Setting aside the obvious shock of the actual subject, I'm going to try the herculean task of bringing this back to being a HN-related topic...
My guess is that there is someone named Jeffrey Goldberg in the NatSec team (or high up, it seems like a common combination of first and last name at least), and likely that they meant to add him, rather than the EDITOR IN CHIEF of the Atlantic of all people. Could this be a UI/UX thing with Signal? (not differentiating between two Jeffrey Goldbergs on your contact list?).
This sounds less like a Signal problem than an information organization problem. Signal can only show what's in its datastore (your contact list).
I just checked on Android - if you try to add someone to a group chat, it shows their name and profile pic.
One potential Signal-side wrinkle is that it allows you to add people to a group chat who are in another chat you're in, but who aren't in your contacts list. There are strangers I was apparently at a dinner party with years ago who are eligible to be added to a group chat. If Jeffrey Goldberg has his Signal profile name set to JG and he wasn't in Mike Waltz's phone with a more specific name, that could lead to this mistake.
Then it's a good thing there's not an Abdul-Malik al-Houthi in the administration, as they might have included the wrong person on the private group chat.
They should add one then, because the operation described is illegal under international law and should not have been executed. They are punishing Yemen for resisting the US backed Israeli genocide in Gaza. It is ghastly.
Well no, he’s complaining about their actions which is shown (in part, relevant to this comment) easily by their enthusiastic acceptance of said slogan.
The blockade of the red sea is a humanitarian operation that is fulfilling yemen's obligations under international law. Genocide prevention rises above all other obligations including the protection of commerce. The united states is facilitating a genocide, we are a bad actor.
If you have empathy for civilians regardless, the United States bombed a civilian residence and killed many bystanders to get at a Houthi official engaged in genocide prevention. This is a war crime.
> This sounds less like a Signal problem than an information organization problem. Signal can only show what's in its datastore (your contact list).
Signal's insistence on punting on the trust/identity problem is a Signal problem IMO, particularly when its advocates make such a fuss (when it suits them) about being a properly end-to-end cryptosystem and not just a toolbox of algorithms. Most of the systems it's competing with make at least some attempt at providing a chain of trust so you don't have to individually verify everyone you want to talk to.
Skype solves it with an invite link. If you want to send an account, you take its invite link and send it, thus making a manual web of trust without search.
i think this is likely what happened, though i also find it just as plausible that he was fat-fingered or drunk-added into the group (i’ve been added to group chats accidentally by both these “methods”)
Entirely possible. Which is why Government services for 'chat' explicitly don't allow contacts to appear who aren't already in the government. You've also no doubt seen email as it appears in Government inboxes with the big red banner "Came from outside, don't trust this" kinds of things will all the links disabled.
Two things that are really troublesome. The first, as Josh Marshall of TPM points out, "No one on that chat asked 'Why are we doing this on Signal?'" which suggests that it isn't the first time Signal was used for 'off books' stuff and that perhaps there are many such conversations. The second is that the conversation was set up while one of the participants was in the Kremlin waiting to talk to Putin. So either 'Kremlin Free WiFi' or the local cell tower providing connectivity?
Most pundits feel like this administration is trying to keep things out of FOIA and discoverability reach which has its own problems.
So yes, tools for Government communications don't have this problem, hell even Microsoft Teams on their US cloud get better protection than this.
meanwhile every company and their dog do this, for 2 lines worth of text you have to go through this litter and "think of the trees" and "if this email was not intended for you we will deny ever having written it" etc...
> Most pundits feel like this administration is trying to keep things out of FOIA and discoverability reach which has its own problems.
Similar issues have come up in the UK about Boris Johnson et al using Whatsapp etc during Covid, and one of the things they said in their defence did have some value - at least in relation to the idea of unminuted discussions.
ie these chat's are what used to be corridor/bar/cafe conversations - ie unminuted discussions are old as government - it's just they are now happening on various messaging apps rather than in person, at much faster pace, and with more people involved.
So I think it's a mistake to think its reasonable that all discussions should be recorded - the real question here is how to get the right balance - and make sure any decision making meetings are recorded - rather than the chat around the decision.
The way it worked in the past - was to get a proper decision you needed all the people in the same room - and so it was automatically minuted as it was an official meeting ( but not the chat at coffee before the meeting ) - now it's possible to get people together virtually that distinction is blurred.
Not sure what the answer is - but just saying it's probably unreasonable to expect all communications to be recorded - people need space to float ideas, or bitch like normal people - however on the other hand it is essential key meetings are minuted - not just for transparency - but for the study of history.
I'm putting my money on somebody fat-fingering the wrong contact. Maybe it's just me but I swear every phone I've ever owned has had extremely unreliable UIs, stemming from a combination of phantom touches being detected, and the phone moving buttons around as I'm trying to interact with it, as if it's on dialup line struggling to load somebody's Sonic the Hedgehog fanpage on GeoCities one gif at a time in 1996. And it's just phones too, this never happens on my PCs.
