There is an opinion about foreign spies to Team Trump

Why a mobile phone is not a phone: How secure is your group chat? What happened to a journalist who was asked to join a chat?

As for that mortifying incident in which a journalist was invited into a supposedly super-triple-extra-confidential conversation with top military and intelligence leaders, it’s hard to know what’s worse: not being aware who was in the group chat or conducting the chat on mobile phones. The participants — the intended participants, anyway — may have thought they were safe because their texts were encrypted by the Signal messaging app, prized by the secrecy-minded all over the world. But a chat is only as secure as the people using it. The Pentagon warned a few days ago that Russians were trying to get people to join their group texts. Steve Witkoff, a special envoy, accepted an invitation to join a chat anyway — and he did it from Moscow.

There’s no way to make a phone completely unhackable. In the secure rooms that Washington officials use to conduct their most delicate conversations, phones are not allowed.

Source: Opinion | Foreign Spies to Team Trump: 👊🇺🇸🔥

The Pentagon isn’t going to shut up: Reply to Pete Hegseth, the White House Reporter who broke NSO Group Spyware

So-called zero-click spyware is now sold to regimes and corporations 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 is a former assistant director of counterintelligence for the F.B.I. You don’t need to be very smart.

The White House continues to ignore a highly sensitive discussion between leading national security officials and the reporter who broke the leak of the open source messaging app.

The media continues to focus on a story from the failing Atlantic magazine that is crumbling by the hour, said the press secretary at the White House briefings on Wednesday.

The Atlantic editor-in-chief published the entire text exchange on Wednesday after officials maintained that nothing classified was discussed. The Signal group included the defense secretary and top intelligence officials in the Trump administration as they discussed an ongoing military operation in Yemen earlier this month. The new details about the group’s messages confirmed that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth described specific weapons systems that would launch strikes in Yemen and that he announced the beginning of the operation more than an hour before the strikes hit.

“I’ve defended cases where people were supposed to be put out of the military and instead they ended up being turned out of their jobs for the small amount of violations that happened,” he said.

Pete Hegseth is a liar. This is so clearly classified info he recklessly leaked that could’ve gotten our pilots killed,” Duckworth said in a news release Wednesday. “He needs to resign in disgrace immediately.”

Mulroy told Here & Now there would be an immediate investigation. If they did this, they’d get court-martialed and be removed from any access to classified information. 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.”

It is toxic for troops to see leadership share plan in advance with no consequences. He says “different spanks for different ranks” is a phrase used in the military to describe the double standard.

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. There is no doubt that what would have happened to the active-duty officer who had participated in the chat was absolutely certain.