An unsecured database used by a generative AI app revealed prompts and tens of thousands of explicit images—some of which are likely illegal. The company deleted its websites after WIRED reached out.

Tens of thousands of explicit AI-generated images, including AI-generated child sexual abuse material, were left open and accessible to anyone on the internet, according to new research seen by WIRED. An open database belonging to an AI image-generation firm contained more than 95,000 records, including some prompt data and images of celebrities such as Ariana Grande, the Kardashians, and Beyoncé de-aged to look like children.

The exposed database, which was discovered by security researcher Jeremiah Fowler, who shared details of the leak with WIRED, is linked to South Korea–based website GenNomis. The website and its parent company, AI-Nomis, hosted a number of image generation and chatbot tools for people to use. More than 45 GB of data, mostly made up of AI images, was left in the open.

The exposed data provides a glimpse at how AI image-generation tools can be weaponized to create deeply harmful and likely nonconsensual sexual content of adults and child sexual abuse material (CSAM). In recent years, dozens of “deepfake” and “nudify” websites, bots, and apps have mushroomed and caused thousands of women and girls to be targeted with damaging imagery and videos. This has come alongside a spike in AI-generated CSAM.

“The big thing is just how dangerous this is,” Fowler says of the data exposure. “Looking at it as a security researcher, looking at it as a parent, it’s terrifying. And it's terrifying how easy it is to create that content.”

Fowler discovered the open cache of files—the database was not password protected or encrypted—in early March and quickly reported it to GenNomis and AI-Nomis, pointing out that it contained AI CSAM. GenNomis quickly closed off the database, Fowler says, but it did not respond or contact him about the findings.

Neither GenNomis nor AI-Nomis responded to multiple requests for comment from WIRED. However, hours after WIRED contacted the organizations, websites for both companies appeared to be shut down, with the GenNomis website now returning a 404 error page.

“This example also shows—yet again—the disturbing extent to which there is a market for AI that enables such abusive images to be generated,” says Clare McGlynn, a law professor at Durham University in the UK who specializes in online- and image-based abuse. “This should remind us that the creation, possession, and distribution of CSAM is not rare, and attributable to warped individuals.”

Before it was wiped, GenNomis listed multiple different AI tools on its homepage. These included an image generator allowing people to enter prompts of images they want to create, or upload an image and include a prompt to alter it. There was also a face-swapping tool, a background remover, plus an option to turn videos into images.

“The most disturbing thing, obviously, was the child explicit images and seeing ones that were clearly celebrities reimagined as children,” Fowler says. The researcher explains that there were also AI-generated images of fully clothed young girls. He says in those instances, it is unclear whether the faces used are completely AI-generated or based on real images.

As well as CSAM, Fowler says, there were AI-generated pornographic images of adults in the database plus potential “face-swap” images. Among the files, he observed what appeared to be photographs of real people, which were likely used to create “explicit nude or sexual AI-generated images,” he says. “So they were taking real pictures of people and swapping their faces on there,” he claims of some generated images.

When it was live, the GenNomis website allowed explicit AI adult imagery. Many of the images featured on its homepage, and an AI “models” section included sexualized images of women—some were “photorealistic” while others were fully AI-generated or in animated styles. It also included a “NSFW” gallery and “marketplace” where users could share imagery and potentially sell albums of AI-generated photos. The website’s tagline said people could “generate unrestricted” images and videos; a previous version of the site from 2024 said “uncensored images” could be created.

GenNomis’ user policies stated that only “respectful content” is allowed, saying “explicit violence” and hate speech is prohibited. “Child pornography and any other illegal activities are strictly prohibited on GenNomis,” its community guidelines read, saying accounts posting prohibited content would be terminated. (Researchers, victims advocates, journalists, tech companies, and more have largely phased out the phrase “child pornography,” in favor of CSAM, over the last decade).

It is unclear to what extent GenNomis used any moderation tools or systems to prevent or prohibit the creation of AI-generated CSAM. Some users posted to its “community” page last year that they could not generate images of people having sex and that their prompts were blocked for non-sexual “dark humor.” Another account posted on the community page that the “NSFW” content should be addressed, as it “might be looked upon by the feds.”

“If I was able to see those images with nothing more than the URL, that shows me that they're not taking all the necessary steps to block that content,” Fowler alleges of the database.

Henry Ajder, a deepfake expert and founder of consultancy Latent Space Advisory, says even if the creation of harmful and illegal content was not permitted by the company, the website’s branding—referencing “unrestricted” image creation and a “NSFW” section—indicated there may be a “clear association with intimate content without safety measures.”

Ajder says he is surprised the English-language website was linked to a South Korean entity. Last year the country was plagued by a nonconsensual deepfake “emergency” that targeted girls, before it took measures to combat the wave of deepfake abuse. Ajder says more pressure needs to be put on all parts of the ecosystem that allows nonconsensual imagery to be generated using AI. “The more of this that we see, the more it forces the question onto legislators, onto tech platforms, onto web hosting companies, onto payment providers. All of the people who in some form or another, knowingly or otherwise—mostly unknowingly—are facilitating and enabling this to happen,” he says.

Fowler says the database also exposed files that appeared to include AI prompts. No user data, such as logins or usernames, were included in exposed data, the researcher says. Screenshots of prompts show the use of words such as “tiny,” “girl,” and references to sexual acts between family members. The prompts also contained sexual acts between celebrities.

“It seems to me that the technology has raced ahead of any of the guidelines or controls,” Fowler says. “From a legal standpoint, we all know that child explicit images are illegal, but that didn’t stop the technology from being able to generate those images.”

As generative AI systems have vastly enhanced how easy it is to create and modify images in the past two years, there has been an explosion of AI-generated CSAM. “Webpages containing AI-generated child sexual abuse material have more than quadrupled since 2023, and the photorealism of this horrific content has also leapt in sophistication, says Derek Ray-Hill, the interim CEO of the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), a UK-based nonprofit that tackles online CSAM.

The IWF has documented how criminals are increasingly creating AI-generated CSAM and developing the methods they use to create it. “It’s currently just too easy for criminals to use AI to generate and distribute sexually explicit content of children at scale and at speed,” Ray-Hill says.

An AI Image Generator’s Exposed Database Reveals What People Really Used It For

Plus: Alleged Snowflake hacker will be extradited to US, internet restrictions create an information vacuum in Myanmar, and London gets its first permanent face recognition cameras.

After senior Trump administration members mistakenly included The Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg in a secret group chat about bombing Houthi targets in Yemen, encrypted messaging app Signal found itself at the center of a storm this week. Some commentators criticized the app, going as far to blame it for the scandal.

But the whole affair that’s dubiously been dubbed “SignalGate” isn’t about Signal at all: Experts say officials shouldn’t invite untrusted contacts into sensitive chats and should only use authorized devices, platforms, and procedures when discussing top-secret military operations. In other words, the people who set up the chat made numerous mistakes, and they had nothing to do with how secure Signal is. In fact, Signal has seen its biggest-ever spike in US downloads as a result of the news.

In other news linked to _that_ Houthi group chat, national security adviser Mike Waltz—an account with the name “Michael Waltz” originally invited Goldberg to the group—left his Venmo account open to public view. As WIRED reported, a “Michael Waltz” Venmo account displayed the names of the adviser’s colleagues and friends, revealing people in Waltz’s wider social network. After WIRED reached out to the White House, the Waltz account hid its friends list. There’s more though: WIRED also discovered other Venmo accounts linked to officials in the Signal chat. Information about who officials associate with could be highly lucrative for foreign spies and hackers.

