Speaker 1: I'm afraid Kaleidoscope and iHeart podcasts. This is kill Switch.
Speaker 1: I'm Dextera Thomas. Maybe you've heard a signal Gate. If not,
Speaker 1: I'll get you up to speed real quick. Back in March,
Speaker 1: a bunch of top White House staff, including the Vice President,
Speaker 1: Secretary of Defense, and a lot of other people, were
Speaker 1: discussing military operations in Yemen. And they were having this
Speaker 1: discussion on a chat app called signal which you'll hear
Speaker 1: more about in the second But amongst all the White
Speaker 1: House officials was an outsider somebody, and that somebody turned
Speaker 1: out to be US National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, had
Speaker 1: accidentally added a journalist from the Atlantic to that group chat.
Speaker 1: That journalists did what journalists are supposed to do, tell
Speaker 1: the public what's happening. It was embarrassing for the White House,
Speaker 1: and it also raised a lot of questions about what
Speaker 1: exactly the US is doing overseas. It's a big enough
Speaker 1: deal that Signalgate has its own Wikipedia entry, and the
Speaker 1: story would have ended there. Then fast forward to May. First,
Speaker 1: a picture started to circulate of the very same guy,
Speaker 1: Mike Waltz, looking at his phone in a meeting using
Speaker 1: an app that looked familiar sort of.
Speaker 2: He was in a cabinet meeting with President Trump and
Speaker 2: other senior officials, and the Roysters photographer got him looking
Speaker 2: down at his phone, and if you zoomed in, it
Speaker 2: looked like he was using signal, which is of course
Speaker 2: very Ray funny and Rai Ray ironic. So people saw
Speaker 2: that they started tweeting it and posting on Blue Sky saying,
Speaker 2: ha ha, look, Mike Waltz's using signal in this photo.
Speaker 2: And then of course when you zoom in there are names.
Speaker 2: It shows the chat and there's says Rubio. I only
Speaker 2: know if one senior official who has a surname Rubio
Speaker 2: obviously relates me to the Department of State. There's Gabbard,
Speaker 2: I think probably Tolsy Gabbard. And then there's one that's
Speaker 2: just straight up says jd Vance.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I wasna say. Jadvance is right in there, and
Speaker 1: I'm just I'm reading part of jd Vance's messages right here,
Speaker 1: just in this picture, which brings up an entirely different question,
Speaker 1: which is should you be reading your text messages during
Speaker 1: a meeting in which they are photographers. But I suppose
Speaker 1: we can leave that to the side. This is my
Speaker 1: friend and former colleague from my Vice News days, Joseph Cox.
Speaker 1: He now reports for and co owns the online publication
Speaker 1: four or for Media.
Speaker 2: Somebody put it in our in our work group chat
Speaker 2: and I was say, I look at Signal every day,
Speaker 2: like way too much, like twelve hours a day. I'm
Speaker 2: looking at that app. This is not Signal. There's a
Speaker 2: there's something ever so slightly different. And when I look
Speaker 2: at the bottom, there's usually a message in Signal says
Speaker 2: please verify your signal pin. And this is so you
Speaker 2: remember the pin so you don't get locked out, and
Speaker 2: it keeps your account more secure. It's a very good thing.
Speaker 2: But at the bottom it said please remember your TM
Speaker 2: SGNL pin. And I'm like, what the well the hell
Speaker 2: is that? And then I google around and that leads
Speaker 2: me to tele Message and their modified version of Signal.
Speaker 1: You really have to be hyper focusing on this stuff
Speaker 1: to notice it at all. And then you further zoomed
Speaker 1: in and said, Yo, this ain't signal.
Speaker 2: This is not signal, this is some weird modified version.
Speaker 2: So yeah, we report that Mike Waltz has inadvertently revealed
Speaker 2: the weird Signal clone that the Trump administration is using.
Speaker 1: Just to clarify here, Signal the actual Signal is a
Speaker 1: messaging app that uses what's called end to end encryption,
Speaker 1: which means that when you send a message, nobody, not
Speaker 1: the government, not even Signal can read your messages. Even
Speaker 1: if they do intercept them, only the intended recipient can
Speaker 1: read the message. It's basically the gold standard for secure messaging.
Speaker 1: What Joseph noticed was that the app Mike Waltz was
Speaker 1: using in the picture looked like the actual Signal, but
Speaker 1: that something was off. This app looked kind of similar,
Speaker 1: but it was clear that someone else had modified it,
Speaker 1: and his suspicion was that this modified version might not
Speaker 1: have had the same security that the actual Signal does.
Speaker 1: So Joseph wrote an article on four or four that
Speaker 1: explained the issue here, and the key was that phrase
Speaker 1: at the bottom TMSGNL. Joseph started digging around and realized
Speaker 1: that this was probably from a company called tele Message.
