> This has nothing to do with adding the wrong contacts. It has to do with putting highly-sensitive material into Signal to circumvent the law around records preservation

My comment above already mentions public records of the DoD contracting out archiving of the Signal chat, so it doesn't in fact circumvent laws around preservation.

> You're doing bullshit partisan whataboutism. "well the democrats did it first".

I don't think it's a huge sin for government workers to be using Signal, remote work and messaging is the new norm and they will use something whether we like it or not, and Signal is the least bad option. I don't blame the Biden DoD for experimenting down that road at all, as I'm skeptical they'd build something better internally - and to your hyperpolitical points I don't see large distinctions between these type of tech choices between administrations (the DoD staff largely remains the same even when presidents change).

The issue with encryption and security will always be human security practices come first-and-foremost, technology second. They failed an OPSEC checklist when using group chats and need to implement better identification management. That's the sort of lesson that large organizations frequently need to re-learn the hard way when adopting new (and often better) things.

This was just a good lesson in security hygiene

I'm not clear on the verdict here.

1. Classified information. Was it legal to put that into the DoD approved Signal build? The media coverage at the time gave me the impression that it was not.

2. Records keeping. Were the Trump admin chats in question properly archived then? I had been led to believe that they weren't. Do you believe that to be incorrect?

> I don't blame the Biden DoD for experimenting down that road at all

The person you're replying to never criticized them for such.