On March 24 — a date which, for President Donald Trump’s administration, will forever live in infamy — The Atlantic published what was supposed to be a private conversation between several members of Trump’s cabinet, including the secretaries of state and defense. The conversation, which took place on Signal, included detailed attack plans, such as the launch times of drones and fighter jets, as well as the name of at least one CIA agent.

What none of the participants realized was that Jeffrey Goldberg, editor in chief of The Atlantic, had been accidentally invited to the chat by Michael Waltz, Trump’s national security adviser.

Approximately six hours after the piece was published, Sens. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV) and Jacky Rosen (D-NV) voted with the Republican Senate majority to confirm Christopher Landau to be deputy secretary of state. He now reports directly to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, one of the participants in the chat.

***

I must now make what is likely a self-evident confession. When given a choice between being right and being a winner, I almost unfailingly prefer to be right. This makes me an almost unfailingly unpopular party guest.

I bring this up because, upon discovering they voted to confirm Landau, I was ready to excoriate our senators. I was ready to suggest that Theresa Bohannan’s recent op-ed in The Nevada Independent calling for Cortez Masto to face serious competition in her next primary didn’t go far enough — Rosen should face some stiff intraparty competition as well.

Before I wrote that column, however, a familiar question crossed my mind. Did I want to be right? Or did I want to win?

You already know the answer.

I looked up their voting records since Landau was confirmed. Six hours isn’t much time to change voting strategies for two senators who pride themselves on being nearly as bipartisan as their evenly divided swing state, after all. Perhaps they’ve changed their tack since then.

Of the seven confirmation votes that occurred last week after Landau was confirmed, Cortez Masto and Rosen voted in opposition to six of them — the one exception being the vote to confirm Michael Kratsios as director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy. They also voted with their Democratic colleagues in opposition of a joint resolution that overturned a Biden-era regulation that capped overdraft fees, though they also voted with the Republican majority to overturn a regulation that sought to tax cryptocurrency-based finance platforms as securities.

So, of the nine non-procedural votes that have taken place since Landau’s confirmation, Cortez Masto and Rosen voted against giving the Trump administration what it wanted seven times. If my math is right — which, of course, it is — that’s a solid C effort.

Consequently, this column will only express two-ninths as much frustration. Cortez Masto and Rosen have demonstrated that they are capable of learning — at a passable level, if not necessarily one that deserves honors — what the present moment calls for.

Acceptable work, senators. You are presently meeting expectations. One thumb up.

***

With that digression behind us, it’s time to start another: What is Signal?

The technical answer is Signal is an open-source encrypted instant messaging service that is widely regarded for its strong privacy features and security protections. These protections are robust enough to prevent Signal from providing personal information about its users to government authorities, even when it’s legally required to furnish whatever information it might have. Instructions on how to use the app are a key component of the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Surveillance Self-Defense project, which seeks to protect the public from online spying and surveillance.

Architecturally, Signal is designed to send messages precisely to the recipients you instruct the app to deliver them to and nobody else. This, metaphorically speaking, means Signal is secure the way an industrial-strength laser cutter is secure. If you’re careless about where your laser cutter is pointed, I have bad news for everyone and everything within a direct line of sight of the business end of your cutter. Similarly, if you’re careless about who you add to a group chat, Signal will dutifully encrypt and send whatever information you put into that chat to the recipients you selected — whether you actually intended to message any specific recipient or not.

In short, Signal, like a laser cutter or a honey badger, does not care.

For most of us, this is an acceptable level of privacy, at least when we’re messaging on our own time. 

When lives or significant sums of money are on the line, however, Signal’s limitations quickly become apparent. Signal can’t know if any device it’s communicating to has otherwise been compromised. It does not notify participants when someone or something has taken a screenshot of their conversation. The app’s “disappearing messages” features can be used in ways that violate retention requirements for employees in highly regulated fields. It can’t know whether you’re messaging someone you’re authorized to message, nor can it know if you’re authorized to message said person about the topic you’re conversing about.

Taking that last limitation into consideration, every workplace messaging system worth its salt will tell you whether you’re chatting with a co-worker or with an “external user” — someone who uses the same system as you but who does not belong to your organization. Many of these systems allow organizations to categorically disable the ability to chat with external users.

Is Signal safer and more secure than most publicly available instant messaging platforms? Absolutely. When the app is used sensibly, it delivers pretty good privacy.

Is Signal safe enough and secure enough for the presidential cabinet to use? Let’s just say Goldberg never would have been in the “Houthi PC small group” chat if Waltz used Microsoft Teams instead.

