Zoë Schiffer: And that’s important, obviously, for people who work in government because, technically, members of the press and other people are supposed to be allowed to access a lot of the communications that aren’t classified by submitting Freedom of Information Act requests. And you can’t do that if the messages are disappearing.
Lily Hay Newman: Correct. There are record retention laws in the US and other countries for transparency and information requests, as you said. But historically, the way governments and other institutions have complied with that is by using communication platforms that are built for the purpose of government communications, tailor-built to be in compliance in a number of ways. So all of this is coming up because now the Trump administration in recent months has been sort of departing from the standard ways that officials in the US have communicated to use consumer platforms, particularly the secure messaging platform Signal, to talk to each other, but doing so in a very ad hoc consumer way like in the same way that you and I would set up a Signal conversation. That’s what they’ve been doing, and that’s where you get into this whole question of how do you comply with records requirements. How do you comply with safety requirements when you’re just kind of using off-the-shelf tech in a regular way? And so that’s where TeleMessage comes in.
Zoë Schiffer: Well, it seems like one of the people, as we mentioned earlier, who was using TeleMessage was Mike Waltz, the now former national security adviser, who at this point is best known for starting that infamous Signal group chat a few weeks back that accidentally added a senior member of The Atlantic Newsroom. How did we find out that he was using TeleMessage in the first place?
Lily Hay Newman: So his screen, the screen of his phone, was sort of inadvertently captured in a photo of a cabinet meeting, a Reuters photo, that Mike Waltz was participating in, was sitting at the table with Trump and a number of officials. The photo is a bit funny because it seems like he thinks no one can see him using his phone, or he is kind of checking his phone. I mean, we’ve all been there, looking under the conference table at our phone. But additionally, his screen shows what appears to be Signal. So we’re really going, zooming in deep into this photo, right. We’re looking over his shoulder at his phone. Now we’re seeing this notification. And then in the notification, instead of the normal words that would be there, people noticed that the Signal … where it would normally say Signal, was being referred to as TM Signal. And that’s how people realized that, actually, he was using this other app called TeleMessage.
Zoë Schiffer: Got it. Yeah. Nothing makes me love reporters more than the absolute psychotic behavior of zooming in on a tiny little phone screen to be like, “What exactly is going on here?” But kudos to 404 Media, because I think they were the first ones to point that out. You wrote in a recent WIRED article that Mike Waltz has inexplicably gotten even worse at using Signal. So, I guess what did you mean by that? How is he getting worse at using this end-to-end encrypted app?
