Trump and intelligence chiefs play down Signal app group chat leak

This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Jackie Leonard and in the early hours of Wednesday the 26th of March, these are our main stories.
Donald Trump says there'll be an investigation into how a journalist was invited onto a messaging group where he saw plans for US airstrikes in Yemen, but the president has defended his team. Hundreds of people in northern Gaza have staged a protest against Hamas, the biggest since the war there began.
And the White House says Russia and Ukraine have agreed to stop targeting shipping in the Black Sea. But Moscow has insisted on further conditions before it implements any deal.
Also in this podcast, and I may have asked this question before, is there life on Mars? The rover found there were some compounds in this particular rock and this is really exciting because these compounds haven't been found on Mars before. President Trump says there'll be an investigation into how a journalist came to be invited onto a messaging group where top officials were discussing a U.S.
military attack on Houthis in Yemen. He also said his administration would be taking a look at the messaging system signal itself.
But Mr. Trump defended the officials involved, including the national security adviser Mike Waltz, who seems to have invited the journalist Jeffrey Goldberg from The Atlantic magazine into the group conversation.
We have an amazing group. Our national security now is stronger than it's ever been.
There was no classified information, as I understand it. They used an app, if you want to call it an app, that a lot of people use, a lot of people in government use, a lot of people in the media use.
Earlier, the CIA director and the head of US National Intelligence told a Senate committee that no war details or identities of undercover officers were disclosed. At times, the exchanges in the committee hearing were very heated.
This is the Democrat Senator John Ossoff questioning John Ratcliffe, the CIA director. Director Ratcliffe, this was a huge mistake, correct? No.
A national political... No, no, you hold on.
No, no, Director Ratcliffe, I asked you a yes or no question and now you'll hold on. A national political reporter...
You can characterize it how national political reporter was made privy to sensitive information about imminent military operations against a foreign terrorist organization. And that wasn't a huge mistake.
That wasn't a huge mistake. They characterized it as embarrassment.
This is utterly unprofessional. There's been no apology.
There has been no recognition of the gravity of this error. And by the way, we will get the full transcript of this chain, and your testimony will be measured carefully against its content.
Senator Mark Warner questioned Tulsi Gabbard, the director of U.S. National Intelligence, if she had taken part in the Signal chat group.
Did you participate in the group chat with Secretary of Defense and other Trump senior officials discussing the Yemen war plans? Senator, I don't want to get into the specifics. Ma'am, were you on? You're not going to be willing to address it.
So you're not, are you denying? Will you answer my question, ma'am? You are not TG on this group chat? I'm not going to get into the specifics. So you refuse to acknowledge whether you are on this group chat.
Senator, I'm not going to get into this. Why are you going to get into the specifics? Is this is it because it's all classified? Because this is currently under review by the National Security Council.
Because it's all classified. If it's not classified, share the text now.
Our North America correspondent, Nomiya Iqbal, who was in the U.S. Capitol building, gave this assessment of the White House reaction to the messaging app incident.
The White House is very keen to play it down. You've got President Trump saying that this was a glitch.
And as far as he's concerned, that that's the end of it. He is standing by his team.
You've also got his White House communications director who is, you know, pretty sort of tough when it comes to sort of saying how he feels, Stephen Chung, accusing people, critics of going after President Trump, trying to bring down his presidency. But interestingly, there does seem to be some sort of split here because you've got the Senate Majority Leader, John Thune, who was announced, he said that the messages are inappropriate, by the way.
And he's also said that the Armed Services Committee may want to have some folks testify and have some questions answered as well. So it doesn't seem to be the end of it.
That was Nomiya Iqbal in Washington. So why is it a problem if the US administration's plans for Yemen strikes were shared on Signal? And how is the messaging app normally used? Joe Inwood spoke to the BBC's technology reporter Graham Fraser and first asked him to explain more about Signal.
Signal is a messaging app like WhatsApp that I'm sure many of our listeners will use but it isn't as popular as WhatsApp. But one of the things it has is it has many more security measures.
The conversations on the app are defaulted so they're end-to-end encryption which means that only the people reading the messages can see them. Even Signal can't even read what is being sent.
Also users users can send messages that will disappear after a set time. Now, Signal, at the absolute heart of its company, is privacy.
They gather very little data about the users, and it's owned by a US non-profit organization, so the whole basis of the company is privacy. But despite that, it isn't something, I understand, that top-level conversations by American officials should be taking place on.
Is that right? Well, yes. One of the big debates today has been whether the officials in question should have been using Signal at all, or should they be using another government service.
As our colleagues in America have been reporting today, Signal has become the unofficial whisper network of Washington officialdom. The app is not banned outright by the US government, but under President Biden, some officials were allowed to download Signal on their White House-issued phones, but they were instructed to use it sparingly and to never share any classified information on it.
Which we understand, of course, they have been today, although that has been denied, I think, by the authorities, by the administration. One crucial question here is about if it's possible to hack signal.