Speaker 1: This company basically makes clones of popular messaging apps like WhatsApp, Telegram,
Speaker 1: we Chat, and Yes Signal with one extra feature. It
Speaker 1: saves copies of all the messages sent or received onto
Speaker 1: another server not to spoil the next part. But maybe
Speaker 1: you're already seeing the problem here, So let's talk about
Speaker 1: the timeline. This picture of Mike Waltz circulates and Joseph
Speaker 1: publishes that article on May first. On May third, two
Speaker 1: days later, an anonymous hacker contacts another reporter named Micah
Speaker 1: Lee saying that they've managed to hack tele a message,
Speaker 1: and so Micah and Joseph put together another article explaining
Speaker 1: how bad this really is.
Speaker 2: I'm getting these screenshots and I'm getting sent this data.
Speaker 2: One of the first examples is a screenshot of a
Speaker 2: telemessage back end, which you know, a normal person should
Speaker 2: not be able to access and a hacker should be
Speaker 2: able to access it. And it has all of these
Speaker 2: contact details for officials from Customs and Border Protection, implying
Speaker 2: that they use the tool as well for some reason.
Speaker 2: So I spend my Sunday phoning up numbers in this
Speaker 2: list of CPB officials contact information, and I answer with
Speaker 2: the name, and I say with Customs and Border and
Speaker 2: they confirm, so it verifies the data. They then hang
Speaker 2: up after I explain what's happening.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 2: But then there's the much more serious stuff, which is
Speaker 2: messages that they may have thought were secure with a
Speaker 2: modified version of Signal, and these messages are going off
Speaker 2: against archived somewhere. The hacker was able to essentially intercept
Speaker 2: them in the middle of that process, and we were
Speaker 2: reading messages that were clearly sent that day of internal
Speaker 2: conversations between various people. One example was one from it
Speaker 2: looks like it was from Galaxy Digital, which is a
Speaker 2: cryptocurrency connected company, and they were talking about some sort
Speaker 2: of bill or law that the Dems may or may
Speaker 2: not support. I'm not particularly interested in the specifics of
Speaker 2: that bill, but it just shows you whoa this is
Speaker 2: a really sensitive conversation, even if I don't really care
Speaker 2: about cryptocurrency. This isn't something that a hacker should be
Speaker 2: able to get, and this isn't something that I should
Speaker 2: be able to read. But the implication is is that
Speaker 2: Mike Waltz and people he was talking to, like Rubio
Speaker 2: or whoever run this same platform, the hacker just managed
Speaker 2: to break into and get the contents of messages. And
Speaker 2: that's massive because who knows who else had access to this.
Speaker 1: So just giving these government officials the benefit of the
Speaker 1: doubt for a moment, maybe this is what happened. Using
Speaker 1: an app that can automatically delete messages is not okay
Speaker 1: for government officials because the public is supposed to have
Speaker 1: access to non classified information, and one of the things
Speaker 1: telemessage promises to do is help organizations comply with regulations
Speaker 1: about retaining records. Now, we have no evidence of the
Speaker 1: reasoning or timing of the government's use of telemessage, but
Speaker 1: that would be a charitable reading here. Maybe they did
Speaker 1: it to obey the law.
Speaker 2: It is a really really, really really hard trade off,
Speaker 2: and one side we want the government to keep records
Speaker 2: so we can foil them and there can be accountability
Speaker 2: and transparency whenever we need that, you know, either in
Speaker 2: the current moment or at a later date. And then
Speaker 2: when they do seemingly choose at all to do that,
Speaker 2: it blows up massively in their face, and it's actually
Speaker 2: probably even worse than the problem they were trying to
Speaker 2: solve in the first place. Tele a message who don't
Speaker 2: make signal, they don't develop signal in any capacity. They
Speaker 2: don't do it for reach Out, Whatsapple Telegram either, but
Speaker 2: they take those apps and they like shoven archiving ability
Speaker 2: onto it. So presumably you might just not make a
Speaker 2: fully secure solution. But then even more fundamentally, there are
Speaker 2: just always going to be risks involved of this, and
Speaker 2: it kind of reminds me of you know, government's always
Speaker 2: asking for back doors into communication products. I'm not saying
Speaker 2: tele message is absolutely a backdoor, and they don't use
Speaker 2: that terminology, but practically it's kind of the same. It's
Speaker 2: taking the messages and copying them elsewhere, which is what
Speaker 2: we think of a backdoor. Fundamentally, by introduce seeing another
Speaker 2: party to the chat, you're introducing more risk in some form.
Speaker 1: Right exactly, because the idea here, what sounds like tell
Speaker 1: Message is promising is that well, signal your message is
Speaker 1: encrypted from one end to the other. It's end to
Speaker 1: end encrypted, so nobody can intercept that. But then it's
Speaker 1: going through tele messages being copied somewhere else, and so
Speaker 1: by default, by definition, it's not encrypted in to end anymore.
