This leaves us asking once again the Casey Stengel refrain: Can’t anybody here play this game?

The story of the day is that Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg ended up on a group text message chain discussing — before the fact — the U.S. military strikes on the Houthi pirates. (Following the paradigm rule of journalistic ethics, Goldberg kept this to himself until after the strikes, then published much of the text chain.) The message chain was on Signal, an app that is supposed to be for secure messaging, and the group included the vice president, the secretaries of state, defense, and treasury, the director of national intelligence, the head of the CIA, and national security adviser Mike Waltz.

Waltz appears to have added Goldberg to the group by accident, possibly mistaking him for someone else with the same initials. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, ironically, insisted in one of the messages that the group “do all we can to enforce 100% OPSEC” [operational security] to keep the plans a secret, yet Hegseth went on to (in Goldberg’s telling) send messages that “contained operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing.”

This leaves us asking once again the Casey Stengel refrain that has become louder with each passing year of the past several presidential administrations: Can’t anybody here play this game? Specifically, does anybody understand how to use technology without compromising security? Donald Trump, usually the last person to be credited for reticence, seems to have been the only person involved in this decision who had the good sense not to put anything in writing over his phone.

The chronic trouble of our leadership class with information security — especially of the digital variety — has led to a seemingly endless series of scandals over the past decade and a half (longer, if you count CIA Director John Deutsch’s taking home laptops with classified information, for which he ended up being pardoned by Bill Clinton). Consider just a partial list:

What I must yet again ask, at this late date, is why we can’t manage to stanch this by establishing more regular systems and protocols. I get that some of these are matters of age and generation in technology use, but Waltz is 51, and Hegseth is 44. Once Goldberg was added, it may have been hard for other recipients to notice him, but should somebody more junior not have been able to double-check all the recipients? The failure here was not even a matter of technology but of user error — still, it ought not to be that hard to just establish closed systems where one need not worry about fat-fingering a list of recipients.

Over a decade on, we seem to learn nothing.