DOJ confirms FBI Director Kash Patel's personal email was hacked

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/03/doj-confirms-fbi-director-kash-patels-personal-email-was-hacked/

66•sebastian_z•1h ago

Comments

trhway•47m ago

Hegseth - Signal app

Noem - habeas corpus definition she gave at the Congress hearing

Kennedy Jr - vaccines and the rest of his view on medicine

Now Patel's unhackable FBI.

I think the world has changed, and i really need to update my expectations of what is new normal. It is like in tech when paradigm shift happens, and you're either go with the new paradigm or get irrelevant.

ToucanLoucan•44m ago

“Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.” ~Hannah Arendt

trhway•40m ago

i'm from USSR, so pretty familiar with it. The issue here is whether it is a fluke, or the world is really going into new phase where totalitarianism and authoritarianism are going to become dominating state of affairs.

For example many attribute rise of totalitarianism back then in 20th century to the power of broadcasting radio and "formation of mass society". We have a similarly transformative factor now - social media. And with the new tech power - propaganda (sounds dated, today it is more like mind control) through social media and total surveillance plus AI "minority report" - we can get a hyper-totalitarianism orders of magnitude more totalitarian than those of the 20th century. And may be we're witnessing the birth of such a new world order.

epistasis•6m ago

The people of the US were converted into functional Putin-subservient Russians for the last election, and the media environment is not getting better, and in fact seems to be getting much worse.

However there is revolt amongst a good chunk of the fractured coalition that barely brought Trump into office.

Trump's Epstein coverup and sheltering of Ghislaine Maxwell took off the shine with a large number of people. The ghastly behavior around the deaths of major figures takes off more. Exempting producers of the pesticide glyphosate has taken off most of the MAHA coalition. And then, of course the wars, when he promised not to launch any and accused his opponent of doing exactly what he's currently doing...

It remains to be seen just how permanent this is, and whether the post-Trump US can be reattached to reality instead of reality TV, but I use hope.

add-sub-mul-div•38m ago

I don't think people appreciate enough how much it mattered that Trump was a celebrity buffoon/reality show personality for decades before "politics". Stupid people eat that up. Other Trumpy candidates have not been able to reproduce his success. Let's not assume this is the new normal.

dogemaster2025•16m ago

I don’t think people appreciate enough how much it mattered that Trump was the only candidate explicitly saying they were working to Make America Great Again, as opposed to foreign interests or illegals.

conductr•35m ago

If Idiocracy was made today, I wonder how far in the future they’d place it. In 2006, they thought 500 years which seems optimistic now.

thereisnospork•5m ago

Future? I'm thinking a Borat style mockumentary in the present.

pwarner•17m ago

Only the best people

chao-•45m ago

From the administration that brought us "We are currently clean on OPSEC", I can't claim surprise. Disappointment, but not surprise.

Nor, however, can I take the statements of malicious actors at face value. They hacked a personal email address, but that does not mean "the FBI’s security was nothing more than a joke".

calvinmorrison•9m ago

These government officials are idiots. Jeffery Epstein, idiot. Why do even rich and powerful use easily hackable stuff?

Lest us not forget bObama@yahoo.com or the IT guy who worked for the Clinton foundation who posted about bleachbit on recdit

unparagoned•40m ago

It’s all fine since he didn’t use it for official business right, right…

justonceokay•38m ago

Or more likely unofficial business

pnw•36m ago

Based on the links in the articles, it's personal photographs and a resume from an old Gmail account. The resume dates from 2017.

noosphr•37m ago

Imagine a world where gpg encryption was the norm instead of something that only works reliably in Emacs.

jonathanstrange•34m ago

This wouldn't have happened if Kash Patel used Emacs, that's right.

k310•32m ago

A great many experts in the military, medicine, disaster relief, and cybersecurity { the list goes on } were fired.

It's almost as if the nation were being weakened on purpose.

Don't get mad, get Vlad. Or just prepare for the long-desired Rapture.[0] and which politicians seem to be working very hard to being about (the Apocalypse part, anyway)

[0] https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/29/us/iran-israel-evangelicals-p...

> Prophecy, not politics, may also shape America’s clash with Iran

So, is prophecy OK in a pitch deck? Asking for a friend.

RobRivera•18m ago

When do the Raptor puppets go on sale?

leereeves•11m ago

Were any of the people fired responsible for security on personal gmail accounts?

idiotsecant•10m ago

Its both dumber and more dangerous than that. Competent people are not valuable to governments that value loyalty more than competence.

sv123•18m ago

Clowns, all the way down.

jameson•7m ago

I wonder how many others are hacked but remain undiscovered

mikkupikku•3m ago

Unfair to clowns, a noble profession.

upheaval7276•12m ago

I'm no fan of this administration, at all, but this seems like a big fat nothingburger. They hacked a personal gmail account, not a government account, not government infra. Why is this not a failing of Google instead of the government? And surely the hackers would have eagerly released anything damning, but nothing damning seems to exist. What am i missing here?

margalabargala•5m ago

It's not a big deal, for the reasons you mentioned. But it's interesting to a lot of people, and therefore newsworthy.

upheaval7276•2m ago

it's definitely newsworthy, no doubt there. but i see so many people in this thread pointing to this as somehow a failing of the fbi, which it's not. i'm all for calling out this administration for its many many failings, but this is not one of them, and calling this a failure of the administration just hurts the credibility of everyone pointing out real issues with this administration.

m_ke•4m ago

just think of what could someone do if they got into your personal email account?

upheaval7276•1m ago

yes, and...?

dlev_pika•8m ago

I still can’t get over the fact that *Kash “Stay in my lane” Patel* is heading the FBI

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