Waltz's team set up at least 20 Signal group chats for crises across the world

One nice side effect of Signal's importance for governmental/military use is that it helps keep it free for civilian use. They can't mandate a backdoor for something other parts of the government rely on to be secure.

I once heard a great anecdote to that effect, and to my embarrassment I can't recall the details to repeat here.

(And yes, I understand that there are limits on what is appropriate to share with civilian hardware on a civilian network, but the truth stands that part of the reason there's not a push to breach encryption in the US like there is in the UK is because Signal is relied upon even by the government when they need a private channel on civilian hardware.)

> They can't mandate a backdoor for something other parts of the government rely on to be secure.

This is a strong assumption.. A government is a collection of people. While there might not exactly be warring factions in the US government, there are certainly numerous agencies and organizations that operate under varying degrees of independence.