After revelations that U.S. plans to attack Yemen in a Signal chat were inadvertently shared with a journalist, NBC Chicago’s Chuck Goudie has more on what makes information classified.
The first shots were on a digital battlefield--an app called Signal, used by teenagers and adults to privately communicate and share videos with friends. It's a favorite app for sexting because it is encrypted.
But it's not intended to be a government venue for anything sensitive such as the decisions about whether to wage a U.S. military attack against Houthi rebel strongholds in Yemen on the Arabian Peninsula.
A week ago, the landscape was being lit up in Yemen by American firepower discussed in detail by U.S. defense secretary Pete Hegseth and top national security officials including Vice President J.D. Vance-meeting via the Signal app text chain...an app that warns of its own “vulnerability to surveillance and espionage especially by Russian hacking groups.”
The report shows messages from Hegseth describing "F-18 1st strike window starts" and "strike drones launch” along with pages of detailed texts about the American attack on Houthi targets, that leveled buildings a week ago Wednesday.
The reporting of this government meeting on a non-government, non-classified public messaging server comes from Atlantic magazine editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, who was inadvertently allowed on the call.
"The semantics here are ridiculous, just absolutely ridiculous” said Goldberg on MSNBC Wednesday. “They're putting anybody with common sense can understand that that is highly sensitive information, especially before an attack."
Goldberg told Morning Joe that “the thing that really struck me as I'm, again, reading this on my phone in a Safeway parking lot, the thing that really struck me is that he's telling me and others that an attack hasn't even begun yet. But the planes are launching in 31 minutes.”
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Defense secretary Hegseth, a former Fox News host, contends the information wasn't war plans, it was attack plans, and not classified.
"There's no units, no locations, no routes, no flight paths, no sources, no methods" Hegseth told reporters.
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There are several levels of classified information-designated by the president and various agency heads.
Pentagon officials maintain the Signal information wasn't classified-even though typically, and historically, planning for a military attack has been classified.
By any measure however, information shared on Signal was sensitive-and potentially dangerous in the wrong hands-as an attack was launching.
"It's war fighting plans...." states DePaul University law professor Gregory Mark, an attorney for the independent counsel during the Iran-Contra affair-a government arms trafficking scandal in the early 80's.
Mark recalls the great lengths he and colleagues went to in discussing sensitive information-classified or not.
"Suppose there were six people who had access to codeword-level intelligence: classified stuff at the highest level. You can't talk about it over a table at Starbucks, even if there are only six of you there,” Mark told NBC5 Investigates.” And, if one of your buddies walks up, you certainly can't keep talking about it."
According to Mark, the use of a non-secure messaging platform to discuss an impending U.S. military attack does send a terrible message to all the men and women who serve and are sworn to follow regulations.
This is the third time since President Trump was sworn in that supposedly secret and certainly sensitive information was made available to U.S. adversaries. In early February, the CIA sent out an unclassified email with a list of all recently hired employees.
Last week, the release of unredacted crime files from President Kennedy's assassination contained CIA personnel secrets, internal spy craft details and even full social security numbers.
