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The Trump administration is hastily explaining how an anti-Trump journalist managed to gain access to a group chat and overheard plans for a military strike against the Houthis in Yemen. At the heart of the controversy is an app called Signal, which is designed to keep people you don’t want in the group on the outside of your conversation- which is where the controversy pops up. What exactly does Signal do, and how did the editor of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, manage to find his way into a conversation intended for Trump advisors only? Rich DeMuro is the host of “Rich on Tech”, heard Sunday nights from 8-11pm on WOR. He appeared on 710 WOR’s Mendte in the Morning program to describe the app at the heart of the story and why it’s so popular.
“It’s been around for a long time, and it’s known to be the most secure messaging app out there,” DeMuro told host Larry Mendte. “There’s only a handful of messaging aps that do what’s called ‘end-to-end encryption’; this means that when you type a message on your device, nobody can see that message from the moment you type it til the moment it travels to the other phone. Now, that’s a good thing, but what we saw with the government is that someone was added to a group message, and that’s how they were able to see this message.”
DeMuro offered two plausible solutions to what might have happened, if the app wasn’t hacked: “There’s no way someone could break into a conversation. Everything is possible, but that’s not what happened… This person is a journalist at The Atlantic, so it’s not out of the question that he would be in someone’s address book. If Mike Waltz says he was not in there, either someone else was able to add him to the group list, or perhaps his address book may auto-complete someone that he’s emailed or texted before, and he’s not specifically in the address book.”
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