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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

#101

Post by ludicrousdispla »

anigbrowl wrote: post #82
lapcat wrote: post #27

> Waltz set some of the messages in the Signal group to disappear after one week, and some after four. That raises questions about whether the officials may have violated federal records law: Text messages about official acts are considered records that should be preserved. I suspect that this was the point of their using Signal, to avoid preservation of records.

SO much for 'the most transparent administration in history', not that I bought into that claim in the first place. Seems like a violation of multiple public record-keeping laws.

transparent but also ephemeral

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

#102

Post by dragonwriter »

alistairSH wrote: post #73

Even worse, Trump wasn't aware of this leak (or denies knowledge of it) until questioned at a press conference earlier today. And instead of promising an investigation, the best he can do is throw some weak insults at The Atlantic. BUTTERY MALES indeed.

> Trump wasn't aware of this leak (or denies knowledge of it) until questioned at a press conference earlier today.

Trump routinely denies knowledge of things he doesn't want to talk about, even things that he has previously demonstrated knowledge about. It's a standard deflection that he never gets called out on or significant pushback on the implications of his claimed lack of knowledge, so he keeps doing it.

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

#103

Post by [deleted] »

apical_dendrite wrote: post #3

This would be unbelievable in a normal administration. The combination of flagrant lawbreaking and incompetence is just so characteristic of these clowns. No, nothing in the Clinton email scandal comes close to cabinet secretaries accidentally real-time texting imminent war plans to journalists using a non-governmental system with auto-deleting messages.

[deleted]

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

#104

Post by hello_computer »

anigbrowl wrote: post #95
hello_computer wrote: post #75

[flagged]

Goldberg wrote an influential-at-the-time article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Goldberg#Views_on_Iraq I feel it's a stretch to say 'he lied us into the Iraq war' as if everyone based their decisions on that. There's an very unfortunate tendency in political discussions to rely on fallacies of composition, where an instance of some phenomenon is taken as equivalent to a whole. Throwing that out with no furth…

[flagged]

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

#105

Post by [deleted] »

anigbrowl wrote: post #82
lapcat wrote: post #27

> Waltz set some of the messages in the Signal group to disappear after one week, and some after four. That raises questions about whether the officials may have violated federal records law: Text messages about official acts are considered records that should be preserved. I suspect that this was the point of their using Signal, to avoid preservation of records.

SO much for 'the most transparent administration in history', not that I bought into that claim in the first place. Seems like a violation of multiple public record-keeping laws.

[deleted]

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

#106

Post by nradov »

anigbrowl wrote: post #86
Balgair wrote: post #77

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. 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…

My theory is that he had to balance the journalistic scoop of the century with the risk of being arrested for illegally accessing/storing classified information. If they had noticed before he published the story then he could have been vanned and the public told that he had infiltrated a secure channel, and who would be able to say otherwise? MAGA people would cheerfully call for his execution.

Under US federal law it is generally not a crime for a person without a security clearance to receive or store classified information. The legal problems come in when they solicit it or take some other action to obtain it.

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

#107

Post by burkaman »

nickthegreek wrote: post #10

Is it wild that a 3rd party app like Signal is used for this type of communication? I feel like that's crazy.

Yes, it is illegal (because of the auto-deleting messages) and explicitly against the rules that every one of these people mandates for their own employees. All of them know that federal records must be preserved, and you have to manually turn on Signal's auto-deletion feature, so this is obviously intentional criminal activity.

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

#108

Post by hnburnsy »

asdff wrote: post #80

304 votes, 75 comments 3 hours after posting and this is already being thrown all the way back to 134 rank on the front page with some 2-3 day old posts. This is very clearly hacker news: a case of opsec slipup in easily the worst fashion coming straight from the SecDef (or one representing the SecDef). A shame it is probably getting flamed and downvoted over partisan reasons, although I know there are many conservat…

>A shame it is probably getting flamed and downvoted over partisan reasons

Is this the forum for this type of news?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html...

  On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

  Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

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

#109

Post by lcc »

hnburnsy wrote: post #108
asdff wrote: post #80

304 votes, 75 comments 3 hours after posting and this is already being thrown all the way back to 134 rank on the front page with some 2-3 day old posts. This is very clearly hacker news: a case of opsec slipup in easily the worst fashion coming straight from the SecDef (or one representing the SecDef). A shame it is probably getting flamed and downvoted over partisan reasons, although I know there are many conservat…

>A shame it is probably getting flamed and downvoted over partisan reasons Is this the forum for this type of news? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html ... On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. Off-Topic: Most stories about…

Like the parent said, a tech-related opsec failure at this level is absolutely something a 'good hacker' would find interesting.

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

#110

Post by hello_computer »

ipython wrote: post #100
hello_computer wrote: post #75

[flagged]

The person I was in 2002 is vastly different than who I am now (PS- I am not Jeff Goldberg). I would assume the same would apply to you as well.

the person that i was in 2002 did not—and would not—spin a story out of whole cloth into the national press—especially one that would contribute to the deaths of over 100k innocent people
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