What do we know about that?

It appears to me that the question of what's happened is about human error

rather than some major hack that someone has managed to somehow get into this group chat

with all these high-ranking American officials.

And, you know, that was something that I spoke earlier today with Matt Navarro, who is a social media expert, and he was telling me that, you know, in his view, this was all about human error. He said that this security breach is the equivalent of walking into a classified meeting room because someone forgot to close the door.
And he went on to say this incident really does expose the weak link and even the most secure platforms, and that is user behaviour. No app can protect against mistakes like adding the wrong person to a group chat.
The BBC's technology reporter Graham Fraser. The US Vice President J.D.
Vance says he plans to go to Greenland on Friday in what's likely to be a highly controversial visit, given President Trump's desire for the U.S. to take control of the island.

A trip to the territory by Mr. Vance's wife Usher had already been announced,

but he has now said he'll go with her.

The governments of both Denmark and Greenland have made it clear

that the island's sovereignty is not up for discussion with the U.S.

Mr. Vance made the announcement of his planned visit on the social media site X.

I'm going to visit some of our guardians in the Space Force on the northwest coast of Greenland and also just check out what's going on with the security there of Greenland. As you know, it's really important.
A lot of other countries have threatened Greenland, have threatened to use its territories and its waterways to threaten the United States, to threaten Canada, and of course to threaten the people of Greenland. So we're going to check out how things are going there.
We heard more from our Washington correspondent, Gary O'Donoghue, about J.D. Vance's plans to visit Greenland.
He says in a video statement that he wasn't going to let his wife have all the fun, and he wants to, quote, check out the security situation there. So he's going to go to this military base,

which is America's most northerly base in the northwest of the island where they do sort of missile surveillance and space surveillance.

I think it's slightly out of the blue in the sense that, you know,

this was just a video statement that dropped today.

I don't know whether it has anything to do with the current news cycle

that the administration is in, which is not a good one for them with the security problems over this signal group

with the details that were shared with a journalist.

The thing it definitely does is it really raises the temperature, the diplomatic temperature,

because he's now the most senior person, senior administration person to make the trip to Greenland.

And given Donald Trump's rhetoric about buying it from Denmark or taking it over, this really does up the ante. When the original trip was announced, Usha Vance was going to go to this dog sled race, which she's not going to, and Mike Waltz, the national security advisor, along with another cabinet member, were also going to go.
And Greenland's prime minister at the time said this was an aggressive move. And Greenland has just had some elections.
They're in the midst of forming a new government. And, you know, they are clearly feeling the pressure.
So if they think the second lady and a couple of cabinet members are an aggressive move, then adding the VP to that mix doesn't really diminish that. I mean, he's going to a US base, he absolutely has

not been formally invited, has he, to Greenland itself? Not as far as we know. And in many senses, the I don't know the details of the agreement that the US has over that particular base, but it's not unusual for members of the administration to visit bases.
But the wider context of this is clear and And it's that the US would like, for two reasons, more access to Greenland. One is its natural resources, but also Greenland has been and is hugely strategic in its position.
It's in the mid-Atlantic, it's on the edge of the Arctic Circle. We know that the Arctic is increasingly a place of great power politics for various reasons.
So there are all sorts of reasons why geopolitically Greenland is of interest to all sorts of people. And that's why you're seeing all this attention paid to it at the moment.
Gary O'Donoghue. Hundreds of Palestinians in the north of Gaza have been taking part in the biggest public protest against Hamas since its attacks in Israel on October 7, 2023.
The protests came a day after militants launched rockets at Israel, which prompted the Israeli army to announce a new evacuation order for large parts of Beit Lahir in northern Gaza. Meanwhile, Israel has passed what's being called a war budget of $170 billion, the biggest in its history.
Our Middle East regional editor Sebastian Asher is in Jerusalem, and he began with the anti-Hamas protest. There have been hundreds of young Palestinians out on the streets in North Gaza and Beit Lahir, and among the charts have been out-out Hamas.
They want the fall of Hamas.

