> Apply these best practices to your devices and online accounts.
> 1. Use only end-to-end encrypted communications.
> Adopt a free messaging application for secure communications that guarantees end-to-end encryption, such as Signal or similar apps.
https://www.cisa.gov/sites/default/files/2024-12/guidance-mo...
Those guidelines are called FedRAMP, and Signal is not FedRAMP certified.
Also, I don't know for sure, but there was a link and discussion here not long ago saying that Signal is pre-installed and widely used at the CIA.
Sure, because senior government officials sometimes do things outside of their official capacity. If a senior government official's communications with their therapist or their lawyer e.g. are compromised, this could leave them vulnerable to blackmail. That's bad for everyone.
Re: other post about use of Signal, I'm not commenting on that post and/or that issue. I'm not expressing an opinion either way on whether it's relevant to this issue. I just want to point out that FedRAMP exists, and Signal isn't FedRAMP certified. If you don't think that is important (and a lot of reasonable people don't), you do you.
Also those recommendations from the CISA recommend to use password managers...like Lastpass and 1Password and others, who had multiple security breaches.
If this is the type of Cybersecurity the US government applies to day to day work, its much easier to understand the field day North Korean and Chinese hackers seem to have all the time.
https://www.upguard.com/blog/lastpass-vulnerability-and-futu...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/daveywinder/2024/08/07/critical...
But let's assume you're right and it's bad advice. The objection in the OP isn't that there was a breach. It's just exploiting the perception that using Signal is somehow wrong, and suggesting that it is a sign that Hegseth is incompetent.
So it's rather important to know that using Signal is recommended by the government's own experts (even if those experts were wrong, hypothetically).
That and the deliberate lack of record keeping.
Attorneys suing the United States government over its use of vanishing Signal messages to coordinate military strikes last month in Yemen allege that new court filings by the government reveal a “calculated strategy” by Trump administration officials to evade transparency laws through the illegal destruction of government records.
The use of the private group chat—in which some messages were configured to automatically delete before they could be archived—was first revealed by The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, on March 24, after he was inadvertently added to the group by Trump’s national security adviser, Michael Waltz. American Oversight subsequently filed Freedom of Information Act requests over the chats and then sought a temporary restraining order in a Washington, DC, federal court in an effort to compel the government to salvage any messages yet to be deleted.
> That and the deliberate lack of record keeping.
That part seems like speculation. How would we even know if records were kept? If records were kept, they'd be classified.
> Attorneys suing the United States government over its use of vanishing Signal messages
That seems very much like the concern is about the use of Signal, so the fact that CISA recommends it is very relevant.
And since this info was leaked to the press, there is clearly someone with access who he should not have trusted. Do you really think the security breach in this case came from his wife or brother?
I guess that's a reference to some fictional "Wilhoit's Law", right? I had to look it up. Turns out it's just a partisan Internet snipe from a classical music composer originally posted in the comments on a blog[1].
That sums up the case against Hegseth nicely. Just a partisan attack without substance, sustained only by ignorance.
1: https://slate.com/business/2022/06/wilhoits-law-conservative...
And now he's adding his family into the mix?
> Do you really think the security breach in this case came from his wife or brother
I don't think it's out of the question.
CISA recommends Signal, but it is not an approved tool to share classified information. That's what SCIFs are for.