President Trump refuses to abide by security protocol that would protect his communication devices from possible hacking and surveillance by both domestic and foreign bad actors.
The president uses at least two iPhones, according to one of the officials. The phones – one capable only of making calls, the other equipped only with the Twitter app and pre-loaded with a handful of news sites – are issued by White House Information Technology and the White House Communications Agency, an office staffed by military personnel that oversees White House telecommunications.
While aides have urged the president to swap out the Twitter phone on a monthly basis, Trump has resisted their entreaties, telling them it was “too inconvenient,” the same administration official said.
The president has gone as long as five months without having the phone checked by security experts. It is unclear how often Trump’s call-capable phones, which are essentially used as burner phones, are swapped out.
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Trump’s call-capable cell phone has a camera and microphone, unlike the White House-issued cell phones used by Obama. Keeping those components creates a risk that hackers could use them to access the phone and monitor the president’s movements. The GPS location tracker, however – which can be used to track the president’s whereabouts – is disabled on Trump’s devices.
President Trump's stubbornness poses a very real national security threat.
Former national security officials are virtually unanimous in their agreement about the dangers posed by cell phones, which are vulnerable to hacking by domestic and foreign actors who would want to listen in on the president’s conversations or monitor his movements.
“Foreign adversaries seeking intelligence about the U.S. are relentless in their pursuit of vulnerabilities in our government’s communications networks, and there is no more sought-after intelligence target than the president of the United States,” said Nate Jones, the former director of counterterrorism on the National Security Council under President Barack Obama and the founder of Culper Partners, a consulting firm.
While the president has the authority to override or ignore the advice provided by aides and advisers for reasons of comfort or convenience, Jones said, “Doing so could pose significant risks to the country.”
The president uses his phone a lot. Two interesting notes from this particular report include the fact that Trump is calling Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), one of the loudest voices in Congress attacking the Russia probe, regularly, and he sometimes is doing it from a blocked number.
Dozens of Trump’s friends and advisers testify to his frequent cell phone use. Florida congressman Matt Gaetz, a Trump confidant, told POLITICO in April that he hears from the president either late at night or early in the morning, sometimes from a blocked number and sometimes from “a 10-digit number that starts with a 202 area code.”
Newly released investigation-related testimony raised the question of who called Donald Trump Jr. from a blocked number on June 6, 2016 between his calls to Emin Agalarov regarding the June 9, 2016 Trump Tower meeting. Don Jr. told investigators he had no idea who called him.
‘Too inconvenient’: Trump goes rogue on phone security (Politico)