I guess Signal is pretty safe, but the phone you are using it on is far from safe. Then there is the issue of being able to accidently add unvetted people to the chat. Is that pretty much the size of the technological issue here?
U.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat
491–500 of 1001 posts
Re: U.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat
#492Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I mean, the conversation included references to materials sent on 'the high side' (classified-material email systems). If they consider those systems secure, what's the point of using Signal instead?
Re: U.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat
#493In 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…
FWIW, Signal has been the de facto semi-informal chat app throughout the US intelligence community for many years. I first started using Signal several years ago because I needed it to chat with people in DC.
European governments do the same but with WhatsApp.
Re: U.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat
#494Earlier 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.
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Re: U.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat
#495Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The most likely reason is convenience, not escaping record keeping.
Avoiding government record keeping is literally part of the Project 2025 plan.
Re: U.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat
#496Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The most likely reason is convenience, not escaping record keeping.
Then why would you enable the disappearing messages functionality?
Re: U.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat
#497If 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…
> 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. The Signal chat group was called the “Houthi PC small group.” It appeared to be a short-term, mission-specific group rather than a long-term, open-ended group. Thus, it's unlikely that much more information would be ga…
They've been bombing the Houthis for quite a few days now
Re: U.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat
#498This 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…
Another interpretation of this is that the lead developer adequately mitigated the risk of errors while also managing the risk of not shipping fast enough. It's very easy to criticise when you're not the one answering for both, especially the latter.
Re: U.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat
#499Earlier quoted context omitted.
He knew the system well and seemed to do enough local testing to avoid major breakage but still. Why have a bunch of rules and policies that you do not follow yourself? Because these rules and policies are for people that are judged to need them by the person with the authority and responsibility for making the decision. Policies like these always have a cost and (hopefully) a benefit. Presumably this lead dev judged…
As long as authority and responsibility land on the same person, I see no problem with it. If, however, a junior develop is responsible for making a change, but has no authority to make the change, then there is a problem.
lord help all people that work in places where you need “authority” to make a change…
Re: U.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat
#500It just came out one of the chat members was in Russia at the time.