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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
World
Rachel Hall

What is Signal, the messaging app at the heart of a US security leak?

Two men sit at a bench as a person holds a sign behind them with a printout of messages shared on Signal
Intelligence chiefs testify on the intelligence breach that inadvertently included the Atlantic’s editor-in-chief on a high-level Signal group chat. Photograph: Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images

When the editor-in-chief of the Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, was added to a group chat of the most senior politicians in the United States discussing a bombing mission in Yemen, one of the questions to arise was why they were using Signal, which is not approved by the US government for sharing such sensitive information.

With Signalgate having dominated a turbulent week in US politics, here is everything you need to know about the app at the centre of the scandal.

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