Elsewhere, we reported on all the ways the White House adopting Elon Musk’s Starlink as an alternative Wi-Fi network could be bad news for network security. There are also early signs in Europe that some companies are going cold on cloud services from Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, as they reassess the risks of dealing with the volatile second Trump administration. And, as crossing the United States border becomes more perilous—for both citizens and visa holders—we updated our guide to keeping your digital privacy intact when you are entering the US.

That’s not all. Each week, we round up the security and privacy news we didn’t cover in depth ourselves. Click on the headlines to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.

**Top US Security Officials’ Passwords and Personal Phone Numbers Discovered Online**

On top of SignalGate and Venmo accounts being left exposed, German news outlet Der Spiegel reported that sensitive personal information linked to several senior Trump administration security officials is easily discoverable online. Reporters from the publication found that mobile phone numbers, email addresses, and “some” passwords for top officials could be found on the internet.

Using people-search engines and information contained in public data breaches, Der Spiegel discovered personal information belonging to Waltz, director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense. “Most of these numbers and email addresses are apparently still in use, with some of them linked to profiles on social media platforms like Instagram and LinkedIn,” the news organization reported. The details were also linked to Dropbox, Microsoft Teams, Signal, and WhatsApp accounts used by the officials.

While millions of people have been caught up in online data breaches and use inadequate privacy settings on their online accounts, high-level government security officials are exposed to a broader and more severe range of online threats, particularly from nation-state hackers, than most people. Officials told the news organization that many of the accounts and personal details were no longer used or had been updated. However, messages Der Spiegel sent to WhatsApp and Signal accounts belonging to Waltz and Gabbard were delivered, the publication reported. Only after they approached the government for comment were some of the accounts restricted.

**Internet Restrictions May Hide Initial Toll of Myanmar Earthquake Damage**

On Friday, a huge 7.7-magnitude earthquake and aftershock hit Myanmar, with widespread damage being reported hundreds of miles away in Thailand. At the time of writing, at least 144 people have been confirmed dead with hundreds of others injured in Myanmar. As the first impacts of the devastating quake started to emerge, The New York Times reported that long-standing and widespread internet restrictions in worn-torn Myanmar were likely making it harder for news of the damage to be understood. Since the country’s military junta took power in 2021, connectivity within Myanmar has been widely disrupted or blocked. For instance in 2023, 13 out of Myanmar’s 14 states faced internet disruptions.

In the wake of the earthquake, more video footage and news could be seen immediately emerging from neighbouring Thailand, experts told the Times. “Compare the coverage of the earthquake in Thailand, where tremors and damage have been extensively reported, posted and documented, to Myanmar, where we still don’t have a clear picture of the extent of the damage and loss and may not for some time,” Joe Freeman from Amnesty International said. The lack of connectivity may also make the recovery and humanitarian efforts harder to coordinate, once again highlighting the vital need for people to have reliable and open access to the internet.

**Alleged Snowflake Hacker Connor Moucka Agrees to US Extradition**

Last summer’s Snowflake hacking spree, where customers of the cloud storage company had their accounts targeted, was likely one of the largest mass data exfiltrations that’s publicly known. Toward the end of 2024, Canadian authorities arrested Alexander “Connor” Moucka, 26, who allegedly used online handles such as “Waifu” and “Judische,” in connection to the hacking activity. This week, Moucka consented to be extradited to the United States to face the alleged charges. According to Cyberscoop, Moucka faces 20 federal charges, including those linked to computer fraud, wire fraud, and aggravated identity theft. Moucka is not the only person allegedly behind the Snowflake hacking, with John Binns and Cameron Wagenius being named in indictments. It is unclear when Moucka’s extradition will take place.

**London Is Getting Its First Permanent Face Recognition Cameras**

Police forces across the UK have massively increased their use of live face recognition cameras in recent years. Use of the controversial technology has historically been temporary: mounting cameras on top of police vehicles and deploying them for specific events and set periods of time. That’s now set to change with the first permanent face recognition cameras being rolled out in London. The city’s Metropolitan Police are in the process of installing fixed cameras in Croydon, in the south of the city.

“This will mean our use of LFR technology will be far more embedded as a ‘business as usual’ approach rather than relying on the availability of the LFR vans that are in high demand across London,” a police official wrote in a letter seen by The Times of London. Reportedly, the cameras will not be used continuously, only when officers are nearby to monitor potential alerts. However, privacy campaigners fear the move could be further rolled out across the city, leading to a network of permanent face recognition cameras unlike those seen in any other democratic countries.

Top Trump Officials’ Passwords and Personal Phone Numbers Discovered Online

WIRED has found four new Venmo accounts that appear to be associated with Trump officials who were in an infamous Signal chat. One made a payment with a note consisting solely of an eggplant emoji.

A number of top Trump administration officials—including four who were on a now-infamous Signal group chat—appear to have Venmo accounts that have been leaking data, including contacts and in some cases transactions, to the public. Experts say this is a potentially serious counterintelligence problem that could allow foreign intelligence services to gain insight into a target’s social network or even identify individuals who could be paid or coerced to act against them.

The officials in question include Dan Katz, chief of staff at the US Treasury; Joe Kent, President Trump’s nominee for director of the National Counterterrorism Center; and Mike Needham, counselor and chief of staff to the secretary of state. All three were participants in the “Houthi PC small group” chat in which sensitive attack plans were discussed and to which Jeffrey Goldberg, editor in chief of The Atlantic, was accidentally invited. Katz was named in it as a point of contact by Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary; Kent by Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, to whom Kent serves as acting chief of staff; and Needham by Marco Rubio, the secretary of state.

A fourth official with an open Venmo account—Brian McCormack, a senior staffer on the National Security Council—also appears to have been in the chat, in which a user with the screen name “Brian” lists McCormack as a point of contact for the NSC. His account went private after WIRED reached out to the NSC for comment. (“Mr. McCormack has made necessary Venmo updates for his personal privacy protection,” says NSC spokesperson James Hewitt.)

Morgan Ortagus, a former Fox News personality and deputy to Steve Witkoff—Donald Trump’s special envoy for the Middle East, who was himself in the chat—also appears to have left Venmo data exposed.

WIRED established that the accounts are almost certainly those of the government officials in question by analyzing the other accounts they were connected to, which in the cases of Katz, Kent, and Needham included accounts appearing to belong to their spouses. The Treasury Department, the National Counterterrorism Center, and the State Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Some of the information revealed by the accounts is quite granular. McCormack and the accounts that appear to belong to Katz and Ortagus, for example, left not only their contact lists publicly visible but also their transactions, which are as recent as last autumn. These records reveal specific information like a 2018 payment from Katz with a note consisting solely of an eggplant emoji and how much he paid an overnight cat sitter in 2019. They also reveal McCormack’s contributions to what appears to be a get-together for veterans of the Bush-Cheney administration (“Cheney team reunion! Thank you!!”), who has reimbursed Ortagus for picnic expenses, and Kent’s connection to noted conspiracy theorist Ivan Raiklin, who calls himself “the secretary of retribution” and once created a deep state target list.

WIRED has previously reported on the partially public Venmo accounts of several of the high-ranking officials in the Houthi PC chat, including Vice President JD Vance; Mike Waltz, the national security adviser; and Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff. Waltz and Wiles set their accounts to private only after WIRED reached out to the White House for comment on Wednesday afternoon.

Venmo did not immediately respond to WIRED’s request for comment. In a statement given to WIRED in response to questions about the Waltz and Wiles accounts, spokesperson Erin Mackey said, “We take our customers’ privacy seriously, which is why we let customers choose their privacy settings on Venmo for both their individual payments and friends lists—and we make it incredibly simple for customers to make these private if they choose to do so.”

