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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

#571

Post by bb88 »

mulmen wrote: post #558
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…

> FBI investigated and declined to bring charges Does the FBI make this determination? Wouldn’t that be the Attorney General’s call?

Yeah, they do. The US Attorneys and the Attorney General are allowed to give input typically into whether any investigation is prosecutable.

Now did they investigate it? Probably not.

What's interesting to me is that personal phones were not seized for forensic examination though.

Were the phones hacked by foreign agents? What other uses was signal used for?

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

#572

Post by dang »

jeffbee wrote: post #379

Amazing that with H.N.'s doctrinaire application of the exact original title rule, this is the title that the mods chose to editorialize.

HN has no "doctrinaire" rule about exact original titles. The rule is this: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Note that word "unless". Since the original title was linkbaity, I replaced it in accordance with the rule.

That's not editorializing, because it's using the article's own language and is a more accurate and neutral description of the article. Editorializing is when a submitter takes advantage of the title field to convey their own view of an article.

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

#573

Post by anigbrowl »

Izkata wrote: post #530
anigbrowl wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A barium meal is for finding leakers within an organization. IF you send material to a journalist, unsolicited, and they report on it, what exactly have you established? Like, do you think they did the same thing with multiple journalists in an attempt to see who would publish and who would keep their mouths shut? Bear in mind, when you join a Signal group you don't see the conversation history from before you arrive…

My guess would be the journalist wasn't the one being tested, it was one of the other members. Adding the journalist would be how it was leaked.

I can't buy this, because everyone in the group can see who added other members (at least until disappearing messages time out that information). If it was just someone leaking they could do that by taking screenshots of the government group and then sending them to Jeffrey Goldberg in a separate chat.

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

#574

Post by dang »

thunkingdeep wrote: post #382
jeffbee wrote: post #379

Amazing that with H.N.'s doctrinaire application of the exact original title rule, this is the title that the mods chose to editorialize.

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…

Oh you guys. If HN were to my liking, I promise you it would be an entirely different place.

Suppressing my own like/dislike responses is where most of my energy goes when doing this job.

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

#575

Post by matthewdgreen »

WinstonSmith84 wrote: post #468
matthewdgreen wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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" Jesus Christ, this is dumb. Using a civilian app with civilian phones is literally the best way to get spied on, by either "your own" or foreign agencies. These people are going to get us all killed in a nuclear first strike.

> These people are going to get us all killed in a nuclear first strike. Not sure how leaking state secrets is risking nuclear annihilation - unless they invite Putin or Xi mistakenly in their Signal Group and plan to bomb Moscow or Beijing but the coziness of the current administration with these 2 countries is certainly not making this scenario realistic at all. Instead the reality is likely more boring: they just…

Don’t kid yourself that coziness makes anyone safe. We’re always one radar fluke away from a mistaken launch. And the more confident any adversary is that they can eliminate leadership, the higher the probability something terrible happens.

Please don’t reassure yourself by thinking that putting total incompetents in power is making anyone safer.

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

#576

Post by dang »

thunkingdeep wrote: post #494
guerrilla wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[flagged]

Actually we specifically re-upped the thread and turned off all the software penalties (such as the flamewar detector) and user flags that were affecting its rank.

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

#577

Post by outer_web »

timewizard wrote: post #309
iteratethis wrote: post #122

This is bad news for entire genres of books, TV shows and movies that are based on the supreme competence, sophistication and wealth of the Pentagon, NSA and CIA. Turns out US military strategy is the same as me and my mates setting up a bar date. It's a disturbing leak in itself but i take issue with the journalist obsessing over the tool of choice whilst ignoring the actual strategizing. The casual way in which a m…

> on the supreme competence, sophistication and wealth of the Pentagon, NSA and CIA. Agencies with no oversight are seen as competent? That's news to me. There's a definite waste of taxpayer dollars on propaganda to try to make this point publicly but I didn't think anyone was poorly educated enough to actually believe it.

Sorry are you claiming that the United States intelligence community is incompetent and that anyone who things otherwise is poorly educated?

What are you basing this on?

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

#578

Post by Alupis »

ohgr wrote: post #511
stevenjgarner wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you able to share any of those security controls? How do you stop presumably well-intended Signal app users from conferencing? Are you talking about cellular signal blocking, or are you talking about avoiding public networks entirely in favor of Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities (SCIFs)?

Many layers of physical controls and regular audits mostly.

So in other words... nothing stopped anyone from doing this either. Except the fear of potential punishment.

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

#579

Post by Libcat99 »

kelipso wrote: post #420
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…

The most likely reason is convenience, not escaping record keeping.

The report includes notes on certain messages having durations set before they would disappear. This indicates intent.
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