The Ghost Protocol: More than journalists in your group chats

On 11 March 2025, The Atlantic journalist, Jeffrey Goldberg was added to a Signal chat where senior US Government officials were discussing the United States’ military strikes in Yemen.

This happened to Goldberg as an accident. Yet, security services around the world have pushed for this to be part of their clandestine surveillance operations: the so-called “Ghost Protocol”.

Governments have been trying to gain access to private online conversations since private online conversations have existed. We have seen examples of governments directly attacking the use of encryption since the 1990s, trying to undermine encryption standards, to directly attacking the devices these conversations are on. Even in the past month, we have challenged the UK Government’s use of secret orders to gain access to Apple’s end-to-end encrypted iCloud services.

The most sinister plan is ‘The Ghost Protocol’. This plan allows government officials to secretly add themselves to any conversation on any platform - the target being end-to-end encrypted chats, like Signal. They do this by adding a “user” silently to the conversation who can decrypt the messages and is invisible to the other participants, much like how Goldberg was able to lurk unnoticed in the Signal chat that was planning strikes in Yemen.

It is crucial that when we message using “secure” methods, that those messages are actually exchanged securely. We may not all be discussing military plans like the group chat Goldberg was added to, but the conversations we do have are personal. Unwarranted interference has a chilling effect on our individual autonomy and our ability to exercise our fundamental rights to freedom of expression and association.

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