President Donald Trump’s national security adviser, Mike Waltz, accidentally added The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, to a secret military chat on Signal.
The chat included Vice President JD Vance, Defense Minister Pete Hegseth and 18 other senior officials. The Signal group chat discussed the upcoming U.S. strikes on Yemen — a few hours before they began, Hegseth detailed information about the time and locations of the attacks.
The public should be concerned about how frivolously Goldberg was added to the national security leadership’s Signal chat room, where confidential details of military operations against Houthis, Yemen were discussed.
The administration must not use any messengers open to the public and instead use secured service channels.
Signal is a publicly available, encrypted messenger app used for calls, texts and group chats.
The app’s purpose is to establish a secure connection between its users and prevent any third-party interference. However, it is still relatively tiny compared to industry giants like WhatsApp, Telegram or Apple’s iMessage.
According to Trump, many media reporters and military personnel commonly use Signal due to its safety and security.
“I hear it’s used by a lot of groups, I hear it’s used by the media a lot,” Trump told reporters at the Oval Office. “Sometimes people can get onto those things, that’s one of the prices you pay when you’re not sitting in the Situation Room with no phones, which is always the best, frankly. The best is to be there.”
Trump’s statement suggests that even though public messengers are not prohibited, he still prefers to discuss sensitive military plans and operations in a more secure and controllable environment.
While the breach seems more like an unforced error, the situation has raised serious questions about the administration’s communications security system.
The addition of Goldberg to the Signal group chat undermines the level of security used to discuss the plans for airstrikes against Yemen.
Though some may argue that even if there is an encrypted end-to-end chat like Signal, the administration should not use any type of public group chats to discuss sensitive military operations due to the possibility of a human factor error like the discussion of airstrikes against Yemen.
“These secure rooms are built to discuss classified information,” NPR reported. “You can’t take a phone into these rooms. You can’t take documents out, and all of these top-ranking national security officials have SCIFs at their offices and at their homes.”
