Signalgate Thoughts

Process vs Policy

I think it is fair to say that the Trump administration really didn’t intend to add The Atlantic’s Trump basher in chief to their signal group. But they did and the left are frothing at the mouth about stuff that was perfectly fine when their side did it.

We should ignore the frothing. Of course they are going to work themselves up into a fury of hypocritical rage but so what? If they weren’t going to do it about this, they’d find some other OUTRAGE!!!1111!!!11! to hyperventilate about.

So onto more serious matters.

Whodunnit?

It is important to know the who and how around Jeffrey Goldberg¹’s addition.

Various people e.g.

streamfortyseven

wonder if it was a deep state hack². Until we get actual evidence of this I’m going to assume this was not the case. That’s because almost everyone thinks that signal’s protocols and code is about as solid as it gets. Now if we get evidence of other (Trump) signal groups leaking then I’ll re-evaluate, but for now I lean strongly to the “human did it using the app” hypothesis. Possibly in a halfway house is what I read from OldNFO³ who suggests:

One of the things that has come out is the phones were a turnover item from the previous administration, who used Signal for 'off the record' things.

It also appears that there were 'phone lists' already existing on those phones. And Waltz was NOT the individual who set up the meeting, it was one of his staffers, possibly Alex Wong.

My question is, WHY was a reporter's number on a phone used by an NSC individual? I kinda doubt it was put there by a new employee, so who had the phone in the last administration?

Leading to the question of who and why. Who is almost certainly a Michael Waltz underling called Alex Wong and Laura Loomer claims on X that this person is potentially problematic:

Alex Wong was appointed by President Trump on 11/22/24 to serve as the Assistant to the President and the Principal Deputy National Security Advisor under @MikeWaltz47 Mike Waltz, the newly appointed US National Security Advisor.

I have discovered that Alex’s wife, Candice Chiu Wong, worked under the Obama administration and the Biden administration as an Assistant United States Attorney in the United States Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia, where she led the Violence Reduction and Trafficking Offenses Section for more than two years.

She was involved in the prosecution of many J6ers during the Biden regime, under which she was nominated to become a Member of the United States Sentencing Commission. Additionally, Candice Chiu Wong served as a Law Clerk to Obama-appointed US Supreme Court Justice Sonia M. Sotomayor!

Making matters worse, Alex Wong worked for Covington & Burling @CovingtonLLP, which is one of the law firms that President recently stripped of its security clearance and terminated all of their government contracts via Executive Order on February 25th, 2025.

If all this is true then I wonder why Alex Wong was appointed to the position he was, though I don’t consider Loomer to be 100% reliable and even if correct there may be good reasons why that I don’t know.

Anyway assume it’s this Alex Wong whodunnit. The question arises about malice vs incompetence. It can be hard to tell the difference - sufficiently advanced incompetence being indistinguishable from malice after all - but in either case it doesn’t look good for Mr Wong. One of the key questions is why he would have Goldberg as a contact in the first place as there doesn’t seem to be a good reason why a person working loyally for Trump would have such a rabid sufferer of TDS as a contact. On the other hand there’s an obvious reason that a non-loyal underling might want Goldberg as a signal contact - namely making it easy to leak stuff without being caught.

The only excuse (per OldNFO above) is that the phone was originally used by a Biden staffer and hence the contact came from a previous phone user, but that seems unlikely. Short of a level of incompetence completely indistinguishable from malice, any phone that was inherited should have been put to factory default with all prior user data scrubbed. Sure the government IT department might then (re)install the signal app on the new device as it is reactivated but that should not have meant that the contacts carried across.

Process Implications and Actions

First on the process side. Figuring out if Wong is loyal but incompetent or disloyal and (also) incompetent is important. Ditto whoever setup his phone (assuming the OldNFO hypothesis).

More critically, as pointed out by Cdr Sal⁴, the key cabinet etc. members need to be less trusting of technology setup by underlings.