***

When The New York Times broke its story nearly a decade ago about then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s use of a personal email account while she served as secretary of state, the urtext of the story was that the use of a personal email account on a private server was intrinsically insecure. As Rubio — who, incidentally, Cortez Masto and Rosen both voted to confirm — said at the time, “You most certainly know you shouldn’t be talking about [classified information] or passing it on in an email, particularly to a private server like the one she had. What they did is reckless — it’s complete recklessness and incompetence.”

That urtext, however, was not why that story helped sink her campaign. Speaking as an information technology manager with more than two decades of experience in the field, I can tell you that most people frankly don’t know or particularly care about the ins and outs of email security, whether self-hosted or commercially hosted email systems are more secure, or even what it means for an email system to be “secure” in the first place.

The subtext of the story — the context in which it existed — was the truly damaging part. 

Barack Obama’s administration — which Clinton served on as secretary of state — repeatedly struggled with technology due to various hidebound bureaucratic rules imposed by the government it was ostensibly running. Obama famously had to use a BlackBerry until 2016 — nine years after the iPhone was first released — because it took nearly a decade for federal information technology workers to develop a suitably secure configuration for mainstream smartphones. The initial launch of HealthCare.gov — the online health insurance marketplace that was supposed to be the centerpiece of Obama’s health care reforms — was a massive disaster.

In that context, if a National Merit finalist who graduated college with honors, who gave the first student-delivered commencement speech in her college’s history, who graduated from Yale Law School, who served as first lady and senator and secretary of state — someone whose campaign messaging refused to shy away from complexity and intersectionality — if America’s valedictorian-in-chief could not function within the rules applied against her by the government she was ostensibly supposed to help control … 

What hope did any of us mere mortals have? If the government can’t even serve the president or the secretary of state, who is it serving?

***

The story of the Trump cabinet’s private chat does not share that context. 

It is, as USA Today somewhat dismissively put it, relatable — much more relatable, for sure, than the privacy and security tradeoffs involved in self-hosting an email system. Trump’s best and brightest were caught treating a conversation of importance to national security with the care and attention one might use to organize a frat party or to arrange an after-hours sexual escapade.

This would be an unconscionable breach of professionalism from any entry-level employee, one which would swiftly lead them to be fired with cause. From those occupying the highest levels of our national government, this should be — and likely would be if Trump’s attorney general wasn’t refusing to investigate the incident  — criminally negligent.

The chat also exists in the context of several subsequent stories demonstrating a collective failure by Trump’s cabinet in applying basic information security hygiene. 

WIRED reported that Waltz had a fully public Venmo account in his name that was linked to several high-ranking officials. As WIRED also reported, Vice President JD Vance had a public Venmo account, too, as did several other members of the group chat — a payment made by Dan Katz, chief of staff at the U.S. Treasury, had a note consisting solely of an eggplant emoji. Der Spiegel, meanwhile, reported that private contact details, email addresses and even some passwords belonging to chat participants can be found in troves of hacked customer data.

Most importantly, the story exists in the context of an administration that not only refuses to accept responsibility or accountability for its behavior, it believes it should be rewarded for failure. 

According to NBC News, Trump has no plans to fire any of the participants in the chat. It’s all “fake news.” Even so, despite the 22nd Amendment of the Constitution prohibiting presidents from being elected to more than two terms, Trump — who is “not joking” about this — is already talking about a third term in the White House.

To our senators’ credit, they only voted to confirm one participant of that chat. A mild apology for their error in judgment, perhaps a backhanded one along the lines of, “We knew Rubio knew better and we expected he’d behave better — we apologize for not realizing he wouldn’t,” would be appreciated. They are also starting to vote like they realize the executive branch is currently being run by a herd of careless amoral jackasses — the sort of people who think, for example, that Sigal Chattah should be the U.S. attorney for the District of Nevada.

Good. It’s about time.

A welcome next step to consider, however, would be to make a promise to us, their constituents, that until the Trump administration is willing to hold itself accountable, our senators should promise to vote against confirming any other official appointments. Additionally, if presented the opportunity to vote to remove any official to this administration, up to and including the president, they should promise to vote for their removal.

Certainly everyone in this administration has earned it.

David Colborne ran for public office twice. He is now an IT manager, the father of two sons, and a recurring opinion columnist for The Nevada Independent. You can follow him on Mastodon @[email protected], on Bluesky @davidcolborne.bsky.social, on Threads @davidcolbornenv or email him at [email protected]. You can also message him on Signal at dcolborne.64.