"On Thursday Reuters published a photograph of Waltz checking his mobile phone during a cabinet meeting held by Donald Trump. The screen appears to show messages from various top level government officials, including JD Vance, Tulsi Gabbard, and Marco Rubio.
At the bottom of Waltz’s phone’s screen is a message that looks like Signal’s regular PIN verification message. This sometimes appears to encourage users to remember their PIN, which can stop people from taking over their account.
But the message is slightly different: it asks Waltz to verify his “TM SGNL PIN.” This is not the message that is displayed on an official version of Signal.
Instead TM SGNL appears to refer to a piece of software from a company called TeleMessage which makes clones of popular messaging apps but adds an archiving capability to each of them. A page on TeleMessage’s website tells users how to install “TM SGNL.” On that page, it describes how the tool can “capture” Signal messages on iOS, Android, and desktop."
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"Israel’s tech world is small, and Israel leads the world in exports of spyware and digital forensics tools. Former Israeli Defense Forces intelligence officials have gone on to found tech companies, especially in the field of spyware and surveillance. Companies like NSO Group, maker of the controversial Pegasus spyware, were founded and staffed by Israeli officials. The company was sanctioned by the Biden Administration. Israeli spyware firms have become known for selling their products to oppressive regimes around the world, where the tech is often used to target human rights advocates, journalists, and dissidents.
TeleMessage was founded in 1999, the same year its founder left his Israeli military intelligence job. The company found early success in the burgeoning world of text message technology. The company grew and eventually pivoted to focusing on extracting messages from common communication platforms for the purposes of archiving, often to meet record keeping regulations.
Tech professionals have moved between companies like TeleMessage and some of the leading Israeli spyware firms. For example, Alon Falah, a technical support manager at TeleMessage until 2021, left the company to join NSO Group, according to his LinkedIn profile. Another employee, Itzhak Demoza, joined Telemessage last year after a stint at Cellebrite, maker of hardware and software widely used by law enforcement to extract data from smartphones."