It's the first time that there's been a protest of this number of people out on the street since the October 7th attacks and the subsequent war in Gaza.

So it's significant in that sense. I mean, among their chants were also calls for peace, calls for there to be no push to drive Palestinians out of Gaza.

is that sense, I mean, among their chance were also calls for peace, calls for there to be no push to drive Palestinians out of Gaza. So it wasn't just about Hamas, but there certainly were these very strong anti-Hamas elements to it.
There's been an underswell of that anger, of that dissatisfaction with Hamas growing in the past few months. And now we've seen it on the streets.
And there's been a call by a small anti-Hamas group for these protests to spread in the coming days. We'll have to see what happens with that.
These protests were dispersed, it seems quite promptly, by masked men. I think it was prompted by the ceasefire is over at the moment.
Israel has resumed its attacks on Gaza. More than 700 people have been killed in the past week.
And Hamas has fired, I think on two occasions now, rockets into Israel, and that's prompted big new evacuation orders, including for this area. And I think that is probably what has led to this outpouring of anger.
And meanwhile, Israel has passed a new budget. There was a deadline looming the end of this month.
If the budget hadn't had its final approval from the Israeli parliament by then, the government would have to call a snap election, which would once again put the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's political future in jeopardy. So it's a victory for Mr.
Netanyahu. There were big protests outside the parliament over the budget and many other issues, particularly over the fate of a hostage still in Gaza and how the resumption of a war may affect that.
Opposition leaders denounced this budget and the main opposition leader, Yahya Lapid, called it the biggest robbery in the history of Israel.

So you can imagine this was a turbulent session. But for Mr Netanyahu, it's been a good day's work.
Sebastian Usher in Jerusalem. In a separate development, a spokesman for the Israeli prime minister said interviews will start on Wednesday for a new head of the domestic intelligence service, Shin Bet.
It follows a Supreme Court ruling that Mr Netanyahu can meet potential replacements for Ronan Bar, who was sacked last week in a move that sparked mass protests. Mr Netanyahu has denied that the sacking is connected to an investigation by Shin Bet into his alleged ties to the Qatari government.
The court upheld a temporary block on Ronan Barr's dismissal. The White House says Russia and Ukraine have agreed to stop attacks on shipping in the Black Sea and work towards pausing strikes on energy facilities.
But the Kremlin says safe navigation will only be enforced once sanctions are lifted from Russian banks involved in international trade in food and fertilizers, and they are fully reconnected to the swift money transfer system. The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, says the deal fails to stipulate what will happen if it's broken.
He said he'd appeal to the Americans for help about any Russian violation. The deal was announced after Russian and Ukrainian officials

held separate discussions with the Americans in Saudi Arabia.

Our diplomatic correspondent James Landale, who's in Kiev,

has this assessment on what exactly has been achieved in the talks.

After three days of talks in Saudi Arabia, at last some progress.

Two separate texts outlining agreements between the US and Russia and the US and Ukraine.

There were some differences, but much was the same.

All sides agreed to ensure safe navigation, eliminate the use of force,

and prevent the use of commercial vessels for military purposes in the Black Sea.

