Everyone in this administration has to know they’re spending the decade after Trump in front of the Congress and various investigators.
The DNC would have to make some serious changes, because the 2024 election was a perfect opinion poll on whether they have enough voters onboard the platform they’ve adopted to win a national election or a swing-state election. Running against a joke of a man, they lost. And the entire Democratic Party still hasn’t admitted to themselves why that happened.
I do hope a good third party moves into the massive power vacuum left by the DNC when it chased itself out of the mainstream into irrelevancy.
On the other hand trump isn't very loyal to his people so far - remember the wasteland of trump advisors and officials in the first term getting convicted of various frauds without getting pardoned (or the lawyer on tape saying he needs a pardon for trying to overturn the election and him not getting it).
Not that it matters but I don't think Biden gave a blanket pardon to his entire staff I think he pardoned people who he thinks are dangerously and unfairly targeted by some extreme media like fauci and Bidens son hunter.
At the end of the day pretty much all of the limits of presidential power come from restraint, especially (but not exclusively) in todays world of a tame judiciary. If the president cares about or wants to be seen as caring about the rule of law it is a bad look to wantonly disregard it too often.
Yes, there are a lot of folks who want to believe everything their chosen guy does is absolutely right but realistically each bad thing chips away at their ability to ignore the evidence. I know several people who have lost faith in trump as the evidence continues to absolutely pile up that he doesn't match the values they were told to appreciate (rule of law, respect for the constitution, human rights, fairness, Christian values, intelligence). If he gives a blanket pardon to everyone that worked for him a few more people will say "wait, maybe the other side was right and this IS a huge abuse" so it's possible, especially if we continue to have elections, that we won't see this kind of thing.
Not to pick on this in particular – nearly all the reporting on this starts and ends with "Signal is insecure" as if that was all it took to be wrong. And in other eras, that was enough.
The man likes Signal. For better or worse, he is the Secretary of Defense...The man we've entrusted to help coordinate our national defense.
There's so many questions I genuinely don't have an answer for...
Has Congress made it illegal to use an off-brand messaging app for secure communications? _Why_ is it insecure? What is the probability that China is reading these messages in real-time? 100%? 25%? 0.2%?
We need to start from the presumption that the people-in-power don't care that it's always been done this way...in fact, they have a ton of pressure to be different. But, in some cases, these people may be willing to listen to reasonable arguments which clearly establish _why_ using Signal is unreasonably worse than using US Government Issue messaging.
Here, his signal comms are likely top secret and we would have no way of knowing if his office followed the legally allowed step of forwarding after the fact for many years.
The thing I am more bothered by is why would he take a picture of his desk, thereby narrowing the attack profile.
I mean, thinking the DoD is actually defending the U.S. is where you went wrong. The stakes are so incredibly low that none of this actually matters.
> Has Congress made it illegal to use an off-brand messaging app for secure communications? _Why_ is it insecure? What is the probability that China is reading these messages in real-time? 100%? 25%? 0.2%?
Is your point that, in the space of your own lack of knowledge, that reasonable rational may exist? Could you share what gives you trust in this administration to be so generous?
- one side ignored Clinton using a private server as sec of state
- this one ignores using Signal
I haven’t seen arguments about what the standard is supposed to be or why this in particular is egregious. That would be more convincing than hyperventilating.
Edit:
If you read the article, there are both classified/secured and unsecured lines available at the station. So what specifically is the problem the administration uses Signal together with unsecured comms?
I don’t follow the allegation its mere presence is problematic, when discussing general communications with other parts of the administration. Especially when accessed via separate/dedicated machine (distinct from secured systems).
If you want to talk about the specifics of, eg, the Yemen war plans then do that — but this article does not.
> Federal agencies did, however, retrospectively determine that 100 emails contained information that should have been deemed classified at the time they were sent, including 65 emails deemed "Secret" and 22 deemed "Top Secret".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Clinton_email_controve...
That sounds a lot worse than what Hegseth is accused of, but didn’t derail her nomination nor draw widespread condemnation from Democrats.
That’s what I mean by “ignoring it”: the conclusion was bad but largely ignored by the party.
SecDef Lovett only rose to O-4 before going into the NYC business community and then becoming a Special Assistant to SecWar Stimpson in 1940. https://history.defense.gov/Multimedia/Biographies/Article-V...
SecDef McElroy came up through Proctor & Gamble, no government or military experience. https://history.defense.gov/Multimedia/Biographies/Article-V...
Just as a few examples of adequately-successful SecDefs coming from "unimpressive" paper resumes.
We don't need to argue about if he knew better; he did, from his own mouth. We need to argue about if it is ok and if it is ok for the people in power to do nothing about it because it's "their team".
At some point soon we need to realize we the people are on one team and everyone saying otherwise is trying to hurt us.
This might be good for a generic politician running for an election to say, but it's not true. We're not on the same team; we're different groups of people with different values who hate each other. Our politicians are the people we've voted to represent us. It's not like Trump, for example, hoodwinked Republicans; they like everything he's doing, and have for ten years, and a lot of it is because people like me hate him. We're not on the same team.
I hold this position and I don't think it's uncommon. Plenty of people think if something is wrong then it doesn't matter who does it.
There's definitely perception bias. Usually conversations are short when we're in agreement. Doesn't create engagement. Doesn't make for good news
So, maybe 10 of you care, but the assymetry is beyond apparent.
For that matter, I remember when Obamas tan suit was horrible unpresidential infraction amd lack of respect. Same people voted for Trump not a peep about respectability.
Do you think the difference will remain at this level through the next election cycle?
I think plenty of people see massive amounts of equivalence and are more caught up in other, more urgent piles in Washington’s reinvention of the Augean Stables.
The emails scandal was on for months and got invoked during election by conservative pundits, politicians. Again and again and again and again. They made it a whole big thing, pretending to care about security.
So yeah, it matters. The consistent track record of just extremely one sided care for security, respectability, lies and what not actually matter a lot. Now we know that conservatives complaining about X does not mean they care about X. They dont, they are ok when one of them does worst. It is just hypocrisy.
None of that is surprising, and I expect the current $SHITSTORM_DU_JOUR to get a lot more amplification in 2028 than in May of 2025, which is the same pattern as happened in scandal A's emails.
