How the US defense secretary circumvents official DoD communications equipment
125 comments
·April 30, 2025standardUser
sillyfluke
What kind of tickles me is that any new poltical thriller tv series or movie that posits that matters of state in the US are conducted by serious and knowledgable people is now virtually unwatchable for me. It's virtually impossible to suspend the disbelief required to enjoy something that is so far removed from the reality of today's politicians.
(The recent cringe inducing Deniro series comes to mind)
pjc50
The entire administration is selected for loyalty. In this environment competence is a threat.
SequoiaHope
> It feels like we're watching history get written by the most entitled and inept among us.
I suspect this is somewhat common in history (this is not meant to excuse it), but we can’t tell because those people still wrote the narrative.
eviks
Competence is part of qualification, so what you're asking for is not possible even in theory
verisimi
True. But what did you think was happening before, with previous governments?
michaelt
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/23/us/politics/23berry.html
For a High-Tech President, a Hard-Fought E-Victory
For more than two months, Mr. Obama has been waging a vigorous battle with his handlers to keep his BlackBerry, which like millions of other Americans he has relied upon for years to stay connected with friends and advisers. (And, of course, to get Chicago White Sox scores.)
He won the fight, aides disclosed Thursday, but the privilege of becoming the nation’s first e-mailing president comes with a specific set of rules.
“The president has a BlackBerry through a compromise that allows him to stay in touch with senior staff and a small group of personal friends,” said Robert Gibbs, his spokesman, “in a way that use will be limited and that the security is enhanced to ensure his ability to communicate.”
[...]
The presidency, for all the power afforded by the office, has been deprived of the tools of modern communication. George W. Bush famously sent a farewell e-mail address to his friends when he took office eight years ago.
While lawyers and the Secret Service balked at Mr. Obama’s initial requests to allow him to keep his BlackBerry, they acquiesced as long as the president - and those corresponding with him - agreed to strict rules. And he had to agree to use a specially made device, which must be approved by national security officials.
whydid
This is an example of the False Equivalency logical fallacy.
kubb
When you feel real love for your favorite celebrity convict, whose incompetence is beyond denying, you'll put your mind to work to search for any device that will enable you to excuse anything he does and who he nominates.
People will talk about "politicians being incompetent", or act like actually anyone who has ever been in the office was like this. It's a pretty close and comforting way to deal with the reality of supporting a fraud without having to admit that you were duped.
verisimi
I don't think so. The original post is based in 'false equivalency'.
My position - for many years - is that government is immoral, and the people who serve in it are the worst; I don't have a preference between blue or red.
vkou
Generally there would be a few garbage appointments, not an avalanche, and more important people have been shitcanned for lesser scandals.
null
enaaem
Imagine Hegseth was a black woman…
beloch
The other members of the five eyes had better be careful about what they share with the U.S. while this is going on.
Public key encryption, like Signal uses, offers good security for most purposes. e.g. It's fantastic for credit card transactions. The problem with using it for transmitting state secrets is that you can't rely on it for long-term secrecy. Even if you avoid MITM or other attacks, a message sent via Signal today could be archived in ciphertext and attacked ten years from now with the hardware/algorithms of ten years in the future. Maybe Signal's encryption will remain strong in ten years. Maybe it will be trivial to crack. If the secrets contained in that message are still sensitive ten years from now, you have a problem.
Anything sent with Signal needs to be treated as published with an unknown delay. If you're sharing intelligence with the U.S., you probably shouldn't find that acceptable.
femto
Even if Signal's encryption implementation is secure, the device on which it is running probably doesn't satisfy TEMPEST requirements. Most consumer crypto is vulnerable in some way to a side-channel attack.
jandrewrogers
Signal has been used widely in US intelligence for many, many years. Nothing about this is new, though perhaps people that never paid attention are just now becoming aware of it. As for the rest of Five Eyes, they use WhatsApp the same way. I’m not sure that WhatsApp would be considered an improvement.
It is clear there is a gap between how people imagine this works, or should work in theory, and how it actually works.
0xEF
They're paying attention to Signal now because Hegseth doesn't know his ass from his elbow when it comes to tech and secrecy, instead acting like someone who has watched too many action films and thinks those are just like real life. The problem is not Signal. The problem is incompetence. Plain and simple. Because he blindly added persons to the group that probably didn't belong there, we now have the infamous "we have OPSEC" line, but instead of questioning why this idiot still has a job anywhere near the intelligence agencies, we're wasting our breath scrutinizing what is easily one of the best opens for secure comes if the user understands how it works.
satanfirst
I'd give different advice.
You shouldn't share state secrets with the US. They will be on or transferred between misconfigured cloud accounts. Some agency will eventually get authorization for analysis of them with an intention of financial espionage. The probable or confirmed loss of them will serve as a plausible deniability for the US when it misuses them.
DaiPlusPlus
> The other members of the five eyes had better be careful about what they share with the U.S. while this is going on.
