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... In March, the US Senate Committee on Armed Services set out to examine issues raised by the Signalgate incident: the need to clarify the existing rules on using "non-controlled" apps, and looking at whether Defense Secretary Hegseth adhered to them in his use of Signal, and whether his actions were evidence of a wider culture of insecure app usage within the Department of Defense (DoD).

This week's dual reports have come back with a mixed assessment of these points. Broadly, what Hegseth was accused of doing -- communicating sensitive information using a third-party messaging app -- appears to have been happening at the DoD in less serious contexts since at least 2020.

The first report, an assessment of the Defense Secretary's use of the Signal app to communicate with senior colleagues in advance of a military operation against Yemen on March 15, is used to illustrate the point. It confirms the widely reported fact that two hours before the raid, Hegseth revealed details of the operation to a Signal group of 19 people, including a journalist who had been added to it in error.

In doing so, the report agrees he violated security policies by sending sensitive information from a personal device, and using the non-approved Signal app in a way that revealed important operational details in advance of the strike. The report ducks the issue of whether this information was classified at the time it was sent, noting that Hegseth was senior enough to determine this for himself.

The second background report has uncovered evidence of a more general culture of shadow communications in the DoD, including widespread use of video-conferencing apps during the Covid 19 pandemic. ...