They also agreed to develop measures for implementing the agreement to ban strikes against energy facilities of Russia and Ukraine. President Zelensky regretted there was no explicit ban on attacks on civilian infrastructure, but sounded broadly content.
It is too early to say that it will work. But this way are the right meetings, the right decisions, the right steps.
No one can accuse Ukraine of not moving towards sustainable peace after this. But then came a third document issued by the Kremlin, which muddied the waters.
It said the Black Sea ceasefire would come into force only when sanctions were lifted on Russian banks, insurers, companies, ports and ships that would allow it to export more agriculture and fertiliser goods. That may take some time and may not entirely be in the gift of the US.
The Kremlin also said the 30-day pause on energy strikes would be backdated to start on March 18 and could be suspended if one side violated the deal. In other words, what's been agreed is a fragile step towards some diminution of the fighting in Ukraine, but with no guarantee of success amid an atmosphere of mutual distrust.
Even if today's agreement were to survive, it's still a long way from the comprehensive countrywide ceasefire the US originally wanted. That was James Landale in Ukraine.
And just to remind you that we're getting together again with our friends at BBC Ukraine cast on Friday the 4th of April, and we'd like you to be part of it. Send your questions about what's happening to globalpodcast at bbc.co.uk.
And if if possible please record your question as a voice note. To southern Denmark now where a giant tunnel is under construction.
It will link Denmark to Germany with cars and trains able to travel under the Baltic Sea. The project is currently Europe's largest construction site.
It will be the world's longest prefabricated road and rail tunnel and is costing more than seven and a half billion dollars. Adrienne Murray went to see it being built.
It's on a scale that's hard to take in. The size of 600 football pitches, this colossal construction site is where a record-breaking tunnel is being built, linking Denmark to Germany.
Inside three enormous halls, tunnel segments, each more than 200 metres long, are moulded from steel and concrete. And showing me around is Henrik Winstensen, the CEO of tunnel operator Femern.
It's not only linking Denmark to Germany, it's linking Scandinavia to Central Europe. Everybody's the winner because obviously businesses, they will be closer connected and then by not having extra distance to drive, you'll also cut in carbon.
Running for 18 kilometers along the Baltic seabed, the Femmen Belt will be the world's longest prefabricated road and rail tunnel. It will slash the rail route between Copenhagen and Hamburg from four and a half to just two and a half hours and replace the 45-minute ferry journey by a drive of less than 10 minutes.
Financed mostly by Denmark, which plans to recoup the costs with tolls, this seven and a half billion dollar mega project has been in the pipeline for two decades. It's been delayed by lawsuits, rising costs and opposition from environmentalists who say it will harm the area's biodiversity.
Those managing the project say any impact is temporary. But it's hoped investment will boost the local area and building is now well underway.
Senior construction manager and as Geertzbello leads the way inside the entrance. Now we are in the first part of the tunnel.
Here we have the water and as you can hear, it's quite thick. Behind these huge steel doors is seawater and the next section of tunnel will have to be placed here exactly.
Each segment weighing 73,000 tonnes will be floated out, then precisely lowered into place. In all, 90 segments will be linked together, piece by piece like Lego bricks.
To do that is a feat of engineering. We have to be very careful that it's placed just in front of the next one.
So we have a system called pin and catch. We will have some arms grabbing onto the element, dragging it slowly into place, and we can remove the steel doors behind us.
The bedrock is too soft to drill, but a tunnel was deemed more secure than a bridge, says Per Galtemann, a professor in concrete and structures at the Technical University of Denmark. If you have a bridge going north-south, the wind is kind of perpendicular.
There was also the risk, or should we say, probability of ships crashing into bridges. You actually have a rather deep water, 30 metres, which means the biggest ships can sail there.
Soon the crucial next segment will be moved into place. And when it opens five years from now, Scandinavia will become a little closer to mainland Europe.
Adrienne Murray in Denmark. Still to come, World Athletics announces a one-off test for athletes who want to confirm they're eligible to compete in women's events.
This, we feel, is a really important way of providing confidence and maintaining that absolute focus on the integrity of competition. Next to Turkey, and large crowds gathered on Tuesday for another night of protests outside the City Hall in Istanbul, in what the opposition party said would be the last demonstration in the area.
It's in response to the arrest of President Erdogan's main political rival, Ekrem İmarmolu, who was detained on accusations of corruption and supporting terrorism. More than a thousand people have been arrested during the past week.
Our correspondent Mark Lowen sent this report from Istanbul. We've made our way through streets closed off by police and dotted with water cannon trucks to Istanbul City Hall, where for a seventh night, huge crowds have gathered, chanting for democracy and against the jailing of mayor Ekrem Imamoglu.
His CHP party says this is the last night they'll come here and that the protests, the biggest in Turkey in over a decade, will continue elsewhere, more of a grassroots movement. We watched today as thousands of students boycotted their classes and rallied in central Istanbul.
Unrest has spread to dozens of other cities, calling for an end to President Erdogan's authoritarianism. He has branded it evil street terrorism and predicted it will fizzle out.
