The eye-popping scandal surrounding the Trump cabinet’s accidental invitation to The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief to join a text-message group secretly planning a bombing in Yemen has rolled into its third day, and that controversy now has a name: SignalGate, a reference to the fact that the conversation took place on the end-to-end encrypted free messaging tool Signal.
As that name becomes the shorthand for biggest public blunder of the second Trump administration to date, however, security and privacy experts who have promoted Signal as the best encrypted messaging tool available to the public want to be clear about one thing: SignalGate is not about Signal.
Since The Atlantic’s editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, revealed Monday that he was mistakenly included in a Signal group chat earlier this month created to plan US airstrikes against the Houthi rebels in Yemen, the reaction from the Trump cabinet’s critics and even the administration itself has in some cases seemed to cast blame on Signal for the security breach. Some commentators have pointed to reports last month of Signal-targeted phishing by Russian spies. National security advisor Michael Waltz, who reportedly invited Goldberg to the Signal group chat, has even suggested that Goldberg may have hacked into it.
The real lesson is much simpler, says Kenn White, a cryptographer and security researcher who has conducted audits on widely used encryption tools in the past as the director of the Open Crypto Audit Project: Don’t invite untrusted contacts into your Signal group chat. And if you’re a government official working with highly sensitive or classified information, use the encrypted communication tools that run on restricted, often air-gapped devices intended for a top-secret setting rather than the unauthorized devices that can run publicly available apps like Signal.
“Unequivocally, no blame in this falls on Signal,” says White. “Signal is a communication tool designed for confidential conversations. If someone’s brought into a conversation who’s not meant to be part of it, that’s not a technology problem. That’s an operator issue.”
Cryptographer Matt Green, a professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University, puts it more simply. “Signal is a tool. If you misuse a tool, bad things are going to happen,” says Green. “If you hit yourself in the face with a hammer, it’s not the hammer’s fault. It’s really on you to make sure you know who you’re talking to.”
The only sense in which SignalGate is a Signal-related scandal, White adds, is that the use of Signal suggests that the cabinet level officials involved in the Houthi bombing plans, including Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, were conducting the conversation on internet-connected devices—possibly even including personal ones—since Signal wouldn’t typically be allowed on the official, highly restricted machines intended for such conversations. “In past administrations, at least, that would be absolutely forbidden, especially for classified communications,” says White.
Indeed, using Signal on internet-connected commercial devices doesn’t just leave communications open to anyone who can somehow exploit a hackable vulnerability in Signal, but anyone who can hack the iOS, Android, Windows, or Mac devices that might be running the Signal mobile or desktop apps.
