They are different stories. This is more about the widespread, illegal Signal usage than the war plans accidentally leaked over Signal. Both are major stories. One is an extraordinary security incident. The other is concerted effort to bypass recordkeeping and disclosure. Nobody will ever be able to be able to FOIA these messages, which rightfully belong to the American people.
- OpSec failure to use an insecure non-DoD channel to communicate military operational status. Doesn't matter if it's signal, SMS, Slack or anything.
- Signal specifically is e2e encrypted without retention, in fact a first class feature to delete messages after some time. This bypasses legal requirements for record retention. Even if an "approved" DoD channel was used, the deletion of communications is a massive, massive scandal.
As others have noted, specifically Signal has a special bulletin due to exploits by Russian actors. This is a big infosec story proceeding in real time. The Hegseth / Yemeni / Goldberg angle is a small facet of it, and possibly least important.
This struck a nerve. Here's another comment to downvote about how this is more about the widespread, illegal Signal usage than the war plans accidentally leaked over Signal. Both are major stories. One is an extraordinary security incident. The other is concerted effort to bypass recordkeeping and disclosure. Nobody will ever be able to be able to FOIA these messages, which rightfully belong to the American people.
I can't imagine the confusion of the mind that thinks it is conservative to behave in this way, or to think this is political and not related to technology.