Right, but this is nothing new: Hegseth is only a recent example of Trump's camp mishandling sensitive docs; I'll bet there's been an inner secret Four Eyes group since the the Mar-a-Lago bathroom official-document-archive story dropped years ago.
What surprises me is that I expected Tulsi Gabbard to be the centre of mishandling allegations, not SecDef.
concordDance
This is silly, many countries use consumer messaging for internal communications. The UK government famously uses whatsapp for example.
TiredOfLife
The encryption is completely irrelevant if the information is sent directly to 3rd parties.
mmooss
Let's pretend you work for a non-US state intelligence agency. How would you find Hesgeth's personal computer in his office on the public Internet? A genuine thought experiment.
punnerud
You could locate the traffic to The White House using this triangulation trick: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42780816
Title:”0-click deanonymization attack targeting Signal, Discord, other platforms”
Maybe not 0-click anymore, but still applies if the user browsing the internet.
o11c
Write an article that he's likely to be interested in reading, spread the link, then mine the browser data just like every other website.
JumpCrisscross
Literally just @ him on X. These are the moments of strategic ineptitude you hoard zero days for decades to score.
Teever
I don't want to derail the conversation too much with this but this is the kind of thing that blows my mind with seeing obscenely wealthy/powerful people like Musk and Trump on social media.
At some level of wealth you reach a point where no one can get to you physically. You're completely physically safe and isolated and can't be hurt. That means that the only way someone can get to you is through communicating with you and making you hurt yourself.
That means that social media is your only weakness. This is how adversaries can affect your plans and goals and disrupt your mind. Yet so many of these people seem so oblivious to this and are as terminally online as your average 4channer or facebook mom.
Does this speak to some sort of weakness in these kinds of people or the addictiveness of social media?
wmf
Yep. The CIA uses these same techniques to track foreigners of interest (e.g. Putin's entourage) so we should assume other countries are attempting to use similar techniques on American officials.
overfeed
Compromise the device of one of his contact and send him a juicy link via telegram that renders "Error: Not viewable on mobile" when opened a phone. Bonus points if the link has 0-day malware dropper
rasz
I would make Witkoff sit on his ass in hotel for 8 hours while my team one room over wirelessly breaks into his phone and gets into those Signal chats.
https://news.sky.com/story/trumps-fixer-was-made-to-wait-eig...
His personal PC? Send Big Ballz his way to do some upgrades
https://www.npr.org/2025/04/15/nx-s1-5355896/doge-nlrb-elon-...
maybe a free Starlink dish
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/17/us/politics/elon-musk-sta...
wmf
If some tech geniuses wanted to improve government efficiency, one thing they could do is create secure yet easy to use collaboration software. Maybe give the app a catchy one-letter name.
null
codeulike
Not a fan of the Trump administration but I imagine the official pentagon communications systems must be extremely clunky and annoying, and about 20 years behind civilian tech.
During the UK Covid-19 enquiry into gov decision making at that time it came to light that most of the UK cabinet were co-ordinating via Whatsapp groups. Again, I'm not a fan of Boris and Dom Cummings but this makes some sort of sense to me. I recognise the need for government teams to have quick convenient chat available to them. Things move too fast these days to wait for the next cabinet meeting or to arrange things via a series of phone calls.
Similarly we can look back to Obama having to fight to keep his Blackberry in 2009 https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna28780205
purpleidea
I can only imagine two possible explanations:
1) He is avoiding some sort of corrupt signals intelligence folks from knowing what he's working on.
2) He is avoiding the government catching him in some corruption by avoiding the official records act.
Anything else?
vkou
3) He's an idiot who hasn't given it a shred of thought, and was hired for loyalty, not brains.
elsjaako
The same reason teenagers might use Instagram DMs to communicate about school projects - It's just the platform he's familiar with.
Or the same reason I have Whatsapp - communication in my social groups happens there, and if I don't have it I get left out.
Your explanations assume there is some deeper meaning, looking at the tradeoffs for each communication platform, and then coming to some rational conclusion. I don't think there's much evidence for that.
The people around trump just happen to be used to using signal to communicate, and if Pete doesn't get on board he gets left out.
nneonneo
Site’s being hugged hard - mirror: https://archive.is/kMZ2A
mschuster91
> It is remarkable to what great lengths Hegseth went to use the Signal app, because as defense secretary he has his own communications center which is specialized in keeping him in contact with anyone he wants. This center is commonly called SecDef Cables and is part of Secretary of Defense Communications (SDC) unit.
... but unlike Signal, SDC respects laws requiring accurate record-keeping. And that's why this bunch of lawbreakers want to use Signal. They want to evade any and all accountability once this administration is over.
jmyeet
Where is the "but her emails" crowd now? There are three main issues here:
1. The Defense Department bans the use of Signal for everybody else. Why is that? Why is the Secretary exempt?
2. As we've seen it's pretty easy to add unauthorized people to what should be secure communication channels where classified information is shared; and
3. There are laws around the preservation of governmental records. Expiring Signal messages seems like it's intentionally meant to circumvent these legal requirements ie it's illegal.