Turkey's political survivor has batted away and crushed so many challenges in his 22-year rule and is emboldened by the fact he's facing little criticism from the West in the current global climate. But on the banner-filled streets here, amidst the nightly tear gas and across this polarised country, something is brewing and it could become serious.
Mark Lowen in Turkey. One of the last surviving members of the Red Army faction that carried out murders and kidnappings across West Germany in the 1970s and 80s has gone on trial.
The faction murdered dozens of people, among them German politicians and businessmen and US soldiers. Here's Sasha Schlichter.
When police raided Daniela Kletter's Berlin flat in February last year, they found a Kalashnikov assault rifle, explosives and large sums of cash. She'd apparently hidden there in plain sight for three decades.
When Germany's Red Army faction, also known as the Bader-Meinhof gang, wound itself up at the turn of the century, Cleter and two accomplices allegedly went on a spree of robberies to sustain themselves financially. Today's trial relates to four attacks on money transporters and nine cash hikes from shops, in which the suspects got away with a total of $3 million.
Sasha Schlichter. Cryptocurrencies are often criticised by environmental groups because the systems they rely on require huge amounts of energy.
But now, a different side to that story. A cryptocurrency company is planning to roll out mini power plants to rural villages in Africa in order to bring electricity to remote parts to power what's called a Bitcoin mine.
The BBC's cyber correspondent Joe Tidy has been to a mine on the Zambezi River to see one project in action. The roar of the Zambezi River is deafening.
But there's another sound on the riverbanks here in northwest Zambia too. The unmistakable whirring of a Bitcoin mine.
24 hours a day, this container full of powerful computers crunches through complex mathematical problems to earn Bitcoins as part of the global volunteer mining network. It's very noisy, but it's a beautiful noise.
Because the truth is, this noise means we're making money. That's Philip Walton, the American Kenyan co-founder of Gridless, the company that runs the mine, containing 120 machines.
It's an odd place for a high-tech crypto operation, but it makes sense, as the electricity is so cheap here as it comes directly from the site's hydroelectric power plant. Zengamina Hydro has been supplying energy for the local community for 17 years.
CEO of the site, Daniel Ray, and his missionary family were involved in the construction. £3 million was raised, mostly from British churches.
But the Bitcoin mine has been a major boost since it was installed in 2023, as it makes use of excess electricity. What we lacked was an institutional, a major user of power in the area.
And the extra revenue, important to say, has also helped us keep the prices down for what we charge the local people, which is also very important. Bitcoin mining didn't build Zengamida Hydro Plant, but there's no doubt it's been a win, not just for the energy company and the Bitcoin miners, but also for the local town.
However, the plant has received a huge amount of investment and will soon be expanding. They hope to sell any excess energy eventually back to the grid.
So Philip and team have got to hit the road and find a new place as perfect as this. The mission to get electricity to isolated communities is a monumental task in Africa.
A 2022 estimate from the International Energy Agency suggests 600 million people on the continent are without power. But because of Bitcoin's reputation, some companies and authorities remain uncomfortable with including it in electrification projects.
Globally, the industry is estimated to use as much energy as a small country like Poland. The environmental impact has long been a concern too, but according to analysts, there are signs that could be improving, with more of the mining giants moving to sustainable energy mixes.
But setups like Zengamina have none of these problems. Yes, they're a tiny part of the overall mining picture, but they're also a rare example of a controversial industry creating much more than just digital coins.
The BBC's cyber correspondent Joe Tidy. World Athletics has approved the introduction of a one-time swab test to check whether competitors are eligible to take part in women-only events.
Under the plans, testing will be in place in time for the World Championships in September. Our sports correspondent Jane Dougal reports.
World Athletics President Sebastian Coe has said the mandatory tests will involve a one-time cheek swap or dry blood test, which would be non-invasive and necessary to protect fairness in the female category. The test identifies the SRY gene, almost always on the Y chromosome, which is crucial in determining male sex characteristics.
Since 2023, World Athletics has banned trans women from the female category, citing scientific research that they retain advantages in strength, endurance and lung capacity, even after suppressing testosterone. The new rules would also identify and bar athletes with what's known as a difference of sex development.
Lord Coe said that World Athletics would be prepared to go to the Court of Arbitration for Sport to defend its proposals, where it won a case against South African athlete Kastor Semenya in 2019. Coe said the testing was to help doggedly protect the female category.
It's important to do it because it maintains everything that we've been talking about, particularly recently, about not just talking about the integrity of female women's sport, but actually guaranteeing it. And this, we feel, is a really important way of providing confidence and maintaining that absolute focus on the integrity of competition.
Last week, Cole lost out on becoming president of the International Olympic Committee to Zimbabwean Kirsty Coventry. She has said that lessons need to be learned from the Women's Olympic boxing tournament in Paris last year, when Algerian Eman Khalif and Lin Yuting of China won gold.
Both had reportedly failed sex tests, but were permitted to compete

