White House Reviewing Signal Use After War Plans Chat Leak | Hacker News Reader

White House Reviewing Signal Use After War Plans Chat Leak

newsweek.com

17 pointsturtlegrids11 comments

Discussion (684 points, 8 hours ago, 196 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43462783

They are different stories. This is more about the widespread, illegal Signal usage than the war plans accidentally leaked over Signal. Both are major stories. One is an extraordinary security incident. The other is concerted effort to bypass recordkeeping and disclosure. Nobody will ever be able to be able to FOIA these messages, which rightfully belong to the American people.

It's the same story by the way HN dupery works.

They are not the same story in reality. HN duplicate rules not agreeing with reality is HN's problem, nobody elses'.

That's neither the way HN nor 'reality' works.

There are two scandals

- OpSec failure to use an insecure non-DoD channel to communicate military operational status. Doesn't matter if it's signal, SMS, Slack or anything.

- Signal specifically is e2e encrypted without retention, in fact a first class feature to delete messages after some time. This bypasses legal requirements for record retention. Even if an "approved" DoD channel was used, the deletion of communications is a massive, massive scandal.

As others have noted, specifically Signal has a special bulletin due to exploits by Russian actors. This is a big infosec story proceeding in real time. The Hegseth / Yemeni / Goldberg angle is a small facet of it, and possibly least important.

This struck a nerve. Here's another comment to downvote about how this is more about the widespread, illegal Signal usage than the war plans accidentally leaked over Signal. Both are major stories. One is an extraordinary security incident. The other is concerted effort to bypass recordkeeping and disclosure. Nobody will ever be able to be able to FOIA these messages, which rightfully belong to the American people.

I can't imagine the confusion of the mind that thinks it is conservative to behave in this way, or to think this is political and not related to technology.

Right wing but non-Trumpist rag Bulwark had a article on the National Archives recently, that was a great refresher of how our nation and how our parties carry (or not) our nation's legacy forward. https://www.thebulwark.com/p/nations-archivist-should-not-be...

The Iran-Contra tapes show up, as an element of history that we nearly lost, that the illegally-political operative running the Archives tried repeatedly to let get deleted.

Trump administration has been no stranger to destroying history. Their read outs for meetings with foreign officials were just the most absurd hokey fake abbreviated read outs last term. https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/news/foia/2019-05-07/white-house-f...

I cant stand what this sham of a government is doing. But that they use illegal communication channels like Signal to hide what they are doing, to avoid making the lasting record of history, that we the people are denied the democratic necessity of looking at and assessing what's happened: that absolutely makes my blood boil. Such denial of democracy, such hiding and cowering from history is the act of people with no pride, with no dignity, who knows they bring nothing good to America.

>But that they use illegal communication channels like Signal

I enjoyed reading what you wrote (though, I disagree with most of it) but the above quote spoiled your overall comment much, and I'm too much of a pedant to let it go, so I'll ask the following, and perhaps thence, I can ask more people to use signal .

What is illegal about signal?

Signanl isn't illegal, but the use by the government is. All governmental communication has to be archived so that future governments know what the previous did, even the bad stuff.

This comment is the key thing to me.

Signal itself could be legal, perhaps, if folks diligently report and record the conversations they have on Signal.

But I very much doubt this administration is using Signal in a legal manner, obeying the legal requirements to keep proper records. Its not Signal's fault, Signal's likely not illegal per se (it is secure government systems though), but it is an incredibly powerful tool that makes it far harder for records to be kept.

I love Signal, but my expectation is that there is a bit of a dark age happening right now in this administration. Where normally there would be emails and communications that would be captured that are instead lost. Not only are records of Signal conversations not being dilligently reported, tools like disappearing messages are being used casually to make sure conversations never can kept, making sure we the people never have the legal opportunity we are assured to see what's happening in these days.

Edit: WaPo, with Why government workers and military planners all love Signal now (federal records act be damned) supporting these concerns, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/03/25/signal-...

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