Military Cybersecurity & Why Signalgate Still Matters

The national debate over security issues raised in early March when top-level US officials engaged in a Signal messaging app group text chat using their personal mobile phones instead of on secure government-issued devices, or in a secure government facility, continues to rage this week. In fact, the official who started that text chat, US National Security Advisor, Mike Walz, was replaced just yesterday, Thursday, May 1, by Marco Rubio, who will fill that position in addition to his other duties as Secretary of State, and Acting Administrator of The US Agency For International Development (USAID). Walz, though, was not dismissed entirely from the Trump administration, as President Trump says he plans to nominate Walz to be US Ambassador to The United Nations. That appointment though, needs to be confirmed by the Senate. What made that text chat, (and at least one other that followed) so controversial, is that not only were they carried out using insecure devices, on a commercial mobile app; they also contained what many military and national security experts contend was classified information, though Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and other Trump administration officials contend it was not. It was in fact the potentially classified nature of the information conveyed–specific attack plans for a raid on Houthi rebels in Yemen–that brought that conversation into the national spotlight, when Atlantic Magazine Editor-In-Chief, Jeffrey Goldberg discovered and then revealed that he had somehow been inadvertently included in the group chat. So, with the dust from this event far from settled this week; I had a conversation about it with CBS News Military Analyst, Jeff McCausland, who is a retired US Army Colonel, the former Dean of Academics at the U.S. Army War College, and is currently a visiting professor of National Security at Dickinson College, in Pennsylvania. Find out more. Listen now.