From Huffington Post
Trump Admin’s Signal Fiasco Offers This 1 Startling Reminder For Anyone In A Group Chat
By Monica Torres
In an explosive new report detailed in The Atlantic, the magazine’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg was inadvertently invited to join a Signal group chat by President Donald Trump’s national security adviser Michael Waltz in mid-March. In it, he was privy to top-secret imminent war plans.
Few, if any, of us will ever be privy to such a monumental mistake, but we’ve all been added to the wrong group chat — and sometimes the results can be equally disastrous for your personal life...
Trump downplayed the severity of this extraordinary leak of classified information and told NBC News that “Waltz has learned a lesson, and he’s a good man.” But what Trump calls a learning moment is what Jennifer King, a privacy and data policy Fellow at the Stanford University Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence calls “one of those really simple dumb mistakes.”
Your group chat’s security is only as strong as the trust you have in your group participants.
King does not blame the Signal app for this human error. The Trump administration officials “were using a tool that they shouldn’t have been using for what they were doing,” she said, noting that this conversation should have been done using secure government equipment. “For better or for worse, Signal is not there to make sure that you didn’t make a mistake in who you added to that list...”
Jennifer King earned her Ph.D. at the School of Information in 2018. Currently, she is the Director of Privacy at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society.
