This would be unbelievable in a normal administration. The combination of flagrant lawbreaking and incompetence is just so characteristic of these clowns. No, nothing in the Clinton email scandal comes close to cabinet secretaries accidentally real-time texting imminent war plans to journalists using a non-governmental system with auto-deleting messages.
¯\(ツ)/¯ Plenty of people in Trump's own cabinet used private email servers too, but no one cared. As always, it's only a problem when a Democrat does it.
U.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat
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Re: U.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat
#52That is absolutely wild. How is this not on the front page?
If literally storming your government building, threating your representatives and injuring police officers isn't punishable any more what is?
Re: U.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat
#53..I noted Board Games(Secret Hitler, for example) require better opsec. So do card games- it's mindblowing to note this too...
[Main comment by me - technical outlook] This is not a surprise at all- there were reports that the first Trump administration was using Signal to communicate, and that it was a a risk as messages can be totally wiped and not kept for records keeping.
-From an infosec standpoint- this is more notable than I think people are giving it credit- the fact that the Vice President(Well, maybe not him, he notably admittted in interviews during the presidential campaign, that he'd been briefed by three letter agencies on Salt Typhoon tageting him, but that he was secure because he used Signal) - the director of national intelligence- and several others- use Signal.
it's one thing for Congress, Sweden's Military, and apparently our own military branches to push Signal heavily for non-sensitive stuff-
But when those around three letter agencies -and the groups that would be interested in finding compromises- are using it, that screams to me that it's considered not that easy to attack- which is a point towards Signal
So then the final thing to secure are the endpoints- and of course the risk is a zero day exploit targeting someone. As for subtle push app updates by Signal themselves being a vector- i'd think the Open Source nature of the app prevent that - if the infrastructure for pushing updates is open source as well especially.
Again though- if the White House is using Signal- they likely KNOW most of what their own Three Letter agencies can and can't do(to a point)- so when people in the know are using it- that is telling.
A lot of it may be for the auto disappearing messages, admittedly- but that's notable. And yes, I'm aware Mark Zuckerberg has been known to move conversations off of WhatsApp, to Signal - again, maybe for the disappearing messages(and lack of a report function which would send part of a convo to FB/Meta to my understanding)- but possibly, for the security and lack of meta data being better from a attack surface standpoint
Re: U.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat
#54> Waltz set some of the messages in the Signal group to disappear after one week, and some after four. That raises questions about whether the officials may have violated federal records law: Text messages about official acts are considered records that should be preserved. I suspect that this was the point of their using Signal, to avoid preservation of records.
Finally, the echoes of Dr Strangelove are strong with this one. A veritable board room of talking heads that don’t ever really talk about life or death, but just the material numbers of raw commerce or messaging (deterrence) .
Re: U.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
¯\(ツ)/¯ Plenty of people in Trump's own cabinet used private email servers too, but no one cared. As always, it's only a problem when a Democrat does it.
I’m sort of surprised Democrats haven’t snapped yet.
Re: U.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat
#56Re: U.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat
#57Is it wild that a 3rd party app like Signal is used for this type of communication? I feel like that's crazy.
From the story: I have never seen a breach quite like this. It is not uncommon for national-security officials to communicate on Signal. But the app is used primarily for meeting planning and other logistical matters—not for detailed and highly confidential discussions of a pending military action. And, of course, I’ve never heard of an instance in which a journalist has been invited to such a discussion. Conceivably…
Re: U.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat
#58That is absolutely wild. How is this not on the front page?
To what end? How is this newsworthy any more? It has the President's blessing - that's all you need now. If literally storming your government building, threating your representatives and injuring police officers isn't punishable any more what is?
Re: U.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
¯\(ツ)/¯ Plenty of people in Trump's own cabinet used private email servers too, but no one cared. As always, it's only a problem when a Democrat does it.
I’m sort of surprised Democrats haven’t snapped yet.