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WIRED: Here's What Happened to Those SignalGate Messages
WIRED - (archived: https://archive.ph/lc4Mm ) Here’s What Happened to Those SignalGate Messages
Dell Cameron
Security
Apr 15, 2025 5:27 PM
A lawsuit over the Trump administration’s infamous Houthi Signal group chat has revealed what steps departments took to preserve the messages—and how little they actually saved.
Attorneys suing the United States government over its use of vanishing Signal messages to coordinate military strikes last month in Yemen allege new court filings by the government reveal a “calculated strategy” by Trump administration officials to evade transparency laws through the illegal destruction of government records.
US defense and intelligence agencies on Monday submitted supplemental declarations in court outlining their individual efforts to preserve the messages at the center of the “SignalGate” scandal. American Oversight, a watchdog organization whose attorneys are suing the government, claim the declarations reveal “troubling inconsistencies” in efforts by US officials to archive the material, with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in particular alleging that it had archived no messages of any substance.
“Using encrypted, disappearing messages on Signal for official government business violates the Federal Records Act and represents a calculated strategy to undermine transparency and accountability,” claims the group’s interim executive director, Chioma Chukwu.
The use of the private group chat—in which some messages were configured to automatically delete before they could be archived—was first revealed by Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg on March 24, after he was inadvertently added to the group by Trump’s national security advisor, Michael Waltz. American Oversight subsequently filed Freedom of Information Act requests over the chats and then sought a temporary restraining order in a Washington, DC federal court in an effort to compel the government to salvage any messages yet to be deleted.
/snip
Dell Cameron
Security
Apr 15, 2025 5:27 PM
A lawsuit over the Trump administration’s infamous Houthi Signal group chat has revealed what steps departments took to preserve the messages—and how little they actually saved.
Attorneys suing the United States government over its use of vanishing Signal messages to coordinate military strikes last month in Yemen allege new court filings by the government reveal a “calculated strategy” by Trump administration officials to evade transparency laws through the illegal destruction of government records.
US defense and intelligence agencies on Monday submitted supplemental declarations in court outlining their individual efforts to preserve the messages at the center of the “SignalGate” scandal. American Oversight, a watchdog organization whose attorneys are suing the government, claim the declarations reveal “troubling inconsistencies” in efforts by US officials to archive the material, with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in particular alleging that it had archived no messages of any substance.
“Using encrypted, disappearing messages on Signal for official government business violates the Federal Records Act and represents a calculated strategy to undermine transparency and accountability,” claims the group’s interim executive director, Chioma Chukwu.
The use of the private group chat—in which some messages were configured to automatically delete before they could be archived—was first revealed by Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg on March 24, after he was inadvertently added to the group by Trump’s national security advisor, Michael Waltz. American Oversight subsequently filed Freedom of Information Act requests over the chats and then sought a temporary restraining order in a Washington, DC federal court in an effort to compel the government to salvage any messages yet to be deleted.
/snip