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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

#421

Post by crtasm »

ineedasername wrote: post #241
atonse wrote: 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.

By default, yes. You can change the permissions so only group admins can add people.

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

#422

Post by viccis »

hatradiowigwam wrote: post #412
ctrlp wrote: post #390

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 blowbac…

> 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. Once upon a time, I was visited very forcefully by the FBI at 0600. They used a battering ram to gain access to my domicile. During the "interview" that took place later that morning, they requested some…

I think there is likely a difference between what the FBI does to someone they want info pretty badly from vs what does to someone that they have determined is a keystone to one of their national adversaries.

If they did have some kind of collection capability around Signal, they likely would not have risked burning it on you.

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

#423

Post by petre »

readthenotes1 wrote: post #407
ineedasername wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Goldberg is not a fan of Trump I did not believe there was any way this was done accidentally...

Hanlon's razor begs to differ.

Trump sent his golf buddy Waltz to negotiate with Putin and he came back brainwashed with Russian propaganda. Russian psyops is either really good or some of these people in the administration are just morons.

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

#424

Post by ctrlp »

GVIrish wrote: post #408
ctrlp wrote: post #390

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 blowbac…

Using Signal in this case is wrong and foolish full stop, and the extremely likely reason they did so is so they could escape standard government record keeping compliance (NARA). To start with, classified information is ONLY supposed to viewed in a SCIF. Secondly, it should never be loaded onto private devices. The private phones of national security leadership would be prime targets for every hostile intelligence a…

Sure, those are the reasons for, but would be interesting for you to address the salient point of not trusting those government systems. I'm sure you can make the counterargument.

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

#425

Post by alistairSH »

boringg wrote: post #400
ctrlp wrote: post #390

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 blowbac…

Option (a) 100%. This is an abysmal mistake on the big stage for a bunch of new people on the job. That it is the intelligence community makes it feel so much worse.

"abysmal mistake" makes it sound like this wasn't a considered action and willful disregard for both op-sec and the law. There is zero chance these guys didn't know what they were doing...

At minimum, Mike Waltz is retired special ops, Rubio has had high-level clearance for ages from his time in the Senate, same for Gabbard in the House. None of them responded "Hey, this is poor op-sec and illegal, perhaps take this to an approved messaging service?"

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

#426

Post by anthomtb »

wood_spirit wrote: post #385
anthomtb wrote: post #371

This hypocrisy reminds me of one of my former lead developers. He required everyone on the team to go through multi-person code reviews and pass an extensive CI suite before merging changes into our mainline. But him? Half that time he'd approve his own changes without review, the other half he would force-push and bypass the CI system entirely. He knew the system well and seemed to do enough local testing to avoid m…

I’m not seeing the parallels. Trump went on about Hillary’s mail and made it a big thing for political points, not because he was particularly caring or didn’t have infamously bad opsec when he got in. You lead dev trusted himself more than the team. He was probably right.

The parallel is senior leaders ignoring secure communication rules that their rank-and-file must follow. Hillary's email server did not immediately spring to my mind.

Edit: Its safe to say that this story involves multiple levels of hypocrisy by the current administration.

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

#427

Post by guerrilla »

ctrlp wrote: post #414
guerrilla wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you expand on what you'd like to see?

Some layer of ACL and better controls over group membership and message visibility. In this case, if it were an inadvertent added member, then there could be a group/role level restrictions on channels that restrict members from a pool of approved members depending on the security context. Classic security stuff, really. I'm sure others could think of more interesting use cases, but preventing mistaken group adds fee…

Yeah, that's what I thought you meant. This situation is what MAC and specifically MLS are actually for, so that exactly this doesn't happen. There must be mobile devices and texting apps that actually support that but as far as I understand it Android is very far from being able to implement that kind of policy (despite heavy use of SELinux).

It's actually weird we don't see this in the corporate world either. These problems, as many of us know personally, exist everywhere, not just at the White House and it's going to lead to huge issues down the road.

Anyone here know if the DoD actually has their own stuff for this? It was they who came up with these technologies back in the rainbow books days.

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

#428

Post by psunavy03 »

milesrout wrote: post #248
overfeed wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 US Supreme Court hews close to precedent. The only two significant overturned decisions in the last decade are Roe v Wade, which regardless of your views on abortion was a poorly reasoned decision, which was really judicial legislation, that had to be essentially amended several times (whether abortion should be permitted is a separate question from whether Roe was good law, which it obviously wasn't) and Chevron…

The fact that this is getting downvoted into the ground really shows the delta between reality and what the members of this site want to convince themselves is reality.

The majority of SCOTUS decisions are unanimous.

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

#429

Post by jeffbee »

guerrilla wrote: post #397
thunkingdeep wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

I happen to know first hand that the thread is not going quite to dang's liking at the moment. I'm hoping it improves, but people are having a hard time sticking to the technical and security aspects.

There are zero technical issues to discuss in this affair.

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

#430

Post by lbarron6868 »

atonse wrote: 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…

I believe they meant to contact Jamieson Greer (JG), and maybe Waltz had both of them listed by initials? That's the leading theory.
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