Speaker 2: So when we first reported on sort of the Trump
Speaker 2: happening use of telemessage, the New York Times followed up
Speaker 2: a few days later, and they were talking about some
Speaker 2: of the security risks about this, and they spoke to
Speaker 2: some executive that's Smash, which is the American company that
Speaker 2: owns the Israeli company tele message, and that executive to
Speaker 2: The New York Times was saying something like we we
Speaker 2: don't de encrypts, which is a bizarre term I've never
Speaker 2: heard anyone use with any in any serious context. But
Speaker 2: what they were trying to say was basically, it's still secure,
Speaker 2: you know, even though we have we're adding this archiving thing,
Speaker 2: it's still secure. And I mean they say that, they
Speaker 2: say it's still end to end encrypted, and of course
Speaker 2: they're free to say whatever they want that they're comfortable
Speaker 2: saying in their marketing material. But Michah Lee, the security
Speaker 2: of research and journalist we worked on the hack, has
Speaker 2: done a ray detailed analysis about how telem message does
Speaker 2: have access to the plain text of messages. But then
Speaker 2: I think even just more importantly, we were looking at
Speaker 2: the contents of messages. It's clearly not end to end encrypted.
Speaker 2: We were reading the messages. So and maybe there is
Speaker 2: a way, and maybe there are some messages that are
Speaker 2: encrypted by tele message, but what we've seen and what
Speaker 2: I'm saying is some are definitely not.
Speaker 1: And just to be clear, we don't necessarily know that
Speaker 1: every single top ranking official in the government is using
Speaker 1: this tele message clone of signal. It looks like tele
Speaker 1: message acts enough like regular signal to where you can
Speaker 1: send messages back and forth and you wouldn't know if
Speaker 1: the person on the other side is using the clone.
Speaker 1: But even if one person in a group chat is
Speaker 1: using it, and we know that former National Security advisor
Speaker 1: Mike Watz is using it, that potentially means that everyone
Speaker 1: they talk to or everyone in a group chat is
Speaker 1: having their messages sent to a third party server and
Speaker 1: that someone else would be able to see those messages.
Speaker 1: In the article, you pretty explicitly say we're not going
Speaker 1: to tell you how the hacker did it, so it
Speaker 1: sounds like the hacker communicated to you, this is how
Speaker 1: I did it. You don't make that public. Why is
Speaker 1: there Yeah, I.
Speaker 2: Mean, first of all, we ask as part of the
Speaker 2: verification process, if they can explain how they did it
Speaker 2: in a verifiable manner, that's good or even better. Of course,
Speaker 2: we can't always fully verify that because we're not going
Speaker 2: to go do the hack ourselves inane and obviously, so
Speaker 2: it really depends, and you have to be really, really
Speaker 2: careful about what you're amplifying because if you include certain
Speaker 2: information that could give other hackers or random people the
Speaker 2: ability to go basically do it again, and who knows
Speaker 2: what they're going to then do with that data. We
Speaker 2: don't want to cause more harm, so there's a trade
Speaker 2: off there, and it also relates to how security researchers
Speaker 2: often disclose vulnerabilities. What hackers will often do is they
Speaker 2: will probe a server or reverse engineering app. They'll go
Speaker 2: to the company, Hey, I found this vulnerability. I think
Speaker 2: you should fix it. The company will say, wow, that's
Speaker 2: really bad. His ten thousand dollars in a T shirt
Speaker 2: or a coffee mug or something, and they'll fix it,
Speaker 2: hopefully within thirty days. Blah blah blah. That's called responsible disclosure.
Speaker 2: That doesn't really involve the media at least traditionally. The
Speaker 2: other way that some hackers do, and they did it
Speaker 2: in this case, they find a vulnerability, they might actually
Speaker 2: exploit that vulnerability to show it's real and to get data,
Speaker 2: and then they go to the press. And in this case,
Speaker 2: the hackers said they did this because they thought the
Speaker 2: company might cover it up.
Speaker 1: So after the four or four article comes out, NBC
Speaker 1: reports that they'd spoken to a second hacker. Is it
Speaker 1: possible that there's another hacker who's gotten information and not
Speaker 1: reported it to a journalist.
Speaker 2: It's absolutely possible. Like already you have one hacker who
Speaker 2: provided information to us, you then have a second hacker
Speaker 2: who also breaks into the system. And that's quite rare,
Speaker 2: to be honest, Like, I report on so many data breaches,
Speaker 2: and it's not common for a media outlet to report
Speaker 2: on a hack and then a day or so later,
Speaker 2: another media outlet says, another hacker got it. Like that
Speaker 2: just doesn't doesn't really happen. Now, let's assume those hackers
Speaker 2: are probably random hackers who were just talking to the
Speaker 2: press or whatever. If you are from a nation state
Speaker 2: intelligence agency like China or Russia or Iran, if you
Speaker 2: haven't even looked at that server, you should probably lose
Speaker 2: your job because that's literally your job is to find
Speaker 2: out where these vulnerabilities are. You don't really have a
Speaker 2: more pressing target than the people around Donald Trump or
Speaker 2: Donald Trump himself. That's sort of in a circle. It
Speaker 2: is your job too, among us of these people.
