Jeffrey Goldberg Says Mike Waltz Lied; Dershowitz Also Weighs In

My biggest point yesterday was that people don't just get on Signal the way they get on Outlook. There has to be a good reason for them even to learn what it is at all, and while I've been out of the business so long that I've never worked with it myself, my instinct is that normally you have to have a tech install it, especially if you're just a suit or a talking head. Thus the most puzzling part of Dershowitz's commentary was at 4:47:

Look, I don't know very much about technology, I'm really a Luddite when it comes to this, but I am on Signal.

That brought me up short. He's a brilliant guy, a celebrity, a retired law professor and appellate attorney, but why does he need high-level commercial grade encryption? Remember that the German Enigma code was basically just a tweak of an earlier commercial-grade product. This is heavyweight stuff. That briefly made me wonder if in fact everyone gets Signal the way they get Outlook. But then I realized he's a friend and adviser to Netanyahu and the Israeli government, and you can bet an Israeli tech installed it on Dershowitz's phone for a very good reason. He goes on,

I use Signal, because it is more confidential, it I think makes the message disappear fairly quickly, but I don't have any secrets -- but I do, I have loyal client secrets, but I don't usually put them online at all.

Yes, exactly, this is why Trump has never used e-mail, and it's why attorneys normally don't, because it's discoverable. As Dershowitz puts it, the real client secrets are just in his head, and he'll take them to the grave. But Netanyahu presumably isn't a client, stricty speaking, as far as I can parse this. I've got to assume he has a separate security category for items that are not ethically flagged as client secrets, but must be communicated securely over the web -- for instance, confidential advice to Netanyahu that is not specifically legal. Signal is adequate for this.

He then raises the same question that puzzles me -- how did a journalist get on the call? Jeffrey Goldberg himself doesn't believe the public explanation:

Journalist Jeffrey Goldberg is accusing Mike Waltz of lying about talking with him — ridiculing on Sunday the claim that his phone number was mysteriously “sucked into” the national security adviser’s cellphone before being included in a Signal group chat about Yemen airstrikes.

“This isn’t ‘The Matrix.’ Phone numbers don’t just get sucked into other phones,” The Atlantic magazine’s editor in chief said in an interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press” moderator Kristen Welker.

“I don’t know what he’s talking about there. You know, very frequently in journalism, the most obvious explanation is the explanation. My phone number was in his phone because my phone number is in his phone.”

And a tech had to install Signal on Goldberg's phone and configure it so it could talk to the national security Signal system. And after installation, it had to be tested to be sure it worked. This was all deliberate and fully authorized, at least up to Waltz's level, and several people were involved in setting it up over a period of days, something Goldberg had to have been at least generally aware of, because they were working on his phone. Again, I don't believe someone at the editor-in-chief level would install a phone app himself.

Instructions for installing Signal are on line here. They involve, in part:

• Downloading Signal to the phone and running the install program
• Registering a phone number and waiting for a verification code
• Entering the verification code and finishing the onboarding process
• Editing a user profile and notifying a chat admin of it.

Signal had to have been loaded on Goldberg's phone, a phone number registered to Signal, a profile for Goldberg had to have been created and known to the Signal chat group, and it had to have been added to the chat. There was nothing random, accidental, or inadvertent about the process. Several people working in several different capacities had to have been involved. Goldberg probably didn't load Signal on his phone or set himself up to do it, but he was clearly aware that something had been done, and he implied this in his interview with Welker.

Another tidbit is that according to the Signal site, anyone on the chat can see the user profile of everyone else on the chat. It's entirely credible that nobody on the chat at the Rubio-Hegseth-Gabbard-Vance et al level would understand this, but someone handling call security had to have been fully aware of everyone who was on the call. Nothing just slipped through.