A Quick Word on Signal

I've used Signal for years and years for unclassified information that was very sensitive. It's not thought to be unbreakable -- probably NSA can break it -- but it is managed by IT/privacy experts who seem to be genuinely committed. There's no suggestion here that Signal itself failed at all; the failure was, as is usual in espionage, on the human side. Somebody let a reporter in, either by accident or on purpose. 

Apparently the Biden administration thought Signal was OK for coordinating about stuff that was classified, as long as the classified stuff was kept on the high side (i.e. in airgapped networks like SIPR and JWICS). In my day, as the old timers say, we never did that. Any discussion of classified information was treated as needing to be kept on the high side.

Occasionally you'd draft a document on a SIPR computer that was really meant to be unclassified, and want to move it to the regular internet so you could send it to people. The only authorized way to do that was to save it to a CD-ROM, by itself, transfer it, and then break the CD-ROM. You were never allowed to connect even a thumb drive to the SIPRnet for transferring files between it and non-airgapped computers connected to the regular internet.

SECDEF Hegseth is younger than me -- which is amazing to me -- but his service was in the right period to have come up with all that same stuff. Why he felt comfortable putting out flight times for combat sorties on Signal is unknown to me; the fact that the CIA/National Security apparatus had apparently endorsed Signal during the Biden administration may have been instructive. 

There seems to have been no harm done, and it's a good opportunity to learn from the mistake and tighten up their shot group on Operational Security. Mistakes happen. You can't freak out about every one of them, but you should learn from every one of them.