Why Government Workers and Military Planners All Love Signal Now

The Washington Post

11:32 JST, March 26, 2025

Days after Donald Trump took office, Jonathan Kamens realized he couldn’t speak freely in his two digital group chats with fellow government employees of the U.S. Digital Service. A friend cautioned that at least one of the group members might rat him out for warning the new administration would gut his agency.

So Kamens started inviting colleagues, one by one, to join him in a group chat on Signal, a messaging app known for its security and privacy. Weeks later, and after being fired from his cybersecurity post, he is in eight private Signal groups with current and former federal workers, where they discuss who’s losing their jobs, trade messages of support and organize appeals to their firings.

“I’m not sure there is any government worker right now who isn’t talking to their colleagues on Signal,” Kamens said.

Two months into the Trump administration, there’s a sweeping shift underway in Washington as federal workers – and some high-level administration officials – migrate their correspondence to Signal in a zeal for secrecy. On Monday, the Atlantic magazine’s top editor said he was accidentally added to a Signal group in which U.S. officials planned a recent military attack in Yemen.

Until now, Signal was mostly known among Silicon Valley geeks and global dissidents for leaving few digital traces. It was lightly used among federal bureaucrats until they embraced it after Trump’s return to office as a tactic to shield communications, according to interviews with more than two dozen government workers – most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation – and people they have consulted for advice.

These new government users have corresponded with a jolt in the popularity of Signal, which is operated by a nonprofit. The app has been downloaded more than 2.7 million times in the United States so far this year, a 36 percent increase from the same period in 2024, according to estimates from market intelligence firm Sensor Tower.

The changes mark a cultural transformation for federal government officials, employees and the public they serve: Adopting Signal and other surveillance-dodging tactics of spies and billionaires comes at the potential loss of a real-time history of the Trump administration.

Lauren Harper, who leads efforts for a more transparent federal government at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, said Americans will never have a full accounting of the policies made in their interests when officials and workers communicate in private channels that are closed off to U.S. citizens.

When you have “secrecy on each side,” Harper said, “the public has no way to understand what is happening inside the government.”

Government employees’ communications have for decades been dictated by federal records laws and ethics rules. Using private email accounts, personal cellphones and unofficial technologies such as WhatsApp and Signal could violate requirements that most government correspondence and internal communications are preserved and archived for public transparency.

Classified secrets or materials related to national security are held to an even higher standard. Communications about those matters must be transmitted only on the most secure government networks to minimize the possibility of disastrous leaks or cyberattacks.

Hillary Clinton’s use of a personal email server when she was secretary of state engulfed her 2016 presidential campaign and triggered an FBI investigation into what the bureau’s director, James B. Comey, said at the time was her “extremely careless” handling of classified information.

Pete Hegseth, now the Trump administration’s defense secretary, chastised Clinton’s email habits when he was a commentator on Fox’s TV networks. “Everyone knows what top secret means. … If you’re hiding that on a private server, that’s a very real problem and likely criminal charges [should] follow,” he said.

In his account of the Yemen attack planning, the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg said a Signal user called “Pete Hegseth” texted in the group chat details of U.S. military planning in the March 15 attack on Houthi militants, including weapons packages, targets and timing.

Signal, like Clinton’s email server, is not an approved platform for exchanging classified or secret intelligence.

Hegseth appeared to deny the validity of the thread, telling reporters late Monday, “Nobody was texting war plans.” Brian Hughes, a spokesman for the U.S. National Security Council, said in a statement that the messages are a “demonstration of the deep and thoughtful policy coordination between senior officials.”

Harper said the National Security Council is required to preserve its records under a federal law, the Presidential Records Act, which official government email is designed to do but Signal is not.

“You could make the argument that if they had followed the rules, they would have a harder time accidentally looping in a reporter,” she said.

It wasn’t the first time that Signal correspondence has become a flash point for the Trump administration. Chats over Signal and other unorthodox communications by members of Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service so alarmed a federal judge that he recently ordered DOGE to hand over documents, memos and correspondence to a group that had sued for access under public transparency laws.

DOGE, which stands for the Department of Government Efficiency, has said it is not legally obligated to comply with the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

Signal, like Meta’s WhatsApp, scrambles the content of all messages and calls. This process, called end-to-end encryption, prevents anyone – including hackers, law enforcement or Signal itself – from accessing what is written or said in the app. While Signal’s end-to-end encryption prevents interference, the messages are still visible at both ends, so that any phone compromised by hack or cyberattack could expose the messages. Spyware tools, such as Pegasus, can be installed without the phone owner knowing and send messages and screenshots back from the phone to the tools’ operators, avoiding Signal’s style of encryption altogether.

Signal also has a unique reputation among secrecy diehards for collecting almost no personal information about its users. That has made Signal a target of some governments around the world that argue that such encrypted apps are a danger to national security.

Those qualities have also made Signal a favorite of some Silicon Valley billionaires, including Musk.

His two-word tweeted endorsement, “Use Signal,” was partly credited for a download surge in the days after the 2021 U.S. Capitol riot and a controversial WhatsApp privacy policy change. Signal’s system to verify new users’ phone numbers temporarily crashed just after Musk’s post. Musk has previously said he uses both Signal and Apple’s iMessage.

Musk did not respond to a request for comment.

Among rank-and-file federal workers, the knowledge that their email messages, memos and other official work could be made public someday has long made them conscious of what they say. But in interviews, some federal workers said the Trump administration has reshaped their communications.

Rapid changes and the slashing of the federal workforce have made them desperate to share information with colleagues and counterparts elsewhere in the government. And more than ever, some workers say they worry that digital water cooler talk or questions about agency layoffs, return-to-office mandates and administration policies could be perceived as disloyal.

“I won’t communicate with my co-workers about anything on government platforms,” said a State Department employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of fear of retaliation. “We are afraid we will be singled out and fired for participating in actions or rhetoric that is adverse to the administration.”

Some federal workers said they’re not using apps like Signal to conduct official government business. Rather, the app, accessed on personal phones, is one of the few remaining places where they feel they cannot be monitored in communications with family, members of the press and co-workers, according to the State Department worker and other federal employees.

When workers were asked last month to summarize five of their significant accomplishments from the past week, the State Department worker said Signal messages flew as colleagues tried to figure out whether and how to reply. Information that the agency’s leadership shares with employees tends to be overwhelmingly glowing, she said, and workers pass around more critical news articles on Signal.

Some federal workers admit they don’t know exactly what they’re afraid of – but they are afraid. “It’s exhausting and I don’t know if I’m being paranoid,” said a NASA employee who spoke on the condition of anonymity, fearing for her job.

This person recently stopped herself from posting a personal photo on social media that she worried could be interpreted as acknowledging the existence of climate change. The Trump administration has slashed regulation and federal policies aimed at reducing global warming.

A digital privacy and security advocacy group, the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, fielded so many questions from government employees worried about possible Trump administration surveillance that it recently created a tip sheet on securing digital communications, said executive director Albert Fox Cahn. Using Signal is among the tips.

Max Stier, CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit that advocates for an effective government and federal workforce, has been close to the federal government for decades and marvels at how quickly the communications norms and habits enshrined for decades have turned upside down.

“It’s a very different style of communication,” Stier said. “These are all symptoms of a workforce that has been traumatized and is deeply fearful of their bosses.”