The photographs taken in the meeting of Donald Trump’s firm this week revealed that senior White House officials now communicate using an even less secure version of the signal messaging application than that at the center of a huge national security scandal last month.
The images, taken by Reuters on Wednesday, show the screen of Mike Waltz, the national security advisor who has accidentally included a journalist in a group cat in which senior US officials discussed operational plans to bomb Yemen, attacks that were then carried out as described.
In the new photographs, Waltz’s screen shows messages between him and contacts that seem to be JD Vance, the vice-president; Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, who has now replaced Waltz as interim national security advisor; Tulsi Gabbard, Director of National Intelligence; And Steve Witkoff, the president’s special envoy to the Middle East who played a key role in negotiations with Vladimir Putin during the Ukraine War.
The Chat Waltz application used seems to be a modified version of the signal called TM SGNL, ​​manufactured by a company that copies messaging applications but adds an ability to keep messages and archive them. White House officials can use the modified signal to comply with the legal requirement that the presidential files be preserved.
The 404 output media reported that the application seems to be “a company of a company called Telemessage which manufactures popular messaging applications clones but adds an archiving capacity to each of them”.
This function suggests that the end-to-end encryption which makes the signal of confidence for the sharing of private communications is perhaps “not maintained, because the messages can be recovered later after being stored elsewhere”, according to 404 Media.
The photograph does not show a large part of the content of the messages that Waltz sent, although one has “Rubio” – probably the Secretary of State – may be seen to read “There is time” while a message of “vance” – probably the vice -president – will read: “I have a confirmation of my counterpart, it is disabled. He will be here in … “
There was also an indication that Waltz had used Signal to call Gabbard, and that the phone planning function included a meeting at 8 am for “PDB”, probably the daily memory of the president.
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On Thursday, before the photo was widely shared, Trump withdrew Waltz from his work as a national security advisor, appointing him UN ambassador and put Rubio in his place temporarily.
Asked about the latest photographs, a White House spokesman told Washington Post: “As we have said on several occasions, Signal is an approved application for the use of the government and is loaded on government phones.”