We're only 100 days in. We've got 1200 more days of this.
eastbound
> We're only 100 days in. We've got 1200 more days of this.
Sounds like locking her up for bypassing the governmental emails would have been a win, now. Maybe add to that, not doing the Title IX with extrajudicial trials in universities, and not threatening people on race and gender when they are not DEI, etc.
Maybe the entire rule of law and spirit of the democracy and listening to the people should have been upheld during the Obama/Biden era, to avoid all this?
It’s not like people didn’t vote this for a reason.
collingreen
It seems like bad faith to be rabid about Clinton emails and silent about the use (and overwhelmingly sloppy use at that) of signal. Do you care about following security procedures or not?
It's also weird to see you seem to take so much pleasure in lashing out - how can you feel vindication thinking your opponents should have done something about emails but not have that same feeling now? How do you hold both views (and with such vitriol) at the same time?
The hypocrisy is why folks find it hard to take these complaints at face value since we show time and time again that they appear more "my team should win the game" than anything consistent and built on principles.
I'm struggling to not write more details here but generally I think the whataboutism and completely ignoring degree is absurd. I remember when the big complaints about Obama were wearing the wrong color suit, saluting with a coffee cup, and allowing a military strike on a us citizen actively working with Al queda. If you want to be convincing (you may not want this- if you just want to feel self righteous and vengeful then carry on) then I think a better path would be explaining why this current situation is a good thing (or at least the same level of bad as the things you hate).
semi-extrinsic
> Sounds like locking her up for bypassing the governmental emails would have been a win, now.
Under what basis should one have "locked her up"? All legal experts agree that there was no crime committed which could result in a prison sentence. This is specifically because none of the emails were classified.
viraptor
> Sounds like locking her up for bypassing the governmental emails would have been a win, now.
This is getting stupid to bring up, but at least we've got a canonical long response to that with a proper legal analysis. https://youtu.be/cw1tNTIEs-o
croes
They vote this to get it worse?
Strange logic.
Supermancho
> Where is the "but her emails" crowd now?
Same place everyone else is now. Nobody cares about the flagrant violations by the executive. This is the foxes walking around freely now.
nonethewiser
Nobody? Including yourself?
mcfedr
Why are your police not investigating this? The guy is actively breaking the law
foota
If you're not aware, these are federal laws, and the force responsible for investigating and arresting people who break them are a part of the executive branch.
Morizero
And the top executive is arguing that they are only accountable to him
t-3
How many politicians have you seen blatantly breaking the law like this and having no problem? It happens over and over again. A lower-level flunky would be in prison, but a political appointee is going to be just fine, forced resignation is the worst that could possibly happen to him. Our system is just that corrupt. The same thing happens with leaks - politician or cabinet member leaking is normal, rando bureaucrat leaking is enemy of the state.
idle_zealot
Judges are investigating and holding trials. The Executive is being obstructive and outright ignoring court orders. Rule of law and the balance of powers have collapsed. Turns out that running a decade+ long misinformation campaign to sow distrust of all legal institutions, as well as expertise and professionalism in general is sufficient to topple the world's oldest democracy. If only there had been any effective counter-messaging things may have been different, but that's impossible with our "left" hollowed out by capital.
SubiculumCode
Because Trump does not investigate himself, and the once independent Attorney General is now just another political arm of Trump, but with prosecutorial power and discrtion. We are in dark times.
jdminhbg
> the once independent Attorney General
This has never been the case; JFK appointed his little brother AG. The problem is that the Congress should be investigating and prosecuting the president but will not.
intermerda
> This has never been the case;
Independence of the Justice Department has been the norm since and because of Watergate.
slt2021
always have been, its just current admin is less subtle about it
SubiculumCode
So you say, but I've seen plenty of independence...see Trump's first term for some examples.
JohnTHaller
Of course, there will be no consequences for his complete lack of... everything
mlinhares
Oh there will be, just not for him. We’ll never know how many state secrets have been leaked through these shenanigans.
JumpCrisscross
> there will be, just not for him
Everyone in this administration has to know they’re spending the decade after Trump in front of the Congress and various investigators.
gmac
Let’s hope so. But of course this is also a heavy incentive for all of them to make sure their regime never leaves power.
xp84
Nah, because the Dems can’t win elections, and Republicans will never hold any Trump ally accountable.
CapricornNoble
Can't Trump just pull a Biden, and toss a blanket decade-long pardon to his entire staff? Would anyone bother to investigate them after that?
mmooss
There will be none if you do nothing.
If you're going to put a guy in charge who is completely unqualified and has a history of alcohol abuse you should at least make sure he's competent. It's actually very grating to see someone operating at this highest level of authority and treating it like its beneath them. It feels like we're watching history get written by the most entitled and inept among us.