U.S. President Donald Trump met with a group of government cyber security at the White House January 31, 2017 in Washington, DC, and said the government must do more to protect against cyber attacks. But he doesn’t seem to be taking that advice himself, some members of Congress fear.
Representative Ted Lieu, a congressman from Los Angeles County, California, led fourteen other House Democrats on Friday in urging the House Government Oversight Committee to investigate “troubling reports” of President Donald Trump’s apparently poor security practices and the potential danger to national security posed by them—including his continued use of an unsecured Android device to post to Twitter, discussion of sensitive information (including nuclear strategy) in the restaurant at his Mar-A-Lago resort, and leaving classified material unlocked while visitors were in the Oval Office.
In a letter to Oversight Committee chairman Jason Chaffetz and ranking Democratic member Elijah Cummings, the fifteen representatives wrote:
Referring to the complex problem of cybersecurity, President Trump recently said in an interview, “I’m not sure you have the kind of security that you need.” We fully agree—which is why we are writing to request that the House Oversight and Government Reform Committedly hold a hearing into troubling reports that the President is jeopardizing national security by egregiously failing to implement commonsense security measures across the board, from using an insecure, consumer-grade Android smartphone to discussing nuclear strategy openly in a dining room at his Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida. Cybersecurity experts universally agree that an ordinary Android smartphone, which the President is reportedly using despite repeated warnings from the Secret Service, can be easily hacked.
Lieu and the other signatories of the letter expressed concern that Trump’s Android device, “most likely the Samsung Galaxy S3,” is particularly vulnerable to attack, and that someone could alter the information the President viewed on it—which could “have a huge impact on his beliefs and actions.” They also feared that someone could gain control of his Twitter account, “causing disastrous consequences for global stability,” or use it as a listening device to pick up sensitive conversations.
Also sited by the letter were photos from a recent White House visit by Intel CEO Brian Krzanich that showed a key still in the lock of a bag for classified material on Trump’s desk. The photo was called out by Senator Martin Heinrich of New Mexico in this Twitter post:
Never leave a key in a classified lockbag in the presence of non-cleared people. #Classified101 (Original Photo @AP https://t.co/F4KaPbX9Hw) http://pic.twitter.com/4GmKK8dp5K
— Martin Heinrich (@MartinHeinrich) February 10, 2017
Additionally, Lieu and the other representatives expressed concern over the continued use of outside e-mail accounts hosted by the Republican National Committee, and compliance with federal records law. “Reports indicate that a political e-mail system used by senior White House staff was hacked in December by a Russian intelligence agency, yet again raising the prospect of the White House being monitored or influenced by unfriendly powers,” Lieu and the others wrote. Federal law requires that all e-mails for official business on an outside e-mail system be forwarded or copied into a government e-mail system within 20 days.
The letter calls for the Oversight Committee to look into whether the President is using an unsecured device, whether Trump and the White House staff have been properly briefed and trained on both information security and operational security, and if “the President and the Office of the President [can] ensure that there are no missing e-mails, communications, and technological exchanges—in other words, can they confirm they are not actively being monitored?”
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