Pro tip: When adding somebody to the group chat about classified information that itself violates government rules, double-check that Jeffrey Goldberg isn’t on the thread.
An attempt by senior Trump administration officials to discuss sensitive military plans in the Signal encrypted messaging app turned into a teachable moment in endpoint security when one of those officials mistakenly added The Atlantic’s editor in chief to that group chat.
As the headline of Jeffrey Goldberg’s story posted Monday sums up things: “The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans.”
In the piece, Goldberg recounted how accepting a Signal connection request on March 11 from a user called Michael Waltz—the same name as Trump’s national security adviser—led to him being added to a “Houthi PC small group” chat. He then witnessed discussions between members of this principals’ committee about military responses to attacks by Houthi militants in Yemen.
The participants in this chat appeared to include officials as high-ranking as Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. Goldberg recounted the latter pledging “to enforce 100% OPSEC” (operational security), followed by banter about how European nations owed the US for its actions to defend shipping lanes in the Red Sea from Houthi drones and missiles.
The Atlantic’s EIC, having accepted that this chat probably wasn’t some elaborate spoof, then realized that strikes carried out by US forces against Houthis on March 15 were only hours away after Hegseth posted a “TEAM UPDATE” in the Signal chat that included „information about targets, weapons the US would be deploying, and attack sequencing“, Goldberg says.
Goldberg, who has reported on military and national-security issues for decades and earlier served in the Israeli Defense Forces as a prison guard, observed in the story that an American adversary could have exploited the details Hegseth shared “to harm American military and intelligence personnel, particularly in the broader Middle East.”
Goldberg’s story shares such gleeful reactions to the March 15 attacks as Waltz replying in pictogram form with fist, American flag, and fire emoji.