Speaker 1: Should people stop using signal after all this came out?
Speaker 2: Absolutely not. More people should use signal or a secure
Speaker 2: alternative that makes sense in their life. Don't let the
Speaker 2: telemassage Debarkle throw you off that just you probably don't
Speaker 2: use a tool like that. It's like an archiving tool.
Speaker 1: Okay, So hopefully we haven't scared you away from using Signal. Truly,
Speaker 1: it is a great app. There's nothing wrong with Signal itself.
Speaker 1: The issue is with tell Message. But there's something else
Speaker 1: we need to talk about, because we've talked about the
Speaker 1: technical side of all this, and now we need to
Speaker 1: talk about the human side. Once a vulnerability is found,
Speaker 1: the next step is figuring out what the potential damage is.
Speaker 1: And to know that, you need to know whether this
Speaker 1: vulnerability was a mistake or it was there on purpose.
Speaker 1: And this is where things get tricky because Telemessage, the company,
Speaker 1: not only has access to servers where messages are archived,
Speaker 1: but they theoretically would have access to all the chat
Speaker 1: logs of everything ever said using their service. And Telemessage
Speaker 1: is based in Israel, founded by someone who worked in
Speaker 1: intelligence for the Israel Defense Force. So what does this
Speaker 1: mean for the US government and what might they do next?
Speaker 1: That's after the break Politics is not really my forte.
Speaker 1: But in order to understand what exactly is at stake
Speaker 1: in this hack, I knew I'd have to learn a
Speaker 1: little bit more about what people are saying in DC.
Speaker 1: So I called up yet another friend and former colleague,
Speaker 1: Evan McMorris Centaro. He's a longtime politics reporter and he
Speaker 1: now writes a daily newsletter for a nonprofit media organization
Speaker 1: called Notice That's NTU.
Speaker 3: It kind of sort of broke in the journalism i'd say,
Speaker 3: around that snowed in era. That's when I first started
Speaker 3: hearing about it.
Speaker 1: It's not just government officials who use Signal. Actually, outside
Speaker 1: of tech people, journalists were some of the earliest adopters.
Speaker 1: The fact that this app is not only secure, but
Speaker 1: that it would automatically delete messages is a big benefit.
Speaker 1: This stuff is really important when you're talking to a
Speaker 1: source about something sensitive.
Speaker 3: And you know, an important thing about Washington is everybody
Speaker 3: that you're talking to is old for the most part,
Speaker 3: and their tech savviness is very low, and so it
Speaker 3: takes a long time for this something like this to
Speaker 3: kind of matriculate out through the entire system. So now
Speaker 3: we're in a world now where the Vice president is
Speaker 3: on it, and the National Security Advisor is on it,
Speaker 3: and the Secretary of Defense is on it. You know,
Speaker 3: these are particularly old people as far as politics goes.
Speaker 3: But it takes from that sort of snowed in time
Speaker 3: all those years ago to now for it to become
Speaker 3: very very prevalent as people sort of start to catch
Speaker 3: on to something that's new. It is not like in
Speaker 3: the movies where the movie shows, you know, the government
Speaker 3: officials have the coolest, slickest, most amazing technology that has
Speaker 3: the best features. In reality, you know, tech in the
Speaker 3: government is a slow, slow moving process and one that
Speaker 3: has a lot of lawyering involved. There are laws, very
Speaker 3: specific laws about the kinds of records that government officials
Speaker 3: have to keep, and so you know there's sort of like,
Speaker 3: you know, these government officials will tell you we're keeping records,
Speaker 3: we are doing things the right way. Some Biden officials
Speaker 3: talked about how they would use it to you know,
Speaker 3: plan like where they would meet up for dinner or
Speaker 3: something like that if they were on the road somewhere,
Speaker 3: things like that. But as we saw with this signal gate,
Speaker 3: there was a real comfort in using this service for
Speaker 3: something that would absolutely be governed by classified records acts
Speaker 3: that are very specific and how classical records must be handled,
Speaker 3: and also in record keeping that are very specific in
Speaker 3: what kind of things administration officials have to keep to
Speaker 3: be archived for history.
Speaker 1: Why does this stuff need to be archived.
