Signalgate: violating national security

in order to violate rights

A familiar risk to a rule-based republic, such as our own, is when the government claims that it must violate our rights in the name of national security. In Signalgate, we face a novel challenge: a government that brazenly risks national security in order to preserve its ability to repress its citizens.

We see that traditional problem in the deportations to the Salvadoran gulag. We are told that the government knows who is a terrorist; that we must trust their judgement; and that we must accept their actions. The reasoning, as always, is that there is some kind of exceptional situation -- an "invasion" in this case. If we accept that the government gets to decide what is exceptional, the exception then just becomes the rule. This works psychologically, because we can choose to believe (even though it is usually not true) that we the non-arrested and the non-deported are being made more safe.

But in the Signalgate scandal, we encounter something more chilling: our government is openly compromising our national security, the better to violate our rights. Its position is that it is worth risking the lives of soldiers abroad in order to be able to persecute civilians at home.

Let me explain.

On March 15, high officials of Musk-Trump conducted a group chat on the messenger app Signal about a bombing of Yemen, including a reporter. Jeff Goldberg, placed in one of the oddest situations in journalistic history, replied on March 24th with a restrained factual account of what happened on the chat before he removed himself. The White House and its allies confirmed that all of this happened, but denied that it was of any significance. With this new scandal, we have tipped over into something different: compromising national security in order to preserve a tool which is used chiefly to violate the rights of Americans.

To see what is novel and what is threatening, let us pause for a moment on the traditional gambit of claiming that we must sacrifice one good thing (freedom) to get another good thing (safety). Musk-Trump is invoking "national security" as a reason why it need not share the facts about its deportation actions with judges, and more broadly as an argument as to why it can deport anyone at any time without due process or indeed any justification at all. The claim here is the old-fashioned one: we must trade rights for security. And the outcome is also the traditional one: if we buy this argument, we lose both. If anyone can be deported at any time for no reason, then we are obviously not only less free but also less secure, as individuals and as a nation.

In a constitutional republic, such as our own, freedom and security alike are grounded in the rule of law. In a rule-of-law state, we can count on the government not apprehending us and deporting us without due process of law and without providing some justification. This practical dignity of our bodies is called habeas corpus, which means that authorities must provide a justification to a court for taking control of your physical body. Logically and historically this is at the foundation of our entire tradition of rights. The individual body comes first; the government must have a good legal reason to confine it.

From this logic, as it strengthened from the Magna Carta eight hundred years ago, to the first English writs of habeas corpus four hundred years ago, to the American Constitution, emerges a usefully liberating skepticism about government purposes. Authorities will always find reasons not to take the individual seriously, and, if permitted, will conspire among themselves to confine our bodies and make us unfree. For this very reason, we have a number of laws, such as the Federal Records Act, whose purpose is to make sure that we know what our government is doing. It is not just that we want them to have a reason for seizing our bodies. It is that we want to be able to head off the kind of government that would plot to do such a thing for tyrannical reasons.

This logic of freedom and tyranny is why government officials, such as those on the Signal chat, are required to record their interactions. Michael Waltz, who initiated the conversation, had the Signal messages set to self-delete. This is a violation of the Federal Records Act and other applicable laws, whose underlying purpose is to protect people from a conspiring government. And so Waltz's action is suggestion of a troubling pattern. Signalgate is shocking on its own. But it is perhaps even more troubling when we begin to understand why the people on the chat were using Signal to make and implement policy. They were risking national security by doing so. But this was worth it to them, apparently, because Signal allows them to deny the rights of Americans.

Let's be clear about the national security problem. For most of us, Signal is a safe platform, and I don't mean to discourage its use by private citizens. But it is specifically forbidden for high government officials to make policy on that platform, because it is less secure that the appropriate government devices. It appears that some of the participants in this Signal chat were highly vulnerable to phishing attacks, since their numbers were publicly available. We know that Russia is trying to hack Signal -- although if the Russians had that data, they would not need to do any very complicated hacking. It is possible, on Signal, to inadvertently add a participant in a group chat or a conversation without knowing who that person is. On government platforms that cannot happen. And then, on Signal, it is possible to go on and share crucial information about, for example, a planned or ongoing military operation, which is exactly did take place on March 15th.

