Summary
Private data of top Trump officials, including phone numbers, emails, and, in some cases, passwords of Mike Waltz, Pete Hegseth, and Tulsi Gabbard, were found online after a Signal chat scandal involving airstrike planning on Yemen.
Der Spiegel reports that some password details were obtained via hacked data dumps and commercial providers, posing security risks like spyware installation.
The scandal raised concerns of foreign espionage during top-secret planning discussions, further damaging the administration’s credibility.
No way! But every Signal evangelist has been coming out of the woodwork to ensure everyone that this just isn’t possible! That Signal is “super safe”™️ and “unbreakable”™️
the data dumps are unrelated to signal, just part of the millions of americans who get their info hacked from websites each year. these people are just under scrutiny because of the recent scandal.
No system is safe if you’re an idiot. The user is always the flaw.
Technically speaking, Signal is pretty much the best you can get in terms of a commonly available and trivially-installable e2e messaging client. This was not a failure that can be attributed to any technical flaw in Signal, and anyone presenting it as such is either ignorant of pretty much all the technical details, or pushing a bad-faith narrative.
This has nothing to do with Signalgate directly, except that it affects some of the same Trump officials.
Furthermore, the main concerns about Signalgate isn’t Signal’s security. While we can obviously never fully rule out that Signal could be compromised, there are many other ways the chat could get compromised:
- Someone’s Signal account could get compromised if someone else steals or guesses the password (like in the Spiegel article).
- Some unauthorized person could accidentally get invited to the chat (for example a journalist from the Atlantic).
- One of the phones could get hacked. (This is likely to happen if someone takes their phone to Russia.)
Additionally, Signal was used to avoid any records of what was discussed.
Nothing is unbreakable but Signal is still pretty damn safe
You should read the article to see where these data dumps came from.
