Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth confidently pronouncing “We are currently clean on OPSEC” in a group chat on a commercial messaging app that inadvertently included a prominent journalist looks set to go down as one of the most iconic political quotes of the year.
For days, Donald Trump and his administration have been snarled up in a truly humiliating scandal. The reputations of Hegseth and national security advisor Mike Waltz have been shredded, with men charged with keeping America safe exposed as bumbling fools casually revealing the nation’s secrets.
The only person involved in that now-notorious group chat who’s come out looking good is The Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, who must be feeling pretty smug about the Trump White House handing him the biggest scoop of the year (so far) on a silver platter. But, just as the dust was beginning to settle, there’s been a new development that, astonishingly, makes everyone look worse.
German paper Der Spiegel figured that if these numbskulls were so lax on this specific conversation, they’ve probably been sloppy elsewhere. It didn’t take long for them to hit paydirt. Their reporters confirm that with even a mild amount of digging they now have personal cellphone numbers, email addresses, and leaked passwords belonging to senior U.S. officials.
A little research confirmed that these weren’t old or deactivated accounts, they’re still very much in use and linked to various social media platforms. If Der Spiegel can find this stuff out, you can guarantee foreign intelligence services have all that and much more on people at the highest levels of power.
While it is quite common for private details to appear in hacked data – this is significant given the careless use of a messenger app by Trumps top security brass. Hostile intelligence could have easily infiltrated their devices with the information at hand. (4/
— Fidelius Schmid (@FideliusSchmid) March 26, 2025
As the article goes on to point out: “Hostile intelligence services could use this publicly available data to hack the communications of those affected by installing spyware on their devices. It is thus conceivable that foreign agents were privy to the Signal chat group in which Gabbard, Waltz and Hegseth discussed a military strike.” Needless to say, this carelessness is not what you want when dealing with top secret information critical to the nation’s defense, and which puts the lives of American servicemen and women at risk.
Replies on X are scornful, especially among the cybersecurity community. One reply claims that this is “incredible and of an amateurism rarely seen“, that these people are “completely incompetent“, and that “they’re in over their heads“.
I dunno, maybe they decided the expert who knew how to stop America’s enemies running rampant through our officials’ private data and viewing the nation’s most critical secrets was a DEI hire and got rid of them. Either way, thanks to Trump and his cronies, the United States is, once again, a global laughing stock. Good job!
Published: Mar 27, 2025 9:43 AM UTC