She was Secretary of State from 2009 to 2013. We heard a ton about the scandal in the 2016 election cycle [when it was convenient and useful politically], not in 2009-2013.
I'm friends with several retired military officers. They tend towards red, but they're absolutely incensed over the Hegseth topic, especially the ones who flew pointy jets.
N-gram viewer: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Clinton+email+...
There are two issues. First, official communications about the workings of government ought to occur on government platforms, so that there's a permanent record for the communication. (As others have mentioned, this is required by the Federal Records Act.)
Second, the Pentagon has limited phone service and limited public internet access by design. The other computers in the office, while for unclassified material, are not (as I understand it) connected to the public internet like Hegseth's personal laptop is.
That said, I have no issue if Hegseth wants to use Signal to make dinner plans with other government officials.
Unfortunately the list of politicians who either don't care about records of their communications being properly kept, or who went out of their way to keep their comms "off the books" is long.
We should want to hold all of them to account, not just this one.
We should and do. FBI investigated Clinton because of her emails.
The European Commission ended up in court trying to keep Ursula von der Leyen's messages secret 'claiming that the texts were “by [their] nature short-lived” and were not covered by the EU’s freedom of information law'
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/feb/10/i-aske...
https://www.politico.eu/article/ursula-von-der-leyen-eu-comm...
Outcome? A(nother) nothingburger.
Sure. They still wound up in court. Hegseth hasn't had to go to court to defend himself because he hasn't even been investigated. You really have to go back to the Austro-Hungarian Empire to find these levels of exploitable ineptitude at the highest ranks of a major military structure.
That case was brought by the New York Times, not any oversight body or investigative function of the EU, which makes it even more cringe-worthy.
"The European Commission faced an embarrassing grilling for almost five hours on Friday as top EU judges cast doubt on the executive’s commitment to transparency on the Covid-19 vaccine negotiations. The EU institution defended itself in a packed EU court in Luxembourg in the so-called Pfizergate case, brought by the New York Times and its former Brussels bureau chief Matina Stevis-Gridneff."
The NYT is presumably welcome to try to take Hegseth to court?
The Times sued to get Von der Leyen to share information. Hegseth already does that because he's an idiot. To my knowledge, SecDef isn't subject to FOIA in a meaningful way.
...and failed
> To my knowledge, SecDef isn't subject to FOIA in a meaningful way
...and as it turned out, neither is VdL.
But again, you're comparing non-disclosure to irresponsible disclosure. VdL didn't send highly sensitive scramble times to a rando.
Is there evidence that SECDEF 'acted with criminal intent'?
We've already clarified that '[being] extremely careless' is not enough for a court case.
[I have a mental picture of a Venn diagram with three circles: "Politicians", "Idiots" and "Criminals"...]
Tough to say if there’s no investigation!
> We've already clarified that '[being] extremely careless' is not enough for a court case
Investigation.
Correct, and this was the outcome:
[FBI director James Comey said] "Clinton had been 'extremely careless' but recommended that no charges be filed because Clinton did not act with criminal intent, the historical standard for pursuing prosecution"
Is '[not] acting with criminal intent' really the standard we think we want to hold our elected officials to?
Yes, mens rea is a deeply-precedented standard that's a good default.
(From the other side the pond) it does seem that legal standards such that one are applied very selectively in the USA, apparently depending heavily on the political leanings of those involved in any (potential) case.
On the other hand, at least you do actually run elections to pick your POTUS, this side of the Atlantic we get the President of the European Commission based on a back-room deal and a Soviet-style "vote" in the Parliament with no choice. To top it off, when she first got the job in 2019, VdL wasn't even a candidate for it during the immediately preceeding European elections.
The DoD kit makes it a little bit harder to add randos to chats where one needlessly posts tactical air strike details.
My point is that “make liberals sad” is also a stated policy goal of this administration.
I think this article is about one of two things…either there is a possibility that SecDef using Signal represents an ongoing, material national security crisis that should be a concern for all Americans…or it’s really the author grieving for a time when they felt safer because the strict protocols of confidentiality signaled (pun intended) a sense of seriousness about government secrets.
If this is a material security threat, I need a lot of writers to explain why because most people don’t know. If it’s a sad liberal, the result will be counter-productive and large numbers of people-in-power will read this article as a win for their team.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/timeline-key-figures-found-l...
I think SecDef Hegseth is actually an even bigger disaster than SecDef Austin. That said....I think the Deep State/ military industrial complex/ Israel lobby is trying to get Hegseth fired because he's one of the Big 3 (Vance/Hegseth/Gabbard) opposed to going kinetic with Iran. But he's making it really easy for his adversaries, because he legitimately sucks at some foundational skills for management at his level.
Because personal smartphones aren't considered secure for protecting classified information. Signal in and of itself might be fine when used properly, but it doesn't matter when the underlying platform is consumer-grade security. The risk of side-channel attacks is astronomical.
>My point is that “make liberals sad” is also a stated policy goal of this administration.
>If it’s a sad liberal, ...
I'm not sure any of that furthers whatever argument you're trying to make. Signal being used in that manner didn't only violate a myriad of established protocols, but it was straight up illegal on top of it. In any normal political climate we would've seen resignations from day one, regardless of party.
Yes. The law requires that classified information be handled under certain standards.
> _Why_ is it insecure?
Classified data is being transmitted on an unsecured device. If Hegseth's personal phone has Uber, Tinder, ... whatever apps installed, that software is running on a device that's contains national secrets.
Systems which handle classified data are meant to be airgapped from the normal internet/normal software.
The issue is not that signal is insecure, but rather that sensitive government information demands additional precaution (e.g. airgapping).
There's a separate issue that there are legal requirements for maintaining records of government communication. Using a personal device (especially with disappearing messages) is illegal since it doesn't maintain this documentation.
Additionally, classified information is tracked to see who read it and when. In the event of a security leak, this can help isolate where the leak happened. If the information gets posted on Signal, then there's nothing more that can be tracked.
> For better or worse, he is the Secretary of Defense...The man we've entrusted to help coordinate our national defense.
That's not the way rule of law works. The Secretary of Defense doesn't get to _decide_ we're doing things differently now. His actions, as well as the actions of his staff, are bound by the laws that congress has passed.