“From my perspective, as a veteran, everyone is entitled to use the applications and services they feel are necessary to live their lives,” says Tara Lemieux, a 35-year veteran of the US intelligence community including the National Security Agency, Department of Homeland Security, and supporting agencies. “That said, when you post anything in those third-party applications and you don’t understand how that information can be shared or exploited, you are taking a risk for our nation—and that’s not acceptable.”

For Lemieux, while public transactions on Venmo might appear harmless, foreign intelligence services—particularly signals intelligence agencies—look for patterns: who’s paying whom, how often, and when. “Say they’re making payments to their children—now you have a point of leverage. If there’s someone out there looking to target you, they can use that information and start making you feel fearful for the safety of your children,” Lemieux says.

“The speed of the digital world has outpaced our ability to keep a handle on it,” she adds. “If you have all this information out there—how the heck are you going to put the toothpaste back in the tube?”

Mike Yeagley, a specialist in commercial data and its security risks, has spent over 15 years advising the US Department of Defense on how both allies and adversaries leverage what he calls “digital exhaust,” the seemingly mundane details—social connections, service transactions, and metadata trails—left behind in everyday apps. “At the highest level of our national security leadership, regardless of administration, there has to be an awareness of our data and what we project that can be discoverable,” he says.

“What’s the risk of someone at the Cabinet level using Venmo to pay their personal trainer? On the surface, it doesn’t look like much,” Yeagley says. “But now I know who that trainer is—or the gardener, or whoever—and suddenly I’ve expanded my ability to target by identifying the people around that official.”

Yeagley adds that “our adversaries are sophisticated and carnivorous in their data collection,” which means that “just the smallest bit of daylight is of interest to someone sophisticated. They will use that data point. They will build from it.”

According to Vemmo, its “contact syncing” feature allows users to upload phone contacts to the app so that they can find people they know. When these exposed Venmo accounts were set up—all before 2020—the app would display a prompt allowing users to sync their phone contacts, automatically populating their friends list with anyone in their address book already using the platform. Venmo says this functionality was deprecated more than two years ago. Today, contact syncing no longer creates connections by default. To add someone as a friend, users have to search for them, send a request, and have it accepted.

Nevertheless, according to Venmo’s privacy policy, unless users proactively change their privacy settings, their network remains visible to anyone. That means that even when a user sets their account to private, their friends list remains visible unless they take an additional step. As of publication, hiding your connections requires navigating to **Settings** > **Privacy** > **Friends List** and selecting **Private**.

_Stephen Lurie contributed reporting._

Even More Venmo Accounts Tied to Trump Officials in Signal Group Chat Left Data Public

Scandal surrounding the Trump administration’s Signal group chat has led to a landmark week for the encrypted messaging app’s adoption—its “largest US growth moment by a massive margin.”

SignalGate, as it's come to be called, may be the biggest scandal to hit the Trump administration in its first months in power. But it's been great for Signal.

Since the news broke on Monday that senior Trump administration cabinet members accidentally included the editor in chief of The Atlantic in a group chat on the Signal encrypted messaging platform where the officials were making secret plans to bomb Yemen, the ensuing news cycle and the constant mentions of Signal have led to the encrypted messaging platform doubling its usual rate of new downloads, the nonprofit organization that runs Signal tells WIRED. Given that 2025 has already been a “banner year” for Signal's growth, according to Signal's leadership, that makes this week the single biggest bump in US adoption of the app in Signal's nearly 11 years of existence.

“In Signal’s history, this is the largest US-growth moment by a massive margin,” says Jun Harada, Signal's head of growth and partnerships. “It’s mind-blowing, even on our side.”

Harada declined to give absolute numbers for Signal's user growth beyond saying that its total downloads are in the “hundreds of millions,” which has been the case for several years. But he said that the week’s rate of adoption has been twice that of a typical week for 2025, which in turn was twice that of a typical week the same time last year. “It happened immediately” after The Atlantic broke the story of Signal's use in the Yemeni bombing, Harada says. “And it’s been sustained. We’ve been maintaining that rate every day.”

In Signal's history, the only comparable spike in adoption occurred when WhatsApp changed its privacy policy in 2021, Harada says, leading to millions of users abandoning that communications app. But that incident mostly brought non-Americans to Signal, unlike the current, US-focused SignalGate bump.

Numbers from the market intelligence firm Sensor Tower largely align with Signal's own analysis of that growth: The company says that Signal downloads in the US increased 105 percent compared to the prior week—and 150 percent compared to an average week in 2024. Outside of the US, Sensor Tower saw only a 21 percent increase in Signal downloads compared to the prior week.

The Atlantic's revelation on Monday that secretary of defense Pete Hegseth, director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, national security adviser Michael Waltz, vice president JD Vance, and other Trump administration officials used a Signal group chat to plan an air strike against Houthi rebels in Yemen—and that Waltz accidentally added Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg to that group in a shocking breach of confidentiality—has raised serious questions about the security practices of the Trump administration that are still resonating days later.

The scandal has called into question whether the executive branch officials were planning the air strike using vulnerable non-approved or even personal devices rather than the secure machines intended for classified conversations. Screenshots of the group chat published by The Atlantic on Wednesday indicate that the officials were using Signal's disappearing messages feature to delete their communications, potentially in violation of US record retention laws.

The incident has raised sometimes-misguided questions, too, about whether Signal itself is to blame for the breach—including from President Trump, who suggested in comments on Wednesday that Signal might be “defective"—despite many cybersecurity and encryption experts' recommendation of Signal as the best end-to-end encrypted messaging tool freely available to the public. “You use Signal, we use Signal, everyone uses Signal,” Trump told reporters, “but it could be a defective platform.”

Signal's Harada declined to respond to Trump's “defective” comment and pointed to Signal's previous statements that it has yet to see any evidence of any vulnerability in the app, much less one that has anything to do with Jeffrey Goldberg being accidentally added to a White House group chat.

But Harada noted that the overall attention to Signal—even the president himself saying that “everyone uses Signal” in the Oval Office—is an example of the kind of visibility it has never had before. “All awareness for Signal is a net positive. The interest in Signal continues to be at an all-time high,” Harada says.

“I don’t think my phone has ever buzzed this much, from people from every walk of life. People are learning about Signal who maybe have never even heard about or considered encrypted messaging before.” Harada also pointed to a report that Google searches for “Signal” were up more than 1,000 percent.

Harada says that Signal was already seeing a significant uptick in adoption in the first few months of 2025. He attributes that growth partly to increasing general interest in privacy among consumers and partly to the breach of nine US telecoms by China's Salt Typhoon hacker group, which led to the hackers accessing some targets' real-time calls and texts. Federal officials at the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency responded to those breaches by publicly recommending that Americans use encrypted messaging and calling applications.

But all of that has been dwarfed by the attention and interest Signal has received this week. As messy as SignalGate may be, Harada says, it has made Signal a household name like never before. “To have this kind of mainstream moment is massive,” he says. “I believe it’s a sea change for private encrypted messaging for the US and the world.”

SignalGate Is Driving the Most US Downloads of Signal Ever

A WIRED review shows national security adviser Mike Waltz, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, and other top officials left sensitive information exposed via Venmo—until WIRED asked about it.

A Venmo account under the name “Michael Waltz,” carrying a profile photo of the national security adviser and connected to accounts bearing the names of people closely associated with him, was left open to the public until Wednesday afternoon. A WIRED analysis shows that the account revealed the names of hundreds of Waltz’s personal and professional associates, including journalists, military officers, lobbyists, and others—information a foreign intelligence service or other actors could exploit for any number of ends, experts say.