in Paris by the IOC. Jane Dougal.
NASA's Curiosity rover has detected what could be a chemical relic pointing to life on Mars. The findings have been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The discovery of long-chain organic molecules derived from fatty acids is not a definite detection of past life, but the latest in a series of hints pointing to possible life on the red planet. Celia Hatton spoke to Monica Grady, a professor of planetary and life sciences at Open University, to learn more about what this discovery could mean.
The rover found that there were some compounds in this particular rock, which we call alkanes, and they are chains of carbon atoms bonded to other carbon atoms with hydrogen in. And what they found was they found chains that had 10 carbon atoms in, 11 carbon atoms and 12 carbon atoms called decane, undecane and dodecane.
And this is really exciting because these compounds haven't been found on Mars before. And they actually are thought to come from the breakdown of carboxylic acids, which are acids which are involved in the formation of life.
So does this really give us a firm indication that at one point there was life on Mars? Unfortunately, no, it doesn't. It's another key marker.
But these compounds can be made by non-biological processes as well as biological ones.

And so they could, you know, have no relevance to life at all. But now we're building up more and more library or catalogue of organic compounds that are present on the surface of Mars.
It's looking even more exciting than it has done before. Can you remind us, if it is ever confirmed that there was life on Mars, why would this be such an exciting discovery or conclusion for us to make?

I think if or maybe when we find conclusive evidence for life on Mars, it's going to show that we're not the only forms of life in the solar system.

At the moment, the only life we know about is life on Earth.

And to find life on another planet, especially if it's had a different genesis from life on Earth, that's going to be really exciting and significant because it means there could be life in all sorts of other places that we're looking at, like on the satellites of Jupiter and Saturn. And of course, we know now that there are an enormous number of planets orbiting other stars.
And so if life got going in two places in one particular planetary system, it could also have got going in another planetary system, which is stupendous. What other rovers are operating on Mars at the moment? Well, at the moment, there are two rovers operating on Mars.
There's Curiosity at Gale Crater and there is Perseverance in Jezero Crater. In the future, by the turn of this decade, there will be a European Space Agency rover on Mars called Rosalind Franklin, which is going to be very exciting indeed.
And so what Curiosity has been doing is it's been drilling rocks and analysing them. Perseverance is also drilling rocks, but it's caching some of those rocks.
It's leaving them in tubes for another rover to pick up and bring them back to Earth. All these rovers, they're looking for signs of water on Mars, which we know was there.
They're looking at clay minerals. Professor Grady, there's so much going on in your field right now.
What's it like to be one of the people who's watching all of these things be discovered? Let me make this really personal. I retire on Thursday.
But, you know, sometimes I wish I could be a postdoc again right at the start of my career because there's such exciting things going on and tremendous opportunities for younger scientists and engineers and technologists. It's just such an exciting landscape.
Monica Grady, a professor of planetary and life sciences at the Open University, and good luck in her retirement. And that's it from us for now, but there will be a new edition of the Global News podcast later.
If you would like to comment on this edition or the topics covered in it, do please send us an email. The address is globalpodcast at bbc.co.uk.

You can also find us on X at BBC World Service.

Just use the hashtag Global News Pod.

This edition was mixed by Caroline Driscoll.

The producer was Liam McSheffrey.

Our editor is Karen Martin. I'm Jackie Leonard.

And until next time, goodbye.