Comment by swiftymon
8 months ago
it's not unauthorized use of signal;
"Government officials have used Signal for organizational correspondence, such as scheduling sensitive meetings, but in the Biden administration, people who had permission to download it on their White House-issued phones were instructed to use the app sparingly, according to a former national security official who served in the administration."
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/heres-what-to-know-about...
It absolutely is an unauthorized use. Authorize use is "let's go to lunch". This was "let's bomb these people at this time".
Big difference.
Let's assume for the moment that the discussion of military plans on Signal was covered by this policy. That's debatable as others have said. Other parts of that policy would seem to suggest this kind of conversation is expressly forbidden on Signal and similar unofficial chat apps, while other less sensitive conversations are permitted.
How does that excuse the lack of attention and validation that resulted in an unintended party being added to the chat?
Regardless of Signal usage policy, that is a massive fuck up.
Did you read the article? Signal is not approved for this kind of communication and has long been advised against. They also had messages set to autodelete which violates the records act. It's blatantly illegal
Buttery Males!
It's too bad that this is being downvoted - swiftymon is trying to provide some context. It's useful to the discussion and well sourced. I'd love to read counterarguments rather than have this fade away :)
Because their claim is false and unsupported by their quote. It is absolutely unauthorized for government employees to conduct discussions like this on services like Signal. It's not even allowed for CUI level discussions, and war planning pushes into Secret and TS territory very quickly.
Organizational discussions means things like, for a standard fed on a TDY with others, "Meet in the lobby at 0700 so we can drive to the site for the meeting at 0800." Not "So we're going to use ... to attack ... at ...", which is almost certainly Secret or TS once aggregated.
This is the sort of counterargument I'd have liked to see instead of disagreement-driven downvoting, yes.
2 replies →
TFA article discusses how officials have long used Signal for routine logistics, contrasting that with the national defense plans being discussed in a group chat with a journalist