The Real Lesson of SignalGate
A Surveillance Arms Race Has Poked a Gaping Hole in National Security
Ronald J. Deibert
April 24, 2025
... The fiasco now known as SignalGate raises many urgent issues related to national security. Communicating classified information via nonapproved channels potentially violates the U.S. Espionage Act, setting messages to automatically disappear contravenes U.S. federal laws on preservation of official records, and officials’ family members and journalists should certainly not be privy to this kind of information. These are huge lapses. But by focusing on National Security Adviser Mike Waltz’s unwitting inclusion of The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, in the first chat group, much of the debate has downplayed an even larger problem: the very real possibility that a foreign government or other hostile power was snooping on the devices through which those communications were taking place.
Convened by Waltz, the first Signal group included not only the defense secretary but also CIA Director John Ratcliffe, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Vice President JD Vance, White House adviser Stephen Miller, and Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff, among others. Every one of these figures is an extremely high-value target for foreign espionage. Moreover, at least some of the participants were communicating on personal electronic devices (as was the defense secretary, and at least some of the participants, in his second group chat), and several were traveling overseas at the time. Witkoff, for instance, was in Moscow (although he denies using a personal device during that leg of the trip), while Gabbard was in Southeast Asia. It is highly likely that one or more of the participants’ devices was already being targeted by a U.S. adversary armed with advanced spyware capabilities. And the compromise of just one phone is all it takes. One weak link and all of the chat groups’ discussions could be exposed.
These episodes point to a looming digital security crisis. Even as high-level officials, for convenience or other reasons, rely more on personal devices for sensitive communications, those devices have become increasingly vulnerable to targeted exploitation and surveillance. Once a device is compromised, hostile regimes and other malicious actors can spy on communications regardless of whether the information in question is encrypted. Thankfully, there are steps that the United States and other governments can take to mitigate this risk. But to do so, they must first recognize the real problem with SignalGate: how exposed sensitive communications and private information have become for anyone reliant on a modern smartphone.
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/real-lesson-signal-gate-pete-hegseth