The Director of
the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), John Ratcliffe, announced that the
country's leaders are allowed to use the Signal application for work, but they
remember to keep the decisions made in these conversations in an official
manner.
The CIA said this
after the accident that The Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg found
himself in a group where classified information on US security was to be
discussed, which was involved in the Signal website, and wrote a story about
the information.
These were secret
conversations between senior US officials led by President Donald Trump on the
US military strikes on the Houthis in Yemen.
Goldberg said
that he obtained the information after being misled and put in a group that
participated in these conversations on Signal in a group called the
"Houthi PC small group" by US National Security Advisor, Mike Waltz.
The group
included Vice President J.D. Vance, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, and
other senior officials.
At a Senate
Intelligence Committee hearing, Ratcliffe acknowledged that he was also part of
the group, where they discussed the airstrikes in Yemen.
He said that when
he was appointed CIA Director in January 2025, Signal was installed on his
computer, as is the case for all other CIA employees.
Signal is a
social media app like WhatsApp, which is used to send text messages, photos,
videos and more, but it has the unique advantage of being more secure because
it protects the data of its users.
The platform was
founded by Moxie Marlinspike with Brian Acton, one of the founders of WhatsApp.
Signal first went public in 2010 under the name TextSecure, and was later
renamed ‘Signal’ in 2015.
Ratcliffe
explained that using Signal for work is allowed, but decisions made in
conversations must be kept in a legal manner, saying, “This is normal, there is
no law against it.”
Democratic
Senator Mark Warner immediately denounced the mistake, calling it yet another
sign of the Trump administration's incompetence. "If this was done by an
intelligence officer, he would be fired," he said.
It is not known
why US officials chose to use Signal to plan these attacks in Yemen, especially
since they already use other means of communication.
