[DisjointedHunt]

The whole point of the Senate testimony from the DNI was that Signal was an approved application that comes pre installed on Government issued devices - and yes indeed, for secure comms.

Even Teams flags external participants to a chat. How was a phone number not known to be within the government perimeter allowed to be added with no alarm to a chat thread in an app pre installed and approved by the agency ?

There are more questions than answers here and its clearly suspicious to say the least that a prominent threat vector such as a mistaken phone number could go unnoticed and not trip a single flag. We're not talking about compromised sim cards or anything, a simple fat finger could expose a secure messaging app thread to an external participant and this is approved by the department for years? How many "Mistakes" over the years have gone unreported ?

Waltz or anyone on that thread isn't responsible for IT, so who ultimately didn't secure this vector?

[apical_dendrite]

You're making an assumption that the professional career civil servants are in charge. The whole theme of this administration is that they are dismantling the administrative state and the civil service. The political echelon has made it extremely clear that if they want something, the civil service cannot stop them from getting it, regardless of tradition or legality. So when DOGE says they want probationary employees fired, but the law says that probationary employees can only be fired for performance or conduct reasons, then OPM directs the agencies to fire probationary employees for performance, and the agency carries out that directive. Does it matter that nobody has actually assessed the performance of these employees? Or that OPM has no authority to direct an agency to fire anyone? No. You see this pattern again and again - agencies giving DOGE root access to systems, the administration ignoring statutes that say they have to notify congress or provide a reason before firing someone, etc. Dismantling agencies despite statutes that explicitly state that only Congress can do that.

There are absolutely no institutional guardrails. If Mike Waltz says he wants to put his personal contacts into Signal, nobody is going to stop him from doing that because they know from numerous examples that the administration does not care about laws or civil service protections an is happy to fire anyone who stands in their way.