What Was on Mike Waltz’s Phone?
When Michael Waltz, the now former national security adviser, accidentally added The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, to a private Signal group chat planning a US attack on Yemen earlier this year, it triggered concerns about the information security practices of top White House officials. These included the fact that Signal, despite being a secure communication method, auto-deletes messages after a set time frame; deleting text messages about official acts may violate federal records laws, which require the preservation of certain communications among administration staff. According to Goldberg, some messages in the group chat were set to disappear after a certain number of weeks. Upon learning this, the watchdog group American Oversight sued the administration and sought to recover the deleted messages.
After that, the incident now known as “Signalgate” went relatively quiet. Last week, however, Waltz’s phone made headlines again: on Thursday, the same day that Waltz would be ousted from his position, a Reuters photographer captured an image that showed him checking Signal messages from colleagues beneath a table at a cabinet meeting. As 404 Media reported, Waltz wasn’t using the official Signal app, but rather a modified version called TeleMessage Signal, which collects and archives Signal messages. As such, Waltz may have used TeleMessage to comply with federal recordkeeping laws; on its (now defunct) website, TeleMessage, the Israeli company behind the app, marketed it as an archiving solution designed to help users meet regulatory requirements when using popular platforms like Signal. (The company was acquired last year by Smarsh, a firm based in Oregon.)
Related Knowledge Center: Signalgate
The inadvertent inclusion of the Atlantic editor on a Signal group chat sharing information about a pending U.S. military strike has created an uproar of accusations and denials. It’s also exposed a Pandora’s box of shoddy digital security practices within the Trump administration
The White House vs. the press | Digital privacy and data security
Related Knowledge Center: Digital privacy and data security
If you’re online, you’re generating a constant stream of information about yourself — sometimes voluntarily, sometimes unwittingly — that is assembled and used to craft your online experience. And generate wealth for data brokers. Meanwhile, designers and managers of the digital infrastructure on which the world depends are engaged in a never-ending effort to thwart attempts, by both criminal enterprises and state actors, to exploit vulnerabilities in those systems.
Signalgate | State surveillance