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https://snyder.substack.com/p/signalgate-violating-national-security
Signalgate: violating national security

Timothy Snyder
Mar 26, 2025
A familiar risk to a rule-based republic, such as our own, is when the government claims that it must violate our rights in the name of national security. In Signalgate, we face a novel challenge: a government that brazenly risks national security in order to preserve its ability to repress its citizens.

We see that traditional problem in the deportations to the Salvadoran gulag. We are told that the government knows who is a terrorist; that we must trust their judgement; and that we must accept their actions. The reasoning, as always, is that there is some kind of exceptional situation -- an "invasion" in this case. If we accept that the government gets to decide what is exceptional, the exception then just becomes the rule. This works psychologically, because we can choose to believe (even though it is usually not true) that we the non-arrested and the non-deported are being made more safe.

But in the Signalgate scandal, we encounter something more chilling: our government is openly compromising our national security, the better to violate our rights. Its position is that it is worth risking the lives of soldiers abroad in order to be able to persecute civilians at home. Let me explain.
...
Even as the Musk-Trump people continue to say that we must sacrifice our rights for national security, they are also starting to say that they find it worthwhile to violate national security in order to have the tools that allow them to violate our rights. In Signalgate, we see the shift from the conventional excuse for authoritarian practices to an open embrace of tyranny for its own sake.

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