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Secrets on Signal – The New York Times

March 27, 2025
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Why does it seem so hard to keep government information classified? Donald Trump and Joe Biden both took top-secret documents to their houses. Hillary Clinton kept State Department emails on a personal server. This week, the White House added a journalist to a group chat about bombing Yemen.

The administration argues it wasn’t a big deal. But security experts say the Signal thread, in which The Atlantic’s editor was accidentally included, was a sloppy and dangerous mistake.

There are several reasons this sort of lapse keeps happening — and the Trump administration is uniquely prone. Today’s newsletter will break them down and explain the stakes.

There are computer systems designed to discuss war plans and other secrets. They are accessible only in secured rooms, and it’s very difficult for foreign powers to penetrate them. You can’t bring your personal devices into these rooms, which are not connected to the web.

But all that security makes them cumbersome and annoying. In most secured rooms, you can’t toggle between work and social media, the way most of us do. You can’t scroll through a classified feed while watching “The White Lotus.” For all but the top officials, who have Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities, or SCIFs, built at their homes, you have to go into the office to check on “the high side,” the slang for the secret computer networks.

Government officials, including new political appointees like the ones in the Signal chat, are trained on the proper protocols, and it can be a crime to violate them. But it’s hard to toggle between an economic speech in Michigan, which the vice president was giving on the day he weighed in, and the monkish habits needed to interact with restricted material. Biden administration officials sometimes used Signal, too, though more for directing colleagues to SCIFs for updates than for sharing the government secrets that could be found there.

Those hassles are at odds with the pledge that Trump administration officials have made to simplify government work and remove red tape. Trump claims he has a mandate from voters who think the government doesn’t work. He has flayed the Biden and Obama White Houses for a deliberative process that made government work slowly.

So his administration has moved fast — often too fast, not always thinking through the consequences of its actions. In a quest to reduce the work force, the C.I.A. fired many of its employees working in diversity initiatives, never mind that many were talented recruiters of spies. In some cases, the administration has had to painfully undo decisions that went too far. It dismissed government scientists and regulators overseeing nuclear plants and then had to rehire them for safety reasons.

That attitude is evident in the officials’ use of Signal, a commercial messaging app with lots of encryption — but not enough to satisfy the government’s high standards for secrecy. The app runs on personal phones, and those are vulnerable. Personal phones can be hacked by nation states and companies. Still, a SCIF is a form of red tape. Texting your colleagues to get work done is more efficient.

The emphasis on action may also have caused the original mistake. Mike Waltz, Trump’s national security adviser, or someone using his phone, added the journalist. It was a user error. In another administration, someone might have double-checked, but not this time.

Russia has shared intelligence with the Houthis, the rebels and pirates targeted in the Yemen bombing. At a House hearing yesterday, one Democrat, Mike Quigley of Illinois, asked what would have happened if the Houthis had the details in the chat. (Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told the group on Saturday that F-18s would be arriving at 1:45 p.m., for instance.)

The Houthis have shot down American drones and fired at U.S. ships. They have coastal defense and anti-air missiles. Maybe if they’d foreseen the attack, they could have threatened the safety of American pilots. It is not something on which the government usually gambles.

At the hearing, America’s spy chiefs — the director of intelligence and the head of the C.I.A. — said no classified information had been shared. And it’s true that those two officials said little in the chat. But Hegseth shared enough for the Russians to know what was happening.

It’s reasonable to believe that Trump officials have used Signal before and would have again if they hadn’t been caught. Based on their apologias this week, perhaps they still will. But the scandal puts a bull’s-eye on Signal. The Chinese already have access to U.S. mobile networks and have intercepted the calls of prominent Americans, including Vice President JD Vance. It would be relatively easy for them to gain access to the next round of chats.

So imagine a different scenario, the next one, in which the subject is not bombing Houthis but deploying American ships and planes to protect Taiwan. If China knew about U.S. plans, it could pre-empt, outflank or outsmart the Americans. It could jeopardize American lives. It could seize Taiwan before the United States had time to act.

Perhaps that prospect will eventually scare officials back into their SCIFs. It’s what they were built for.

  • Sudan’s military recaptured the capital, Khartoum, which the rival Rapid Support Forces had occupied since a brutal civil war broke out nearly two years ago.

  • Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s former president, will face trial for attempting a coup after he lost the 2022 election.

  • South Korea admitted that adoption agencies committed widespread fraud decades ago as they sent children to American and European homes for profit. Adoption agencies falsified documents to present babies as orphans when they had known parents.

  • The British authorities issued a record fine against the University of Sussex. Regulators found that the school’s policy on transgender equality limited what staff members could teach or say about sex and gender.

  • Germany is grappling with its fascist past and at the same time faces ascendant extremism. Against that background, a difficult question has arisen: Where should Nazis be buried?

  • Vigilantes known as “pedophile hunters,” who film themselves confronting people who message minors online, are growing more violent in their exploits, a Times analysis found.

  • After more than 10 years, the Gaia space telescope will be switched off and sent into orbit around the sun. The telescope has gathered data on nearly two billion stars, millions of potential galaxies and some 150,000 asteroids, transforming astronomy.

Foreign governments can rest easy knowing that Trump’s team will leak sensitive information over and over again, Noah Shachtman writes.

Here is a column by David French on the group chat.

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