Senators Say Signal Is Great — Even ‘Encouraged.’ Just Not for Classified Information.

Signal, the encrypted messaging app, is all anyone at the Capitol seems to be talking about since The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg revealed he had been accidentally added to a Trump administration Signal group chat regarding the lead-up to military strikes in Yemen. It’s also what everyone seems to be talking on.

Senators told NOTUS they use the app regularly, even to discuss sensitive information. Using the app for general communication is essentially unofficial policy in some offices. But lawmakers are quick to make a distinction: It’s not for classified information.

“We’ve actually encouraged folks, because of Salt Typhoon, to get off more of the traditional wireless networks and get onto more encrypted,” Sen. Mark Warner, the ranking member on the Senate Intelligence Committee, told NOTUS, citing the cyber espionage campaign believed to be operated by China. “But, encrypted end to end doesn’t mean that it’s supposed to take classified information.”

Congressional offices deal with personal information, business details and other information that is sensitive but not necessarily classified all the time. Signal is an obvious choice to discuss information in that in-between space.

“Yeah, we do use Signal,” Sen. John Fetterman said. “It’s stuff like saying, ‘Hey, we have an interview scheduling,’ and it’s like, ‘yeah.’ When I’ve had classified briefs, it’s in a secure room.”

“We’re not making plans to blast, you know, a terrorist group in Yemen. I think it’s probably different,” Fetterman said.

None of the offices NOTUS spoke to had an official policy for how the app should be used. Sen. Todd Young said he didn’t think a policy was necessary.

“We hire good people, and we trust them. We interview for common sense,” he said.

But in the face of cyber threats, senators were open that they use the app for texts, phone calls and even sharing files with sensitive information.

Young said sensitive information moving around the office is what has motivated his office’s use of the app.

“You can imagine foreign or domestic actors compromising our systems, getting access to privileged communications, and I wouldn’t want to release, for example, constituent information that was of a sensitive nature,” he said of using Signal.

Young noted that his office doesn’t use it exclusively, noting the use of secure government email servers.

Senators also have access to a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, or SCIF — an area designed for classified discussions. It’s meant to stop all electronic transmissions that could be sent or received out of it. The Intelligence Committee usually meets in a committee room that is entirely an SCIF-certified space. But those rooms are limited across Capitol Hill and so are the clearances to actually access them. Besides that, they’re meant to be used specifically when dealing with classified information, not just sensitive material.

The main draw to Signal is that it’s open source and has end-to-end encryption, giving it another layer of defense against hacking attempts from foreign adversaries, lawmakers said. In addition to Salt Typhoon, Americans have also reportedly been targeted by Pegasus spyware, an Israeli-developed technology that has been used to spy on journalists, activists and dissidents around the world.

Signal isn’t a panacea against these attacks, but encrypting the information being passed between users makes it just slightly more difficult to crack. The app also gives users the ability to limit the amount of time that messages are stored for. Users can have messages “disappear” anywhere from an hour to a month later.

The administration is in hot water for using the app to share seemingly classified information in a chat that Goldberg was accidentally added to. “The information contained in them, if they had been read by an adversary of the United States, could conceivably have been used to harm American military and intelligence personnel,” Goldberg wrote, choosing to not publish the details of those messages.

The White House has denied that any classified information was shared in the chat. The incident was made public amid growing questions around the administration’s handling of sensitive and confidential information, including Americans’ tax payer data, as NOTUS has previously reported.

“I use it personally from time to time, but I don’t use it for anything classified,” Sen. Angus King said. “It’s encrypted, but it’s not an accepted classified platform for the United States government.”

Sen. Mark Kelly didn’t shy away from telling NOTUS that his office uses Signal.

“Yeah, we use Signal,” Kelly said. “You want to hear the kind of discussion I’ll have on Signal? It would be something like, ‘Hey, you know that thing we talked about two days ago over in the hearing? Next time we’re in the SCIF, we need to talk about that again.”

Not all offices use the app, however. Some Republicans said that while they personally have used the app, their offices don’t.

“There’s some people that, like when I’m travelling overseas, they’ll call me back on it,” Sen. Rick Scott said. “It’s a waste to use it for me because I don’t check it.”

Asking Sen. James Lankford if he uses the app got a short chuckle and a drawn-out reply.

“Well, it’s a fair question,” he said, just as the doors to the Senate subway closed.

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John T. Seward is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.