operation Bomb Dirt is quite poor. Seeking divine intervention in the hopes that the next round of desultory air strikes will be more productive than in the past is not so unreasonable.

To me this is kind of funny given the enormous discrepancy in power between the USA and the Houthis. It's kind of like if a grown man prayed for victory just before getting into a fist-fight with an infant.

The Houthis need to be lucky only once for the US to have a massive egg on their face. People are still talking about the downed F-117 in Serbia. Also realistically I would bet that if a carrier is sunk quite a lot of the people on board would drown. There is air of invulnerability over US Capital ships so some of them being lax on evacuation procedures training is not unthinkable.

Signal is probably at least as secure as everything else the government has in its toolbox. Moxie is the real deal.

Imagine Mark Zuckerberg now. Facebook implemented Signal-type end to end encryption, with PFS and OTR and everything, and also Zuckerberg very much bends the knee and kisses Trump's ring, and still the people in his administration organize their illicit, leaky chats on the open source nerd niche messenger instead of the mainstream one run by his all-American megacorp they probably had preinstalled to talk with their buddies.

Also, technically, I think that the NSA is at least as competent as Moxie. The main problem with them is not that they have a massive conflict of interest, because their day job is breaking encryption to spy on Americans and everyone else. The probability that the security community would roll out backdoored encryption to spy on an administration might not be larger, but it certainly seems much higher than the probability of Signal being a NSA operation.

I'd bet it's not as secure as an in-person meeting in a SCIF.

IDK I don't actually think a very large portion of the US security apparatus actually cares about or follows the ostensible security protocols, and SCIFs are only as good as said protocols.

I've certainly heard this opined about high-level political types. In my experience the contractors and low level folks take it pretty seriously, and I know there was a lot of annoyance from those groups in particular about Hillary's email server, for example. There is (perhaps rightfully) a pretty strong view of a two-tier system there.

ETA: I've also heard rumblings that different departments within the government handle things like this very differently too.

We take it seriously because we’d get absolutely reamed for fucking it up. Even if it were something mild/unintentional enough to avoid criminal charges, if I triggered some sort of audit, I wouldn’t expect to keep my job.

That’s the other thing about the various “improper storage” scandals. Responsibility was diluted. Sure, the government could find out who dumped files in Joe’s garage, but they elected not to spend the money. Not when there was no actual leak involved. This case doesn’t have that excuse.

I've heard extremely hair-raising anecdotes set both inside high-level Pentagon circles and big military contractor circles where high-level political types probably weren't a problem (although political correctness might be). Think things along the lines of knowingly improper access controls on HUMINT or phone calls to foreign countries placed in secure areas.

It's very schizophrenic. A coworker of mine told me a story about a base he worked on. To finish a step in acquiring your clearance to work there, you had to log into a secure system. You could not log into the secure system because you hadn't completed all the steps in acquiring your clearance. Therefore, someone who was already cleared had to log into the system for you, so that you could finish all the steps to get your own clearance. This itself was a violation of the rules for both the person who logged you in, and yourself.

Nobody cared. Everyone knew the system was bullshit.

But it's hard to imagine having to break the rules to get inside the circle of trust a clearance represents doesn't input a certain fundamental disrespect for said circle of trust.

Yeah that sounds about right, and I 100% think it nudges (in the mind of the practitioners) OPSEC out of the category of "important to prevent people from dying" into "more of this dumb bureaucratic paperwork stuff."

Which is really bad if it's actually important.

One part of the CIA triad (which sounds like some kind of military secret, but I’m told it’s just a cool-sounding cybersecurity acronym) is Availability — users should have access to everything they need to do their jobs without undue hurdles. If the government is violating that principle, it invites a cavalier attitude towards security and damages it in the process.

This Signal chat situation sounds like a particularly pernicious case of Shadow IT, as much as I dislike the term. But I’m very much curious how government officials are supposed to communicate with each other, particularly with how interconnected the world is now.

Yes - I appreciate the invocation of cybersecurity principles (which I know little about) here, but yeah I think that's right, and a real problem.

With how many neocons are still infesting the admin and how leaky they tend to be it actually might. Not if you invite random journalists though.

You are absolutely correct. But if you want to gather

Secretary of Defense, Vice President Vance, Tulsi Gabbard. In total, "18 individuals were listed as members of this group, including various National Security Council officials" in a room,

you will have a single meeting for the whole term of the president.

True, however, at least one person was in this group that really didn't need to be. There were likely others.

Evidently, in the hands of the White House it is not very secure.

Signal security was not compromised in any way. And moronic endpoints are a flaw in any messaging system.

Using non secure messaging platforms is reckless, adding people to the chat they shouldn't have access to is incompetence. There is difference.

I know what you meant. I'll take your word for it that that Signal's communications are as encrypted and secure as anywhere else. I don't see why not.