Among the accounts linked to “Michael Waltz” are ones that appear to belong to Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, and Walker Barrett, a staffer on the United States National Security Council. Both were fellow participants in a now-infamous Signal group chat called “Houthi PC small group.”

The White House declined to comment after being presented with WIRED’s findings, but the accounts appearing to belong to Waltz and Wiles went fully private following WIRED’s inquiry.

Earlier this week, The Atlantic reported that an account with the name “Michael Waltz” accidentally invited the publication’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, to the chat, in which senior administration officials discussed plans for a strike on Yemen. (Waltz told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham he takes “full responsibility” for inviting Goldberg, adding, “We have some of the best technology minds looking at how this happened.”) Over the encrypted messaging app, which Department of Defense guidelines bar from being used for the discussion of any nonpublic defense information, the group debated whether a strike should be carried out at all. Hours after an account with the name of defense secretary Pete Hegseth shared missile targets, strike timing, and other highly sensitive operational details of a coming strike, US forces bombed Houthi targets in Yemen, reportedly killing at least 53 people.

A WIRED review of public data exposed on Venmo accounts associated with senior administration officials suggests that the Signal group chat was not an isolated mistake, but part of a broader pattern of what national security experts describe as reckless behavior by some of the most powerful people in the US government.

The Venmo account under Waltz’s name includes a 328-person friend list. Among them are accounts sharing the names of people closely associated with Waltz, such as Barrett, formerly Waltz’s deputy chief of staff when Waltz was a member of the House of Representatives, and Micah Thomas Ketchel, former chief of staff to Waltz and currently a senior adviser to Waltz and President Donald Trump.

Other accounts carry the names of a wide range of media figures, from on-air personalities like Bret Baier and Brian Kilmeade of Fox News and Brianna Keilar and Kristen Holmes of CNN to a cable news producer, a prominent national security reporter, local news anchors, documentarians, and noted conspiracy theorist Ivan Raiklin, who calls himself the “the secretary of retribution” and once created a deep state target list. (Fox News declined to comment; CNN did not respond to a request for comment.)

Many of the accounts appear to belong to local and national politicians and political operatives ranging from US representative Dan Crenshaw of Texas to a former mayor of Deltona, Florida, as well as venture capitalists, defense industry entrepreneurs, and executives like Christian Brose, the president of defense tech giant Anduril. (Crenshaw’s office and Anduril did not respond to requests for comment.)

One of the most notable appears to belong to Wiles, one of Trump’s most trusted political advisers. That account’s 182-person friend list includes accounts sharing the names of influential figures like Pam Bondi, the US attorney general, and Hope Hicks, Trump’s former White House communications director.

While none of the Venmo transactions for the account listed for Waltz, Wiles, or Barrett were publicly visible, it appears that none of them had opted out of sharing their contact list, allowing their friend lists to remain visible to the public. After WIRED reached out to the White House for comment, both Waltz and Wiles appeared to change their Venmo privacy settings to hide their friend lists.

Venmo spokesperson Erin Mackey said in a statement, “We take our customers’ privacy seriously, which is why we let customers choose their privacy settings on Venmo for both their individual payments and friends lists—and we make it incredibly simple for customers to make these private if they choose to do so.” The comment is nearly identical to the one Venmo provided to WIRED in response to a 2024 story about now-vice president JD Vance’s Venmo.

Last July, WIRED reported that Vance had left his Venmo account public, exposing a network of connections to Project 2025 architects, DOJ officials, Yale Law classmates, and far-right media figures. (While it was not reported at the time, WIRED’s analysis of that public Venmo account—and the networks of his listed friends—found that the Michael Waltz Venmo account appeared in Vance’s extended network, comprising friends and friends of friends.) According to The Atlantic, Vance was also an active participant in the Signal chat alongside Waltz, where he questioned whether the planned military operation in Yemen aligned with President Trump’s broader message on Europe.

When the Michael Waltz account was set up in 2017, the app would display a prompt allowing users to sync their phone contacts, automatically populating their friends list with anyone in their address book already using the platform. Privacy advocates, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, criticized this design, arguing that it exposes users to unnecessary risks by making social connections public by default. It wasn’t until BuzzFeed News revealed in 2021 that then-president Joe Biden was easily found on the app that Venmo, which is owned by PayPal, added the option to hide friend lists. But that setting remains opt-in. According to its privacy policy, unless users proactively change their privacy settings, their network remains visible to anyone.

Mixed in with the high-profile names connected to the apparent Waltz Venmo account are a number of accounts appearing to belong to ordinary people, such as several doctors, real estate agents, and a tailor. These are the kinds of low-level connections that, experts say, spies look at for basic information—a relationship with a medical specialist could expose that a person is being treated for an illness that hasn’t been made public—as well as patterns, pressure points, or a way in. Experts call them “soft targets”: people who have access but aren’t protected.

For instance, when the US and Israel reportedly sabotaged Iran’s nuclear program with the Stuxnet virus, they used a control engineer’s USB stick, not one belonging to a senior official. Chinese intelligence has used similar tactics, contacting thousands of foreign citizens using LinkedIn or going after university students to get closer to US researchers and companies. While WIRED has found no evidence that foreign adversaries have used Venmo to target a US politician’s network, the platform makes these relationships visible—potentially giving adversaries a searchable map of the people around power.

“The first thing you think of is the counterintelligence issue, right? And the security vulnerabilities. It kind of boggles the mind, in a way,” says Michael Ard, a former intelligence analyst who now runs the masters program in intelligence analysis at Johns Hopkins. “It would be really easy for somebody to spoof a contact, and that is something the security industry has already been issuing notices on.”

Waltz has spent years inside the Republican national security establishment. A former Green Beret—something reflected in the number of apparent veteran Green Berets, Navy SEALs, and other special operators to whom the Venmo account bearing his name is connected—he served as a defense adviser at the Pentagon under former defense secretaries Donald Rumsfeld and Robert Gates, and later counseled US vice president Dick Cheney on counterterrorism. In 2020, following the US drone strike that killed Iranian general Qassem Soleimani, Waltz says he was part of a small group of lawmakers privately briefed at the White House.

Another participant in that thread was Hegseth. A public Venmo account under his name, identified by The American Prospect in February, revealed a similarly elite network—including names matching executives at defense firms like Palantir and Anduril as well as lobbyists and President George W. Bush–era officials. In the Signal chat, the defense secretary directly responded to Vance’s concerns: “VP: I fully share your loathing of European free-loading. It’s PATHETIC.”

Both Vance’s and Hegseth’s Venmo accounts have since been deleted.

_Jake Lahut contributed reporting._

Mike Waltz Left His Venmo Friends List Public

The Trump cabinet’s shocking leak of its plans to bomb Yemen raises myriad confidentiality and legal issues. The security of the encrypted messaging app Signal is not one of them.

The eye-popping scandal surrounding the Trump cabinet’s accidental invitation to The Atlantic’s editor in chief to join a text-message group secretly planning a bombing in Yemen has rolled into its third day, and that controversy now has a name: SignalGate, a reference to the fact that the conversation took place on the end-to-end encrypted free messaging tool Signal.

As that name becomes a shorthand for the biggest public blunder of the second Trump administration to date, however, security and privacy experts who have promoted Signal as the best encrypted messaging tool available to the public want to be clear about one thing: SignalGate is not about Signal.

Since The Atlantic’s editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, revealed Monday that he was mistakenly included in a Signal group chat earlier this month created to plan US airstrikes against the Houthi rebels in Yemen, the reaction from the Trump cabinet’s critics and even the administration itself has in some cases seemed to cast blame on Signal for the security breach. Some commentators have pointed to reports last month of Signal-targeted phishing by Russian spies. National security adviser Michael Waltz, who reportedly invited Goldberg to the Signal group chat, has even suggested that Goldberg may have hacked into it.

