A cybersecurity expert dismissed national security adviser Mike Waltz's excuse for inviting a journalist to a group chat where high-ranking government officials discussed plans for a bombing raid in Yemen.
The national security adviser suggested to Fox News host Laura Ingraham that The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg has somehow gotten "sucked into" the group chat on Signal, but British security blogger Graham Cluley said that explanation simply isn't plausible.
"Not really, not the way that this journalist has been accused of doing it," said Cluley, co-host of the "Smashing Security" podcast. "Now you get invited to a chat group, so someone who's already in it adds you to a chat group. But once that has happened, of course, the messages are being sent to someone's phone, so if their phones are hacked, then their messages could be read in the future. So Signal is what we call an end-to-end encrypted messaging app, which means in transit, the messages are encrypted, but once they reach the phone, obviously they're decrypted because otherwise you wouldn't be able to read them yourself."
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At least one of the participants, Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, was overseas during the discussion, which Cluley said could have exposed the deliberations to foreign adversaries.
"Obviously if they had the opportunity, they absolutely would have done [it]," Cluley said. "But why would you expose yourself to that kind of risk? I mean, there are government-approved secure messaging systems where these sort of communications should be happening. You shouldn't be using an off-the-rack messaging service. You shouldn't be using Snapchat, you shouldn't be using WhatsApp, you shouldn't be using Signal if you are communicating at this kind of level about this kind of serious thing."
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