On Thursday the New York Times reported that President Donald Trump regularly calls friends on unsecured iPhones to kvetch about issues of national importance. The report cites anonymous current and former officials who say they are speaking to the Times “not to undermine Mr. Trump, but out of frustration with what they considered the president’s casual approach to electronic security.”
If these officials’ claims are accurate, the matter is deadly serious. The president has two official iPhones that have been altered by the National Security Agency to limit their functionalities and protect them from hacking and eavesdropping. These phones don’t have Trump’s contacts, so he uses a third iPhone that bears no difference from the ones ordinary civilians use. National security officials have repeatedly warned the president that the Russians and, especially, the Chinese are listening to his conversations, and that he is better advised to use one of the secure iPhones or, preferably, the secure White House landline. He is supposed, furthermore, to exchange his two official phones for clean ones every 30 days—the routine swap guarantees against malware—but he usually doesn’t because it’s inconvenient.
Although the Times’ sources say Trump has been “pressured into using” the landline more in recent days, “he has not given up his iPhones” despite repeated warnings about malign foreign listeners. Predictably Trump denied the story—“I rarely use a cellphone, & when I do it’s government authorized”—but it’s consistent with what we know of the president’s cavalier attitude toward infosec.
In the case of China, which has invested enormous energy in industrial and national security espionage against the United States, the threat is serious. The Chinese, the officials claim—in keeping with much we know about clandestine Chinese behavior over many decades—listen to the president to understand what persuades him, how he responds to provocations, what he thinks about a variety of policies. They then cultivate contacts inside the United States to influence the people who seem to have influence over Trump. It’s a deadly serious and high-stakes game, the Chinese are ruthless at pursuing it, and the president believes it’s less important than his own convenience.
What’s galling about the revelation is that the 2016 Trump campaign repeatedly lashed Hillary Clinton for knowingly endangering national security by using her personal mobile device and personal email instead of secure government-issued devices in highly vulnerable foreign locations. Why Clinton insisted on using personal devices was never entirely clear, in part because she concocted a series of elaborate lies to pretend she hadn’t tried to hide anything when she had clearly and aggressively tried to hide a great deal. Leaving aside the “Lock her up” foolishness we still hear at Trump rallies, Clinton deserved every bit of the criticism she received for endangering national security for the sake of personal convenience.
That of course is precisely what Trump has done. Although he seems not to have been trying to conceal illicit or unethical activities, as Clinton very much did seem to be doing, Trump may have put the country at as much risk as she did—possibly more. It bears remembering, too, that Clinton was only secretary of state. Trump, gabbing away on his unsecure iPhone as the Chinese take careful notes, is president of the United States.
It’s an unfortunate sign of the madness of our politics that, although Trump has manifestly behaved with culpable irresponsibility, his Democratic critics are in no position to criticize him, having defending Clinton’s egregious and deliberate flouting of information security protocols at every point. Democrats can dismiss Clinton’s behavior with pompous phrases like “election pearl clutching” if they like, but in fact she was culpable—very likely criminally so. Her boosters would have had much less trouble arriving at that obvious truth if she had not been the Democratic nominee in 2016 but a mere former secretary of state.
Trump is very likely also culpable, too, though to a different degree and for different reasons. And every day that the president shrugs off warnings about information security is a day that he is choosing to put the country at a disadvantage, and its secrets at risk, for his own convenience.
