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

theatlantic.com

271–280 of 1001 posts

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

#271
post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

On the other hand, directly sharing war plans with the press is about as transparent as you can get.

A corollary here is that maximum pressure is being put on DoD to find “leakers”. It now appears that to the normal people in DoD, what looks like evidence of regular leaking to the press might be incompetence at the appointee level.

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

#272
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…

Almost as bad as a private email server being used for governmental business.

Oh this administration does that, too.

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

#273

I wonder whether the phones and software used were certified for discussing such sensitive issues and if there are risks of leaking the data because of this.

Before the phrase “good with the Cyber” I believed opsec was teachable.

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

#274
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…

Jeff Goldberg loves his country more than he cares about a "source."

He might serves his country better by waiting for them to incriminate themselves more.

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

#276

This is an insane story demonstrating extraordinary incompetence, not to mention revealing some rather comical beliefs about American exceptionalism. It's on the bottom of the third page, pushed down by flags. During any other administration, such a disastrously , criminally incompetent use of technology would have been top of the front page for days, but this administration is so cosmically incompetent that pointing…

Use https://news.ycombinator.com/active as your starting point. It's not linked from the front page.

Thanks, and also thanks to moderators for offering it

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

#277
post #141

Setting aside the obvious shock of the actual subject, I'm going to try the herculean task of bringing this back to being a HN-related topic... My guess is that there is someone named Jeffrey Goldberg in the NatSec team (or high up, it seems like a common combination of first and last name at least), and likely that they meant to add him, rather than the EDITOR IN CHIEF of the Atlantic of all people. Could this be a…

Can users in a group add/invite others in? My firth though was someone doing it on the sly, to leak deliberately.

This is what I started thinking last night. Any of the people who were added to the chat could be disgruntled and add a reporter to the chat to leak it. Is there even any log of who added who to a chat? There might not even be any way to pin it on the leaker. If the leaker had been involved in several such chats and knew the intent was to intentionally violate federal recordkeeping laws, not only would this accomplish the leak, but there might not even be any record of who caused the leak.

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

#278
post #253
post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard to say. Sharing it may have lead to saving of servicemen lives since it may cause an abort. Not like it is a self defense mission, attacks on Houthi is totally optional meddling that likely breeds more 'terrorists'.

Trying to assess the consequences of publishing highly classified information on military operations is a ridiculously reckless idea. None of us have enough data about the full picture to even try to guess correctly here. The only sane thing to do is to maintain confidentiality and leave it to the involved agencies to draw consequences as they see fit.

A group of idiots who share battle plans with journalists under commander in chief Trump have clearly displayed their incompetence in drawing consequences. That the idiots who illegally sent it know best was not even on my radar of possibilities and is a ridiculously reckless idea imo.

It is not even clear to me that preserving serviceman is one of the goals of these agencies, given they've marched them off to die in several needless wars. Sure maybe the agencies might have more information, that doesn't mean they're more likely to make decisions that preserve life. Deference to 'experts' in government has lead to much bloodshed.

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

#279
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…

Don’t worry - this massive fuckup will surely spark numerous congressional investigations, resignations, and trigger serious reflection by the administration on their security protocols so they will comply with the necessary recordkeeping laws, confidentiality and proper handling of classified information in the future. Oh who am I kidding. Less than 8h later: “it’s just an oopsie right? No harm no foul- nothing to s…

I've already seen at least two posts on X with claims that this was actually all intentional and that "Trump is playing 5D chess"... and I think they were serious.

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

#280

Could've been a setup to get The Atlantic to leak government secrets...

But the backfire is catastrophic: every leaker in DoD can now claim as a defense that their leak must be a political appointee up there attaching docs to now-expunged Signal chats. That is now both Occam and Bayes rational.
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