Mar.26

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Teapot Signal Scandal Dominates the News for a Second Day

We still think the story of stupid, careless members of the Trump administration accidentally sharing plans for an imminent military attack with the editor of The Atlantic will fade away, with no real consequences for most or all of the people involved. But it's certainly not fading yet. Indeed, the story branched off in many different directions yesterday. Let's run them down:

• The Blame Game: Initially, blame for the whole Signal Mobilier fiasco fell on NSA Mike Waltz, since he was apparently the one who inadvertently added Jeffrey Goldberg to the group chat. We're not sure why that made sense, or even if it did make sense, since the big mistake here was not adding Goldberg, it was having that conversation in that way in the first place. In other words, there are 18 very guilty people here, not one. Early yesterday, however, the tide turned a bit, and it was Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth who was under the microscope. Enough so that this meme was trending on Twitter all day long:
  
  
  
  By the afternoon, the focus seemed to shift back to Waltz, and he offered the most non-apology apology we've ever heard, saying that he accepts full responsibility for Signalscam, but then turning around and saying the real bad guy here is Goldberg, whom Waltz described as "scum."
  
  Thus far, Donald Trump is standing by Waltz, explaining that the NSA "learned a lesson." That said, behind the scenes, many Republicans are furious with Waltz. Many of them already disliked him, and now they say he cannot be trusted, and will not be trusted, by the people he has to work with.
  
  As everyone reading this knows, Trump: (1) can change positions on a dime, and (2) cares only about his own image, and whatever path is easiest for him. So, it's still very possible he decides that he is better off without Waltz than he is with Waltz (in much the same way he decided to cashier Mike Flynn). Of course, what should actually happen here is that Waltz and Hegseth should both be broomed, ideally with several others along for the ride. But don't hold your breath waiting for THAT outcome.
  
  
• Signal Was the Wrong Tool to Use...: Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE) might be a Republican, but he's a Republican willing to break ranks, at least sometimes. He's also a former brigadier general in the U.S. Air Force, specializing in intelligence. So he may know a thing or two that is relevant here. And he was apoplectic yesterday, declaring that neither Signal nor any other privately owned software should be used for secure communications, especially on everyday cell phones. "I will guarantee you, 99.99 percent with confidence, Russia and China are monitoring those two phones," he said, while adding "There's no doubt that Russia and China saw this stuff within hours of the actual attacks on Yemen or the Houthis."
  
  We also heard from a reader who has relevant expertise. We're going to share their message without initials, just in case:

  I am a senior research scientist in IT that has worked in and around Federal law enforcement for over thirty years. As such, I am very familiar with how clearances work, how classified information is to be handled, and what can and cannot be installed on federal computer systems and mobile phones.
  
  While there are many, many reasons why this fiasco should never have happened, I would like to focus on the use of Signal. As you know, Signal is an end-to-end encryption software, similar to WhatsApp. While it is true that it was used by officials during the previous administration, it was done only on personal phones and then only to relay casual information, not top secret information. Anyone working in or for the federal government with access to sensitive data is trained in this.
  
  I was listening to the hearing yesterday that, among other things, covered what has to be one of the most egregious examples of incompetence and gross negligence in the handling of classified information I have ever witnessed. So imagine my surprise when CIA Director John Ratcliffe, when asked why the chat group used Signal, responded that it is installed by default on agency computers. Well, anyone working in IT within the Federal government knows that only software that has been FedRAMPed is permitted to be installed on government systems, and then only if required to do your job. FedRAMPing is a process whereby the government vets software to ensure it doesn't phone home or collect and send personal information to third parties, among other things. Signal is NOT FedRAMPed, meaning Ratcliffe was either lying or doesn't know how the process works. Or that they were all using personal phones, which makes things even worse, as official phones are hardened and almost impossible to hack, while personal phones are far more susceptible to hacking.
  
  Had I or any of my colleagues pulled a stunt like this, we would be immediately suspended and likely charged with a crime.

  Thanks for this added insight!
  
  
• ...No, We Mean It Was REALLY the Wrong Tool to Use...: It is not merely theoretical that Signal COULD be hacked. TPM's Josh Marshall is reporting that it already HAS been hacked, by the Russians. Could the participants in the conversation possibly have known that, though? Well, maybe... if they had read the special bulletin distributed by the Department of Defense warning about the Russian hack.
  
  
• ...And Yet, it Was Oh, So Right: Quite a few readers wrote in yesterday to take us to task for one significant point we missed in our original item. Signal was not a good choice for maintaining security, that much is clear. On the other hand, it was an excellent choice if the goal was to shield the conversation(s) from scrutiny, and from laws requiring that documentation of official conversations be retained.
  
  
• Playing with Fire: Yesterday, the administration was in damage-control mode, and was trying to do whatever it could to put the Signal-Contra Affair in the rearview mirror. Most obviously, as the anonymous reader above notes, there were congressional hearings involving John Ratcliffe, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and FBI Director Kash Patel.
  