Speaker 3: Well, you know, Acts of the presidential record jacks are
Speaker 3: designed for history when you're president. When your government official,
Speaker 3: your privacy is different. The work that you do, the
Speaker 3: work product that you do as a government official. It
Speaker 3: kind of belongs to the government with means it belongs
Speaker 3: to everybody. That's true of the executive branch. It's not
Speaker 3: true of Congress. It's a very important part of what
Speaker 3: an administration does is create a history of how decisions
Speaker 3: are made so future decisions can be made better. They
Speaker 3: are not This is not your personal private email. Those
Speaker 3: emails are public record and can be looked at by
Speaker 3: people and can be requested by people.
Speaker 1: So look, one of the first things that I thought
Speaker 1: of when I saw this whole telemessage thing in the
Speaker 1: hack is the first thing that popped in my mind
Speaker 1: was this kind of reminds me of Hillary Clinton in
Speaker 1: the emails, And it's become kind of a meme at
Speaker 1: this point. You know, I've heard the memes so much
Speaker 1: that I've actually kind of forgotten what the email thing
Speaker 1: was about.
Speaker 3: There are actually three separate email scandals in the Clinton
Speaker 3: campaign twenty sixteen. A right, so let's start with the
Speaker 3: first one. So Hillary Clinton, rather than use her email
Speaker 3: system that was given to her the as Secretary of
Speaker 3: State that goes through the government, she sent all of
Speaker 3: her emails through a private email server that she had
Speaker 3: set up herself. But so what happened was is that
Speaker 3: when she was done being Secretary of State, she had
Speaker 3: to do the Official Records Acts part of her job,
Speaker 3: and so she turned over all of these emails. And
Speaker 3: then it turned out that the way those emails had
Speaker 3: been turned over was that her and her lawyers had
Speaker 3: gone through all these emails on this server that she
Speaker 3: owned and said, these are the ones that are professional,
Speaker 3: these are the ones that you need to categorize, and
Speaker 3: thousands of other ones we're keeping them. They're not they're
Speaker 3: personal emails, they're not subject to the Official Records Act.
Speaker 3: And then also we're like kind of deleting them for
Speaker 3: all time, so it's never to be found again. The
Speaker 3: second email scandal was the Clinton campaign itself. When it
Speaker 3: was running, it's senior advisor, John Podesta, used his personal
Speaker 3: Gmail for all of his communications with the campaign. He
Speaker 3: was a top advisor. He got a lot of emails,
Speaker 3: a lot of very sensitive series emails. So he gets
Speaker 3: this weird email one day that asks him for like
Speaker 3: his information and passwords and stuff were like you know,
Speaker 3: links away as a phishing attack. He sends it to
Speaker 3: the IT guy and says, is this bad? And the
Speaker 3: IT guy sends it back email saying, now this is
Speaker 3: a legitimate email, but actually he meant to say it
Speaker 3: was an illegitimate email. Pessa clicks on it spears phishing attack.
Speaker 3: All of his emails are harvested. Huge scandal for the
Speaker 3: Clinton campaign, all right. So that's the second one. The
Speaker 3: third one is that Kuma Abidin, who was another top
Speaker 3: senior Clinton advisor while she was Secretary of State and
Speaker 3: on her campaign, had a personal laptop of her own
Speaker 3: and she would get all of Hillary Clinton's emails. And
Speaker 3: so you know, they had had all this conversation. The
Speaker 3: fbi'd investigated the private email server thing, They talked about it.
Speaker 3: The FBI had said, look, this is not great that
Speaker 3: you did this, but we don't see anything worth prosecuting here.
Speaker 3: That happened early in the campaign, but at the very end,
Speaker 3: in the last subverts of the campaign, whom Abiden's then
Speaker 3: husband named Anthony Wiener, who was a congressman from New York.
Speaker 3: He was involved in a very like embarrassing and like ongoing,
Speaker 3: endless kind of sex scandal involving him texting people, some
Speaker 3: of them underage, sexting them.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: So, in the course of that investigator of that, they
Speaker 3: uncover that, oh, he's been using this laptop that has
Speaker 3: of course archived on it in its own version of
Speaker 3: Outlook or its email software whatever it was, all of
Speaker 3: these old Hillary Clinton emails that maybe some of them
Speaker 3: are the ones that she, you know, tried to delete
Speaker 3: from a server. We can go back where we can
Speaker 3: look and see if any of them are going to
Speaker 3: violate the lot. So this comes out right near the
Speaker 3: very end of the campaign, and all of a sudden,
Speaker 3: Hill Clinton's emails are back, and then she loses in
Speaker 3: a very close election to Donald Trump, and a lot
Speaker 3: of people equate it being at least one of these
Speaker 3: email scandals that did it, possibly three, but really it
Speaker 3: was email all along. But it does also feel like
Speaker 3: a different time. I will give you a great example
Speaker 3: that just happened, you know, the one hundred days of
Speaker 3: Trump's administration just passed, and so everybody is trying to
Speaker 3: score interview with the president and write a big piece
Speaker 3: about the one hundred days. The Atlantic magazine, which of
Speaker 3: course is the place where Signal Gate happened, was was revealed.
