Emojis in Classified Leaked Info: The Broader Picture of Modern Communication

When you text your family or friends, chances are you throw an emoji or two in the message. Whether it's to express laughter, sadness, disgust, or replacing a word entirely, emojis have become a modern day form of communication.

But it's not just us that are using emojis - apparently it's also government officials when discussing sensitive information. In particular, an airstrike.

The Classified Leaked Info

It was chaos in Washington, D.C. when classified info was leaked through a group chat. Several high-ranking political figures were included in the chat - Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gubbard.

The information was leaked after The Atlantic's editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg was accidentally added to the chat by Trump's national security advisor Mike Waltz. Like any journalist, Goldberg leaked the security breach. He shared screenshots of the message exchanges in his article, which includes one with three emojis. Waltz responded to a message about airstrikes with a fist emoji, American flag emoji, and a fire emoji.

Why Were These Emojis Used?

On March 15, just hours before the attacks, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shared sensitive information in the chat, including details U.S. airstrikes on Iran-backed Houthi sites in Yemen. The editor-in-chief was unknowingly added to the group.

This represents a common problem: people can be mistakenly added to group chats. It's a reminder for everyone, especially those in positions of power, to be careful about what they share in digital conversations.

It also represents another more recently common behavior of using symbols to communicate, even in government conversations. The emojis themselves have powerful contexts behind them.

The fist emoji has become popular in the Trump era, especially after he raised his fist after surviving an assassination attempt.

The American flag emoji is the most obvious. The flag itself represents the U.S., however some may find it controversial as a nation that is becoming more and more divided either agrees or disagrees with new laws and bills being put into place.

Lastly, the fire emoji. Often used to represent hot - both literally and figuratively. In this instance, you have to assume the fire represents the outcome of the airstrike.

A New Form of Communication

While emojis themselves aren't entirely new, involving them in everyday conversation is. Emojis is Japanese for "picture+letter", and they first appeared on Japanese phones in the late 1990s.

A designer Shigetaka Kurita created the first 176 emojis for NTT DoCoMo's i-mode, a mobile internet platform.

In 2010, emojis were added to the Unicode standard, and the symbols continued to expand. What was once just smily faces or hearts, turned into animals, food, flags, and so much more.

Emojis can represent feelings just as much as they can be used for communciation. Being they were used in conversations regarding national security, it shows how mainstream they've become.

This leak goes to show how important it is to use your emojis carefully.

Is the Signal App Actually Secure?

Regardless of how you decide to communication - through words or emojis, you want to know that your information, especially confidential, is secure.

The information was leaked from the Signal app, which the White House confirmed was used in this secret exchange.

Matthew Rosenfeld, the creator of Signal, used this as an opportunity to promote his platform saying you have "the opportunity for the vice president of the United States of America to randomly add you to a group chat for coordination of sensitive military operations."

But how secure is it?

At least 40-70 million users use Signal monthly, which may seem low compared to the 2.95 billion monthly users on Whatsapp.

However, what Signal has on their side is end-to-end encryption (E2EE), meaning no one can see the message except for the sender and the receiver - including Signal themselves.

It also collects less information from users and doesn't store usernames, profile pictures, and more.

So, the issue wasn't the Signal app itself, rather the person using it. That means no level of security or legal protection can protect you from your own user error.