Now, so-called zero-click spyware has been sold to regimes and companies around the world. Apple has notified users in 150 countries. An Israeli spy maker NSO Group has been deployed in Saudi Arabia, Spain, Hungary, India, Mexico and Rwanda. “Now, junior college countries can enter and be successful,” Frank Figliuzzi, a former FBI assistant director of counterintelligence, told me. “You don't need to be very refined.”
It should be time to knock down the hatch. But the Trump administration has other priorities. About 1,000 FBI agents were transferred from regular duties to Jeffrey Epstein's case file. (Even in New York City – a hotbed of foreign intelligence activities, the FBI's field office is the “all deck” on the Epstein Review.) Meanwhile, the Justice Department stopped an investigation into the possible compromise of foreign government New York City Mayor Eric Adams. Seven agency efforts to boycott Russian sabotage and cyberattacks have been put on hold. New requests from the Bureau's counter-terrorism department to hunt down those who sabotage Tesla, while the new Joint Task Force investigated “illegal support for Hamas on our campus.”
As for that tragic incident, one of the journalists was invited to have a super third-level exchange with top military and intelligence leaders, it was hard to know what was worse: not knowing who was chatting in groups or on mobile phones. Participants – intentional participants, in any case – may consider them safe because their text is encrypted by a signal message application, which is valued by confidentialists around the world. However, chatting is only as safe as those who use it. Just a few days ago, the Pentagon issued a warning that Russian hackers were tricking people into mirroring the text of the signal group to a second device. Special Envoy Steve Witkoff joined the chat anyway – he did it from Moscow.
After that, Mr. Vickov said he was using secure, government-issued equipment. However, there is no way to make the phone completely unavailable. In SCIF, Washington officials have the most sensitive conversations in the safe room, not even allowing cell phones to enter the door.
People at the Signal Gate Center – National Security Advisor Michael Waltz; Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth; National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard; to name just a few – all know this. They all served in the army. There is no doubt that countless lectures from counterintelligence experts cover all the different ways in which opponents can stand out with sensitive data. But it is a government that is positive and proud to reject expertise. It treats it as a corrupt old guard, a true enemy, a person in a “deep state” and touts its own refusal to hear proofs of their legitimacy and justice. Through this view, security agencies must succumb to the White House’s will, and it would be even better if the people at the top did not have traditional position qualifications. It was a government that made weekend Fox News host the leader of the world's largest military, put a conspiring podcaster in charge of the FBI and became a reality star as president at its peak. Such mistakes are inevitable.
“Of course, they have WhatsApp groups and signal groups,” Matt Tait told me. Mr Tait is a good cybersecurity consultant and a former analyst with the UK Signal Intelligence Agency GCHQ. “Basically, they don’t really trust the civil servants who work for them, nor do they really see any constraints that people will follow in traditional ways.”
