Another day, another breach of national security by the unqualified and unfit Secretary of Defense Pete “WhiskeyLeaks” Hegseth. I usually call him incompetent, too. But at this point, I have to wonder if he isn’t deliberately making sure every country with an intelligence service has access to our classified secrets.
This appears to be Signalgate Episode Five. Hegseth should have been fired after Episode One, in which he shared classified war plans to strike Yemen on the unsecure Signal app in a chat that also included a reporter from The Atlantic.
But Signalgate Episode One was followed by Episode Two, then Episode Three and Episode Four, in which we learned about Hegseth’s unsecure, secret wifi hookup for Signal on his office computer.
Now we know, via The New York Times, that those Signal war plans were shared on Hegeth’s phone.
This is a BFD. The Times tells us even low-level government workers are told not to use their personal phones or laptops for work-related matters. A defense secretary’s personal phone “would usually be among the most protected national security assets,” cybersecurity analysts told The Times.
More on Hegseth’s recklessness, incompetence or worse from The Times:
“There’s zero percent chance that someone hasn’t tried to install Pegasus or some other spyware on his phone,” Mike Casey, the former director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, said in an interview. “He is one of the top five, probably, most targeted people in the world for espionage.”
…
In using that same phone number on Signal to discuss the exact times that American fighter pilots would take off for strikes in Yemen and other sensitive matters, Mr. Hegseth opened himself — and, potentially the pilots — to foreign adversaries who have demonstrated their abilities to hack into accounts of American officials, encrypted or not, security experts said.
“Phone numbers are like the street address that tell you what house to break into,” said James A. Lewis, a cybersecurity expert. “Once you get the street address, you get to the house, and there might be locks on the doors, and you ask yourself, ‘Do I have the tools to bypass or break the locks?’”
China and Russia do, and Iran may as well, several cybersecurity experts said.
…
“I guarantee you Russia and China are all over the secretary of defense’s cellphone,” Representative Don Bacon, Republican of Nebraska, who has suggested that Mr. Hegseth should be fired, told CNN this week.
How many more episodes do we have to go through before this threat to our national security resigns or gets fired? Or gets someone killed?