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U.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat

theatlantic.com

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Re: U.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat

#111

Post by zeven7 »

nradov wrote: post #106
anigbrowl wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My theory is that he had to balance the journalistic scoop of the century with the risk of being arrested for illegally accessing/storing classified information. If they had noticed before he published the story then he could have been vanned and the public told that he had infiltrated a secure channel, and who would be able to say otherwise? MAGA people would cheerfully call for his execution.

Under US federal law it is generally not a crime for a person without a security clearance to receive or store classified information. The legal problems come in when they solicit it or take some other action to obtain it.

Laws matter less than they used to. When the President regularly uses the term "retribution" to describe his mode of operation, I don't blame someone for taking a more careful approach in a case like this. It shouldn't be that way, for a journalist. But a lot of things shouldn't be the way they are today.

Re: U.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat

#112

Post by hnburnsy »

lcc wrote: post #109
hnburnsy wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>A shame it is probably getting flamed and downvoted over partisan reasons Is this the forum for this type of news? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html ... On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. Off-Topic: Most stories about…

Like the parent said, a tech-related opsec failure at this level is absolutely something a 'good hacker' would find interesting.

>tech-related opsec failure

Not sure that 'fat fingering' on a mobile device rises to the level of tech-related opsec. The choice to use a non-government approved device certainly is news, but not necessarily Hacker News. Plenty of better places to debate it.

Re: U.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat

#113

Post by sharpshadow »

Balgair wrote: post #77

If anything, I'm a bit surprised that Jeff Goldberg burned this source. If anything, I'd suspect that he'd keep the channel open as long as he could. Or, he's got other channels that work better. All the same, I mean, wow. These guys are just morons here, there's really no other way around it. I'm trying to think of a charitable way to spin this and I've got nothing. Like, very clearly, these people are going to get…

Sounds like he received the message purposefully and pretends it was an mistake?

2h is a lot but also not that much time, everything is prepared already it’s more a countdown I would say. What would be a usual timeframe to inform the people you want to inform about an immediate event which is going to happen?

Re: U.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat

#114

Post by yks »

alistairSH wrote: post #70
dbl000 wrote: post #9

This was such a weird news story to read. At least they used Signal? That's gotta be a plus at some level. Unrelated, but I wonder how the gray hat market for Signal vulns is doing now?

How is that a plus? Maybe vs plain old SMS... But, it's a flagrant leak of classified info. Using a medium explicitly prohibited by policy. And likely now lost to time (Signal messages can be configured to auto-delete on a timer), when all of this sort of correspondence is legally required to be retained.

> How is that a plus?

They could've used Telegram /s. It's popular with the crypto crowd after all.

Re: U.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat

#115

Post by _DeadFred_ »

anigbrowl wrote: post #82
lapcat wrote: post #27

> 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.

SO much for 'the most transparent administration in history', not that I bought into that claim in the first place. Seems like a violation of multiple public record-keeping laws.

Please FOIA the administration's process for meeting records requirements while using Signal. People need to call them out on this or nothing happens.

Re: U.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat

#117

Post by overfeed »

tptacek wrote: post #99
Balgair wrote: post #77

If anything, I'm a bit surprised that Jeff Goldberg burned this source. If anything, I'd suspect that he'd keep the channel open as long as he could. Or, he's got other channels that work better. All the same, I mean, wow. These guys are just morons here, there's really no other way around it. I'm trying to think of a charitable way to spin this and I've got nothing. Like, very clearly, these people are going to get…

As soon as he realizes (or a reasonable person would realize) that the group chat is not a hoax, and that he is getting confidential military information over that channel, his continued membership in the channel demonstrates intent to receive the information, which makes anything he writes about it in the future legally problematic. It's complicated and it's not like just receiving classified information from a sour…

The fourt cases related to Watergate established that receiving classified information is not illegal, and affirmed 1A rights. I'd argue it's a exactly the same as a journalist overhearing this motley crew discussing the war plan in the halls of the White House without being aware there's a journalist nearby. I wouldn't bank on the current supreme court to uphold precedence, or the current administration persecuting the journalist for "hacking" into a "secure" government chat group - which is what they'll allege without evidence. I suspect the journalist cares more about national security than the cowboys in the chat group, and is acutely aware that they are a target for hacking by nation-states, which would leak classified information.

Re: U.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat

#118

Post by Jtsummers »

sharpshadow wrote: post #113
Balgair wrote: post #77

If anything, I'm a bit surprised that Jeff Goldberg burned this source. If anything, I'd suspect that he'd keep the channel open as long as he could. Or, he's got other channels that work better. All the same, I mean, wow. These guys are just morons here, there's really no other way around it. I'm trying to think of a charitable way to spin this and I've got nothing. Like, very clearly, these people are going to get…

Sounds like he received the message purposefully and pretends it was an mistake? 2h is a lot but also not that much time, everything is prepared already it’s more a countdown I would say. What would be a usual timeframe to inform the people you want to inform about an immediate event which is going to happen?

> Sounds like he received the message purposefully and pretends it was an mistake?

Why would he have been added to the group? For what purpose would the current National Security Advisor have to bring in an outsider to discussions that ended up involving almost certainly classified data?

> 2h is a lot but not that much time

He was added to the group two days (13 March) before the strikes (15 March), not two hours.

Re: U.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat

#119

Post by ornornor »

belter wrote: post #28
danso wrote: post #11

Staggering display of incompetence and carelessness. And unfortunately, one that we’re unlikely to get much transparency about, in terms of how such an operational screwup was allowed to happen. > At 11:44 a.m., the account labeled “Pete Hegseth” posted in Signal a “TEAM UPDATE.” I will not quote from this update, or from certain other subsequent texts. The information contained in them, if they had been read by an a…

Is this worst than using Top Secret documents as toilet paper? https://d3i6fh83elv35t.cloudfront.net/static/2023/06/FyM1h-C...

Pardon my ignorance but what’s the context of this picture? I don’t watch the news fwiw.

Re: U.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat

#120

Post by Jtsummers »

ornornor wrote: post #119
belter wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this worst than using Top Secret documents as toilet paper? https://d3i6fh83elv35t.cloudfront.net/static/2023/06/FyM1h-C...

Pardon my ignorance but what’s the context of this picture? I don’t watch the news fwiw.

After he left office in 2021, it was found that Trump kept boxes and boxes of top secret files at his residence, including in the bathroom among other places. Somehow this is not an issue for the GOP.
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