On Wednesday afternoon, even President Donald Trump suggested Signal was somehow responsible for the group chat fiasco. “I don't know that Signal works,” Trump told reporters at the White House. “I think Signal could be defective, to be honest with you.”

The real lesson is much simpler, says Kenn White, a security and cryptography researcher who has conducted audits on widely used encryption tools in the past as the director of the Open Crypto Audit Project: Don’t invite untrusted contacts into your Signal group chat. And if you’re a government official working with highly sensitive or classified information, use the encrypted communication tools that run on restricted, often air-gapped devices intended for a top-secret setting rather than the unauthorized devices that can run publicly available apps like Signal.

“Unequivocally, no blame in this falls on Signal,” says White. “Signal is a communication tool designed for confidential conversations. If someone's brought into a conversation who’s not meant to be part of it, that's not a technology problem. That's an operator issue.”

Cryptographer Matt Green, a professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University, puts it more simply. “Signal is a tool. If you misuse a tool, bad things are going to happen,” says Green. “If you hit yourself in the face with a hammer, it’s not the hammer’s fault. It’s really on you to make sure you know who you’re talking to.”

The only sense in which SignalGate _is_ a Signal-related scandal, White adds, is that the use of Signal suggests that the cabinet-level officials involved in the Houthi bombing plans, including secretary of defense Pete Hegseth and director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, were conducting the conversation on internet-connected devices—possibly even including personal ones—since Signal wouldn’t typically be allowed on the official, highly restricted machines intended for such conversations. “In past administrations, at least, that would be absolutely forbidden, especially for classified communications,” says White.

Indeed, using Signal on internet-connected commercial devices doesn’t just leave communications open to anyone who can somehow exploit a hackable vulnerability in Signal, but anyone who can hack the iOS, Android, Windows, or Mac devices that might be running the Signal mobile or desktop apps.

This is why US agencies in general, and the Department of Defense in particular, conduct business on specially managed federal devices that are specially provisioned to control what software is installed and which features are available. Whether the cabinet members had conducted the discussion on Signal or another consumer platform, the core issue was communicating about incredibly high-stakes, secret military operations using inappropriate devices or software.

One of the most straightforward reasons that communication apps like Signal and WhatsApp are not suitable for classified government work is that they offer “disappearing message” features—mechanisms to automatically delete messages after a preset amount of time—that are incompatible with federal record retention laws. This issue was on full display in the principals’ chat about the impending strike on Yemen, which was originally set for one-week auto-delete before the Michael Waltz account changed the timer to four-week auto-delete, according to screenshots of the chat published by The Atlantic on Wednesday. Had The Atlantic’s Goldberg not been mistakenly included in the chat, its contents might not have been preserved in accordance with long-standing government requirements.

In congressional testimony on Wednesday, US director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said that Signal can come preinstalled on government devices. Multiple sources tell WIRED that this is not the norm, though, and noted specifically that downloading consumer apps like Signal to Defense Department devices is highly restricted and often banned. The fact that Hegseth, the defense secretary, participated in the chat indicates that he either obtained an extremely unusual waiver to install Signal on a department device, bypassed the standard process for seeking such a waiver, or was using a non-DOD device for the chat. According to political consultant and podcaster FP Wellman, DOD “political appointees” demanded that Signal be installed on their government devices last month.

Core to the Trump administration’s defense of the behavior is the claim that no classified material was discussed in the Signal chat. In particular, Gabbard and others have noted that Hegseth himself is the classification authority for the information. Multiple sources tell WIRED, though, that this authority does not make a consumer application the right forum for such a discussion.

“The way this was being communicated, the conversation had no formal designation like 'for official use only' or something. But whether it should have been classified or not, whatever it was, it was obviously sensitive operational information that no soldier or officer would be expected to release to the public—but they had added a member of the media into the chat,” says Andy Jabbour, a US Army veteran and founder of the domestic security risk-management firm Gate 15.

Jabbour adds that military personnel undergo annual information awareness and security training to reinforce operating procedures for handling all levels of nonpublic information. Multiple sources emphasize to WIRED that while the information in the Yemen strike chat appears to meet the standard for classification, even nonclassified material can be extremely sensitive and is typically carefully protected.

“Putting aside for a moment that classified information should never be discussed over an unclassified system, it’s also just mind-boggling to me that all of these senior folks who were on this line and nobody bothered to even check, security hygiene 101, who are all the names? Who are they?” US senator Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat, said during Tuesday’s Senate Intelligence Committee hearing.

According to The Atlantic, 12 Trump administration officials were in the Signal group chat, including vice president JD Vance, secretary of state Marco Rubio, and Trump adviser Susie Wiles. Jabbour adds that even with ​​decisionmaking authorities present and participating in a communication, establishing an information designation or declassifying information happens through an established, proactive process. As he puts it, “If you spill milk on the floor, you can’t just say, ‘That’s actually not spilled milk, because I intended to spill it.’”

All of which is to say, SignalGate raises plenty of security, privacy, and legal issues. But the security of Signal itself is not one of them. Despite that, in the wake of The Atlantic’s story on Monday, some have sought tenuous connections between the Trump cabinet’s security breach and Signal vulnerabilities. On Tuesday, for example, a Pentagon adviser echoed a report from Google’s security researchers, who alerted Signal earlier this year to a phishing technique that Russian military intelligence used to target the app’s users in Ukraine. But Signal pushed out an update to make that tactic—which tricks users into adding a hacker as a secondary device on their account—far harder to pull off, and the same tactic also targeted some accounts on the messaging services WhatsApp and Telegram.

“Phishing attacks against people using popular applications and websites are a fact of life on the internet,” Signal spokesperson Jun Harada tells WIRED. “Once we learned that Signal users were being targeted, and how they were being targeted, we introduced additional safeguards and in-app warnings to help protect people from falling victim to phishing attacks. This work was completed months ago."

In fact, says White, the cryptography researcher, if the Trump administration is going to put secret communications at risk by discussing war plans on unapproved commercial devices and freely available messaging apps, they could have done much worse than to choose Signal for those conversations, given its reputation and track record among security experts.

“Signal is the consensus recommendation for highly at-risk communities—human rights activists, attorneys, and confidential sources for journalists,” says White. Just not, as this week has made clear, executive branch officials planning airstrikes.

_Updated at 5:50 pm ET, March 25, 2025: Added remarks about Signal by President Trump._

SignalGate Isn’t About Signal

DNA-testing company 23andMe has filed for bankruptcy, which means the future of the company’s vast trove of customer data is unknown. Here’s what that means for your genetic data.

Genetic testing company 23andMe, once a Silicon Valley darling valued at $6 billion, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection late Sunday as it prepares for a sale of the business. CEO Anne Wojcicki, who cofounded the company in 2006, has also stepped down after months of failed attempts to take the firm private.

As uncertainty about the company’s future reaches its peak, all eyes are on the trove of deeply personal—and potentially valuable—genetic data that 23andMe holds. Privacy advocates have long warned that the risk of entrusting genetic data to any institution is twofold—the organization could fail to protect it, but it could also hand over customer data to a new entity that they may not trust and didn’t choose.

California attorney general Rob Bonta reminded consumers in an alert on Friday that Californians have a legal right to ask that an organization delete their data. 23andMe customers in other states and countries largely do not have the same protections, though there is also a right to deletion for health data in Washington state’s My Health My Data Act and the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation. Regardless of residency, all 23andMe customers should consider downloading anything they want to keep from the service and should then attempt to delete their information.