Speaker 3: The reporters reveal that they just at one point just
Speaker 3: called up the president on his cell phone and Trump
Speaker 3: answered and agreed to do an interview.
Speaker 1: Like just.
Speaker 3: Hello, mister President, I'd like to interview. Okay, sure, we're
Speaker 3: not talking about going through layers of security here. We're
Speaker 3: not talking about going through you know, arbiters that are
Speaker 3: checking on this. This is a guy just has a
Speaker 3: phone that can ring, you can pick it up. When
Speaker 3: President Obama was in power, you know, he wanted to
Speaker 3: keep his personal BlackBerry. You know, this is how long
Speaker 3: ago it was. The BlackBerry. A part of like what
Speaker 3: made Obama cool was that he was like a guy
Speaker 3: that knew how he was a BlackBerry and he wanted
Speaker 3: to keep it. There was some conversation that maybe he
Speaker 3: had been given this like super secure government version of
Speaker 3: a BlackBerry. Near the end of his administration. You can
Speaker 3: go on YouTube and you can watch this. He goes
Speaker 3: on Jimmy Fallon and talks about getting his first smartphone
Speaker 3: near the end of his administration, that the government gives
Speaker 3: him a smartphone that he can use, and Obama says
Speaker 3: he can't take a picture, I can't do a phone call,
Speaker 3: can't send a text message because all that stuff makes
Speaker 3: it not secure. Then the president having an ability to
Speaker 3: do that, all that can be hacked not secure. The
Speaker 3: president now gets a phone call from reporters. There was
Speaker 3: no conversation at all about the president just having a
Speaker 3: phone you can call. This is an incredibly different idea
Speaker 3: of what it means to be a secure administration, and
Speaker 3: nobody cares anymore. It just not even talked about. It's
Speaker 3: a completely different landscape.
Speaker 1: And I mean this has been different even on the
Speaker 1: Republican side. I mean, didn't Bush just not use email,
Speaker 1: not use personal email?
Speaker 3: That's correct. George W. Bush famously sent a last email
Speaker 3: to all of his friends in his email list, like, look,
Speaker 3: I'm not gonna be able to email anymore because they
Speaker 3: can see my email. So I'm not going to do
Speaker 3: that anymore. Goodbye for now. And He's not the only
Speaker 3: person to do this. I remember the interview with Lindsay Graham.
Speaker 3: He has talked about how he is never in his
Speaker 3: life sent an email? Wow, right, Why would I send
Speaker 3: an email? He says? Why would I do that? And
Speaker 3: the thing is, you know, part of being a senators
Speaker 3: you have a staff or anything they can deal this
Speaker 3: communication for you. Why, He's like, why do I send
Speaker 3: an email? An email can only get me in trouble?
Speaker 3: Why would I ever do it?
Speaker 1: Let me jump to signal gate real quick, because let's
Speaker 1: go with single gate. You've got these high levels senior
Speaker 1: officials on the Trump administration talking about essentially war plans,
Speaker 1: right doing it on signal What, strictly speaking, what were
Speaker 1: they supposed to have been using.
Speaker 3: There are extremely secure government communication tools that are used
Speaker 3: to talk about things like national security stuff. But chat
Speaker 3: that involves the Vice president, the Secretary of Defense, the
Speaker 3: Secretary of State, the National Security Advisor, and the chief
Speaker 3: of staff and some of their deputies. Every single person
Speaker 3: on that chat has access to millions of dollars of
Speaker 3: equipment specifically designed to let them communicate without breaching national security.
Speaker 3: For whatever reason, they chose not to use that stuff.
Speaker 3: And the result is in this case, they ended up
Speaker 3: inviting a reporter in. There's been a lot of reporting
Speaker 3: for other government officials who talk about how, yes, we
Speaker 3: use signal, but just how incredibly dumb and unbelieve, unfathomably
Speaker 3: dumb it was to use a signal group chat to
Speaker 3: plan and execute a military strike and to then detail
Speaker 3: how that worked. The problem is not the reporter you
Speaker 3: ineventally put on, it's the foreign power that can hack
Speaker 3: it and look at it. So, even in a world
Speaker 3: where people do increasingly use signal, this particular thing was
Speaker 3: seen as one of the dumbest things that people can
Speaker 3: imagine in a long long time in Washington, a town
Speaker 3: where dumb things happen pretty much every day.
Speaker 1: So sener Ron Widen has he basically is demanding and
Speaker 1: he's released this letter, but he's demanding an investigation, right.
Speaker 1: And there's one part of this letter that I found
Speaker 1: kind of wild, right, And this is kind of near
Speaker 1: the middle, near the end. So he's talking about tele
Speaker 1: message and he says, I'm gonna read this here. It
Speaker 1: remains unclear whether the design of this system was merely
Speaker 1: the result of incompetence on the part of the foreign
Speaker 1: company whose senior leadership are former intelligence officers, or a
Speaker 1: backdoor designed to facilitate foreign intelligence collection against US government officials.
