How Secure is a Phone? A Report on the Pentagon Investigation of a Russian Hacker Exposure to a Top Pentagon Deputy Director of State
It is hard to know what is worse, a journalist being invited into a discussion with a top military and intelligence leader, or a group chat being conducted on mobile phones. The intended participants may have thought their messages were safe because of the Signal app, which is prized by the secretive world. The people using a chat are just as safe as the people using it. A few days ago the Pentagon issued a warning that Russian hackers were pretending to be from the Signal group to trick people into joining. Steve Witkoff, a special envoy, was invited to join a chat and did it from Moscow.
There’s no way to make a phone completely unhackable. Washington officials who use the most sensitive conversations in the secure rooms are not allowed to use their phones inside the door.
Source: Opinion | Foreign Spies to Team Trump: 👊🇺🇸🔥
Pentagon Director Robert Figliuzzi, a Zero-Click Spyware Attacker, and The Pentagon’s Pete Hegseth
Zero-click spyware is sold to corporations and regimes around the globe. Apple has notified users in 150 countries that they’ve been targeted. A program from a single Israeli spyware maker, the NSO Group, has been deployed in Saudi Arabia, Spain, Hungary, India, Mexico and Rwanda. Frank Figliuzzi was the former assistant director of counterintelligence for the F.B.I. “You don’t need to be very sophisticated.”
The White House continues to downplay a highly sensitive discussion between national security officials and a reporter on an open-source messaging app.
At a White House briefing Wednesday, press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the media “continues to be focused on a sensationalized story from the failing Atlantic magazine that is falling apart by the hour.”
After officials minimized their actions, Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in-chief of the Atlantic, accidentally published the entire text exchange from the Signal discussion. The defense secretary and top Intelligence officials in the Trump administration were in the group that discussed an ongoing military operation in Yemen. According to new details about the group’s messages, Pete Hegseth described the specific weapons systems that would launch strikes and that he announced the beginning of the operation more than an hour before the strikes hit.
“I’ve defended spillage cases where people were going to be put out of the military or people were going to be turned out of their job within the military for violations that are just the smallest fraction of what just occurred,” Carroll said.
Pete Hegseth is a liar. This was so clearly classified that it could’ve led to the deaths of our pilots. He needs to resign immediately for being a disgrace.
“There would be an immediate investigation launched,” Mulroy told NPR’s Here & Now. If they did this, they would be removed from any classified information, and court-martialed for it. I think everybody in the military knows that is the case. And unfortunately, instead of owning up to it and taking responsibility, it seems to be that they’re making excuses for every reason why they could be able to do this.”
For troops it is bad to see leaders share attack plans in advance but they do not suffer consequences. But that double standard is so common, he adds, that there’s a phrase for it in the military: “different spanks for different ranks.”
But the leak of operational details lands a little differently with military veterans and especially with active-duty troops, who can be discharged and prosecuted for much lower-level leaks. Security breaches like what happened in the Signal group chat are called “spillage” by the military.
“What typically happens in a spillage as serious as this is they’re immediately fired,” says Kevin Carroll, who served 30 years in the Army, and in the CIA, and at the Department of Homeland Security in the first Trump administration. He says there’s no doubt what would have happened to an active-duty officer who had participated in the Signal chat.
