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

Remember: every comment on here is implicitly directed to dang, and every link is implicitly approved of by dang.

This is really his website at this point. The rules are mainly just his tools for shaping the content of discussions and submissions to his liking.

A decade ago it was different. I mean, he was still way overbearing and biased, but I don’t think it really had the same power-steering effect on the shapes of discussions as it does today. Over time, this is where we’ve come to.

> Why have a bunch of rules and policies that you do not follow yourself?

If you can get away with it, why wouldn't you set things up this way? Rules for thee, not for me. You can't try to view power plays like this through the lenses of ethics or morality. The point is to use rules to bind and punish your enemies and to make sure that only your friends can get away with breaking them. You do this with media capture and twisted narratives, taking advantage of the erosion of rule of law as a respected concept among the public.

As long as you build an order around independence of countries and diplomacy (instead of, say, force) any organisation will only be as useful as countries are willing to follow and any structure can only be as good as the ones in charge are willing to go.

In consequences there are many flaws and a lot is stuck in post WW2 thinking, but I doubt there is a realistic chance of anything overall better.

The current U.S. administration tries to reshape things by disruption, we will see how this goes, but I doubt this will earn trust and buy-in from others. Thus not lead to a stable and "better" system. (While better, of course, is not globally objective, which again is key to the problem)

And these guys have been in power for only a few months, they're still finding out about their new tools. What will happen in the next 4 years? will they even leave power peacefully?

In my opinion there are at least two ways to interpret this:

a) It's an unintentional opsec failure. Perhaps there was an address book collision with another intended user. Perhaps it was fat-fingered. This seems likely.

b) It was an intentional leak. Perhaps overtly, perhaps covertly, by one or more of the channel members for unknown purposes. This seems less likely as there are better ways to leak with less blowback risk.

Regarding using Signal in the first place. Yes, this seems like bad opsec, but it's possible that the current admin working groups don't trust the official secure channels and assume they are compromised and they are being spied upon by their own or foreign agencies. That seems very likely, given the circumstances. In which case, it is still a possible opsec failure, but perhaps a less bad risk than trusting operational security to known adverse agencies. This is the more interesting case, imho, since the assumption on here is largely that these types of coordination should be happening on official government channels. But "government" is not necessarily a unified collective working towards the same goals. If you have a strong suspicion that agents within your own team are acting against your goals, then of course, you have to consider communicating on alternative channels. Whether that's to evade legal restrictions or transparency, like with the Clinton email servers, or to evade sabotage, I'm not judging the ethics, just considering the necessity of truly secure communication.

Is that trust in Signal justified? It suggests members at the highest security clearances believe Signal is not compromised. Are they correct? In any case, clearly there are more ways to fail opsec than backdoors.