Speaker 1: So the foreign government here and the foreign intelligence officers
Speaker 1: he's speaking about this is Israel, which is regardless of
Speaker 1: one's personal beliefs, may be the official US stance is
Speaker 1: that we're very friendly with Israel. This is an ally
Speaker 1: to even can leave open the door to suggest that
Speaker 1: this is the creation of the app is intentional active espionage?
Speaker 1: Am I just reading this? Or is this that actually
Speaker 1: just a wild thing to say in public?
Speaker 3: One Israel has absolutely by the United States a number
Speaker 3: of times. You know that a country is going to
Speaker 3: say something in public, but you really want to know
Speaker 3: what they're talking about in private, right And so even
Speaker 3: if that country is ostensibly your ally, you want to
Speaker 3: know what's going on. And two, this has of course
Speaker 3: been a central concern when it comes to information technology
Speaker 3: and the government for a long time now. This idea
Speaker 3: that this kind of technology can be used by a
Speaker 3: foreign government to hack our stuff, even this foreign government,
Speaker 3: even this ally is not an unlikely one. Why it does, like, look,
Speaker 3: this piece of technology telling message was so sort of
Speaker 3: cartoonishly hackable according to the reporting that we have read
Speaker 3: about it, that either someone is just like really bad
Speaker 3: at making something and has scammed people into buying it,
Speaker 3: or they're stupid like a fox and they made this
Speaker 3: thing so they could just harvest all the information that
Speaker 3: they could get. Either way, you're looking at a huge
Speaker 3: failure of the American governmental state to protect our secrets.
Speaker 3: Clear like an undeniable fuck up. And the question is
Speaker 3: just like how much of a fuck up is it?
Speaker 3: And they're not sure yet, but that is what he
Speaker 3: is saying needs to be investigated. After Pete hegsif their
Speaker 3: secretary of defense was on this signal chat. Later reporting
Speaker 3: discovered he had put an unsecure line into his office
Speaker 3: in a Pentagon that he had ad maybe you signal.
Speaker 3: In many other contexts, the President didn't say, Okay, we
Speaker 3: got to do an investigation what exactly we have been
Speaker 3: spreading all over the place through bad op sect by
Speaker 3: our secretary of defense? Right, very serious job, right, The
Speaker 3: President said, Look, I talked to him again. It was
Speaker 3: a serious conversation. But you know he's going to get
Speaker 3: it together now, that's for the president. That was the
Speaker 3: President's response to this. So in that context, I would
Speaker 3: say it is not that likely that Roten Widen is
Speaker 3: going to get either of the investigations he wants from
Speaker 3: the Trump administration. This administration is much more focused on
Speaker 3: protecting its own, much more focused on circling the wagons here.
Speaker 1: Evan, Okay, I get that, But do people in DC
Speaker 1: even understand this stuff? Do they even care?
Speaker 3: Well, you know, we are asking them to understand this stuff, right,
Speaker 3: These are the ones who often these people who have
Speaker 3: to write regulations about crypt currency for us, these are
Speaker 3: the ones you have to figure out what we're going
Speaker 3: to do about artificial intelligence. Right. The woman who is
Speaker 3: in charge of determining how much we're going to use
Speaker 3: artificial intelligence in American education recently referred to it as
Speaker 3: a one like the steak sauce, not AI, but a
Speaker 3: one in a public's forum. Wait, this is the Secretary
Speaker 3: of Education, Wynda McMahon. She was talking about artificial intelligence
Speaker 3: and education.
Speaker 1: Okay, just as an aside here. I had to look
Speaker 1: this up later and Evan was right. This was in
Speaker 1: an education summit in San Diego, and she said a
Speaker 1: one twice.
Speaker 3: And so if you're a person involved in technology in
Speaker 3: the tech world, if you're a person trying to get
Speaker 3: these regulations or stop these regulations, these are the people
Speaker 3: that you're working with. And I think it explains a
Speaker 3: lot about some of the scandals that we have seen
Speaker 3: when it comes to technology, and it also explains a
Speaker 3: lot of some of the confusing life that we live
Speaker 3: in America when it comes to technology.
Speaker 1: Man. So maybe the last one I'll ask you here
Speaker 1: then is you know you've you've been in the game
Speaker 1: for a minute. You've been reporting on politics, and this
Speaker 1: is how I know you, right, I know you. You
Speaker 1: know we were advice. I knew you as like, if
Speaker 1: I have a question about politics, let me ask Evin.
Speaker 1: He's gonna understand this stuff.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm a nerd. I with the nerd. I know
Speaker 3: I did it. I would hold it.