[ BTW I disagree in part with the “government should have its own Signal equivalent” that Cdr Sal talks about because that’s actually worse from a security perspective. First the government app needs to be developed, which is easy technically as signal is open source, and then it must be deployed and kept up to date, which is not so easy since we don’t want this app in the Google/Apple App Stores. If you don’t use the offical App Stores you have to set up your own one and make sure the phones connect there instead. This is doable, and indeed is done by some enterprises, but it’s not an easy thing to do correctly and the failure mode for when it is done wrong is very bad, particularly if you are a high value target like the US President and top level associates. Finally you end up with yet another messaging app and, since not everyone in government will have the secure government one, you’ll end up with a mess of Whatsapp, Signal, texts, AND government app. Its better to just tell everyone to use Signal. Signal works, official records people are happy so don’t reinvent the wheel because the chances are your reinvented version is subtly broken and won’t get fixes for basic wheel functionality that the original one does. ]

Sal points out that all these people are youngish and should be technically savvy so basic security measures like checking who else is in the chat should be and one strongly suspects that all Trump officials will do so going forward. The Trump admin as a whole got lucky in this case in that nothing critical leaked and OPSEC was mostly maintained. I bow to Sal in his analysis of what operational details were leaked and how bad that might have been, but it is nothing like the “War plans were sent to journalist” sensationalism that Trump opponents went on about.

That’s it for process. Various lefties frothed about how Russia might be reading POTUS’ signal messages which, if they were serious, suggests they don’t understand the difference between Signal and Telegram (the latter may well have a GRU backdoor, the former doesn’t have any and so the UK haz a sad and probably wants to ban it)

Policy Implications

Now lets move on to what this chat told us about the Trump administrations posture on world trade and so on.

This is important. We get to see the Vance PoV that “this is not the US’ problem so why are we doing anything here?” This may not be exactly Trump’s PoV but it is certainly closely aligned. The follow up is also important

If Vance’s Munich speech and the Ukraine negotiations haven’t made it clear, this chat thread does: the Trump administration is uninterested in altruistically supporting the free world. You want the US to help you? do something that is beneficial to the US, or pay (or both). You want to bitch about what the US does? don’t expect the US to help.

European leaders currently gathered to see how to square the circle on Ukraine need to read that and think about what it means. When Trump, Vance and co. talk about Europe not spending enough on defense and wondering why they should bother to rescue Europe this is what they mean. I would be unsurprised if, assuming the Houthis remain annoying and Europe fails to react - the latter is more or less a given they don’t have the naval forces to react - Trump doesn’t start levying a charge on ships in the Red Sea that aren’t US flagged or destined to the US.

That charge might well be higher for ships of some nations versus ships of others as well. I’ve done some back of the envelope sums for the difference in operating cost is for a ship going around the Cape of Good Hope vs one going through the Suez Canal. The key is that the non-Suez way is around ten days travel time⁵ longer and for a container ship the cost per TEU per day is in the US$10-15 range depending on ship size. Assuming $10/TEU/day and 10 days additional travel, a ship like the notorious Ever Given (capacity 20,000 TEU) will incur $10 * 10 * 20,000 = $2 Million in additional expense going the long way around. If Trump charged, say, $0.5-1M/ship for escort services he’d add a cost of $25-$50/TEU which would still save the operators money compared to the long way around and would improve container usage stats (two x 10 days =~ 3 weeks which enough for the ship and containers to return almost all of the way back to Asia) which means more revenue and more profit per ship and container.

The same calculation will absolutely affect things like the cost of Arabian oil/gas in Europe too compared to American oil/gas to the benefit of USA and of course if he offers discounts depending on ship origin / destination and naval support by such nations we might see a significant change in trade. The advantage of this is that it would incite countries like India and Japan to run real patrols in the area (India is already doing some, but should do more). What could perhaps be seen as a disadvantage is that it would probably also incite the West Taiwanese to deploy the PLAN there (and/or to pay off the Houthis via Iran).

I suspect that this, and Trump’s planned tariffs, are going to cause Europe to enter into a recession. It may well also impact West Taiwan negatively too because W Taiwan will see an effective tariff on its European trade and, assuming Europe enters recession, lower demand as well. Since Winnie the Flu and co have been recently been announcing plans to 'vigorously boost consumption' it seems cleare that the PRC’s economy is not healthy today. Whether that latter will be enough to cause the W Taiwanese to consider a “short victorious war” as a distraction to domestic issues sooner rather than later is unclear, but that consideration is another one that adds to the chance that this time next year could be sporty around Taiwan.

1. BTW can we have a bit more variety in names? Jeffery Goldberg, Jeffery Goldstein, Jeff Goldblum … I get them all mixed up.

See also Nick Fuentes/Nick Freitas and Micheal Walsh/Matt Walsh. Still at least we aren’t Korea where about half the population’s either a Kim, a Lee, or a Park…

2. SignalGate And Spring Break - And Cleaning...

3. I can haz...

4. The Signal I Was Waiting For

5. Difference in distance from Asia to European ports is roughly 4500nm. Ships do ~20kts. That means 4500/20/25 = 9.375 days. Call it 10 days.