This is not hard: What’s okay for communicating some important information is not okay for communicating classified national defense intelligence.

What’s a good analogy for Signal, the commercial, publicly available encryption app?

Have you ever watched a public hearing of the Senate or House Intelligence Committee? It happens almost every time: A witness from one of our intelligence agencies is asked a question that, whether the interrogating lawmaker realizes it or not, calls for an answer that includes national defense information — in the main, classified intelligence.

Now, there is nothing improper about an intelligence official’s coming to testify at a public hearing; it would be improper and potentially illegal, however, for the official to communicate the classified information in the public setting. Our intelligence officials know this very well because their access to classified information is conditioned on their training in how it is to be handled and their commitment not to disseminate it to unauthorized persons or in unauthorized settings.

So what happens next is a commonplace: The agency official will tell the panel that he or she cannot answer the question in public, but may be willing to address the matter in the closed, classified setting — in which the only people present (including members of these select intelligence committees) have the appropriate security clearances.

Not hard to grasp, right? It’s not a problem to be testifying at the public hearing, but it’s a huge problem if classified information is disclosed at the public hearing. Hence — we see it again and again, with no controversy — the the official stops, calls time-out, and tells the committee the matter can only be discussed in a classified setting. Problem solved.

If you understand that, then you understand the game the Trump administration is playing regarding the now-infamous chat that top administration national security officials conducted on Signal.

On Wednesday, National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard provided some audacious testimony to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. With a straight face, Director Gabbard claimed that the patently classified national defense information about imminent U.S. military strikes on the Houthis in Yemen was not classified. I will come back to that in a separate post — with another analogy that I hope will make the administration’s machinations easier to pierce.

Just as unconvincingly, Gabbard also attempted to take on the fully justified derision Trump national security officials are taking for having their conversation on Signal. Gabbard asserted that it is now standard for Signal to be installed on the government phones that security officials are given for the conduct of official business. Officials, she explained, are encouraged to use such end-to-end encryption applications when “coordinating” their activities.

“Coordinating” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in the administration’s messaging amid this scandal.

Trump’s national security officials would have you believe that, because Signal is loaded onto the government phones they are given, it’s perfectly fine to have any kind of conversation, no matter how sensitive, on Signal. Ergo, you’re supposed to believe that there was no problem for officials, including Gabbard herself, to have conducted the chat they had in the couple of hours prior to the commencement of the U.S. attack on the Houthis — especially since they keep implausibly insisting that nothing classified was disclosed.

That’s ridiculous. Other than by degree, the administration’s story is not different from pretending that it would have been fine to have the conversation without Signal as long as the officials were using government phones — after all, the government did give them the phones so they could “coordinate” and “communicate.”

What you won’t hear these officials say in their word salads is that it’s permissible to communicate about national defense matters and disclose patently classified information while using Signal. That’s because it’s not. In government regulations, Signal is not an authorized system for transmitting government secrets. Period.

And on that point, by the way, I’ve heard a number of administration defenders ask: Well, how do we know that the government systems are really more secure than Signal? Sorry, that’s a red herring. Let’s assume for argument’s sake, and against the assessment of intelligence experts, that Signal is every bit as good as the White House situation room or the Pentagon “tank.” The stubborn fact remains: In order to get privileged access to classified information, officials have to commit to follow the rules. The rules say officials have to use government-approved secure systems.

Officials do not get to make up their own rules because they personally suppose Signal is just as secure as the government channels. That’s a violation of the terms under which the official gets exposure to the nation’s secrets. No one knows that better than these officials, who have government-approved SCIFs (sensitive compartmentalized information facilities) in their homes and in places they regularly travel. They have to use SCIFs because, as they well know, using Signal is not allowed.

Signal is like the public portion of a congressional Intelligence Committee hearing. If an official wants to “coordinate” on it, fine. Use it to set up meetings, or perhaps even to give a very general description of the agenda for the meeting, in addition to other non-sensitive matters. It’s somewhat more secure than conventional text and email. Nevertheless, the moment the “coordination” starts evolving into a substantive intelligence conversation in which classified information is likely to be exchanged, national security officials know they have to get off Signal. They must proceed to SCIFs or other secure locations approved by the government’s intelligence community for the dissemination of national defense intelligence — just like, in congressional testimony, they’d need to pause the public hearing and go into closed session.

The fact that this is easy to understand (or should be) doesn’t mean it’s always easy to do. To the contrary, it’s often very inconvenient. These are all very busy people. They work hard in high anxiety positions with enormous responsibilities. They are on duty 24/7 and on the move all the time. It would be much easier if Signal were an option for the top secret matters they absolutely need to discuss.

But it’s not . . . and they know it’s not.