It's a thousand times worse than you think

Their little group chat is the tip of a truly historic intelligence breach

Whiskeyleaks seems appropriate

The explosive news broke yesterday that National Security Advisor Michael Waltz had opened a Signal group chat to discuss the planning for strikes on Houthi rebels in Yemen and included Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg. The group would grow to include the top national security and political officials of the Trump Administration and share the detailed strike packages on Yemeni positions hours before the attacks began.

Not one of these idiots noticed that there was someone named ‘JG’ silently watching the entire thing unfold. My teenagers have better operational security than the clowns supposedly running our country.

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The ‘adults in the room’ running our national security...and a reporter

The punchlines are too many too count but one of my favorites is the very last paragraph of the story when our completely unqualified Secretary of Defense offered this gem.

I can honestly see why Veep went off the air. You cannot compete with this level of complete buffoonery and have people believe it.

There is an absolute ton of reporting being cranked out right now that is digging deeper into this. Democratic lawmakers are demanding investigations and resignations. Republicans are desperately spinning it as no big deal and “but her emails” excuses. They have not yet dug into some crucial points I’d like you to consider.

I want to highlight a few key things that have kept me up last night as were thousands of intelligence officials around the world scrambling to assess the largest intelligence breach since Edward Snowden as one described it to a friend.

The casual use of Signal by high ranking Cabinet members, the likely use of personal devices for classified information, and the likely exposure of these conversations to Russian intelligence.

No one said a word

One thing that caught my eye upon first reading the story was when they decided to discuss Top Secret war planning on Signal, instead of standard secure means, not one member of this group that included our Director of National Intelligence, raised an objection. That tells me that using Signal is standard practice in the Trump Administration.

That means that for possibly two and a half months our national security secrets have been regularly shared and discussed using a commercial, open source, messaging service that is not actually secure and not cleared for classified communications. While Signal is encrypted it is not known if foreign intelligence agencies have access to the messages.

It is known that if you are able to hack and spoof a users phone you can see everything they are typing and receiving on their phone. In a Politico story one former NSA employee explains a key vulnerability, “People can link Signal messaging to a desktop application,” he said. “This means that Signal data is being delivered to potentially multiple desktop and laptop computers where it isn’t being stored in a phone’s secure enclave. That data is then at risk from commodity malware on the system.”

In a nutshell, the app is great for enhanced privacy but is is far from safe. But, the issue for me as a former government official is that they are using private messaging apps with timed disappearing set up to avoid the Presidential Records Act and FOIA requirements. By using Signal they are avoiding their being any written record of their discussions and hiding them from the public.

Not one person raised a concern when he launched the group which tells us it is standard practice in the Trump Administration. The entire thing is only made more outrageous and deeply fucked up when you consider that while this group chat was being used Tulsi Gabbard tweeted out this gem:

I don’t suppose she is going to treat herself or her peers to this standard.

UPDATE: Since I first posted this article its been reported by NPR’s Pentagon Correspondent Tom Bowman that a DOD wide email went out last week warning that Signal was unsecure and not to be used.

Action Item: We need journalists and lawmakers to be asking all of the participants in this debacle if using Signal is standard practice in this Administration?

Copy and Paste

Goldberg reported that in one key series of posts from Hegseth the posts “contained operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing.” It is clear that to use Signal to send such details of the plan it is more than likely that those plans were on an unsecure personal device, either a phone or computer with Signal on it.

That means the Secretary of Defense is using personal devices for classified information. You are not allowed to download apps like Signal onto secure messaging devices in use by the U.S. government or on to classified computers. In addition, the ability to copy and paste or take screenshots is disabled as well.

The only way to copy and paste details of a war effort would be to carefully type them in by hand off of a classified device and into Signal, in itself a massive breach of security regulations, or that the original document is already on an unsecured laptop or phone and Hegseth simply copied and pasted it.

Either scenario makes Hillary’s sharing of recipes to her basement server look like a cute little bygone moment.

The number of times that Pete Hegseth appeared on television or in print to rail about Hillary Clinton’s use of that private server in her home to conduct business as the Secretary of State is nearly impossible to count.

Here he is the day before the 2016 election beating up her up for far less than what we currently know he did.

When he landed in Hawaii yesterday, Hegseth decided after 8 hours of contemplating it, to do the old “the reporter is a liar working for a rag,” excuse even though the National Security Council Spokesman literally confirmed the group chat was real in the actual Atlantic story.

Really top notch comms team they have there at DOD these days.

The fact is it happened and the implications for our national security are devastating. Real men and women’s lives are at stake here and these clowns are treating them like an inconvenience and the lives they are taking as nothing.

Let’s consider that the response by the United States National Security Advisor to the reports that strikes had killed many of their targets that we now know included innocent women and children was…well…this:

Fist bump, flag, fire!

Action Item: Journalists and lawmakers need to be asking and demanding investigations into whether Pete Hegseth is using personal unsecure devices to handle and view classified documents in violation of the law.

In the Kremlin

The final most truly disturbing aspect of this is that Trump’s special envoy to Russia, property developer, Steve Witkoff was actually in Moscow when he was added to the Signal group on his personal phone.

As a matter of fact, based on the timelines that I have been able to construct Witkoff may very well have been inside the Kremlin itself when Waltz put out the call to assemble on Signal.

According to this story from Sky News on the ground, Witkoff arrived in Moscow around noon Moscow time on Thursday the 13th. He was kept waiting for an astonishing eight hours by Putin before meeting him around 8:00 PM.

The story goes on to say that the Kremlin announced that Putin’s meetings were done at 1:30 AM local time and Witkoff headed to the airport just half an hour later.

Moscow is 7-hours ahead of the Eastern Time Zone of the United States. Witkoff had spent the day waiting in Moscow for Putin.

4:28 PM in Washington D.C. is 1:48 AM in Moscow as he headed for home.

Did Witkoff have his personal phone on him inside the Kremlin? Did he use Moscow cell service or Kremlin WiFi to participate in the Houthi planning group while in the capital of one of the Houthis prime allies who have been giving them targeting information for U.S. warships and other attacks?

At a minimum we know that based on the timeline provided by Goldberg, Steve Witkoff used Signal to plan a major military operation while in Moscow.

As I mentioned above, one of the key vulnerabilities of using Signal is that if you have a spoof of a users phone or malware on their devices you can see their conversations in real time. How many times have you been warned not to use that free wifi in public to access your bank accounts or use your credit cards? That’s because it’s very easy to use wifi to access your activity on your devices.

Our envoy to Russia appears to have done that…in our enemies capitol.

Do the Russians now have access to everything on his phone? What other Signal chats is he part of?

Action Item: Witkoff must testify. His phone must be seized and examined for hacking. All of them must resign.

Investigate, minimize the damage, demand resignations

The questions are endless and unanswered about this entire affair but we must demand answers and full unvarnished investigations.

Heads must roll for this.

As I write this it appears the idiot FBI Director Kash Patel is appearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee and is being asked whether there will be an investigation.

There must be. This is a massive intelligence breach. A friend relayed from a colleague inside an intelligence agency that they’re viewing this as the largest breach since Edward Snowden and the assessment will be larger in scale and scope due to the size of the group and positions of those members.

We are talking potential intelligence on the personal devices of the Director of National Intelligence, Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State, National Security Assistant, Political Advisors to the President, the CIA director, and their seconds that were added. We are talking 18 people all with illegal sharing of intel.

They have put in danger thousands of lives and the entire national security of our country for convenience and covering their tracks.

We deserve a lot more answers than fist bump, flag, fire.

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