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Last month, a source called me. As usual in D.C., he wanted to talk on Signal. The encrypted communications app long ago replaced Blackberries as the default way to message in D.C.
So it wasn’t that surprising that a magazine editor somehow got added onto a Trump administration Signal chat involving J.D. Vance and other administration figures discussing air strikes against the Houthi terrorists in Yemen. Since everyone under 50 in D.C. is constantly messaging each other and media contacts, something like this was eventually bound to happen.
In an age where high-level remote government meetings have become the norm, important decisions in America and Europe are arrived at by video chat and text.
But there may be bigger reasons why the Trump administration and everyone in D.C. should be wary about using Signal. While the app is ubiquitous because it’s perceived as being more ‘private’ than WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook, Brian Acton, the man behind WhatsApp, created the Signal Foundation and is a major liberal donor. Moxie Marlinspike, Signal’s other founder and coder, claims to be an anarchist, and no fan of the Trump administration.
Liberal foundations helped fund Signal’s rise and the initial fiscal sponsorship for Signal was provided by the Freedom of the Press Foundation whose key figures, Daniel Ellsberg of the Pentagon Papers, Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald, are better known for leaking damaging government information to leftists, rather than for keeping it secret.
Signal continues to be run today by leftists who passionately hate the Trump administration.
The Signal Foundation’s president, Meredith Whittaker, described as the “woman in charge of the secure communication channel”, became famous leading a revolt against Google when it dared to add the black female president of the Heritage Foundation to its AI council.
“There is zero proof that anti-conservative bias exists. In fact, these companies bend over backwards to not enforce their terms of service for people like President Trump,” Whittaker falsely claimed.
Other foundation board members include Katherine Maher, the current head of NPR and former head of Wikimedia, who famously claimed that “our reverence for the truth might be a distraction that’s getting in the way of finding common ground and getting things done.”
Maher had said that, “the number one challenge that we see here is, of course, the First Amendment in the United States.” She had cheered Hillary and Kamala, and denounced President Trump as a “deranged racist sociopath.” Rounding out the board are Jay Sullivan, a former Twitter exec ousted by Musk and Amba Kak, a Whittaker protege with ties to the Biden administration.
Signal is a leftist activist group which makes it all the more strange that so much of D.C. is convinced that their privacy is secure using it. So much so that key Trump administration figures, including the vice president, could chat about an upcoming military strike on Signal.
For now there’s no evidence that Signal calls or chats were compromised by anything other than ‘user error’ of the kind that leads random people to occasionally try to add me to groups on Skype, WhatsApp, Signal and every known communications app in the free world.
Signal’s leaders continue to boast that they are committed to the security of the app and the organization’s actual CTO, Ehren Kret, occasionally retweets Elon Musk, but the fundamental difference between WhatsApp and Signal lies not in the technology, but its credibility.
“Signal either works for everyone or it works for no one. Every military in the world uses Signal, every politician I’m aware of uses Signal. Every CEO I know uses Signal because anyone who has anything truly confidential to communicate recognizes that storing that on a Meta database or in the clear on some Google server is not good practice,” Whittaker said.
The question is whether there might be a tipping point at which the value of sabotaging the ‘right’ takes priority over operating a credible platform, as it did when Whittaker went to war against having even one single conversative sit on Google’s AI ethics review board.
Signal is just a digital incarnation of leftist civil libertarianism of the kind that created the ACLU and other free speech movements because they believed that privacy and speech innately favored insurgent revolutionary movements over establishment conservative ones.
“I champion civil liberty as the best of the non-violent means of building the power on which worker’s rule must be based. If I aid the reactionaries to get free speech now and then, if I go outside the class struggle to fight against censorship, it is only because those liberties help to create a more hospitable atmosphere for working class liberties. The class struggle is the central conflict of the world; all others are incidental. When that power of the working class is once achieved, as it has been only in the Soviet Union, I am for maintaining it by any means whatever,” ACLU co-founder Roger Nash Baldwin wrote in ‘Soviet Russia’.
The entire quote is important because it makes it all too clear that civil libertarianism for groups like this is a strategy, a means, not an end, a way to bring down the system and then rule over it.
The ACLU’s current Case Selection Guidelines lay out a more sophisticated version of this argument calling for a consideration of the “impact of the proposed speech and the impact of its suppression” on the organization’s leftist political agenda. And in the last election, you could find the ACLU holding events on “ways to combat the spread of disinformation”.
The ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation still, for the most part, oppose the government use of big tech companies to engage in censorship, known as ‘jawboning’, but other digital civil libertarian groups, notably the Electronic Privacy Information Center, have come out on the side of some government censorship. The Knight Foundation, which helped fund Signal and retains ties to it, has sympathies for ‘jawboning’ censorship.
Katherine Maher, a Signal board member, described taking “a very active approach to disinformation,” based on “conversations with government” in her past career.
Privacy on Signal, like that on any platform or app, depends on the commitment of those in charge to maintaining its integrity. Where WhatsApp is seen as an information gathering tool for Facebook’s data hungry operation, Signal emphasizes that it’s a non-profit and has no reason to spy on you. But Facebook does things to make money whereas Signal’s motives are ideological. And that ideology is hostile to conservatives and the Trump administration.
