why is the US gov using a ‘cartoonishly hackable’ messaging app?

About 48 hours after the US National Security Advisor was spotted using a weird cloned version of Signal, someone said they’d hacked it. It took them all of 15 minutes. We now know that TeleMessage is ‘cartoonishly hackable,’ but we still don’t know why top White House officials were using it. And what about the investigation to find out if this Israel-based app is bad on accident, or on purpose? I called up my friends Evan McMorris-Santoro of NOTUS and Joseph Cox of 404 Media to get some more context on how bad this might actually be.

Here’s the links promised in the episode:

Evan’s daily newsletter in NOTUS
Joseph’s article in 404 on the Telemessage hack
And here’s Micha Lee’s technical breakdown of Telemessage’s security problems

Our guests:
Evan McMorris-Santoro: @evanmcs.bsky.social
Joseph Cox: @josephcox.bsky.social

Got something you’re curious about? Hit up @dexdigi on IG or Bluesky. See you on the next one.

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