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

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

#531

Post by bb88 »

codewench wrote: post #519
joshuamerrill wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because I don't know whether either of those are appropriate. There aren't many comparable breaches to this one. The closest in modern times may be Hillary Clinton's email server being used for government business. In that case, the FBI investigated and declined to bring charges, under the expectation that a jury would be unlikely to render a guilty verdict. Okay, fine. But the FBI investigated and laid out the facts…

18 USC 793(f) seems to apply here: "Whoever, being entrusted with or having lawful possession or control of any document, writing ... through gross negligence permits the same to be removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of his trust ... and fails to make prompt report of such loss, theft, abstraction, or destruction to his superior officer— Shall be fined under this title or imp…

Why would the FBI investigate anyone who would be pardoned by the president anyway?

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

#532

Post by anigbrowl »

guerrilla wrote: post #438
rurp wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with all of this, my only quibble is that I would bet there have already been costs associated with this idiocy. Hostile powers knew going in that this would be an incompetently run administration and I'm sure were looking at gaining access to personal devices out of the gate. It's possible that a great many highly sensitive conversations have already been read by adversaries. I also expect that similar slopp…

Yes, this was one of the main points on infosec Mastodon today. While everyone is aware enough to be concerned with encryption over the wire, it's the endpoints that matter. Personal Android devices capable of running Signal are going to be some of the easiest to compromise for a sufficiently motivated attacker. I've seen n00b cops do it for drug gangs here. There's no question that Russia, China, et al. can do it ju…

Exactly. Signal on Android uses your phone PIN, for some insane reason.

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

#533

Post by watwut »

serpix wrote: post #436
nopelynopington wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trump has already been president and already demonstrated to us that he will not leave power peacefully. He's openly discussing serving a third term. I think it's highly unlikely that the transfer of power will happen peacefully unless 1) he dies in office (of natural causes) Or 2) the republicans win in 2028 and a different republican president is sworn in.

There are more options than this.

Conservatives or Trump will not give power back peacefully. The most likely is that they will prevent fair elections, but they also may simply refuse to give out power. They are attacking justice now and placed loyalist in power agencies.

They cant afford giving away power now. Just in the last three months, there were multiple very clear law breaking acts. Musk is giving government contracts to himself. They do not worry about these, because they do not intend to give out power.

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

#534

Post by nitwit005 »

ctrlp wrote: post #424
GVIrish wrote: post #408

Earlier 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.

They are the government. You're suggesting trusting a third party over trusting themselves.

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

#535

Post by [deleted] »

tromp wrote: post #521
bb88 wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would we expect Patel and Bongino to investigate anything here? They were put there to investigate anyone else other than the current administration. Why would any FBI agent take a risk on investigating anyone potentially in current or future administrations? They'll get fired later when the political winds change.

With the current administration I expect that fierce loyalty trumps both competence and accountability. Sadly, I expect to see many more such examples of amateur hour.

[deleted]

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

#536

Post by rdsubhas »

bambax wrote: post #458

> The Signal chat group, I concluded, was almost certainly real. Having come to this realization, one that seemed nearly impossible only hours before, I removed myself from the Signal group Why? Why not stay in the group indefinitely (or until found) and write stories sourced from a mysterious individual deep in the entrails of the Trump administration? That would have been absolutely specacular and could have result…

Are you suggesting he knowlingly convert into a hacker and get prosecuted as a traitor?

He exited and correctly disclosed himself as a victim of being unknowingly added. This is exactly what anyone who values the rest of their life should do.

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

#537

Post by snickerbockers »

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.

You're correct that Trump's entire cabinet are hypocrites and they deserve to be raked over the coals for this and have their past statements thrown back in their faces. At this point there's no reason to believe Trump or anyone in his circle ever saw the email scandal as anything but a cudgel with which to rhetorically bash their opponents.

But the problem with them being hypocrites in this regard is that it follows from them doing the same thing Hillary did, and in that case the "fair" way to punish them would be the same way she was punished, which is not at all. So I don't see any real accountability ever coming from this beyond maybe trump firing a couple of sacrificial lambs from his administration.

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

#538

Post by belter »

bb88 wrote: post #531
codewench wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

18 USC 793(f) seems to apply here: "Whoever, being entrusted with or having lawful possession or control of any document, writing ... through gross negligence permits the same to be removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of his trust ... and fails to make prompt report of such loss, theft, abstraction, or destruction to his superior officer— Shall be fined under this title or imp…

Why would the FBI investigate anyone who would be pardoned by the president anyway?

Don't worry, Courts are going away also...

"Speaker Mike Johnson floats eliminating federal courts as GOP ramps up attacks on judges" - https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/speaker-mike-johns...

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

#539

Post by analog31 »

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…

They are being spied upon, by the future, on purpose. That's why we have laws regarding records retention, open meetings, etc.

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

#540

Post by ctrlp »

nitwit005 wrote: post #534
ctrlp wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They are the government. You're suggesting trusting a third party over trusting themselves.

The government is not a unitary entity. The Constitution provides for three branches of government explicitly to offset each other's power. And the civil service is essentially a 4th branch of government. Just replacing the titular heads of government does not guarantee any ability to control the body. Witness the outpouring of protest at "the government's" attempts to control "the government" via DOGE. They are not the same.
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