Perhaps no one in the world has made such catastrophic tech flubs this year as U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.
The saga started when the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, reported that he had been mistakenly added to an unauthorized Signal group chat by U.S. National Security Advisor Michael Waltz, where numerous high-ranking government officials discussed detailed plans for attacking the Houthis in Yemen, including the times and places where such attacks would occur.
To be fair, we’ve all made some embarrassing tech mistakes. But for most people, that means accidentally liking an ex’s Instagram post from five years ago — not sharing top-secret government military plans on a commercial messaging app with unauthorized recipients.
This mishandling of massively sensitive information was already troublesome enough, but this week, The New York Times reported that Hegseth shared information about the attacks on Yemen in another Signal chat, which included his lawyer, his wife, and his brother, who had no reason to receive such sensitive information; Hegseth’s wife doesn’t even work for the Pentagon.
These security failures are particularly egregious — how do you manage to accidentally loop in a journalist on your military plans? But this is far from the first time that contemporary technology has landed global governments in tricky situations — and we’re not just talking Watergate.
Stationed in the military? Don’t use Strava
The fitness tracking/social media app Strava can be a privacy nightmare, even for your average athlete. The app allows people to share their exercise logs — often runs, hikes, or bike rides — on a public account with their friends, who can like and comment on their morning jogs in the park.
But Strava accounts are public by default, meaning that if you aren’t savvy enough to check your privacy settings, you will inadvertently broadcast to the world exactly where you work out. Strava defaults to hiding the first and last 200 meters of a run as a means of obscuring where someone lives, since people are likely to begin and end runs near their home.
For anyone on the internet, it’s still risky to broadcast a 200-mile radius of where you live, but it’s even more dangerous if you’re a member of the military at a secret base, for instance.
In 2018, Strava unveiled a global heat map, showing where in the world public users have logged activities. This d …