“This situation really brings home the point that there is still no national health privacy law in the US protecting your rights unless you live in California or Washington,” says Andrea Downing, an independent security researcher and cofounder of the patient-led digital rights nonprofit The Light Collective. “Meanwhile, we continue to evolve our understanding of how genetic information has value, but also has unique vulnerability.”

John Verdi, senior vice president of policy at the Future of Privacy Forum, says 23andMe’s new owner could revise the company’s privacy policies for new customers and new data collection, but the data it has already collected from current customers is subject to existing terms. “The company has legal obligations regarding information collected under the current policies,” he says.

Still, researchers emphasize that in practice, such a large transition will create real data exposure that is outside of 23andMe customers’ control. “In my opinion, these privacy policies—especially in the context of acquisitions in the venture capital and private equity space—aren't worth the paper they're printed on,” says longtime security researcher and data privacy advocate Kenn White. “For regular people out there who use these services, you're pretty much on your own. My advice is to request your data get deleted as soon as possible"

To delete your genetic data through 23andMe’s website, log in and then go to **Settings** in your profile. Scroll to **23andMe Data** and then click **View**. At this point, you can choose to download a copy of your genetic information. Then scroll to **Delete Data** and click **Permanently Delete Data**. Once you initiate the process, you’ll receive an email from 23andMe to confirm. Click the link in the email to complete the deletion process. Additionally, you can direct 23andMe to destroy the biological sample it used to extract your DNA data if you previously authorized the company to keep it. Go to **Settings** and then **Preferences**.

You can also opt in to and out of participating in research at any time by updating your consent status in your account settings. If you opt out, 23andMe will stop using your information for research going forward and will discontinue use of your data within 30 days. This does not affect studies that have already been completed.

23andMe has never been profitable and has struggled to revamp its business model since it went public in 2021. Demand for its ancestry and health testing kits has been declining for years. And data privacy has had a role to play in the company’s dwindling fortunes after the company was hit with a major data breach in December 2023 that affected millions of customers. The incident led to a class action lawsuit, which 23andMe agreed to settle for $30 million.

Last summer, Wojcicki filed a proposal to take the company private, which was rejected by 23andMe’s board of directors. Shortly after, the company shuttered its in-house drug discovery unit, and its board members resigned en masse over Wojcicki’s strategic direction.

23andMe says it intends to continue operating as usual throughout the sale process and that there are no immediate changes to the way it stores, manages, or protects customer data. In an open letter to customers, the company said it will “seek to find a partner who shares our commitment to customer data privacy and allows our mission of helping people access, understand and benefit from the human genome to live on.” But the direction of 23andMe will ultimately be in the hands of whoever takes over the company.

“If there is a new owner that comes out of the bankruptcy process, that new owner steps into the shoes of 23andMe and takes over those assets,” says Jennifer Wagner, an assistant professor of law, policy, and engineering and anthropology at Penn State University.

“They would still be bound by the complex web of contractual agreements that are in place right now with users,” Wagner adds. “But I think it does give rise to some uncertainty in terms of whether or not a new player would have the same values or that same kind of culture that 23andMe was trying to cultivate.”

_Updated 7:15 pm ET, March 24, 2025 to correct the date 23andMe formally went public._

How to Delete Your Data From 23andMe

Crossing into the United States has become increasingly dangerous for digital privacy. Here are a few steps you can take to minimize the risk of Customs and Border Protection accessing your data.

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When Ryan Lackey has traveled to countries like Russia or China, he has taken certain precautions: Instead of his usual gear, the Seattle-based security researcher and chief security officer of a cryptocurrency insurance firm brings a locked-down Chromebook and an iPhone that's set up to sync with a separate, nonsensitive Apple account. He wipes both before every trip and loads only the minimum data he'll need. Lackey has gone so far as to keep separate travel sets for each country, so that he can forensically analyze the devices when he gets home to check for signs of each country's tampering.

Now, Lackey says, the countries that warrant that paranoid approach to travel might include not just Russia and China but also the United States—if not for Americans like him, then for anyone with a foreign passport who might come under the increasingly draconian and unpredictable scrutiny of US Customs and Border Protection (CBP). "All of this applies to America more than it has in the past," says Lackey. "If I thought I were likely to be a targeted person, I would go through this same level of protection."

Since the start of the second Trump administration, there appears to be an uptick in foreign visitors to the US being denied entry, resulting in people being sent back to their original destinations or being held in detention. Citizens from Germany, the UK, and France have all reported being detained, in some cases for weeks, or denied entry when attempting to enter the US—including several individuals who say they are legal residents with Green Cards. France’s education minister said one French scientist was denied entry after immigration officials searched his phone and found conversations where “he expressed a personal opinion on the Trump administration’s research policy.” The stricter enforcement of visa and travel permit regulations has led to officials in Germany and Britain to change their travel guidance, with Britain warning that rules are enforced “strictly.”

That de facto border crackdown is set to become far more explicit if the Trump administration follows through on a plan to enact a new “travel ban” on more than 40 countries, which would reportedly bar entry entirely from at least 10 nations and subject visitors from another five to new scrutiny and automatic interviews at the border. Another 26 countries would fall into a third category where their status will be decided in the 60 days after the policy goes into effect.

All of these changes suggest that US borders are about to become far less friendly places to foreigners and even to Americans returning from abroad. And these new border enforcement measures will no doubt be accompanied by aggressive attempts at surveillance extending to travellers’ electronic devices—a threat to digital privacy and free expression that extends to foreigners and US residents alike.

“We’re seeing extraordinarily disturbing examples of retaliatory action based on people's speech and political opinions,” says Nathan Wessler, the deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. “When that’s combined with really sweeping authority to mine the contents of our phones and laptops, looking at things we've written, things people have sent us, it should be a particular cause for concern for people across the political spectrum—and people with all kinds of citizenship and immigration statuses.”

In fact, Customs and Border Protection has long considered US borders and airports a kind of loophole in the US Constitution's Fourth Amendment protections, one that allows them wide latitude to detain travelers and search their devices. For years, the agency has used that opportunity to hold border-crossers on the slightest suspicion and demand access to their computers and phones, with little formal cause or oversight.

Citizens are far from immune. CBP detainees from journalists to filmmakers to security researchers have all had their devices taken out of their hands by agents.

As those intrusions become more common and aggressive in the second Trump era, WIRED has assembled the following advice from legal and security experts to help preserve your digital privacy while crossing American borders. But take all of these strategies with caution: Given CBP’s unpredictable—and in many areas undocumented—practices, none of the experts WIRED spoke to claimed to have a privacy panacea for the American border.

_This article was first published in February 2017 and updated in March 2025 to reflect changes in technology and the second Trump administration. WIRED’s guide to protecting yourself against government surveillance includes more security and privacy advice._

**Phone Home**

First, if you have any reason to think you could be detained or questioned at the border, alert a lawyer or a loved one who can contact a lawyer _before_ going through customs, and contact them again when you get out. If you are detained, you may not be able to access your devices or otherwise have the opportunity to reach the outside world. And in the worst-case scenario of a lengthy detention, you'll want someone advocating for your release and legal representation.

**Lock Down Devices**

If customs officials do take your devices, don't make their intrusion easy. Encrypt your hard drive with tools like BitLocker, Veracrypt, or Apple's Filevault, and choose a strong passphrase. On your phone, set a strong PIN. Using hard-to-crack alphanumeric code to unlock your phone rather than a four digit PIN or biometrics is the strongest approach to securing the device. On an iPhone, disable Siri from the lock screen by switching off **Allow Siri When Locked** under the **Siri men**u in **Settings**.