> We need to start from the presumption that the people-in-power don't care that it's always been done this way...in fact, they have a ton of pressure to be different. But, in some cases, these people may be willing to listen to reasonable arguments which clearly establish _why_ using Signal is unreasonably worse than using US Government Issue messaging.
The onus should not be on the general public to convince the Secretary of Defense to adhere to bog standard requirements for handling sensitive information. If he has an idea, "I think using Signal on my personal phone to discuss imminent military actions is better than using a secure line," he could push that idea forward. Have the Pentagon's security staff evaluate the idea. Instead, he simply did it.
Real-time might be nice but there's value in reading material at this level with almost any delay.
In 1949 a US counter-intelligence program(me), the Venona project[1] decrypted Soviet cables from 1945 which made it almost certain the First Secretary to the British Embassy in Washington DC [2] was a Soviet asset. That wouldn't have happened if the Soviets hadn't misused their channels of communication.
[1] https://www.osti.gov/opennet/manhattan-project-history/Event... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Philby
It isn’t enough to say “don’t use Signal”, at some point they need to address the reality that there are no functional alternatives.
Right next to that computer is a "Cisco IP Phone 8851 with a 14-key expansion module." That phone "connects the President, the National Security Council, Cabinet members, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, intelligence agency watch centers, and others." IOW everybody ostensibly on that Signal chat except the editor of The Atlantic.
So now I'm questioning what "functional" means in this context. Does it mean "A thing I can type into while I'm at my desk and can continue to use while I'm taking a dump as long as I poop in public wifi", or does it mean "a thing that brings all top staff together to truly "have op-sec"?
Reading further it looks like he also had access to "SecDef Cables", which provides " interoperable, certified and accredited, multi-security level voice, video, and data services."
So there are functional alternatives, especially considering the functions I personally thought our government was looking for. Maybe they prioritized a safe space for Waltz to use his favorite emojis instead?
Check out what happened to the Signal FOSS fork.
Then check out what Molly is doing, and why.
Personally I'd favor Briar over Signal any day.
How can he do these things?
Turns out they all could've, they just chose not to.
Maybe we should strengthen the checks and balances, and Congress shouldn't abdicate ANY of its authority to the president. Maybe the system should work how it's supposed to instead of how is easiest.
> Turns out they all could've, they just chose not to.
That's not really the case, there are plenty of actions which he has tried to implement but have been blocked by courts.
This has never been the case; JFK appointed his little brother AG. The problem is that the Congress should be investigating and prosecuting the president but will not.
Independence of the Justice Department has been the norm since and because of Watergate.
For all the hate Trump gets, it’s Congress who’s created and who props up this monarchy.
https://www.scrippsnews.com/politics/president-trumps-first-...
https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/06/politics/cornyn-texas-senate-...
This list will contain more examples:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Republicans_who_oppose...
I personally started using signal some time around 2018 and I'm sure there were millions of users by the time Biden began his term.
https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/03/27/biden-authorized-sign...
"... it explicitly did not allow use of Signal to communicate "non-public" Department of Defense information, which would have included the conversations Trump administration officials had in their group chat."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petraeus_scandal
He was fired the day after it reached Obama's desk, and eventually got a slap on the wrist and two years' probation.
Overall, yes let's please investigate and appropriately punish wrongdoing at all levels.
1. The Defense Department bans the use of Signal for everybody else. Why is that? Why is the Secretary exempt?
2. As we've seen it's pretty easy to add unauthorized people to what should be secure communication channels where classified information is shared; and
3. There are laws around the preservation of governmental records. Expiring Signal messages seems like it's intentionally meant to circumvent these legal requirements ie it's illegal.
We're only 100 days in. We've got 1200 more days of this.
Same place everyone else is now. Nobody cares about the flagrant violations by the executive. This is the foxes walking around freely now.
NB: I’m not arguing that this change in policy was done after a careful Chesterton’s Fence analysis and weighing of all relevant factors, but it would seem stranger if a new leader couldn’t change any policies than if they can.
edit: To the lazy down voters. Address the 'my side never does anything wrong' issue and I might concede.
At some level of wealth you reach a point where no one can get to you physically. You're completely physically safe and isolated and can't be hurt. That means that the only way someone can get to you is through communicating with you and making you hurt yourself.
That means that social media is your only weakness. This is how adversaries can affect your plans and goals and disrupt your mind. Yet so many of these people seem so oblivious to this and are as terminally online as your average 4channer or facebook mom.
Does this speak to some sort of weakness in these kinds of people or the addictiveness of social media?
They're online because their followers are online. Social media may be the actual lead pipes to our empire [1].
So yes, they are absolutely weaker than leaders with digital hygiene. But the reason they're there is because the American public is similarly weaker.
[1] https://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/wi...
I think that direct connection is particularly attractive to the right kind of narcissist. Might be the best drug they've ever had.
In America, the lead pipes of their empire are the literal lead pipes still in use all over the country.
It would be a perfect psyop opportunity (I'm guessing) to trigger Trump's most enthusiastic fans.
Life is a reality TV show.
Someone with Trump's level of wealth could retire to an island and be like Elvis in his later years only dealing through people with intermediaries. They could have the best doctors, the best fitness regime and the best diet, and the best security and hundreds of miles between them and physical threats.
Title:”0-click deanonymization attack targeting Signal, Discord, other platforms”
Maybe not 0-click anymore, but still applies if the user browsing the internet.
Yes, I should have thought of that old and obvious one. It opens up a universe of possibilities.
https://news.sky.com/story/trumps-fixer-was-made-to-wait-eig...
His personal PC? Send Big Ballz his way to do some upgrades
https://www.npr.org/2025/04/15/nx-s1-5355896/doge-nlrb-elon-...
maybe a free Starlink dish
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/17/us/politics/elon-musk-sta...
I'm guessing there are a few scenarios where they could be tortured / blackmailed into compliance, even if it meant that the DoD would know about it in a day or two, and it would still be worth it.
E.g., shortly before a real fight over Taiwan began.
I really, really hope Hegseth gets his OPSEC act together, yesterday.