It is not properly proofed against the dumb people that use it. Which, as all the security folks have told me, is a salient failure point of all systems. A single Nigerian phishing scam cannot compromise the White House network because POTUS clicked the wrong e-mail. We hope, at least.

A single Nigerian phishing scam cannot compromise the White House network because POTUS clicked the wrong e-mail. We hope, at least.

They prevented one Hilary from becoming POTUS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podesta_emails

Any system with good enough opsec doesn't have the needed throughput to be useful.

Jeffrey surely had a responsibility to leave this group chat when he figured this was a real thing really happening and he wasn't supposed to be there. As in, legally he shouldn't be privy to classified stuff.

Not really his problem if he didn't have a clearance. The SECDEF shouldn't be sending out classified stuff over Signal; they shouldn't be doing government business over Signal at all, for that matter; the comparisons to Hillary are reasonable here. It appears the person who set up the group (Michael Waltz) intended it to be for unclassified discussion, but trying to discuss the same thing at one level of detail via an easy-to-use unclassified system and at another via a pain-in-the-butt classified system never works.

So what should they use? Slack? Google Messenger? Facebook messenger? AIM? Does the USG have its own private, secured messaging app? TBH, Signal actually seems like the best option if you need to have a group discussion with people all over the world and with conflicting schedules.

I mean...I'm open to alternatives, but what are they?

I’m confident they have one. I’d guess Teams.

Still no bueno for classified information, but if what Gabbard says is true, this chat was perfectly innocent on that front. :)

It is indeed Teams, which is another reason there will never be any prosecution.

Prosecutor: And is it true that you used Signal, a non-government communications method, to set up a group chat at the very highest levels:

Waltz: Yes

Defense Attorney : Mr. Waltz, what is the official government communications method for the Department of Defense

Waltz: Microsoft Teams Chat

Defense Attorney: Your honor, defense moves to dismiss with prejudice.

Prosecutor: Err, um, err... no objections

Are you kidding? The official, encrypted, auto-record keeping email system the government has used for the last 40 years.

The one they undoubtedly can't access from their private iPhones, because allowing that would be an obvious, glaring security flaw.

So they should have used email to decide to bomb Yemen and that would have been acceptable? Too slow, for starters.

I'm not really sure what the actual offense is here. I think it's accidentally adding an unrecognized phone number to a chat group, others think it's using the chat group in the first place.

Are you kidding? The official, encrypted, auto-record keeping email system the government has used for the last 40 years.

Are you seriously proposing that people use e-mail for instant messaging? What is this, 1993?

The one they undoubtedly can't access from their private iPhones, because allowing that would be an obvious, glaring security flaw.

“Security” is just a jobs programme for people who couldn’t get into the real police. They did it this way and what happened? Did the heavens fall down? No. Quod erat demonstrandum.

“Security” is just a jobs programme for people who couldn’t get into the real police. They did it this way and what happened? Did the heavens fall down? No. Quod erat demonstrandum.

So the argument we're going with is "OPSEC is for suckers who can't even make it into... the police?" Uninspired trolling.

Are you seriously proposing that people use e-mail for instant messaging? What is this, 1993?

Yes. Emails are messages, and they are instant. Easy to lock down access, easy to encrypt with code 100% under your control. Decentralized, robust, fail-safe. Add rudimentary mailing lists if you need your "groups" organized, done. Millions of people have conducted complex discussions like that for decades.

How many planes did the Houthis manage to shoot down due to this “failure of OPSEC”? Zero. Therefore, the level of OPSEC that you want them to deploy is evidently unnecessary. OPSEC is not reducing military casualties; all it’s doing is giving “security personnel” a paycheck, and conferring no actual military advantage.

This is OPSEC’s “The emperor has no clothes” moment. All OPSEC’s recommendations were disregarded, and nothing bad happened. This proves that OPSEC is stupid, not that its violators are stupid.

I would also like to point out that anyone who condemns this “security breach” without in the same breath condemning Hillary’s e-mail server is double-standards-ing HARD. It’s OK when Dems do it?

How many planes did the Houthis manage to shoot down due to this “failure of OPSEC”? Zero.

Have you noticed that America's adversaries are not all nomadic camel herders with temporary access to Iranian missiles?

When the top ranks of the US government all conduct their business using some app on their private phones (as I assume they all do, the carelessness to invite a journalist by accident suggests group creation on signal is an every day rote task for them), it's basically guaranteed that foreign adversaries have access to much of that information.

At the very least Israel has enough expertise (via NSO Group's Pegasus) to have rootkit access to arbitrary smartphones. I'm 100% confident China has similar capabilities, and Russia and Iran might not be far behind (snatching the physical phone is always a realistic low-tech option, though). I have low trust in the EUs capabilities, but honestly, they might just be able to buy the tech as SAS. iOS and Android are extremely vulnerable, period.

