>but this was (probably) a result of somebody fat-fingering the wrong contact...
Supposedly, it was the result of a helpful Apple feature getting the wrong phone number for one of the intended group participants. Then Signal cheerfully used that wrong phone number to add the reporter to the group.
* https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/06/signal-group...
I don’t think there’s any culpability or responsibility for the app, it doesn’t really bill itself as a good platform to do the high-level planning of military strikes.
If there are UI issues, they should be fixed because they are also annoying when planning somebody a surprise birthday party. (Or all the other stuff an encrypted chat app might be good for).
On the other hand, PGP just calling itself “pretty good” was pretty funny. Maybe that’s the level of active humbleness that everybody should aim for.
None of this is meant to excuse these officials for not authenticating everybody in that group or for using highly informal text messages to plan an airstrike of all things.
Ultimately there's no excuse for leaking information when you're at that level of government; I just feel like the app industry needs to take responsibility and fix several obvious, well-known and common UI issues.