signalgate
'Signalgate' Inspector General Report Wants Just One Change to Avoid a Repeat Debacle
The United States Inspector General report reviewing Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth's text messaging mess recommends a single change to keep classified material secure. A United States Inspector General report publicly released today found that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth could have put US troops and military operations at risk by using the consumer messaging service Signal to share sensitive, real-time details in March about a planned attack on Houthi rebels in Yemen. The IG first shared the classified report with Congress on Tuesday. The report contains only one direct recommendation: that the chief of US Central Command's Special Security Office "review the command's classification procedures for compliance" with Department of Defense regulations "and issue additional procedures, as necessary, to ensure proper portion marking of classified information." The report also references another IG publication about use of "non-DOD-controlled electronic messaging systems" and points to its recommendations that DOD "improve training for senior DOD officials on the proper use of electronic devices."
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How Signal's Meredith Whittaker Remembers SignalGate: 'No Fucking Way'
The Signal Foundation president recalls where she was when she heard Trump cabinet officials had added a journalist to a highly sensitive group chat. In March of this year, Meredith Whittaker was at her kitchen table in Paris when Signal, the encrypted messaging service she runs, suddenly became an international headline . A colleague sent their group chat the story ricocheting across the globe: "The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans." Of course, you know the rest: In the piece, The Atlantic's editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, detailed how he'd been added to a Signal chat about an upcoming military operation in Yemen. Over the following days and weeks, the incident would become known as " SignalGate "--and created a legitimate risk that the fallout would cause people to question Signal's security, instead of pointing their fingers at the profoundly dubious op-sec of senior-level Trump officials. In fact, Signal's user numbers grew by leaps and bounds, both in the US and around the world. It's growth that, Whittaker thinks, is coming at a time when "people are feeling in a much deeper, much more personal way why privacy might be important." On this week's episode of, I talked to Whittaker, who also cofounded the AI Now Institute, about the aftermath of SignalGate, the trajectory of artificial intelligence, and the tech industry's current relationship with politics. Nice to see you, Katie. Nice to see you, too. Brace yourself, we always start these conversations with a little warmup, so I'm going to ask you some very fast questions. I knew you were gonna say that. What's the weirdest AI application you've ever seen? A chatbot that pretends to be your friend.
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It's the End of the World (And It's Their Fault)
It's late morning on a Monday in March and I am, for reasons I will explain momentarily, in a private bowling alley deep in the bowels of a 65 million mansion in Utah. Jesse Armstrong, the showrunner of HBO's hit series Succession, approaches me, monitor headphones around his neck and a wide grin on his face. "I take it you've seen the news," he says, flashing his phone and what appears to be his X feed in my direction. Everyone had: An hour earlier, my boss Jeffrey Goldberg had published a story revealing that U.S. national-security leaders had accidentally added him to a Signal group chat where they discussed their plans to conduct then-upcoming military strikes in Yemen. "Incredibly fucking depressing," Armstrong said.
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