Signal’s protocol secures the message in transit. But their desktop app may or may not have client-side vulnerabilities. And if he clicks a link, you’re out of Signal and into the browser. If the link downloads a file, you’re into the OS.
(The recent cringe inducing Deniro series comes to mind)
Of course any film about war (or perhaps any topic) could be controversial to someone. The WW2 epics starring John Wayne or Sergei Eisenstein's Alexandr Nevsky are both examples where the directors twisted every detail and used every opportunity to present a political message that the viewer may or may not agree with. My view on this is that the director of Civil War, Alex Garland, makes statements with the film that I disagree with. He seems to not see the humanity in people, at least, in my opinion. The movie never doubles down on anything, there is no deeper examination of the characters in the film, they just are until they aren't anymore. This is similar to his 2018 film Annihilation, which is essentially a retelling of J.G. Ballard's The Crystal World, and all of those characters in some way lack a humanity (although I think this works much better in this film as you discover that each character goes into the zone to find something about themselves that is missing and what defines them as human to themselves). And similar to The Beach, the novel he wrote that was turned into the movie The Beach, starring Leonardo Dicaprio about vapid westerners partying in thailand, or 28 days later, the zombie movie he wrote directed by Danny Boyle. Garland seems to see life as cheap and meaningless across the books and movies he has created. He cares more about the visual trappings of the setting he creates than the humans who live there. In the case of Civil War, I find it offensive as it uses the visual style of documentary films about ongoing wars as a costume and set dressing for his movie. And this movie comes from a culture (American) that started a war in Iraq and has done basically no introspection as to how those decisions completely changed their society into what it is today. This also influences the Civil War film. The president is blamed exclusively for all bad things across america. The entire movie is about how everything is the president's fault but lets interview him to see why.
In a sense, you do have a point. I do happen to agree that it is rather hard to match the sheer.. what is a good word here.. brute reality of war. It is genuinely hard to do even with the best efforts, because, and this is kinda the point that I am slowly leading towards: that the reality has to meet the expectations of the audience.
And this is where I think you seem to fail at something you chastise the director/producer/maker(whole crew?), who made that movie. You seem to think that all wars all the same at all times; that the esperanto of violence would immediately cause a rather quick, normative default 'war' state that anyone could recognize. But you would be wrong... I don't want to bore you with the details, but just to give an idea consider the thought that it was not that long ago that soldiers wore rather colorful uniforms ( for a reason ) and it is only more recent wars that made them try to blend into environment. And this is but one, small, but visible difference, which will define how a war "looks" like.
<< It trivialized those experiences using them as a costume so american audiences could giggle in delight at the cinema without having to worry about the trappings of an actual war
Does it? I watched the movie, because I heard so many differing opinions that it got me curious. I try to abstain from most movies lately. Frankly, were it not for my wife, we wouldn't stream, but it is what it is.
But more to the point, which scene seemed trivial to you? Maybe my experience is different, because I watched it home?
On the other hand, I think, again, you misunderstand something. Just by default, most of us do make odd sounds, when were are nervous or uncomfortable ( yes, even laugh ). I do not want to assume too much, but I think even if you saw someone laugh, you might be misinterpreting something. My point is that, even if what you observed ( assuming it was observed ) is true, it is.. not the movie's fault. People's come in all shapes and sizes. I know I laughed hard that one time I thought I was close to dying.
<< And it did so all to tell a narrative that was somewhat against war-time journalism, painting their efforts as self absorbed and self serving.
I mean.. I did not get that impression, but I think that one could be safely left to interpretation.
<< I simply found the film disgusting and if people disagree with me that is fine.
I am not sure what to disagree with. That war is bad? That the movie does not capture its true horrors? That people suffer? You might be losing your point a little.
<< Of course any film about war (or perhaps any topic) could be controversial to someone.
I didn't see it as controversial. It was mildly interesting, but that was it. I personally think too many read too much into it, while Bill Hicks probably would have called it for what it is.
<< The WW2 epics starring John Wayne or Sergei Eisenstein's Alexandr Nevsky are both examples where the directors twisted every detail and used every opportunity to present a political message that the viewer may or may not agree with.
Ok. Now I know you are older than me. And to that I can only say: welcome to the cinema. It is not just WW2 movies. Everything now has a message. Sometimes, it is ridiculously overt, sometimes not.
<< My view on this is that the director of Civil War, Alex Garland, makes statements with the film that I disagree with.
Hwell, you probably should not have watched the movie or listened to him or both.
<< The movie never doubles down on anything, there is no deeper examination of the characters in the film, they just are until they aren't anymore.
Well that.. is an interesting criticism. I was going to respond reflexively, but I am going to ask you a real question that ties back to your original complaint how movies don't show the true horrors of war.
Would you agree, especially based on the lack of deeper examination phrase you used, that, the fact that all those deaths don't matter is in a sense a lot more terrifying than whatever deeper meaning you would want to add to those deaths. Meaningful death could mean immortality, but just not being there anymore is just that..
<< The president is blamed exclusively for all bad things across america. The entire movie is about how everything is the president's fault but lets interview him to see why.
Again, I think you misunderstand the audience of that movie, because that part is a very clear reflection of the real life in US.
I was going to continue, but I think it is clear that we disagree to a fair degree. Please let me know what you think. It may end up being an interesting conversation.
For the record, I was fortunate enough to not have experienced actual war, but some of family members did so I got to hear some of the stories. I am not even talking about a trained soldier doing a tour in a foreign land ( though that experience clearly gives you a close insight into what is happening in that time ). I am talking about the civilians just trying to survive.
I would like to see someone take up the idea of Canamerimex Union in a movie for kicks -- that is, the idea of Canada, California and Mexico forming a union on the west coast (and maybe continuing down the east coast, with Canada bridging both coasts)
I actually liked that little detail and don't think it's too farfetched. In real life those two states are currently on opposite sides of the political spectrum, but (iirc) we don't actually know why the civil war started in the movie and it seemed careful to avoid any kind of left vs right ideology. California and Texas both have a rich history of calls for secession from the union, and both have heavyweight economies that could allow them to stand as their own countries. I think if a civil war did break out where both states disagreed with the Federal government, they'd be more likely than you think to form an alliance.