Of course, none of this excuses the failure to verify the identities of everybody in their chat, the choice to use a (probably) unvetted app on a (probably) unvetted personal device, or any other of a number of basic opsec rules that should be obvious to anybody who is vested with the authority to order an airstrike on the other side of the planet.
Agree, though I 100% see it on PC too, when web pages try to override standard scroll behavior to do some visual trick at the expense of well tested platform and browser scrolling support.
I don't use Signal, and am unfamiliar with the UI/UX.
However, it seems more plausible to me that Jeffrey Goldberg is in someone's contact list from previous on-purpose leaks (to control narrative, etc, typical "anonymous sources say" stuff) - and was accidentally added to this group.
When adding people to a chat, it shows the contact list from the device, with avatars. It is also possible to manually enter a phone number or username.
It's very likely that senior government officials have a phone with journalists saved in the contacts. It's easy to imagine why there are rules against using the same phone for secret war stuff, yet here we are.
That would solve the problem of accidentally adding journalists to chats, but phones belonging to high level officials are surely targets for the intelligence services of hostile nations. A phone that's used casually, taken to foreign countries, and not actively managed by security professionals is at high risk of being compromised given that threat model.
There is someone with the same initials, not with the same name. I saw someone else point out a potential candidate here but I don't recall the exact name.
I've seen Jamieson Greer as US Trade Representative (same initials) and Jeffrey Kruse of the Defense Intelligence Agency (same first name) mentioned as possibly being the intended invitee.
I mean, I expect the actual approved governmental secure messaging apps would make it much harder to accidentally add a journalist to the thread, so I don’t know if this is a Signal problem per se.
100%. Let's not blame Signal where it's on you to only invite the proper potentially anonymous contact you want to communicate with. Very different goals.
This also highlights why the conversation being held on Signal is so bad. Imagine if "J G" expressed concerns about going forward with the attack. Making actual decisionmaking on go or no go over a non-classified system is insanely stupid.
> Setting aside the obvious shock of the actual subject, I'm going to try the herculean task of bringing this back to being a HN-related topic...
Is that so shocking? I watch often some forums on reddit related to combat footage, not frequently but enough to see various patterns. Before houthis started attacking shipping lanes, there were tons of videos of them kicking ass of Saudi military but way more often some subsaharan African mercenaries in their uniforms. Like, really badly kicking ass, smart ambushes, devastating results even on heavy machinery. The opposite side had almost nothing.
Then with change of this, the tone and content turned 180 degrees. Almost always absolutely precise laser guided bomb strikes even if for 1-2 guys seemingly in the middle of nowhere, and a lot of them popping up all the time (to the tune of few every single day). Always titled cca 'Saudi air force doing XYZ'. Like sure, if you are clueless and don't know state of their army, their discipline, level of training and so on you can believe that.
I didn't believe this since the switch was sharp, US is simply flying there for quite some time, together with Saudi air force. TBH I don't care, just sharing observations. No way we can know hard facts obviously, but its easy to connect those very few dots. A bit of failure from opsec point of view - if you do this stuff, at least keep it secret and not broadcasting to whole world so politicians can keep big smiles and grand statements, at least for clueless civilians who barely know where Yemen lies on the map.
What others write it matches my observation - “Houthi PC small group”, seemingly short term group about specific attack. US attacks themselves are already happening for a year and something.
This is what I started thinking last night. Any of the people who were added to the chat could be disgruntled and add a reporter to the chat to leak it. Is there even any log of who added who to a chat? There might not even be any way to pin it on the leaker. If the leaker had been involved in several such chats and knew the intent was to intentionally violate federal recordkeeping laws, not only would this accomplish the leak, but there might not even be any record of who caused the leak.
If they have admin privileges. The person who creates a group has them by default, and can grant them to anyone else, admins can add, remove, and grant or revoke admin privileges and set group name/description parameters, and disappearing message configuration. Yes, you could have a group where the founder revokes admin privileges for themselves and then nobody can make changes to the group (although individual members can leave and delete the history on their own devices). Signal users can also delete their own messages.
Trump sent his golf buddy Waltz to negotiate with Putin and he came back brainwashed with Russian propaganda. Russian psyops is either really good or some of these people in the administration are just morons.
Hanlon’s razor still has to account for why Goldberg was in Walt’z phone to begin with. If you’re going to butt dial or fat finger the editor of a publication into your super classified bombing plans I don’t think even Hanlon could reconcile it to random number dialing instead of just hitting the wrong contact.
Dunno about Waltz, seems like he is himself quite puzzled about how Goldberg ended up in the group, denied any connection with him and called the Atlantic journalist 'scum'. He also spoke with his buddy Elon and they've got the best minds looking at it right now.
Maybe he's better at handling firearms than mobile chat apps, dunno. The Chinese, which he dislikes, are definitely not going to have a hard time with people like him running the show. I read they were trying to recruit some of the laid off federal workers.
My guess is that there is someone named Jeffrey Goldberg in the NatSec team (or high up, it seems like a common combination of first and last name at least), and likely that they meant to add him, rather than the EDITOR IN CHIEF of the Atlantic of all people. Could this be a UI/UX thing with Signal? (not differentiating between two Jeffrey Goldbergs on your contact list?).