Experts say Pentagon chief has endangered secrets of US defense department and given assistance to foreign spies
As more develops about the US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, and his repeated disclosures of sensitive military intelligence in unsecured Signal group chats, there are growing concerns his behavior has weakened the Pentagon in the eyes of its foreign adversaries and made him and his entourage a top espionage target.
Allies, already concerned by Donald Trump’s aggressive tariffs, have also begun to see the US as an intelligence-sharing liability. There are fears that the mounting firings and leak inquiries in Hegseth’s orbit, along with his inability to manage these internal crises, exposes the entire global US war footing – especially, if a geopolitical and external crisis comes across his desk.
“[What if] a foreign entity, whether it be a state actor or non-state actor, is able to intercept the movements of troops or department personnel, or something like that, capture them and hold them to ransom,” said Kristofer Goldsmith, an Iraq war veteran and CEO at Task Force Butler. “That kind of thing could very easily happen.”
As inappropriate, stupid and reckless as whisky Pete has been it’s not like he was using Facebook PMs or Twitter. Signal is quite secure in general.
Signal encryption is already targeted by Russians and Belarusians trying to compromise it. If it’s still secure, who knows for how long. Also, is Hegseth’s phone itself secure, and everyone has communicating with? Probably not. That is why these kinds of communications are not meant to take place over 3rd party software and on unsecured phones.
So what? So is the NSA and everyone else in the world? You have no evidence that the could or have compromised it at all. Just baseless “oh but it may be compromised some day!”.
Put another way - Russians and Belorussians are also trying to hack the encryption used by your bank. WHO KNOWS HOW LONG THAT WILL REMAIN SAFE.
This is the actual issue here - not Signal. Using a personal device with who-knows-what for hardening or even patch management is a significant problem.
Yes, that is the point. I have no evidence, nor will I. When Russia hacks it successfully, they aren’t going to put out a press release and give everyone a grace period to move off the app before they start harvesting state secrets are they? You need to act like it is already compromised becuase you don’t know that it isn’t or when it inevitably will be.
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There is no such thing as unbreakable encryption. It will be compromised at some point and you will not know when. To pretend otherwise is to asinine.
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