But like I said, what was interesting to me about the movie was the fact that the two states were allies against the Federal government, without any mention of the modern day left vs right culture war. It's interesting to think about how such an alliance could come to be when we remove the things we suppose might spark a civil war today.
They're both ridiculously disenfranchised in the Senate.
They've both got significant antivax elements.
They've both got a very large Hispanic population and a portion of the Mexico border.
They're both large states with large economies and large governments; Whereas the Connecticut governor leading the Connecticut national guard is numerically incompetent at protesting the actions of the federal government, or has to overcome a bunch of coordination problems with other governors, they aren't and don't. Whereas Trump was free to seize the COVID pandemic supplies that Maryland bought and paid for, and redistribute them as political favors to red states, it would have been more difficult to do to a state with six times the population and a power center far from Washington. Any effort to oppressively regulate interstate trade is diminished somewhere you're dealing with large amounts of intrastate trade; Conversely, any impediments on trade with and travel to Mexico are going to be substantial issues in both Texas and California.
Oh, and the cast were invited to have a panel at a conference for the fucking Heritage Foundation!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_P52G4Kyq5M A look at the 24 world and it's insane violence by Jon Bois
Edit: and don’t forget this show was on fox.
There is a significant difference though which even Veep didn't predict - the people in Veep were still riding in the well-oiled deep-state car, while those clowns today is actively destroying that car.
Wrt. clowns - note that the most important Hegseth's staffer is his wife who was his producer back at Fox and basically does the same for him at the Pentagon.
People will talk about "politicians being incompetent", or act like actually anyone who has ever been in the office was like this. It's a pretty close and comforting way to deal with the reality of supporting a fraud without having to admit that you were duped.
What is the faulty reasoning here? Apart from "My side good, your side bad."
The faulty reasoning is saying that "this is just like previous administrations". It's not.
As opposed to the current guy, who hasn’t completed a sentence or a thought in twenty years and regularly goes off on tangents about black people eating pets. Great take. Love when you folks make it clear you’re just here to shitpost dishonestly.
Obama's and Hillary's blackberries were government procured devices altered by the NSA for security purposes.
The current US defense secretary isn't doing that.
Did they discuss details of upcoming military operations on it, though? Because that's a whole other level of wilful negligence.
Trump's admin won't get a fraction of that scrutiny.
For a High-Tech President, a Hard-Fought E-Victory
For more than two months, Mr. Obama has been waging a vigorous battle with his handlers to keep his BlackBerry, which like millions of other Americans he has relied upon for years to stay connected with friends and advisers. (And, of course, to get Chicago White Sox scores.)
He won the fight, aides disclosed Thursday, but the privilege of becoming the nation’s first e-mailing president comes with a specific set of rules.
“The president has a BlackBerry through a compromise that allows him to stay in touch with senior staff and a small group of personal friends,” said Robert Gibbs, his spokesman, “in a way that use will be limited and that the security is enhanced to ensure his ability to communicate.”
[...]
The presidency, for all the power afforded by the office, has been deprived of the tools of modern communication. George W. Bush famously sent a farewell e-mail address to his friends when he took office eight years ago.
While lawyers and the Secret Service balked at Mr. Obama’s initial requests to allow him to keep his BlackBerry, they acquiesced as long as the president - and those corresponding with him - agreed to strict rules. And he had to agree to use a specially made device, which must be approved by national security officials.
Because there was a difference in conduct. Obama consulted "lawyers and the Secret Service," "agreed to strict rules" and "use[d] a specially made device...approved by national security officials." Hegseth yelled YOLO before effectively tweeting target co-ordinates for our warbirds.
Yeah, but that bit about "handlers" of the President of the United States could also be a data point here. That term is usually used in conjunction with 'asset'.
Nixon once said "If the President does it, it's not illegal", despite that being just nowhere to be found in the Constitution in any form, yet that statement caused a bunch of right wing think tanks and policy institutions and voters to agree so wholeheartedly that they spent 70 years ensuring it would become reality.
Significant portions of the Republican party have been trying to make the US a monarchy again for decades.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/02/hillary-clin...
even bush fooled everyone he was literate (save from the two times he held books upsidedown) while in office.
"Some of the classified emails found on former secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s home server were even more sensitive than top secret, according to an inspector general for the intelligence community."
"Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott has apologised after a photo emerged of her sipping a can of M&S mojito on a London Overground train."
Meanwhile in Australia, the opposition leader visited a pub during his campaign and the crowd yelled at him to drink a beer out of his shoe.
I suspect this is somewhat common in history (this is not meant to excuse it), but we can’t tell because those people still wrote the narrative.
Can threaten authors with treason for negative books like he did in an EO recently. Change school curriculums. Then Maga can start revising history..
Was the 2025 recession from tarrifs? Nah it was Biden's inflation, or Ukraine aid. Actually.. didn't China impose tarrifs on US and US just reciprocated?
The reality will be altered and murky
I see this claim form time to time, but the unsavory side of WW2 is thought in classes, although not without controversy [1]:
Despite the efforts of the nationalist textbook reformers, by the late 1990s the most common Japanese schoolbooks contained references to, for instance, the Nanjing Massacre, Unit 731, and the comfort women of World War II, all historical issues which have faced challenges from ultranationalists in the past. The most recent of the controversial textbooks, the New History Textbook, published in 2000, which significantly downplays Japanese aggression, was shunned by nearly all of Japan's school districts.
On the other hand, after the occupation, GHQ had imposed a press code [2], i.e. censorship of mass media, that undoubtedly had an impact on postwar Japan, so you could say that the point still stands.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_history_textbook_cont...
The reality is already altered and murky. There has been a full-blown total information war over reality for several years now.
But Trump and MAGA, even if they win, won't win forever. There will someday be an end to this particular attempt to impose unreality. Then history (or at least the history of this) can be told honestly. (Or at least without MAGA spin. It may have a new spin, but it will at least be a different one.)
We don’t learn much in school about George Washington burning down Iroquois villages because we focus on other things. It’s entirely possible that Trump becomes so bad that the people who remember his misdeeds get erased like so many Iroquois or Vietnamese people or gays with HIV under these other presidents.
Here’s a clip [2] of Noam Chomsky describing the war crimes of every post WW2 president. Many people still regard those people as good presidents because they ignore their misdeeds.