And this is absolutely catastrophic, even if not a single aircraft is shot down - ever. Imagine going into negotiations with an adversary that knows your true goals and what arguments support them, and what pain points you want to mitigate.

I would also like to point out that anyone who condemns this “security breach” without in the same breath condemning Hillary’s e-mail server is double-standards-ing HARD. It’s OK when Dems do it?

Of course not! She was grilled for months on that, and for many good reasons. Might have cost her the election, even (probably not).

it's basically guaranteed that foreign adversaries have access to much of that information.

“Basically” seems to be doing a tremendous amount of work in this sentence. You’re constructing an entire catastrophic narrative from one piece of evidence where nothing catastrophic happened. Here’s an alternative take that fits the evidence just as well: when they’re discussing adversaries who have more hacking capability than stone-age Yemenis, they stick to more secure channels.

If this had been discussing China or Israel I would be more sympathetic to your concerns, but it’s bombing a group of people who have never seen a computer in their lives, not bombing 1337 h4X0rz. The Pareto frontier of convenience vs. security is placed in a very different location when Yemen is your foe vs. when China is your foe.

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I am sure there are internal secure messaging apps both on the classified side and the unclassified side. They might be terrible however.

It appears the person who set up the group (Michael Waltz) intended it to be for unclassified discussion

So Waltz set it up for interfacing for unclassified stuff like with journalists and forgot about it. So-and-so made a group chat, so-and-so invited so-and-so, and next thing ya know Jeffrey Goldberg is the only journalist in a Signal chat with the nation's leadership as they plan a military action?

This appears like a level of brazen, incompetent comfort that suggests to me they're probably using Signal for all sorts of coordination. Of which the only reasonable thing I can land* on is: other forms of communication are suspected compromised and they have an immediate need. But it's much easier for me to believe a sloppy disregard for procedure is commonplace.

  • Or Signal has been okay'd for this use and we don't know?

This appears like a level of brazen, incompetent comfort that suggests to me they're probably using Signal for all sorts of coordination.

Now that the US's rivals know this, how possible is it for them to compromise Signal's servers for some Man in the Middle breach? Is it true that even the Signal company themselves can't read user comms?

Signal is e2e encrypted so this isn't an issue.

While agree there must be some level of incompetence or just a screw-up, I really don't see which of the various chat apps would be better than Signal. AFAIK, it's the most secure almost to the point of being a problem for things like FOIA, as once the app is deleted all the message history is gone.

Anyway, I"m not sure I agree with the 'bad ops-sec' here and tend toward 'if you message the wrong person, you can't claw it back.'

almost to the point of being a problem for things like FOIA

What a happy coincidence.

Anyway, I"m not sure I agree with the 'bad ops-sec' here

If you are unsure of this despite the fact this article exists, then what do you consider an example of bad OPSEC?

chat apps would be better than Signal... as once the app is deleted all the message history is gone.

If there is no inhouse Signal equivalent, then it's about 20 years past due. I bet there is and I bet it sucks and that's why they use Signal.

Wiping message history without recording keeping is a problem, because all text messages about official acts from federal agencies must be preserved. I guess politicians across the spectrum have decided this is not actually an important accountability feature in democracy nor are historical records important enough to bother. Fair enough.

Sorry, 'ops-sec' is not the correct term. the 'Ops-sec' was the failure. I think I meant something similar but specifically with the technology...Tech-sec or something.

Signal is the correct app to use if you're going to do these things--at least from what's on tap.

I think people are shocked that they didn't all assemble int he 'war room' to make the weighty decision to drop some bombs. The halcyon days of Dr. Strangelove are over, my friends.

I wonder if we'll even remember this happened in 3.75 years. Things are so whackadoodle, I can't tell if this is actually a scandal or not. Seems...not?

If there's an inhouse Signal equivalent would it be cleared for use on your garden-variety cell phone?

(Anyway yes I bet it sucks either way).

Wiping message history without recording keeping is a problem, because all text messages about official acts from federal agencies must be preserved. I guess politicians across the spectrum have decided this is not actually an important accountability feature in democracy nor are historical records important enough to bother. Fair enough.

I have a bit of a rant about this but TLDR;

  1. I think this is a very common problem and suspect "using Signal with messages set to delete" is fairly typical even at lower ranks, and
  2. Modern records are made at a MUCH faster rate than dated records-keeping laws anticipated. Arguably either all records-keeping laws or associated technology needs to be completely revamped to account for modern electronic messaging capability.

The boring answer is that "the official channels" require badging through a few locked doors to log into a desktop computer in a windowless room to check email, which isn't very responsive if you're trying to move very quickly across several tiers of organization.

That is a poor excuse, but it seems the most likely one to me. Either that or concern about opsec was minimal given the adversary's technical prowess, but that also strikes me as a poor excuse.

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