Remember also to turn your devices off before entering customs: Hard-drive encryption tools offer full protection only when a computer is fully powered down. If you use FaceID, your iPhone is safest when it's turned off, too, since it requires a PIN rather than a face scan when first booted, resolving any ambiguity about whether border officials can compel you to unlock the device with your biometrics.

In recent years, Apple and Google have made it possible to separate sensitive apps from being shown with others on your phone—placing them in a separate folder from other apps and protecting them with another layer of authentication. Android’s Private Spaces can be turned on in the Security and privacy settings menu, while long pressing an app on iOS will bring up the option to place it in a hidden folder.

Finally, Wessler recommends that travelers be sure to update their operating systems on both laptops and phones before crossing the border. That’s because CBP could, in some cases, use tools like Cellebrite or GrayKey to exploit unpatched vulnerabilities in those devices, accessing them without the user unlocking them. “It may be that if your operating system is six months out of date, your device is vulnerable,” Wessler says. “The newest version may not be.”

**Keep Passwords Secret**

This is the tricky part. American citizens can't be deported for refusing to give up passwords for social media accounts or encrypted devices, says the ACLU's Wessler. That means if you stand your ground and don't reveal passwords or PINs, you may be detained and your devices confiscated—even sent off to a forensic facility—but you'll eventually get through with your privacy far more intact than if you divulge secrets. "They can seize your device, even for months while they try to break into it," says Wessler. "But you’re going to get home." (Despite the Trump administration’s shocking treatment in some cases of foreign permanent residents, this protection applies to green card holders too, Wessler says.)

Be warned, however, that denying customs officials access can at the very least lead to hours of uncertain detention in a bleak, windowless CBP office. At some US airports and in various states, court rulings have put limitations and restrictions on what CBP officials can do to access your devices, but there’s little guarantee those restrictions will be followed in practice if border agents have your computer or phone in their custody without oversight.

Broadly, the CBP outlines two types of device searches: basic, where an officer “manually” reviews a device’s content; and an advanced search where a device is connected to external equipment and its contents can be reviewed, copied, or analyzed. The latter search requires a “reasonable suspicion” of a crime, CBP says. The agency’s official guidance avoids explicitly saying people are required to hand over passwords, skirting around the issue by saying devices should be presented “in a condition that allows for the examination.”

“If the electronic device cannot be inspected because it is protected by a passcode or encryption or other security mechanism, that device may be subject to exclusion, detention, or other appropriate action or disposition,” the agency says online.

For non-Americans coming to the US on a visa or from a visa-waiver country, Wessler warns that they face a far starker dilemma: Refuse to give up a passcode or PIN and you may be denied entry. “There’s a very practical assessment people have to make about what's most important to them,” he says. “Getting into the country but sacrificing privacy or protecting your privacy—but risking that you may be turned around at the border.”

**Minimize the Data You Carry**

For the most vulnerable travelers, there’s one clear solution to that dilemma: The best way to keep customs away from your data is simply not to travel with it. Instead, like Lackey, set up travel devices that store the minimum of sensitive data. Don't link those "dirty" devices to your personal accounts, and when you do have to create a linked account—as with an Apple ID for iOS devices—create fresh ones with unique usernames and passwords. "If they ask for access and you can’t refuse, you want to be able to give them access without losing any sensitive information," says Lackey.

(Social media accounts, admittedly, can't be so easily ditched. Some security experts recommend creating secondary personas that can be offered up to customs officials while keeping a more sensitive account secret. But if CBP agents do link your identity with an account you tried to hide, the result could be longer detention and, for noncitizens, even denial of entry.)

If you can’t create a separate travel device, the Electronic Frontier Foundation also suggests logging out of apps and cloud services—such as Google Drive, or MicrosoftOne Drive—so that border agents can’t access documents or data you are storing remotely. Backing up data, such as photos or files, to the cloud services before you travel can help to remove data from the phone.

“The only sure way to protect yourself is to not carry information with you or to carry as little as possible,” says the ACLU’s Wessler. “As long as you have a device and there's stuff on it, that's potentially vulnerable to search.”

That vulnerability to search comes in part from the fact that privacy rights for digital devices at the border remains troublingly unsettled in US law, says UC Davis law professor Elizabeth Joh. While the Supreme Court decision in _Riley v. California_ in 2014 declared warrantless searches of devices at the time of arrest unconstitutional, no case has set such a precedent for the American border—much less for non-Americans seeking those same privacy rights.

Since 2014, several federal appeals courts have come to conflicting opinions about when it’s constitutional for customs and border agents to search electronic devices, but the Supreme Court has yet to weigh in. Until it does, the border zone will remain in a kind of legal limbo.

The government, after all, has the power to open bags crossing into its territory or even dismantle cars to search for contraband, Joh points out. "What does that mean in an age when people bring their digital devices across borders? The Supreme Court hasn’t spoken to that issue," Joh says. "The real problem here is there's still no good set of protections for a portal into your private life."

How to Enter the US With Your Digital Privacy Intact

The ad hoc addition to the otherwise tightly controlled White House information environment could create blind spots and security exposures while setting potentially dangerous precedent.

As the Trump administration's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) continues to rampage through the United States federal government, essentially guided by Elon Musk, the group has also been upending traditional IT boundaries—evaluating digital systems and allegedly accessing personally identifiable information as well as data that has typically been off-limits to those without specific training. Last week, The New York Times reported that the White House is adding Musk-owned SpaceX’s Starlink Wi-Fi “to improve Wi-Fi connectivity on the complex,” according to a statement from White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt. The White House's Starlink internet service is reportedly being donated by the company.

Spotty internet is an annoying but highly solvable problem that WIRED has reported on extensively. Of course, the White House is a highly complex organization operating out of a historic building, but network security researchers, government contractors, and former intelligence analysts with years of experience in US federal government security all tell WIRED that adding Starlink Wi-Fi in a seemingly rushed and haphazard way is an inefficient and counterproductive approach to solving connectivity issues. And they emphasized that it could set problematic precedents across the US government: that new pieces of technology can simply be layered into an environment at will without adequate oversight and monitoring.

“This is shadow IT, creating a network to bypass existing controls,” alleges Nicholas Weaver, a member of the nonprofit International Computer Science Institute's network security team and a computer science lecturer at UC Davis. He adds that while secret and top secret information is typically (but not always) processed only on special, separate federal networks that have no wireless access, the security and uniformity of White House Wi-Fi is still extremely important to national security. “A network like the White House unclassified side is still going to be very sensitive,” he says.

“Just like the Biden Administration did on numerous occasions, the White House is working to improve WiFi connectivity on the complex,” White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt tells WIRED in a statement.

A White House source who asked not to be named supported the switch, arguing that in some areas of the campus, “the old Wi-Fi was trash.”

Researchers point out that while Starlink is a robust commercial ISP like any other, it is not clear that it is being implemented in compliance with White House Communication Agency requirements. If the controls on the White House Starlink Wi-Fi are more lax than on other White House Wi-Fi, it could introduce security exposures and blind spots in network monitoring for anomalous activity.

“The only reason they'd need Starlink would be to bypass existing security controls that are in place from WHCA,” claims former NSA hacker Jake Williams. “The biggest issues would be: First, if they don't have full monitoring of the Starlink connection. And second, if it allows remote management tools, so they could get remote access back into the White House networks. Obviously anyone could abuse that access.”

