The nation’s top intelligence officials have told lawmakers that it was routine for them to discuss sensitive national security issues on the encrypted messaging app Signal. It’s widely used at their agencies, they said, and even came pre-installed on their government devices.
But conversations with a dozen current and former government employees reveal a hazier picture of the government’s use of the commercially available chat app — with guidance varying drastically across agencies and no clear oversight over the type of information shared.
Some agencies, including the Department of Defense, have even issued recent warnings about the app’s security vulnerabilities and stressed that Signal is “not approved to process or store nonpublic unclassified information.”
The app has been thrust at the center of a debate on whether top officials should be using Signal to communicate critical and potentially classified information, following the release of a report by The Atlantic last weekdetailing how members of the president’s Cabinet — including Vice President JD Vance, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth — used it to coordinate military strikes in Yemen.
The contents of the group chat — including the specific timing and weapons used in the attacks — were published in full last week by The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, who was mistakenly added to the conversation by national security adviser Mike Waltz.
Current and former federal workers across agencies, granted anonymity to discuss sensitive government communication methods, revealed a complex and looser use of Signal on government-issued phones in recent months, but didn’t know when the policy shift was sanctioned and by whom. These officials also agree that the free chat app should not be used to discuss sensitive or classified information, which adversaries could intercept.
“For comms like that, you just always assume that there’s somebody on your phone,” said one former CIA official, who called the level of detail relayed in the now infamous group chat “beyond idiotic.”
The Trump administration has asserted that the information discussed was not classified — although cybersecurity and national security experts have cast doubt on those claims. The issue is further complicated by the emergence of reports in recent days that Waltz created and hosted multiple other Signal group chats to relay sensitive national security information to Cabinet members. While Waltz has denied leaking classified information, he has not commented publicly on the potential additional Signal chats.
It’s not fully clear which agencies allow their employees to use the app on government-issued devices, and it often varies even within offices. The Pentagon did not respond to requests for comment, and neither did the CIA. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency declined to comment on questions around the use of Signal at the agency.
Alexa Henning, spokesperson for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, tweeted last week that “widespread use” of Signal began under the Biden administration, adding that “at ODNI, when I got my phone, it was pre-installed.”
But not all officials had that experience.
“I don’t recall using it on my government phone,” said Chris Inglis, who served as national cyber director at the White House under the Biden administration from 2021 to 2023.
A Defense Department employee said t two senior officials in at least one Pentagon service branch had to specifically request that the app be installed on their government-issued devices and were granted a waiver to do so. An administration official said that “Signal is available on many US government devices based on local IT policies.”
A former White House official who served under the Biden administration said they did not have Signal on their government-issued device and that it “would be very new and rare” for federal officials to have the app automatically available on their devices.
Matthew Shoemaker, a former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst who left the agency in 2021, said that while Signal was used during his time in government, “it was almost exclusively restricted to scheduling purposes,” such as letting their boss know that they’ll be late to work because of personal circumstances.
“That’s why Signalgate is all the more staggering — because these senior leaders were doing the exact opposite of what even my most junior intelligence officers knew not to do,” he said.
Signal’s robust privacy features, such as end-to-end encryption and minimal data collection, make it more secure than other messaging apps. But officials who handle classified information have procedures for how to engage with it, and often do so in a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, otherwise known as a SCIF.
One former security and intelligence official confirmed that Signal is “increasingly used across the U.S. government” but only for “unclassified discourse.”
“Agencies and departments typically have guidelines regarding what apps are sanctioned for use on government phones and for what purposes,” they added.
Top Trump officials embroiled in the scandal have rebuffed suggestions that Signal should not be used as an official communications platform.
Testifying before the House Intelligence Committee last week, Gabbard said Signal “comes pre-installed on government devices.” She pointed to guidance issued by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in December, following a massive Chinese government-linked hack of U.S. telecommunications systems.
The guidelines recommend “highly targeted individuals,” including government personnel, “use only end-to-end encrypted communications” like Signal. But this guidance was not binding and does not apply to classified information.
Meanwhile, Ratcliffe told the Senate Intelligence Committee last week that Signal “was loaded onto my computer at the CIA, as it is for most CIA officers,” and insisted that the practice began during the Biden administration.
A current CISA employee told POLITICO that it was not an option for workers at the agency to download the app onto their government-issued devices.
Multiple former national security officials said they received no explicit guidance from their agencies about their communications on Signal, beyond the broad spectrum training they received on cybersecurity and the handling of sensitive and classified information.
“It’s so blindly obvious, I don’t recall it being a big focus,” said a former senior official at the Pentagon, who served in the Biden administration and confirmed that they had used Signal on their government-issued device.
Experts have also raised concerns about Signal’s disappearing messages feature, which allows conversations to be automatically deleted after a set time frame. Under the Federal Records Act, administration communications need to be preserved, and the destruction of such communications may be considered a crime.
“One of the problems for government officials using Signal is they can automatically set it to delete messages, and then once deleted, it can’t be brought back,” said Greg Nojeim, director of the nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology’s Security and Surveillance Project.
And ultimately, government communications are not the same as personal messages.
“Security concerns aside … our communications were officially the property of the government, subject to FOIA, and must be retained in perpetuity,” Inglis said.
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