Signal president defends app's security after ‘war chat leak’, says it has ‘gold standard in private…’

Signal president Meredith Whittaker has publicly defended the security of her company’s messaging app amidst reports that US President Donald Trump administration officials mistakenly added a journalist to an encrypted chatroom discussing sensitive US military actions in Yemen.
While Whittaker did not directly comment on the specific incident, which has prompted national security concerns from Democratic lawmakers, she took to X (formerly Twitter) to tout Signal as the “gold standard in private comms.”
"Signal is the gold standard in private comms. We’re open source, nonprofit, and we develop and apply (end-to-end encryption) and privacy-preserving tech across our system to protect metadata and message contents," Whittaker stated.


Whittaker asked users to check signal.org/bigbrother to see how little data the company is able to provide.
“Now, WhatsApp licenses Signal’s cryptography to protect message contents for consumer WhatsApp. Not on WhatsApp for business. Neither consumer nor business WhatsApp protects intimate metadata—like contact list, who’s messaging whom, when, profile photo, etc. And, when compelled, like all companies that collect the data to begin with, they turn this important, revealing data over,” she said.

Soon after the ‘Signal chat leak’, US President Donald Trump addressed the breach in which Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, was mistakenly added to a classified Signal group chat discussing sensitive military operations against the Houthis.
Trump stated that the breach likely resulted from an error by a junior staffer working for National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, who inadvertently included Goldberg in the high-level discussion.
“And what it was, we believe, is somebody that was on the line with permission; somebody that was with Mike Waltz — worked for Mike Waltz at a lower level — had, I guess, Goldberg's number or called through the app, and somehow this guy ended up on the call. Now, it wasn't classified, as I understand it. There was no classified information. There was no problem, and the attack was a tremendous success,” Trump said in an interview with Newsmax.
"I can only go by what I was told; I wasn't involved in it. But I was told by — and the other people weren't involved at all. But I feel very comfortable, actually," he added.