President Donald Trump's latest public directive to Attorney General Pam Bondi to prosecute his political nemeses may or may not have been meant for a private message, but, says The Verge, the president has a serious security problem and that "Signalgate was just the beginning."
In March, National Security Advisor Mike Waltz mistakenly added Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, to a classified Signal group chat including Vice President J.D. Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in which Hegseth allegedly shared specific details like attack timings, weapons, and types of aircraft.
In his initial Truth Social tirade against Bondi, Trump did not include White House aide turned U.S. Attorney nominee Lindsey Halligan's last name when he suggested to Bondi that she "is a really good lawyer," hinting at the fact that she, unlike Erik Siebert, former U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, who resigned after Trump threatened his job because he was unable to dig up any mortgage fraud evidence on New York Attorney General Letitia James, would find evidence.
A republished Truth Social message did include Halligan's last name, "suggesting that maybe the administration was trying to make it look a bit more like a public-facing message," according to The Verge. " It’s the kind of tactic we’ve seen from the Trump administration before, like when officials tried to justify Trump’s (almost certainly)“covfefe” typo.
Whatever the intention, says The Verge, "the flub highlights a disturbing trend that has members of the Trump administration divulging sensitive information on platforms that don’t have the same standards as the secured equipment and networks typically used by the government."
While Signalgate pointed fingers at the competence of—or lack thereof— Trump's cabinet members, this is entirely on the president, who "is clearly comfortable sending what appears to be confidential information over a DM on a social platform — a class of communication that’s notoriously insecure," remarks The Verge.
In August, ICE officials added a random person to a group chat, which revealed sensitive information about a person slated to be deported, including their Social Security number and criminal history, according to a report by The 404.
Elon Musk's much-maligned Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) sifting through personal information of Americans also raises major concerns, and all of these lapses put everyone in danger, says The Verge.
"The number of security lapses and potential privacy violations that have occurred not even a year into Trump’s second term raises, to understate the matter, some serious red flags. Even though the information leaked by the administration hasn’t been (as far as the public knows) hugely damaging thus far, government officials could put the entire country at risk if their communications fall into the wrong hands."