The White House Communications Agency, staffed with military information
security experts, is in charge of making sure that the President’s
cellular phone isn’t getting hacked by adversaries who might otherwise
be able to listen in on his calls, capture his messages, intercept his
search history, and remotely operate his camera and microphone. Donald
Trump routinely ignores their advice.
According to multiple internal sources who talked to a team from
Politico, Trump feels that the security advice he’s received is “too
inconvenient” and so he’s decided that he knows enough about “the cyber”
to just wing it.
Trump refuses to use hardened, secure cellphones. Instead, he uses
regular, consumer, off-the-shelf phones (one from Apple and the other
from Samsung) and routinely refuses to allow his security staff to
inspect them to determine whether they have been compromised (according
to one source, the President once made his staffers wait five months to
inspect his phone).
Trump also refuses to make secure phone calls using the WHCA’s internal
switchboard process because he likes to call people (possibly Sean Hannity) late at night from his lonely bedroom, which his wife refuses to share with him.
It is undoubtedly true that foreign adversaries continuously seek to
hack the communications of the White House and the President; Michael
Kelly’s cellular phone was already hacked during the transition (Kelly
ignored security advice to get rid of the hacked device and continued to
use it for several months before finally giving it up) (because he is a
dumbass).
