Trump Admin’s Signal Fiasco Offers This 1 Startling Reminder For Anyone In A Group Chat

In an explosive new report detailed in The Atlantic, the magazine’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg was inadvertently invited to join a Signal group chat by President Donald Trump’s national security adviser Michael Waltz in mid-March. In it, he was privy to top-secret imminent war plans.

Few, if any, of us will ever be privy to such a monumental mistake, but we’ve all been added to the wrong group chat — and sometimes the results can be equally disastrous for your personal life.

We talked to privacy experts to help you make sure nothing even remotely this explosive can happen to you — because you’re definitely susceptible.

In total, the group chat titled “Houthi PC small group” had 18 members including Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President JD Vance.

As “JG” on Signal, Goldberg had a front-row seat to watching Trump’s top intelligence officers sharing prayer emojis after Hegseth shared upcoming planned strikes against the Houthi militia in Yemen, including targets and weapons used. Goldberg even got a two-hour heads-up on the U.S. attack before it actually happened, which helped him confirm that the group chat was legitimate and not misinformation.

Despite Hegseth denying that the chat was real, the National Security Council has confirmed that the chat appears to be authentic and is investigating how Goldberg got included.

Trump downplayed the severity of this extraordinary leak of classified information and told NBC News that “Waltz has learned a lesson, and he’s a good man.” But what Trump calls a learning moment is what Jennifer King, a privacy and data policy Fellow at the Stanford University Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence calls “one of those really simple dumb mistakes.”

King does not blame the Signal app for this human error. The Trump administration officials “were using a tool that they shouldn’t have been using for what they were doing,” she said, noting that this conversation should have been done using secure government equipment. “For better or for worse, Signal is not there to make sure that you didn’t make a mistake in who you added to that list.“

Obviously, very few of us will make a mistake of this magnitude, but it’s also a startling reminder that what you share on a private group chat is not guaranteed to stay private ― even on a secure app like Signal.

Signal’s end-to-end encryption is intended to keep messages secure from outside threats like from law enforcement or hackers who could be trying to read what is being said.

But in this case, the privacy was compromised from people within the group chat. It’s a harsh reminder: Your group chat’s security is only as strong as the trust you have in your group participants. Signal, for example, does not notify the other person when you take a screenshot of a disappearing message, which makes it easy for someone like Goldberg to keep track of what was being said.

“It only took one person and then nobody else noticed, because they’re all just assuming that somebody else has made sure that this is all the right people,” King said.

As Thorin Klosowski, a security and privacy activist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, previously told HuffPost, Signal can also be compromised if an outsider gets ahold of your physical phone, too. “If someone had physical access to a phone, they would be able to obviously see whatever conversations are happening on it. If it’s unlocked, people can screenshot. You can record calls,” Klosowski said as examples.

If you want to avoid the Trump officials’ mistakes, double-check the identity of people in a large group chat filled with people you might not know well. King recommended following the skepticism Goldberg demonstrated in his article: Goldberg did not immediately assume everyone was who they said they were and sought to verify their identity based on if they communicated like how they did in past conversations.

In other words, before you share sensitive information, review everyone who has been invited to join your chat. If you see the initials of someone you cannot immediately recall knowing ― like “JG” in this instance ― ask them to share their identity. You could also ask the person who added the new guest to confirm if they added the right person.

Deleting messages will not guarantee your conversation is private, either, as the Trump administration learned. Signal lets users choose to automatically delete messages from all chat participants’ apps within seconds or days.

According to the Atlantic report, Waltz set some of the texts in the Signal group to “disappear,” or delete, after one week, but that is more than enough time for an intrepid journalist to document what was being said.

Sharing sensitive information in a channel you should not is a blunder that is not limited to national intelligence officers. Employees are caught doing this all the time, too.

In 2023, U.S. federal regulators fined 11 banks $549 million for allowing employees to discuss company business using unauthorized means of communication like WhatsApp, iMessage and Signal during the COVID pandemic when many bank employees were working from home. The Wall Street firms were fined because they are required to preserve all official communications by their employees, and when employees use apps like Signal, it makes it easier for businesses to hide potential wrongdoing.

Ultimately, your privacy is only as secure as your weakest link, and in this case, Waltz was the group chat’s weak link who invited a journalist to join top-secret military plans.

But every member of this war chat is actually the bigger weak link for agreeing to discuss highly classified military information on an unclassified, commercial app like Signal.

And Waltz, Hegseth and the rest of the “Houthi PC small group” learned this the hard way. I’ll be sending laughing-while-crying emojis their way.