Speaker 1: But hold on, you're the politics nerd. Now you're kind
Speaker 1: of having to be the technology nerd a little bit.
Speaker 1: I'm starting to notice that tech is starting to creep
Speaker 1: into politics. You got to understand signal. Five years ago,
Speaker 1: I wouldn't have been asking you a questions about apps,
Speaker 1: That's right. I'm starting to notice that politics reporting is
Speaker 1: starting to Frankly, I think we should start requiring our
Speaker 1: reporters know more about technology. Maybe they did in the past,
Speaker 1: Like you can't get that pass, you know what I
Speaker 1: mean for not knowing stuff?
Speaker 3: Oh one, this is a huge problem in politics. It
Speaker 3: matters what you can do with AI and things like
Speaker 3: misinformation and fake videos. It matters what you can do
Speaker 3: with things like the hack ability of some of these apps.
Speaker 3: All this stuff matters, But you're still living in a
Speaker 3: world in politics often where it's like, hey, it's just Twitter,
Speaker 3: like it's twenty ten, or hey, it's just signal, Right,
Speaker 3: we're just signaling. Who cares? It's just signal, Like what
Speaker 3: are we doing? Who cares? And that is a huge problem.
Speaker 3: It is a huge problem, and they're changing the nature
Speaker 3: of the way politics works, and unless we're able to
Speaker 3: get up to speed, we are hosed. So you are
Speaker 3: one hundred percent right there. So we absolutely need to
Speaker 3: know about this stuff. The tech is starting to eat
Speaker 3: the politics, and the politics is not ready to stand
Speaker 3: up to that yet. And maybe they will be, maybe
Speaker 3: it'll happen, but right now it absolutely is not.
Speaker 1: And this all brings us back to where we started
Speaker 1: the technology. I asked a similar question to our first guest,
Speaker 1: Joseph Cox from four or four Media. I've been reading
Speaker 1: your reporting forever and it seems that a lot of
Speaker 1: your stuff was focused on specifically on companies. But it
Speaker 1: seems like a lot of politics reporting nowadays is necessarily
Speaker 1: tech reporting, especially with this administration.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, absolutely. When you have the CEOs of the
Speaker 2: biggest tech companies in America, you know, Jeff Bezos, Smug Zuckerberg,
Speaker 2: Tim Cook, Ela Musk officely, but he's almost in his
Speaker 2: own category because he essentially is a member of the
Speaker 2: US government. When you have all of those people going
Speaker 2: to Trump's inauguration and donating a million dollars each or
Speaker 2: whatever to it, that inherently makes tech political. Three four
Speaker 2: or five years ago, you'd have people say, oh, stick
Speaker 2: to tech, you're getting too political. I tech is inherently political.
Speaker 2: Is the tools and the companies that provide the technical
Speaker 2: infrastructure for how the will's functions and political decisions directly
Speaker 2: dictate that. And tech decisions can directly dictate political decisions
Speaker 2: as well, so they're completely inseparable.
Speaker 1: Maybe this is sort of obvious, but when I talk
Speaker 1: to my friends who report on politics or the economy
Speaker 1: or art or whatever, they're being expected to understand technology
Speaker 1: for their work. Now, this stuff is connected, and I
Speaker 1: think it always was, but especially now, we can't ignore it.
Speaker 1: And that's part of what we're trying to explore with
Speaker 1: kill Switch. If you want to keep up with Evans' work,
Speaker 1: I highly recommend checking it out at Notice That's in
Speaker 1: ot Us. You should also check out Joseph Cox's articles
Speaker 1: on four or four and if you want a really
Speaker 1: technical analysis of tell a Message and how cartoonishly bad
Speaker 1: it is, I highly recommend checking out Michael Lee's article
Speaker 1: on his own site, and all those links are in
Speaker 1: the show notes. Thank you so much for listening to
Speaker 1: kill Switch. Let us know what you think and yo,
Speaker 1: if there's something you want us to cover, let us
Speaker 1: know about that too. You can hit us at kill
Speaker 1: Switch at Kalaidoscope dot NYC, or you can hit me
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Speaker 1: your thing. Also leave us a review that helps other
Speaker 1: people find the show, which in turn helps us keep
Speaker 1: doing our thing. Kill Switch is hosted by Me, Dexter Thomas,
Speaker 1: is produced by Sena Ozaki, Darl Lukkatts and Kate Osborne
Speaker 1: and this week we have production help from a LISTA
Speaker 1: midcalf Our theme song is by me and Kyle Murdoch,
Speaker 1: and Kyle also mixed. The show from Kalaidoscope. Our executive
Speaker 1: producers are Oz Valashin, Mangesh Hatigodur and Kate Osbourne. From
Speaker 1: iHeart our executive producers are Katrina Norvil and Nikki E.
Speaker 3: Tour.
Speaker 1: Catch on the next one, good Bye,