Whatever one thinks about a given military operation, it is hard to disagree that it is better, at least for the Americans involved (the surviving relatives of dead Yemeni civilians might have other views), if the plans are not broadcast around the world before they are implemented. The use of Signal suggests the use of personal phones, which some of the participants have more or less admitted (Tulsi Gabbard refused to say; Steve Witkoff, trying to head off the charge that he was using his personal phone inside the Kremlin, admitted to having joined the chat on it after leaving Russia). And the use of personal phones opens a whole new set of vulnerabilities, including the rather widespread Israeli app Pegasus.

But here's the point: the authorities knew of these risks to national security, and thought that they were worth taking, and for a reason. I suggest that this reason is that Signal chats provide American authorities with cover to plan the violation of human rights.

It is important to understand that the risk is systemic. We know about this one instance of the use of Signal and about the one leak. But other leaks have almost certainly happened already. We know about this particular occasion because the inadvertently-added individual happened, by a wild chance, to be a highly responsible reporter who wrote about the incident in a highly responsible way. The assumption that Jeffrey Goldberg is the only person who was inadvertently added to a national security group, just because he is the only case we know about, is unsustainable.

So the people on the group chat were breaking the law, and they were breaking their own departments' rules, they were ignoring advisories from their own departments, and they were endangering national security. The information that they were sharing, had it gotten into the hands of anyone who has not a highly-responsible reporter, could have compromised not only that attack in particular, but US methods in general. It could also have served as the basis for blackmailing American officials. Indeed, for all we know, information that has been leaked on previous Signal conversations, or on other platforms on personal phones, could be the basis for blackmailing American officials right now. But the use of Signal and personal phones appears nevertheless to be the norm in Musk-Trump. Indeed, the administration has given no sign that this would change.

From the content of the group chat, it is clear that Signal (and, again, likely on personal phones) is the default way that Musk-Trump high officials communicate with one another. This group chat explicitly referred to another one. There was a protocol at the beginning of this chat, which seemed familiar to everyone. It involved adding people whose Signal numbers were known, as if this were a standard procedure. No one during the chat wrote anything like: "hey, why are we using Signal?" The reason that no one did so, most likely, is that they all do this every day.

Using Signal enables American authorities to violate the rights of Americans. Signal is attractive not because it is secure with respect to foreign adversaries, which it is not, but because it is secure with respect to American citizens and American judges. The autodelete function, which Mike Waltz was using, violates the law. But what is most essential is the purpose of that law: to protect the rights of Americans from their government. The timed deletion function allows American officials to be confident that their communications will never be recorded and that they can therefore conspire without any chance of their actions being known to citizens at the time or at any later point.

Everyone on that group chat, including the Vice-President, the Director of National Intelligence, the National Security Advisor, and the Secretary of State, knew that what they were doing was against the rules, the guidance, and the law. But they were doing what they were doing, I would suggest, for a reason: precisely because it allowed them or their colleagues to compromise the rights of Americans.

In other words, it was worth risking the lives of American soldiers abroad in order to have the opportunity the violate the rights of American civilians at home. Making soldiers unsafe is apparently a price worth paying to make the rest of us also unsafe.

If Signal is used for the most sensitive national security discussions, it is reasonable to ask whether it is also used in discussions about sensitive matters of domestic policy -- for example in the discussions of deportations to the Salvadoran gulag or in plans for targeting other individuals. If this is correct, then consider this: when the government contemplates deporting you, it will be doing so on an app that allows those discussions to be secret, not from foreign adversaries, but from you and from judges.

And that, it would appear, is why Signal is being used -- and will be used.

Judge James Boasberg is presiding over the El Salvador deportation case. He will now also preside over the Signalgate case, in which the chat participants are accused of violating the Federal Records Act. It is a curious juxtaposition, to say the least: in the one case, the government is unpersuasively invoking national security to keep secrets; in the other, it is openly violating national security in order to preserve the capacity to keep secrets. I think the two cases are linked, not only conceptually, but also technologically. They show both kinds of arguments for authoritarian rule, the traditional and the novel. But most likely they both involve the use of Signal. Perhaps the judge will take the opportunity to inquire.

Even as the Musk-Trump people continue to say that we must sacrifice our rights for national security, they are also starting to say that they find it worthwhile to violate national security in order to have the tools that allow them to violate our rights. In Signalgate, we see the shift from the conventional excuse for authoritarian practices to an open embrace of tyranny for its own sake.