this post was submitted on 04 May 2025
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Yesterday, I published an analysis of what I could publicly find about TM SGNL, the obscure and unofficial Signal app used by Mike Waltz, and presumably also by Pete Hegseth, JD Vance, Tulsi Gabbard, and other fascists in Trump's government. Afterwards, someone privately sent me the URL https://www.telemessage.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Signal.zip.

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[–] [email protected] 91 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (3 children)

The original git repo has a .il tld. Hmmm… I’m just gonna throw it out there, but an app created by foreign nationals might not be a good choice for top secret communication.

[–] [email protected] 55 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

It is if the person is a foreign asset.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 week ago

It is if the official is being payed to lure fellow officials into making big security mistakes. Anyone who knows a sociopath knows they would sell their mom for a candy bar.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

If its open source and audited, it doesn't matter.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Sure, but this is a very obscure project. It has few eyes holding it accountable.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

The government is buying it. And cryptocurrency companies. That's a lot of money and a lot of eyes.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Clearly not enough money and eyes, because it got hacked.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago

Yeah. That's the story.

We need to ensure the government only uses open source tools and we need more funding for security audits.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 week ago
[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Can someone explain why this is remarkable… or not.

[–] [email protected] 84 points 1 week ago (2 children)

The source code seems to have some hardcoded credentials in there, essentially making this a back door. The git repo also seems to have Israeli surveillance roots to it, which is troubling for any sort of top secret data.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 week ago (2 children)

If you read the blog post one day older than this one from before he got the code, he speaks more about the Israeli ties. The CEO for TeleMessage is former IDF.

https://micahflee.com/tm-sgnl-the-obscure-unofficial-signal-app-mike-waltz-uses-to-text-with-trump-officials/

I haven't spent a lot of time looking into TeleMessage, but what I did find at a quick glance is that several of the executives on the teams page list Israeli universities in their bios, and the CEO, Guy Levit, says that, "From 1996 until 1999, Guy served as the head of the planning and development of one of the IDF’s Intelligence elite technical units."

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

A short while back, there was an article about a Bibi leak where he was bragging they know the US admin plans and controlled them.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

You've got to be more clear about serving in the IDF. Luckily your quote gives more detail, but literally every Israeli citizen has to serve in the IDF, so former service in the IDF doesn't mean much more than just saying they're Israeli.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago

Thank you for making this make sense :)

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago
[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago

Paywall bypass for the article's link on the hackers that exfiltrated message contents: https://archive.is/8kaQQ

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Is there a secondary source that this is actually the app being used?

This whole thing seems very questionable

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Why not just use the official signal app, if you're going to use it at all?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Apparently archives.

I guess its a legal requirement for government and the financial sector.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I archive my signal chats. But, I guess, they need an automatic way to do that. They should ask their precious Grok or whatever tf it's called.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Probably they need a way to archive it where the user can't enable or disable archiving

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

Yeah, that would make sense. But this is not the right use case for Signal at all. In fact (and I know I'm preaching to the choir), it defeats Signal's use case in many ways. I don't even know what they're trying to accomplish with this.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

So that whole thing with the Signal group chat was done on some wacky fork on top of that??? Lmao