America’s Runs on Leaks, Signal, and Shirtless WhatsApp Photos
Private contact details and passwords of Trump’s top security officials were found online, exposing a serious national security vulnerability.
If democracy dies in darkness, apparently national security is just chilling out in a Dropbox folder, waiting to be phished.
According to DER SPIEGEL, some of Donald Trump’s top national security officials—Pete Hegseth (Defense), Mike Waltz (NSA), and Tulsi Gabbard (Intelligence)—were using Signal to casually discuss an imminent military strike. And now, it turns out, their private phone numbers, email addresses, and even some passwords are floating around the internet like expired promo codes. You could’ve joined their group chat if you had a LinkedIn premium account and a little German initiative.
This isn’t about some rogue intern forgetting to update their iCloud settings. This is a full-blown security götterdämmerung.
It’s one thing to worry about TikTok spying on teens. It’s another when foreign agents can browse the phone number, WhatsApp account, and Signal profile of the U.S. Secretary of Defense—along with a shirtless profile photo, just to really set the tone of the apocalypse.
America’s National Security Runs on Consumer Tech
There’s something darkly poetic about it all. The world’s most militarized empire—owner of 11 aircraft carriers and more nuclear warheads than Starbucks outlets—entrusting military plans to an encrypted chat app that also hosts your roommate’s crypto group.
This wasn’t some obscure backchannel. It was a Signal chat about attacking Yemen’s Houthis, involving intelligence data and precise plans. According to The Atlantic, they even added a journalist to the chat—Jeffrey Goldberg, of all people. Why? No idea. Maybe he was moderating. Maybe it was bring-your-favorite-editor day. Maybe we’ve gone fully postmodern and the war room is now just a group chat with read receipts.
And while they were texting war strategies, one official—Steve Witkoff, the special envoy—was literally in Russia.
Convenience Always Wins
Why would national security leaders use Signal and Dropbox instead of secure government systems? Because they’re human. And humans, even powerful ones, are lazy. They like interfaces that don’t require three-factor authentication and 14 approvals. They want to drag and drop, not toggle through a Defense Department VPN that crashes if you try to open Excel.
But this points to a broader truth: the infrastructure of American power is increasingly duct-taped together by private tech tools that were never meant to handle state secrets. Our elections run on email servers, our health data is stored by Google, and now, apparently, our foreign policy is crowdsourced from LinkedIn leaks and commercial people finder databases.
And if you think this is just a Trump admin thing, think again. This is bipartisan negligence. It’s systemic. Because in Washington, the real continuity isn’t ideology—it’s incompetence disguised as pragmatism.
When Open-Source Intelligence is Just… Open
You’d think these people would be paranoid. That they’d know foreign actors love cracked passwords and leaked databases. But here’s the kicker: much of this information wasn’t even obtained through advanced hacking. Reporters used standard people search engines, commercial data brokers, and public password dumps. You could do it from a Starbucks if you weren’t too busy updating your Threads bio.
This wasn’t spycraft. This was scrapbooking. Anyone with enough time and the right plugins could’ve found Hegseth’s shirtless WhatsApp photo and matched it with facial recognition software. (Imagine being the intern who had to run a Pentagon official’s thirst trap through a neural net. Freedom isn’t free.)
And Gabbard—bless her—tried to stay careful. She blocked her info from most commercial search engines. But even her email turned up on WikiLeaks and Reddit.
Are We a Nation or a Group Chat?
This whole debacle raises a deeply uncomfortable question: is the U.S. still a government, or just a bunch of private actors using tech tools to LARP as one?
If foreign policy decisions are being made in Signal groups created ad hoc by ideologically aligned officials, with no oversight and no security, what does that say about the actual system of checks and balances? What happens when journalism becomes part of the conversation—not by publishing leaks, but by being added to the thread?
And if our enemies don’t need to break into Fort Meade, because your Gmail was in a 2019 data breach, then maybe the threat isn’t the adversary—it’s the architecture.
When the Hack Isn’t a Hack, It’s the System
It’s tempting to laugh this off as another Trump-era farce. But don’t. This isn’t just about Pete Hegseth forgetting to change his password from “America123.” It’s about a broader erosion of institutional integrity, where government functions are offloaded to unregulated platforms, and national security is treated with the same care as a fantasy football draft.
We are living in a country where Signal is the new Situation Room. Where passwords are scavenged from Reddit threads. And where the fate of foreign nations is decided between emoji reactions and disappearing messages.
In a world like that, it’s not that democracy dies in darkness—it dies in plaintext.
That’s the point.