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/

101•sebastian_z•2h ago

Comments

trhway•1h 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•1h 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•1h 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•46m 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.

ToucanLoucan•37m ago

Unfortunately that leaves us with the Democrats who have shown time and again that they are unwilling or unable to confront this movement for what it is.

I'm frankly far more concerned that the Republicans lose next election, and we get Democrats in power who then prioritize "getting back to normal" and once again utterly failing to hold accountable the utter BUFFET of mediocre wannabe dictators who brought us to the brink already.

I also hope. But I'd be lying if I said I thought it was rational.

Fricken•5m ago

Authoritarianism is a spectrum and all states are on it. We all have brain slugs now, it was voluntary. We'll be going back to that old time religion, but with a new twist. With AI every man will, in a much more literal way, be able to have an ongoing private conversation with god. And you won't need money or the government anymore. God has a special plan for you and you follow it.

add-sub-mul-div•1h 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•56m 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.

OhMeadhbh•13m ago

I heard some of the best advice I ever heard at a Subgenius devival in Dallas in the 80s: "Act like a dumb-shit and they'll treat you like an equal." Every year that quip seems more and more relevant.

conductr•1h 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•45m ago

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

scotty79•4m ago

I think it's the future of entertainment. Ruthlessly mocking idiots in power (and others). To be honest it's the present of some entertainment.

pwarner•57m ago

Only the best people

chao-•1h 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•49m 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

tomjakubowski•12m ago

Obama's old personal email was at defunct ISP ameritech.net, not Yahoo. I only remember because that's the ISP I grew up with.

Trump using yourefired as his Twitter password well into his 2016 campaign was amazing, too.

unparagoned•1h ago

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

justonceokay•1h ago

Or more likely unofficial business

pnw•1h 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•1h ago

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

jonathanstrange•1h ago

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

bryanrasmussen•23m ago

I think it's a pretty cynical take that an Emacs user will never be made FBI director.

k310•1h 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•58m ago

When do the Raptor puppets go on sale?

leereeves•51m ago

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

idiotsecant•50m ago

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

sv123•59m ago

Clowns, all the way down.

jameson•48m ago

I wonder how many others are hacked but remain undiscovered

longislandguido•14m ago

Considering 95% of spam that hits my inbox originates from compromised Gmail accounts, I'd say it's a few.

Because Google is too big to fail, all Gmail traffic is essentially whitelisted and they can't be bothered to do anything about it.

mikkupikku•44m ago

Unfair to clowns, a noble profession.

xeonmc•33m ago

Prefer the title “jesters”

bryanrasmussen•26m ago

the sensible middle of the road between clowns on the left and the jokers on the right.

longislandguido•22m ago

Did you write the software that allowed him to get hacked in the first place?

upheaval7276•53m 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•45m 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•42m 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•44m ago

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

upheaval7276•41m ago

yes, and...?

ohyoutravel•30m ago

Major public figure who is currently in a position of power in the USA. That’s bad news because it reveals sensitive details which may lead to their further compromise. Imagine you’re compromised by a corrupt administration with pics of CSAM or something already, now imagine a foreign actor also having compromised you. It’s a sticky situation.

upheaval7276•25m ago

Yes, that's all true, all potential issues in theory. I'm still not seeing why this points to or supports the (valid) claim of incompetence in the FBI. That seems to be the angle most posters in this thread are taking, and it seems...misguided to me. Tilting at windmills. Let's call out the admin for their real failings, not nonsense like this. Getting your gmail account hacked does not reflect on you as a professional.

ohyoutravel•6m ago

Leaking one’s credentials to sensitive personal repositories of information is a “real failing” lol, how could one think any differently? I would be mortified and immediately rectify the situation.

weaksauce•23m ago

you don't think that it's relevant and concerning that the director of the FBI didn't take operational security seriously enough that his account got compromised? even if they didn't get anything incriminating (which maybe they did and are going to blackmail him later) that show a shocking lack of competency for someone in that kind of position.

upheaval7276•22m ago

we don't even know how it was compromised. was his password "password", or did the hackers exploit a gmail/google vulnerability?

pkilgore•10m ago

are you suggesting the former is not a demonstration of a shocking lack of competency?

dlev_pika•48m ago

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

hmokiguess•27m ago

Was he running openclaw on his unpenetrable system by any chance?

paxys•25m ago

2FA is too woke. Sounds like DEI.

throwawa1•24m ago

24 year old Israeli girlfriend + Kash = True luv.

OhMeadhbh•20m ago

Certainly the FBI and GMail having gaps in their operational information security isn't news.

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