One baffling aspect of the arrangement is that Starlink and other satellite internet is designed to be used in places that have little or no access to terrestrial internet service—in other words, places where there are no reliable fiber lines or no wired infrastructure at all. Instead of a traditional ISP modem, Starlink customers get special panels that they install on a roof or other outdoor place to receive connectivity from orbiting satellites. The New York Times reported, though, that the White House Starlink panels are actually installed miles away at a White House data center that is routing the connectivity over existing fiber lines. Multiple sources emphasized to WIRED that this setup is bizarre.

“It is extra stupid to go satellite to fiber to actual site,” ICSI's Weaver says. “Starlink is inferior service anyplace where you have wire-line internet already available and, even in places which don't, inferior if you have reasonable line of sight to a cell tower.”

Weaver and others note that Starlink is a robust product and isn't inherently unreliable just because it is delivered via satellite. But in a location where fiber lines are highly available and, ultimately, the service is being delivered via those lines anyway, the setup is deeply inefficient.

While Starlink as a service is technically reliable, incorporating it in the White House could create a long-term federal dependence on an Elon Musk–controlled service, which could create future instabilities. After European officials raised concerns earlier this month on whether Starlink might stop serving Ukraine, Musk posted on social media: “To be extremely clear, no matter how much I disagree with the Ukraine policy, Starlink will never turn off its terminals … We would never do such a thing or use it as a bargaining chip.”

_Updated at 3 pm ET, March 24, 2025, to add comment from the White House, additional details from a White House source, and further context around the transmission of classified materials._

Using Starlink Wi-Fi in the White House Is a Slippery Slope for US Federal IT

Companies in the EU are starting to look for ways to ditch Amazon, Google, and Microsoft cloud services amid fears of rising security risks from the US. But cutting ties won’t be easy.

The global backlash against the second Donald Trump administration keeps on growing. Canadians have boycotted US-made products, anti–Elon Musk posters have appeared across London amid widespread Tesla protests, and European officials have drastically increased military spending as US support for Ukraine falters. Dominant US tech services may be the next focus.

There are early signs that some European companies and governments are souring on their use of American cloud services provided by the three so-called hyperscalers. Between them, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) host vast swathes of the internet and keep thousands of businesses running. However, some organizations appear to be reconsidering their use of these companies’ cloud services—including servers, storage, and databases—citing uncertainties around privacy and data access fears under the Trump administration.

“There’s a huge appetite in Europe to de-risk or decouple the over-dependence on US tech companies, because there is a concern that they could be weaponized against European interests,” says Marietje Schaake, a nonresident fellow at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center and a former, decade-long member of the European Parliament.

The moves may already be underway. On March 18, politicians in the Netherlands House of Representatives passed eight motions asking the government to reduce reliance on US tech companies and move to European alternatives. Days before, more than 100 organizations signed an open letter to European officials calling for the continent to become “more technologically independent” and saying the status quo creates “security and reliability risks.”

Two European-based cloud service companies, Exoscale and Elastx, tell WIRED they have seen an uptick in potential customers looking to abandon US cloud providers over the last two weeks—with some already starting to make the jump. Multiple technology advisers say they are having widespread discussions about what it would take to uproot services, data, and systems.

“We have more demand from across Europe,” says Mathias Nöbauer, the CEO of Swiss-based hosting provider Exoscale, adding there has been an increase in new customers seeking to move away from cloud giants. “Some customers were very explicit,” Nöbauer says. “Especially customers from Denmark being very explicit that they want to move away from US hyperscalers because of the US administration and what they said about Greenland.”

“It's a big worry about the uncertainty around everything. And from the Europeans’ perspective—that the US is maybe not on the same team as us any longer,” says Joakim Öhman, the CEO of Swedish cloud provider Elastx. “Those are the drivers that bring people or organizations to look at alternatives.”

Concerns have been raised about the current data-sharing agreement between the EU and US, which is designed to allow information to move between the two continents while protecting people’s rights. Multiple previous versions of the agreement have been struck down by European courts. At the end of January, Trump fired three Democrats from the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB), which helps manage the current agreement. The move could undermine or increase uncertainty around the agreement. In addition, Öhman says, he has heard concerns from firms about the CLOUD Act, which can allow US law enforcement to subpoena user data from tech companies, potentially including data that is stored in systems outside of the US.

Dave Cottlehuber, the founder of SkunkWerks, a small tech infrastructure firm in Austria, says he has been moving the company’s few servers and databases away from US providers to European services since the start of the year. “First and foremost, it’s about values,” Cottlehuber says. “For me, privacy is a right not a privilege.” Cottlehuber says the decision to move is easier for a small business such as his, but he argues it removes some taxes that are paid to the Trump administration. “The best thing I can do is to remove that small contribution of mine, and also at the same time, make sure that my customers’ privacy is respected and preserved,” Cottlehuber says.

Steffen Schmidt, the CEO of Medicusdata, a company that provides text-to-speech services to doctors and hospitals in Europe, says that having data in Europe has always “been a must,” but his customers have been asking for more in recent weeks. “Since the beginning of 2025, in addition to data residency guarantees, customers have actively asked us to use cloud providers that are natively European companies,” Schmidt says, adding that some of his services have been moved to Nöbauer’s Exoscale.

Harry Staight, a spokesperson for AWS, says it is “not accurate” that customers are moving from AWS to EU alternatives. “Our customers have control over where they store their data and how it is encrypted, and we make the AWS Cloud sovereign-by-design,” Straight says. “AWS services support encryption with customer managed keys that are inaccessible to AWS, which means customers have complete control of who accesses their data.” Staight says the membership of the PCLOB “does not impact” the agreements around EU-US data sharing and that the CLOUD Act has “additional safeguards for cloud content.” Google and Microsoft declined to comment.

The potential shift away from US tech firms is not just linked to cloud providers. Since January 15, visitors to the European Alternatives website increased more than 1,200 percent. The site lists everything from music streaming services to DDoS protection tools, says Marko Saric, a cofounder of European cloud analytics service Plausible. “We can certainly feel that something is going on,” Saric says, claiming that during the first 18 days of March the company has “beaten” the net recurring revenue growth it saw in January and February. “This is organic growth which cannot be explained by any seasonality or our activities,” he says.

While there are signs of movement, the impact is likely to be small—at least for now. Around the world, governments and businesses use multiple cloud services—such as authentication measures, hosting, data storage, and increasingly data centers providing AI processing—from the big three cloud and tech service providers. Cottlehuber says that, for large businesses, it may take many months, if not longer, to consider what needs to be moved, the risks involved, plus actually changing systems. “What happens if you have a hundred petabytes of storage, it's going to take years to move over the internet,” he says.

For years, European companies have struggled to compete with the likes of Google, Microsoft, and Amazon’s cloud services and technical infrastructure, which make billions every year. It may also be difficult to find similar services on the scale of those provided by alternative European cloud firms.

“If you are deep into the hyperscaler cloud ecosystem, you’ll struggle to find equivalent services elsewhere,” says Bert Hubert, an entrepreneur and former government regulator, who says he has heard of multiple new cloud migrations to US firms being put on hold or reconsidered. Hubert has argued that it is no longer “safe” for European governments to be moved to US clouds and that European alternatives can’t properly compete. “We sell a lot of fine wood here in Europe. But not that much furniture,” he says. However, that too could change.

Schaake, the former member of the European Parliament, says a combination of new investments, a different approach to buying public services, and a Europe-first approach or investing in a European technology stack could help to stimulate any wider moves on the continent. “The dramatic shift of the Trump administration is very tangible,” Schaake says. “The idea that anything could happen and that Europe should fend for itself is clear. Now we need to see the same kind of pace and leadership that we see with defense to actually turn this into meaningful action.”

Source

Wired