The Weekly Lemur aims to inform readers about the most pressing issues domestically, internationally, and on Duke University’s campus through bite-sized and digestible coverage, filtered through the prism of “big ideas.” We like to take readers out of just the headlines and situate ongoing events in a larger intellectual and historical context. Alejandro Nina Duran and Aarav Dagar contributed to this week’s edition.
When one thinks about the impact of technology on national security, one probably thinks first about nuclear weapons and artificially intelligent attack drones, not messaging apps. And yet as the “Houthi PC small group” debacle from this past week revealed, communications technology is a core and under-discussed source of weakness for national security decision-making. This edition of the “Weekly Lemur” seeks to cast a wide net in understanding the implications that all sorts of technologies have for the enhancement—or degradation—of our national security.
American global hegemony since World War II is not just due to material advantages in manpower and economic might: information systems have always been crucial to our ability to preserve, protect, and project power in foreign policy. In addition to human assets like spies, contractors and local informants (HUMINT, or human intelligence) and public diplomacy and propaganda campaigns, communications technology (or more broadly, SIGINT, or signals intelligence) has long been foundational to the security of our troop movements and diplomatic efforts, from code-breaking machines to fiber-optic cables, and good ol’ wiretapping. The technology of cyberspace has added another layer of complexity to maintaining and extending American information dominance. American success in computing technology has given us an upper hand on global competitors and enemies by providing us with extensive, hard-to-trace interconnected networks for spreading and manipulating information. But as we certainly know from the past week, ease of communication can be a double-edged sword, particularly when our leaders are not sufficiently informed or responsible on the risks of indiscreet messaging. While social media and the proliferation of messaging apps may have multiplied our intelligence vulnerabilities, placing Signalgate in a larger historical context reveals that only the technology is new—the art of our politicians royally screwing up on transparency and security—on matters both foreign and domestic—is far older.
In the 1970s, technology played a crucial role in both the perpetration and uncovering of Watergate. In June 1972, former Blue Devil Richard Nixon was revealed to have spied on the Democratic National Convention through miniature listening devices (bugs). Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein used extensive phone records, document leaks, and anonymous sources to track and ultimately expose the conspiracy. Additionally, investigative journalists helped trace the Committee to Re-Elect the President’s (CREEP) slush fund to hush money payments. However, the tipping point came in August 1974 when the White House’s audio surveillance system—ironically installed by Nixon himself in 1971—provided the smoking gun evidence of Nixon admitting on tape to directing the CIA to obstruct justice. All stories of rising public distrust in government place a heavy emphasis on this cover-up, and for good reason. What is more unusual is to recognize and place technology and the foolishness of a politician’s misuse of technology at the center of the Watergate story. But read back over this paragraph and you can see that technology was at the core of the crime, the cover-up, and its discovery.
During Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, controversy erupted over her use of a private email server for official State Department work. Many Americans were outraged, and her opponent seized on the opportunity, questioning her integrity and intelligence for using a hackable email server for potentially classified national security matters. Trump and his MAGA faction leveraged social media to capitalize on the scandal and discredit Mrs. Clinton. Her actions—or lack thereof—were widely interpreted as a lapse in judgment in an important area. And look what was central to the story: both Clinton’s improper and foolish use of technology, in this case also with foreign policy implications, and alternatively the use of new media to inflate the scandal on the Internet.
Of course, throughout that first campaign and since Donald Trump has shrewdly used social media to elevate himself and downplay scandals of his own—he probably understands communications technology and messaging at scale better than any other American politician (maybe ever). Trump had built his persona through other media technology, including television, from his days as a reality TV star on The Apprentice. That background—and NBC’s stored taping technology—almost backfired on Trump in the Access Hollywood October surprise, when Trump’s infamous “locker room talk” with Billy Bush seemed to briefly threatened his candidacy and sink his chances of winning the election. Of course, that video, unlike Nixon’s tapes, did not end his political career. The scandal only emboldened MAGA, and Trump’s subsequent online damage control affirmed the power of social media and messaging technology to keep his political career afloat.
But perhaps, the tables have finally turned on Trump, our modern day communicator-in-chief. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” Hillary Clinton posted on X, in response to Jeffrey Goldberg’s article exposing the Trump administration’s Signal group chat OPSEC breach. When Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, was accidentally added to a group chat about sensitive military operations against the Houthi militants in Yemen, the public was stunned. How could the members of this Signal group chat—including all of the most important Cabinet officials in intelligence and national security— have all acted so carelessly? How could they show such poor judgment? The scandal might be the most extreme example yet of a politically foolish security lapse rooted in ignorance or inattention to technology, but it’s hardly a new phenomenon.
As Jeffrey Goldberg subsequently mused, Signalgate and the scandals that preceded it have an element of “relatability” that makes them perhaps more political consequential. We’ve all mistakenly added someone to an email thread, and I certainly know a thing or two about using technology hastily, even if there are no interlopers on the Lemur Writer’s Room group chat. But there’s obviously a difference between the Lemur group chat about meeting times and merch and the national security group chat about bombing Yemen. We must hold our leaders to a higher standard—they must be both better, safer users of technology and less flippant about the national security risks of leaks. It should not be too much to ask for great responsibility to come along with such great power: we should not expect the least serious, least technologically savvy people in government, the military, or any organization to be the ones making the life-and-death decisions for everyone else. Hopefully, this debacle will institutionalize a greater degree of integrity at the top of the Trump administration, even if no heads roll.
By Aarav Dagar and Alejandro Nina Duran