One skirts the official tools like this to prevent accountability from a written record. Completely sensible if you're planning to be judged for your actions.
Public key encryption, like Signal uses, offers good security for most purposes. e.g. It's fantastic for credit card transactions. The problem with using it for transmitting state secrets is that you can't rely on it for long-term secrecy. Even if you avoid MITM or other attacks, a message sent via Signal today could be archived in ciphertext and attacked ten years from now with the hardware/algorithms of ten years in the future. Maybe Signal's encryption will remain strong in ten years. Maybe it will be trivial to crack. If the secrets contained in that message are still sensitive ten years from now, you have a problem.
Anything sent with Signal needs to be treated as published with an unknown delay. If you're sharing intelligence with the U.S., you probably shouldn't find that acceptable.
Right, but this is nothing new: Hegseth is only a recent example of Trump's camp mishandling sensitive docs; I'll bet there's been an inner secret Four Eyes group since the the Mar-a-Lago bathroom official-document-archive story dropped years ago.
What surprises me is that I expected Tulsi Gabbard to be the centre of mishandling allegations, not SecDef.
Tulsi is by all appearances more experienced in operating under the radar. That said, I’m sure she won’t disappoint.
It is clear there is a gap between how people imagine this works, or should work in theory, and how it actually works.
Because competence is a disqualifying attribute in the kakistocracy known as the Republican Party.
For lunch orders and office softball schedules. Not top secret information.
You shouldn't share state secrets with the US. They will be on or transferred between misconfigured cloud accounts. Some agency will eventually get authorization for analysis of them with an intention of financial espionage. The probable or confirmed loss of them will serve as a plausible deniability for the US when it misuses them.
Also, to be clear, Signal doesn't use public-key cryptography in the naive way (i.e. to encrypt/decrypt messages) as was/is possible with RSA. It uses asymmetric key pairs to first do a Diffie-Hellman key exchange, i.e. generate ephemeral symmetric keys, which are then used for encryption/decryption. This then also guarantees forward secrecy, see https://signal.org/blog/asynchronous-security/ . (Add to that they incorporate an additional post-quantum cryptographic scheme these days, and I'm probably omitting a lot of other details.)
Approximately 30,000 people go to work in the Pentagon every day. There are areas in the building that are SCIFs and they don't allow cell phones and laptops. But the majority of the building is an office building used for office building type stuff. Employees and contractors bring their personal cellphones and mobile devices in there every day.
Forcing the reader to parse thru the literary devices in order to get to the argument weakens the argument.
Edit: I didn't state something perhaps I should have. Symmetric key is considered more secure because public key is more complicated so more room for side channel mistakes, and the computation needes to break public keys doesn't scale as fast with key size. I am not an expert but that is what I've read.
For their use case, which requires communication between two (or more) arbitrary users who never communicated before among millions of users, running on cheap commodity hardware over wireless connectivity to the internet.
Leaving encryption aside, looking only at the network level, the DoD is capable of using a dedicated fiber line. Or rather a parallel fiber infrastructure.
Is this device using DoD PKI [0]?
If not, then how is DoD managing access to it? Or is there a post-it with a local password stuck to it?
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Access_Card#Integrate...
Maybe it’s the servers that is the problem.
The encryption probably won't be owned up to the point where it is practical to decrypt traffic in bulk, but it's a valid thing to look at.
About a month ago there was a discussion here saying Signal is preinstalled and widely used at the CIA.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43478091
It's also recommended by the government's cybersecurity agency CISA.
https://www.cisa.gov/sites/default/files/2024-12/guidance-mo...
Oddly they have thought of that already, to the point all encryption systems in use in the gov are thought of in these terms.
All that matters are the different assumed times to publication (weeks to years), and then treating the strength of measures involved differently based on what is reasonable for the given use.
If you absolutely need something to never be published then encryption isn't the solution, and nor are computers generally.
Obviously using signal here is a terrible opsec failure, I'm just not sure how what you are saying changes anything
Distribute a bunch of physical artifacts (smartcards) across the globe; guard a central facility (a symmetric key exchange center) extremely well etc.
The military can also afford to run its (encrypted or plaintext) communications over infrastructure it fully controls. The same isn't true for a service provided out of public clouds, on the public Internet.
"A one-time pad (OTP) is considered theoretically the most secure method of communication — when it’s implemented correctly. That means: 1. The key (pad) is truly random. 2. The key is at least as long as the message. 3. The key is used only once. 4. The key is securely shared in advance and kept completely secret.
When all these conditions are met, a one-time pad provides perfect secrecy — an eavesdropper cannot learn anything about the message, even with infinite computing power."
The reason why the policies restrict access to government systems isn’t because anyone thinks that those systems are magically immune to security bugs, but that there are entire teams of actually-qualified professionals monitoring them and proactively securing them. His phone is at risk to, say, a dodgy SMS/MMS message sent by anyone in the world who can get his number, potentially not needing more than a commercial spyware license, but his classified computer on a secure network can’t even receive traffic from them, has locked down configuration, and is monitored so a compromise would be detected a lot faster.
That larger context is what really matters. What they’re doing is like the owner of a bank giving his drunken golf buddy the job of running the business, and the first thing he does is start storing the ledger in his car because it’s more convenient. Even if he’s totally innocent and trying to do a good job, it’s just so much extra risk he’s not prepared to handle for no benefit to anyone else.
I assume he copy pasted the message on his unsecured device.
How many apps had access to that text in his clipboard?
To me this isn't a technical problem with Signal, it's an opsec problem, and that's quite a lot harder to explain to people.
Surely they don't have iCloud on their devices though...
Too deep. The problem is the physical environment, the room in which the machine displays the information. Computer and technological security means nothing if the information is displayed on a screen is in a room where anyone with a camera can snap a pic at any time.
At least in the case of the leak the culprit was the UX, no?
Suppose a user wants the following reasonable features (as was the case here):
1. Messages to one's contacts and groups of contacts should be secure and private from outside eavesdroppers, always.
2. Particular groups should only ever contain a specific subset contacts.
With Signal, the user can easily make them common mistake of attempting to add a contact who already is in the group. But in this case Signal UI autosuggested a new contact, displaying initials for that new contact which are the same initials as a current group member.
