Signal / Depositphotos
The White House has found the «of the extreme» in the scandal of secret military chat and a journalist — Apple iPhone is said to be to blame.
Briefly about the situation: On March 13, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, was suddenly invited to a Signal chat. They were discussing serious US military plans for Yemen. The group was set up by Trump administration officials, but definitely not for prying eyes.
The journalist was invited to the chat by National Security Advisor Mike Walz. When it became clear that there had been a leak — Walz explained that he had accidentally added Goldberg instead of another person. And now new culprits have been found. As writes The Guardian, a technical investigation by the White House found that the culprit was… the iPhone. More specifically, the feature that automatically suggests contacts.
The situation was explained as follows: Goldberg once made a request to the White House to get a comment for an article. Trump’s spokesman, Brian Hughes, forwarded his contact to Walz. And allegedly, Walz’s iPhone showed that Goldberg — is Hughes, but with a different number. The smartphone offered to update Hughes’s contact — and attached Goldberg’s phone number to it. When Waltz was about to add Hughes to the chat, he clicked on the contact, but added Goldberg instead.
«I’m not going to comment on my relationship with Mike Waltz beyond saying I do know him and have spoken to him», — Goldberg himself commented on the scandal.
But the randomly added journalist didn’t get fewer questions. According to Goldberg, members of the Trump administration used the Signal app on their personal phones. No encryption or secure networks, which, to put it mildly, is not the best option for discussing airstrikes. In other words, US enemies can hack into an app over which the government has no control, and it doesn’t help that Signal keeps your phone number private.
The White House is already trying to explain why they use Signal at all. They say that there is simply no government messenger that allows you to write to several agencies at once. All in all, no matter how you look at the situation, — a bunch of randomness. But the iPhone was the «extreme»: it automatically connected the contact, offered the wrong number, and the journalist found himself in a group chat discussing strikes on Yemen.
Source: PhoneArena / TechCrunch