{"id":100,"date":"2025-04-25T14:54:35","date_gmt":"2025-04-25T14:54:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/yesn2.com\/?p=100"},"modified":"2025-05-02T22:01:34","modified_gmt":"2025-05-02T22:01:34","slug":"signal-chat-participants-sued-for-three-months-of-app-records","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/yesn2.com\/index.php\/2025\/04\/25\/signal-chat-participants-sued-for-three-months-of-app-records\/","title":{"rendered":"Signal chat participants sued for three months of app records"},"content":{"rendered":"

Participants on a Signal group chat discussion<\/a> about a strike on Houthi targets in Yemen are facing a lawsuit over a request to turn over all conversions they had on the encrypted app over the past three months.<\/p>\n

The suit is the first filed since reporting<\/a> indicating Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth discussed the same strike in a Signal chat with his wife, brother and personal lawyer.<\/p>\n

The suit asks for the Signal messages from Hegseth and other top Trump officials, asking for the totality of messages in their accounts \u201cregardless of sender or recipient.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen news first broke about Signalgate, the first question on a lot of national security people\u2019s minds wasn\u2019t, \u2018How did this happen?\u2019 We knew how it happened. Our question was, \u2018How often did this happen?\u2019\u201d said Kel McClanahan, executive director of the nonprofit National Security Counselors, who brought the suit on\u00a0behalf of SpyTalk reporter Jeff Stein after filing a similar public information request for the data.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThe heads of at least five of the most powerful agencies in the national security community were freely texting over an app that was not approved for sensitive communications and setting it to automatically delete everything they said. And since then we’ve learned that we were right to be worried, thanks to the news about Hegseth’s Signal chat with his wife and personal lawyer about bombing plans.\u201d <\/p>\n

The Department of Defense did not immediately respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent are also named in the suit.<\/p>\n

Offices for the other officials listed on the lawsuit did not immediately respond to request for comment.<\/p>\n

The same figures are also in litigation with the group American Oversight, which argued the Signal chat, which had some messages set to automatically delete, violated public records laws and sought an order directing the government to preserve or recover any related records.<\/p>\n

But the group said the messages appear to have been deleted from Ratcliffe’s phone, citing a declaration from Hurley Blankenship, the CIA\u2019s chief data officer, who said that only \u201cresidual administrative content\u201d remained visible in a screenshot but that the chat no longer showed \u201csubstantive messages from the Signal chat.\u201d<\/p>\n

When McClanahan filed his initial records request, he expressed concern officials may be regularly seeking to dodge public records laws by routinely discussing government business on Signal<\/a>. <\/p>\n

He also noted the ease of destroying those records.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis administration has proven again and again that it is allergic to accountability and transparency,\u201d he said, \u201cand we are bringing this case to make sure that they can’t just put national security at risk for their own convenience and then destroy all the evidence afterwards.\u201d<\/p>\n

Updated at 9:46 a.m. EDT on April 26<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Participants on a Signal group chat discussion about a strike on Houthi targets in Yemen are facing a lawsuit over a request to turn over all conversions they had on the encrypted app over the past three months. The suit is the first filed since […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":102,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/yesn2.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/yesn2.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/yesn2.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yesn2.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yesn2.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=100"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/yesn2.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":101,"href":"https:\/\/yesn2.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100\/revisions\/101"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yesn2.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/102"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/yesn2.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yesn2.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yesn2.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}