Now the user has unwittingly added another member to the group.
Note in the case of the leak that the contact was a bona fide contact-- it's just that the user didn't want that particular contact in that particular group. IIRC Signal has no way to know which contacts are allowed to join certain groups.
I don't know much about DoD security. But I'm going to guess no journalist has ever been invited to access a SCIF because they have the same initials as a Defense Dept. employee.
That's not the threat model. The threat model is that Signal is a tiny LLC making an app on behalf of a foundation and open source software project. It's a small group of human beings.
Small groups of human beings can be coerced or exploited by state-level actors in lots of ways that can't feasibly be prevented. I mean, if someone walks up to you and offers $2M (or blackmails you with whatever they found in your OneDrive, etc...[1]) to look the other way while you hand them your laptop, are you really going to say no to that keylogger? Would everyone?
At scale, there are auditing techniques to address this. The admins at e.g. github are (hopefully) not as vulnerable. But Signal is too small.
[1] Edit: Or, because let's be honest that's the scale we're playing at: straight up threatens to Novichok you or your family.
You and I know that. So do the adversaries. The biggest issue for them is going to be not tripping over the intelligence collecting agencies (or corps) already on their devices.
1) He is avoiding some sort of corrupt signals intelligence folks from knowing what he's working on.
2) He is avoiding the government catching him in some corruption by avoiding the official records act.
Anything else?
Or the same reason I have Whatsapp - communication in my social groups happens there, and if I don't have it I get left out.
Your explanations assume there is some deeper meaning, looking at the tradeoffs for each communication platform, and then coming to some rational conclusion. I don't think there's much evidence for that.
The people around trump just happen to be used to using signal to communicate, and if Pete doesn't get on board he gets left out.
We have to assume malicious intent. These people could start a nuclear war. They get zero flexibility or grace.
... but unlike Signal, SDC respects laws requiring accurate record-keeping. And that's why this bunch of lawbreakers want to use Signal. They want to evade any and all accountability once this administration is over.
During the UK Covid-19 enquiry into gov decision making at that time it came to light that most of the UK cabinet were co-ordinating via Whatsapp groups. Again, I'm not a fan of Boris and Dom Cummings but this makes some sort of sense to me. I recognise the need for government teams to have quick convenient chat available to them. Things move too fast these days to wait for the next cabinet meeting or to arrange things via a series of phone calls.
Similarly we can look back to Obama having to fight to keep his Blackberry in 2009 https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna28780205
Do you know at all or are you just relying completely on your imagination to justify the Trump admin's actions?
IIRC the French installed gov controlled Jitsi server. That plus a VPN would be a whole not more secure.
If you do not have things in place I think "we need to discuss state secrets securely" would have been clearly sufficient to justify an exemption to lockdown rules.
And unarchived. It's very convenient to not have to do things in meetings with minutes where people might later question your decisions. Or report them to the police.
Which works fine as long as there are no bad actors who may bribe, corrupt, blackmail, etc. Unfortunately that is not the reality we live in and one way[0] of counteracting the bad actors is to enforce transparency with things like "everything must be recorded and archived".
[0] Sadly not 100% effective.
That 20 year old tech is simply more secure... specifically because it is less convenient. By doing things the way they do them they can enforce access to desired levels of security by controlling physical access to the equipment. With something like Signal, that access is entirely the responsibility of the user. The user will inevitably mess that up, particularly when things get exciting. ... and Signal is not even really all that good at preventing the user from messing the identity thing up.
* https://articles.59.ca/doku.php?id=em:sg (my article)
Also, I complain a lot about Teams, but my understanding is modern DoD basically runs on Microsoft, AWS, (also Google?) just the same as private companies. Probably not Zoom, which is unfortunate from a usability perspective but also wise I think.
Can you name a popular civilian tech that blocks adding random journalists to small chat groups? That includes strong identity guarantees? That meets compliance requirements around logging calls?
Bloomberg might come the closest on this. Why don't you go out and price a Bloomberg terminal for yourself, at the grade that lets you trade options with other Bloomberg terminal owners over the chat interface?
Get me inside the minds of these freaks.
If someone gave me a whole set of locked down _windows_ computers and a bunch of achaic phone lines and told me to use them in 2025, I’d also try to circumvent such inconvenience.
1) DoD and other departments have either tacitly or explicitly approved the use of Signal for internal matters for several years now, with proper opsec.
2) You cannot govern exclusively from a SCIF, hence 1.
If you have the resources available to the SecDef, you frankly should be able to. Mobile SCIFs are something private companies can provide off the shelf for a few hundred thousand dollars. That's a drop in the bucket.
Obviously, nobody can or should spend all their time in one unless you're some kind of watch officer, but when handling TS/SCI material, there really is no reason for a principal to not have access to a SCIF within a moment's notice if they make it a priority. And there's no reason to be sharing TS/SCI with anyone that is not themselves in a SCIF. We have a declassification/reclassification process if information needs to be more widely disseminated.
(1) doesn't have to be Signal. It should be some "enterprise" solution that DoD can own and operate, and it should federate with the same thing used in other executive agencies, and the WH itself. And it should have military grade authorization (meaning labeled, multi-level security).
That said, (2) is quite right: you cannot govern from a SCIF. SCIFs are mainly tools of control to access to long-ago classified information. New classified information cannot be born in a SCIF for the simple reason that SCIFs cannot scale to the needs of those who govern.
I was thinking of encrypting a secret in the structure of a Rust program so it can only be decrypted by compiling and running it.
Unless you can predict the future, I'm not sure how you would generate a key that would be unknowable now but generally available in the future.
I’m guessing that’s the product in question: https://www.vertiv.com/490454/globalassets/products/monitori...
The extreme bipartisan view is that government business done by public officials should be hidden from the public record at their whim, even with the explicit goal of avoiding FOIA. Democrats believe that this is not only justified but virtuous, because Hillary Clinton lost an election.
I guess the Treasury Department could stop transferring funds into DoD accounts, but that seems unlikely.
Perhaps he could be prosecuted for violating various laws, but that would require action by the DoJ, which also seems unlikely.
