The first 100 days of Trump’s second presidential term have included a surprising player that doesn’t seem likely to go away anytime soon: Signal.
The encrypted messaging platform wasn’t necessarily in the public conscious until last month when top government officials discussed details of an impending military attack in Yemen in a group chat on the platform that inadvertently included The Atlantic‘s Jeffrey Goldberg.
The editor-in-chief published a piece called “The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans” about his shocking inclusion, and quickly set off national interest in Signal. Signal subsequently told Wired that the incident led to a huge uptick in downloads of the app on top of what had already been a “banner year.”
Critics argued that if the nation’s top officials were talking about war plans in one chat, there must be other unreported chats. And just a few weeks later, another chat was revealed by The New York Times.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who was on that original Signal thread, also was reported to have shared detailed information about those same forthcoming strikes in another Signal chat that—for some reason—included his wife, brother, and personal lawyer.
Signal itself collects virtually no user data on its 30 million monthly users. But it’s still an unsecured consumer platform, often operated on a user’s personal phone, that’s vulnerable to hacks and surveillance. The Associated Press reported last week that Hegseth had an unsecured internet connection set up in his office so that he could use the Signal app on his computer.
The app has a feature that allows users to set messages to automatically delete after a set period of time. That’s given some a false sense of security, but this week’s Semafor report on the massive right-leaning Signal group that’s attracted billionaires has reiterated that people can leak messages, and phones can always take screenshots.
Turns out, what happens on Signal doesn’t always stay on Signal.
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