  After trying out many, many angles of attack on Monday, Team Trump seems to have settled on this as their main justification: No classified information was shared, and all Goldberg saw was a casual, non-classified conversation between Trump administration officials. Gabbard, in particular, was so confident that this explanation exonerates everyone that... she refused to say whether or not she was one of the 18 people who were part of the text conversation. "Don't admit you were one of the bank robbers unless you were caught on camera" would seem to be the basic idea.
  
  There is one small problem with "none of the information was classified," though. Goldberg still has all the texts, and he is threatening to release them. After all, he's not only a journalist, his name's also being dragged through the mud. The hold up is that he and his publication want to make sure they are not breaking the law. Everyone knows that the Trump-run DoJ will bring its full might down upon Goldberg if there is even the slightest opportunity to do so.
  
  And that brings us to the Catch-22 that the White House has created for itself. If the information is not classified, then there is no question that Goldberg can release it. But if the administration wants to keep the information private, or wants to have any basis for going after Goldberg, it has to admit that the information is indeed classified, thus gutting the defense it offered before Congress yesterday. And the three folks who spoke to Congress yesterday were under oath, so admitting that the information was classified after all would mean they perjured themselves.
  
  Perhaps the worst-case scenario would be to insist the information was not classified, then for Goldberg to release it, then for it to be clear that it was classified after all. While there is some judgment involved in classifying materials, there are also some materials that are automatically classified based on the subjects they address. We imagine details of an imminent military strike probably trigger those auto-classified rules.
  
  In this scenario, Goldberg would be covered, since he would be releasing government-certified "unclassified" information. Then, when it became clear that the information actually WAS classified, the administration would not only be liars (and perjurers), but they'd add on the extra layer that they were willing to let Goldberg expose classified information in order to try to sustain their lie.
  
  Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive!
  
  
• But Her E-mails: Another angle that remained pretty big yesterday, especially among right-wing media figures, was that this is no different from Hillary Clinton's e-mail server, and that Democrats said that was no big deal, so they are hypocrites in acting like this IS a big deal.
  
  We wanted to address this in a little bit of detail yesterday, but time did not allow, so we will address it now. There is, first of all, no evidence that anyone who was not supposed to see those e-mails actually saw them. Remember, most people didn't even know the mail server existed. "Security through obscurity," as it is called, is not a great strategy, but it does work sometimes, and it seems to have done so here. The Chinese and Russians knew that Hillary was professional to her core and they would never have suspected that she had a private e-mail server so they would never have looked for one. In this one case, security by obscurity might actually have worked.
  
  Beyond that, once the e-mails were pored through with a fine-toothed comb, only 110 of the first 30,000 messages examined by the FBI had classified information, and only 8 of those had top secret information. Of the second group of 30,000 messages examined, only three had classified information. And all of these e-mails, including the most secret ones, involved the sort of auto-classified stuff we note above. For example, a bunch of them were discussions of CIA drone strikes in Pakistan and... Yemen. That starts to sound VERY similar to what happened with the Signal Ring last week, since Hegseth, Waltz and Co. were also discussing an attack on Yemen. However, the Clinton e-mail discussions were about a New York Times article on the CIA drone strikes. In other words, the information was already public; the messages were only classified because of the auto-classification rules. Other classified Clinton e-mails were about relatively trivial subjects, like a phone conversation with the leader of Malawi. Phone conversations with national leaders are also auto-classified, for obvious reasons, but undoubtedly even if the whole world learns what Clinton and Bingu wa Mutharika chatted about, it does not exactly compromise U.S. national security.
  
  In short, the Clinton e-mail situation—which Republicans turned into the biggest thing this side of Watergate—is not even in the same universe as Signalwater.
  
  
• Consequences: We propose above that, with the possibility of someone being thrown under the bus to protect Trump from the consequences of Signalpot Dome, the people involved in this fiasco will suffer no consequences.
  
  That does not mean that we believe there will be no consequences, however. It was already the case that the leaders of other nations believed (with good reason) that Hegseth and Waltz are unqualified buffoons, while Gabbard (and possibly Trump himself) may be Russian assets. They also knew that this president is so lax, he literally leaves highly classified information lying around in his bathroom, where all visitors to his house potentially could see it.
  
  Now, in addition to all of this, foreign leaders know that all (or nearly all) of the highest-ranking defense and intelligence officials in the U.S. government have a careless and cavalier attitude about intelligence, and that they are prone to stupid mistakes. Those leaders also presumably suspect, quite reasonably, that this was far from the only time that sensitive matters were discussed over exceedingly inappropriate and unsecured channels. And finally, those leaders know that when there's a huge screw-up, the response from the White House is a shrug and the observation that stuff happens.
  
  How can any nation share anything sensitive or important with the U.S. right now? It's one thing for Americans to put Americans at risk. It's another thing for Americans to put Britons at risk, or Canadians, or Australians, or Japanese people. And the less the U.S. knows about what's going on in the world, the greater the risk of a military disaster, a terrorist attack, etc.

We'll see if the SYZ Affair continues to burn brightly in the next few days, or if it burns out. At the moment, the only silver lining for the administration is that there aren't many stories this week about Elon Musk trying to destroy Social Security. (Z)