Thanks for that clarification.
But the concept of this isn't good. I would say they need some kind of special phone that can only accept and send text and calls to like phones. So even if a number was entered by accident or intentional, unless the receive has the same type of phone, they won't get the message. Butt dials do happen and you dont' want to butt dial someone during a sensitive discussion.
I don't see why Pete is the head focus for the fake news. He wasn't the one who started the group chat.
Even as a mistake, that person should be disciplined for allowing an unauthorized person to be in the chat.
Story time
My friend was an officer with a communication MOS. She said the comms usually be jacked up in Iraq due to user error. So often, communication was made via sat phones. Unsecured, but it worked better. This was for minor stuff to bigger things like air strikes. It was common practice, so no one got in trouble. Her gripe was that on the radio, there's 1 knob that soldiers are told not to turn, leave it as is. Often, it gets turned. This is the IT help desk call "is the unit plugged in".
Then when she was in training, cells were often used as well due to the same problem above.
Since we're honoring the age-old Hawaiian tradition of talk story ...
i created a chat server on the "high side' network using standard workstation and PC machines. I used public domain, off-the-shelf software and integrated a half dozen applications and add-ons to field a secure, well-managed chat server farm. I also installed a distributed gateway that allowed users to connect to the same IP address, but the actual chat connection would be directed to the server with the least number of connections to increase performance. 1,000 client connections on a single server tends to make the chat server unusable. We had 4 servers.
It became the Pacific theater's most reliable and robust form of communications other than secure phones, but something anyone with a device connected to the network could access. it was so popular, the Pacific Navy used it for exercises, Persian gulf deployments, and even to transmit launch orders for cruise missiles at the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
The system was bullet proof from a hacker standpoint. Chat rooms with standardized names were stood up using BOTa. Each room had one administrator plus 2 admin BOTs which allowed anyone with the passwords to use them as administrators (like me). Anyone granted access to a room had to be approved by a POC from that unit designated to grant access. That information was sent to the room admin who then added the user to the room's list of authorized participants. The user then received a password that was required upon entering the chat room. Those passwords were sent to only secured, trusted email accounts.
During several exercises, the system was targeted heavily by the Red Team "Black hat" players whose job it was to find vulnerabilities and to try and infiltrate the exercise from outside. They were given access to the network, having proven they could easily gain access through a number of means.
The main objective for the hackers was to try and gain access to our chat rooms, obviously because they could eaves drop on everything as well as have the chance to interject misinformation. There was usually a proposed replacement for my chat system set up in tandem to determine if it was operationally secure. Since I was using IRC Chat, something the Navy deemed insecure (because they didn't spend time evaluating how it can be made secure), they were chomping at the bit to get rid of it in favor of a "more secure" and expensive chat product.
In every exercise, the new product was used on day one while mine was only configured for operations but not yet being used. By day 2, the new system had been so thoroughly compromised by the Red Team, using that chat was halted and continued on my system. Nobody was ever able to attack or access the chat servers I built. Fleet commanders were sending us praise saying our system enabled them for the first time to conduct operations and a hot wash post-deployment meeting via chat while still afloat.
Long story short -- protecting communications regardless of the client app is not new. Someone with the experience and tasking should be able to make it that way whether it's on an approved secured network or not. not everyone has immediate access to high side networks, so I understand how operations can't be at a standstill until everyone needed is able to be in front of a properly encrypted connection. In those cases, there should be at a minimum someone involved to manage the technical and administrative tasks required to make the online meetings secure and available to everyone who should be participating -- and no one else.