I use Signal, the way I use every communications app or service, with the assumption that anything I send is vulnerable to being intercepted, seen and heard if there is a sufficiently motivated party inside or outside the organization behind it. That’s not paranoia, it’s pragmatism. Privacy can be improved, but it can’t ever be absolutely ensured.
Conservatives should use Signal cautiously and Trump administration officials would do well not to hold meetings using a supposedly secure app run by some of their worst enemies.
With these people running Signal it is 100% certain that Democrats will know every move Trump is making ahead of time. If MAGA hasn’t figured out how the game is played by now they never will.
Goldberg blabbing about his involvement in the meeting may have hurt the Left’s ability to penetrate Trump world by making its members more wary.
1985 with the USSR: Trust but verify.
2025 with products or services produced by the left: Verify and then maybe trust.
A central problem mainstream media has ignored in this scandal: there is no proof any Houthi leaders were actually killed. We just have the word of a woman-beating drunk who can’t even keep his story straight about the leaks, so why believe anything he says about the airstrikes? The Trump Administration won’t even name the leaders supposedly killed, most likely because there were none. They just killed random civilians and congratulated themselves.
Breaking News: Combat Veterans like to drink alcohol.
Story at 11.
The old and tested forum for holding cabinet conferences is a large table with ample seating inside a secure building.
Trump’s cabinet should return to that model. Mostly, this propensity to employ new, web-based apps when older, modern methods will suffice is a fashion ‘tic’ that might excite middle managers in small, striving businesses. But the impulse is dangerous to free discourse in any deliberative body.
“Back to basics” should be our clarion call.
I’m not convinced online meetings work well anywhere. We have body language for a reason.
Our Safety Mgr told me he got more out of my facial expressions than he did any comments during our Staff Meetings! I guess when you’re absolutely astounded by ignorance and have enough savings you’re a tad freer to show TRUE emotions!!
Any meeting like the EARTH ENDING one just elevated above EVEREST should be held IN PERSON – in a SECURE ROOM – UNDER THE CONES OF SILENCE!! Unless you are setting a TRAP to expose the corruption of those who are “administering” the meeting!! I do hope this was more of a TRAP set than a blunder worthy of the biden bunglers!
That is how professional governments and battle plans work.
Democrats <—— The greatest threat to democracy .
Exactly. Signal is run by some of President Trump’s worst enemies. And
we’ve seen what his enemies may be capable of – have come within an
ear’s breadth of seeing it.
In theory, it’s one of the most brilliant battle-field feint in history. Send out a seemingly important strike plan… and get all the defenders to get on their phones.
Now, AI can target everyone who’s phone got pinged after that news story broke…. especially the Houthi dirtbags. (sorry, sand bags)
Battle plans, target selection and all the timing thereof should ONLY be discussed in a physical, secured, electronically shielded room. WHY? Because there is NO SUCH THING as unbreakable encryption, as there is no such thing as a truly “random” number. Improvements in “AI” technology means that soon, ALL of so called “secure” communication can be “decrypted” in real time; as they speak.
So all principles need to be in the same location at all times?
What if POTUS or SECDEF is on a trip to Japan or Australia?
We’ll hold off on all attack plans until they get back to DC in some bomb shelter approved by you.
Clinton could not be disturbed while playing golf. Osama lived on.
No one said “at all times” – just when the IMPORTANT stuff is in the works – I think THIS one should qualify as IN PERSON ONLY!
Lock up leftist hackers on National Security grounds.
The whole ‘controversy’ may be a shiny squirrel to distract from preparations to liberate Persia.
I was suspicious of Signal about 5 months ago when I learned one of the programmers is transgender.
only one?
Could definitely be more than one since I only saw about 2-3 members of the team 😰
I don’t see people mentioning it here or elsewhere but Signal is an open source program, so if there is a backdoor I suspect it can be proven by a knowledgeable programmer.
“Moxie Marlinspike”? Is that even a real name? I haven’t seen the word “moxie” since Mad magazine in the 60’s.
Watch Mel Gibson’s “Payback” movie… the uncut original. William Devane uses moxie quite appropriately.
He’s a white guy with dreads who claims to be an anarchist. Assume it’s fake.
Maybe we need to return to ‘The COS”! For those youngsters out there, that is The CONE of SILENCE!! ALL participants are in ONE ROOM – a SECURE ROOM with not nitwit leftists included – EVERYONE KNOWS EVERYONE ELSE!!
IF we need a REMOTE communications system for OFFICIAL Gov’t Communications then it shouldn’t be anything that a NON-Government, NON-Essential person would have! I’m sure one of Mr. Musk’s team could whip up something while the Cabinet is out for lunch and load it up on their devices upon their return! I’d trust that long before I’d trust an app that I could get!
I would not characterize Edward Snowden as a leaker, but rather as a whistleblower. He blew the whistle on a huge, dirty, domestic spying operation being perpetrated by the deep state against the American people.
A simple reminder that should be always front-of-mind but is often overlooked:
“THE ALGORITHM DID NOT WRITE ITSELF”
For me, who is a natural observer of a problem and solve it now, I can scarce believe this question is being asked. My answer? Well, duh!! Or do I not get it somehow. Our security was compromised when using this equipment.
Really? we should keep using it. Seems simple to me. Get a new safe system immediately and desist using this one.
Are they still using it for security conferences. Disappointing. We love Mr. Trump but he needs smart people to help him/us.