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US The inspector general’s report released publicly today found that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth could have endangered U.S. forces and military operations by… Using the consumer messaging service Signal To share sensitive real-time details in March about a planned attack on Houthi rebels in Yemen. The IG first shared the classified report with Congress on Tuesday.
The report contains only one direct recommendation: that the head of CENTCOM’s Special Security Office “review command classification procedures for compliance” with DoD regulations “and issue additional procedures, as necessary, to ensure the appropriate portion of classified information is appropriately marked.” The report also cites another IG publication on the use of “electronic messaging systems not under DoD control” and notes its recommendations that DoD “improve training of senior DoD officials on the proper use of electronic devices.”
The incident that the Inspector General was investigating was recalled Signal gateThis is because senior US officials were using the main platform for communications that usually take place through secure government channels. More importantly, then-US National Security Advisor Michael Waltz accidentally invited journalist Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, to the Signal chat as well. Goldberg then went public with the chat’s existence and false inclusion of it, demonstrating in real time some of the risks of using the consumer app for top-secret government and military business. Meanwhile, in addition to very specific information about the raid, including details like the timing of the bombs being dropped, Hegseth messaged Chat at one point, “We are now clean on operations,” referring to Operations security.
The Inspector General’s report notes that Hegseth is DoD’s “principal original classification authority” and thus decides what information should be classified and whether the information will be declassified.
“We concluded that the Secretary sent sensitive, non-public operational information that he determined did not need to be classified via Signal chat on his personal cell phone,” the inspector general wrote in the report. “However, because the Secretary indicated that he used the Signal application on his personal cell phone to send DoD non-public information, we conclude that the Secretary’s actions did not comply with DoD Instruction 8170.01, which prohibits the use of a personal device for official business and the use of an unapproved, commercially available messaging application to send DoD non-public information.”
The report states that Hegseth “declined to be interviewed” for the inspector general’s report and instead provided a written statement about the Segingate events. The Department of Defense did not immediately respond to WIRED’s request for comment.
The signal is The gold standard secure messaging app For consumer use. It encrypts messages and calls end-to-end so that only the sender and recipient can access them, not outside eavesdroppers or even Signal itself. Signal also collects very minimal metadata, so the company knows next to nothing about its users and has nothing to turn over if it receives requests from law enforcement. No matter how good Signal is, the “threat model” and use case for individual consumers is very different from that of high-level government and military officials.