SignalGate — Encryption Can’t Fix Stupid… But AI Can

‍

‍

This week’s government news was dominated by Signalgate. All kinds of theories have been floated about how it occurred, who is responsible, and if the messages were really secret. Outside of the partisan wailing, this is a simple case of human stupidity.

But even the most intelligent and well-trained humans can make stupid mistakes. Over and over again, it’s not the mathematics of encryption that are ‘hacked’ but the people operating those systems. It’s time for software to stop these kinds of problems.

So how would software solve this? Gmail already asks if you meant to add an unexpected contact to an email thread, it would make sense for Signal to offer a similar feature. In addition, each of these messaging groups should have a monitoring agent that checks the credentials of both those on the thread and the legality of the messages. The monitor could conduct these checks on a regular schedule, with minimal computation, and even reviewing messages in real-time is low cost, especially given the stakes.

As a veteran, I don’t think there’s any excuse for such a serious breach, but I’m sure we can all agree: there should be software to ensure these breaches happen a lot less.