Congress could also hold Trump responsible for Hegseth's actions, but that also strikes me as unlikely.
The past 9 years have been a really good education in why the Separation of Powers is important, and what's at risk when it doesn't function properly.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/02/hillary-clin...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jul/05/fbi-no-charg...
Also:
https://www.fbi.gov/news/press-releases/statement-by-fbi-dir...
"To be clear, this is not to suggest that in similar circumstances, a person who engaged in this activity would face no consequences. To the contrary, those individuals are often subject to security or administrative sanctions. But that is not what we are deciding now."
OP's comment was pointing out the similarities between issue #1 and issue #2. There's no dismissal.
Novel idea: what if we focus on the exact issue that was originally brought up?
'Someone else did it, or something like it, sometime, somewhere.' I'm past caring about that -- because it's used too frequently to distract from the current issue.
A. Hegseth broke the law and shared classified information on a system that wasn't approved for it.
B. Or, he unilaterally declassified operational details without informing anyone or going through a normal process.
It can only be one of the two above options, because the facts aren't in question.
Edit: But looks like National Security Advisor Mike Waltz will be taking the fall for this: https://www.bbc.com/news/live/crkx3ed5dn2t
Is it? I'd think that somebody who took Hillary's hidden 3rd party communications seriously would take these seriously too.
The bizarre behavior is insisting that what Clinton did was trivial, but that this is a disaster.
Also this emphasis on security is backseat driving from a bunch of people who want to attack Iran. The real problem with them using third-party communications is that they avoid FOIA.
It's a simple ask.
They both share in common that rather than continuing to talk about just one thing, you are now talking about (at least) two.
But whataboutism is a diversion tactic that tries to shift the attention from behavior/event A to behavior/event B; pointing out the hypocrisy notes the similarities between behaviors/events A and B and contrasts the response.
Both can be deployed in similar situations, but the motivations for choosing one over the other are substantially different.
> The communication intent is often to distract from the content of a topic (red herring). The goal may also be to question the justification for criticism and the legitimacy, integrity, and fairness of the critic, which can take on the character of discrediting the criticism, which may or may not be justified. Common accusations include double standards, and hypocrisy, but it can also be used to relativize criticism of one's own viewpoints or behaviors.
Both Clintons private email server, Pete signal chats and Trump documents stash in Mar-a-lago are equally bad. Lack of consequences signal erosion of “Law and order” in the US. It seems that US is now not different from third rate countries where last minute exceptions, insider trading, open bribery, secret police(ICE) and targeted prosecution is a new norm.
However, Hegseth’s transgression was the worst in terms of severity by orders of magnitude. Details of an in-progress military operation and all.
That at least is surely not true. We know the contents because his attention to security was even less than the others we've heard about.
Whataboutism is when you bring up something about person A, then the only argument against it is something relating to person B.
For example, when you point out the call the president made to the secretary of state in Georgia begging him to "find" 11,780 votes. Then, without a great excuse, the other person brings up Biden's mental decline.
Both true, both concerning, but the reply just being blatant and desperate misdirection.
But it’s not hypocritical of our country to want to improve our government officials and not for them to stagnate or slip backwards.
The Legal Eagle channel did an analysis of the two situations, "Signal War Plans v.s. Hillary's Emails":
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cw1tNTIEs-o
The two situations are not actually (legally) equivalent. One huge difference being that Hesgeth et al are setting communications to auto-delete, which is against records keep statues (there is no evidence Clinton purged e-mails).
Hypocrisy indeed.
a) beaurocrats' real comms setups (3 telephones, four monitors all sitting on the desk – versus mounted on arms/wall) full of clutter and sitting on an anachronism of a wood desk
and b) what you'd see in any "spy" movie with dark-mode graphics displaying fancy l33t charts displayed on quad-monitor setups mounted on arms, probably in a low-light setting and the beaurocrat doesn't look at the "small" monitors himself, his cronies do that, the only monitor he looks at is the single 136" on the wall used for teleconferencing with villains
is hilarious
Maybe the DoD should work on developing some internal Android and Signal forks that focus on adding additional critical security controls without impacting usability. There's an obvious desire path here.
I know personally that given the choice I'd probably rather use Signal than whatever messaging system the DoD contractors managed to come up with. And private conversations between senior military officials over encrypted DoD communication channels probably aren't FOIAable anyway.
Both are fairly "meh" WRT to usability, but neither are so awful people should be breaking the law over it.
They have a completely sepearate internet for TS/SCI (JWICS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Worldwide_Intelligence_C...)
Yes, in the chat where a reporter was accidentally present, many of the messages were set to be disappearing. I don't know why anyone would do that if not to avoid recordkeeping laws.
> The images of the text chain show that the messages were set to disappear in one week.
https://apnews.com/article/war-plans-hegseth-signal-chat-inv...
Further, Project 2025 suggests bypassing federal record keeping legislation by simply holding in-person meetings without record.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxe55mU4DA8
Oddly, the Project 2025 training videos that presumably the members of the executive cabinet have seen say _not_ to delete messages or set messages to auto-deleting _because_ that would be in violation of federal record keeping legislation.
It's not just this. Security involves compromises and trade-offs. Humans will be stupid humans and re-use passwords, install better but insecure software, not ever update, etc. It's an old story.
In the year 2025, if communication with any other human on the globe isn't as simple as opening and app and typing, then people will find another way because there are about a thousand better ways.
So I doubt they are trying to get away with anything. They're just preferring the trivial option over the option that probably involves a physical token or slow biometrics or 15-second logout or whatever arduous security features the government comms probably have. Just like any human would.
Perhaps this will force the government COMSEC people to re-evaluate their practices.
Updated to add: I'm not defending their practices, just giving a likely explanation. Blaming the users is not always the best way to evaluate a security failure.
https://www.google.com/search?q=computer+security+human+natu...
Say what you want about the usability of DoD home grown solutions, but it was a military system backed up by military budgets and guns - civilians are less likely to be collateral damage in an attack against these systems.
Now, all the civilians using Signal are potential splash damage casualties in a military conflict.
I also suspect Signal does not have the budget, staffing, or desire to serve as a front line soldier in a cyber war; but this exposes them to military-grade risks, whether they like it or not.
nneonneo•23h ago