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 agency in the world. It matters little if the information was encrypted in transit if the host device is compromised.
One would have to be a fool to not trust all of the classified tools and safeguards the US government uses only to then use a commercial app on commercial phones to communicate classified data in public while stateside and abroad. Just the fact that someone could accidentally add an unauthorized person to the chat is but one reason it was crazy for them to do this.
Sure, but I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt on that count. I’m fairly sure that’s because they felt it would be safer if the confidential info they sent wouldn’t stay around.
You conveniently failed to acknowledge this link https://www.project2025.observer where people _have_ read the policy proposals, and wrote them up in a nice little list, and are tracking their implementation.
We're 79 days in, and 42% of the policy objectives outlined in the document are complete, with another 15% in progress. Over 50% of the objectives have been actioned within the first 100 days. I've seen general contractors execute on a blueprint slower than this administration.
Project 2025 was a real proposal written by many people who were in his first administration, working with his campaign, and now his second administration. A significant fraction of the proposals are being implemented: https://www.project2025.observer/
Who said anything about fear? It’s just that when someone tells their backers what they plan to do, you can probably learn something useful by assuming they intended to use those plans.
It's no less a playbook or policy goal than a political party platform. Several of the authors of Project 2025 occupy staff or cabinet positions in the administration.
The policy goals of the ACLU, Clinton Foundation, etc are inputs to the Democratic Party's operations. Why would it be controversial to note that the Heritage Foundations's published policy is similarly an input to the Republican Party's operations?
Because it doesn't convey anything to anyone who doesn't already agree with you, especially when you just drop the name and treat that as if you've proven something. It's not a way of progressing a discussion, it's a way of stopping one.
I'd also note that mentioning George Soros being involved in anything gets condemnation here, so the same thing applies to both sides to at least some extent.
Now that your comment is flagged, I no longer remember the context. Maybe I'm getting older, but it seems like flagging is used as a downvote button lately. I don't think your comment was flag-worthy.
"classified information is ONLY supposed to viewed in a SCIF"
No.
No, no, no.
Most classified information is NOT designated SCI. When classified info was mostly paper, it was placed in GSA approved safes in regular 'ole office buildings. You'd get to work, open your safe, and do your work. Most SIPRNet computers are not in SCIFs.
Heck, you can even mail classified documents via USPS. Confidential and secret documents can be sent registered mail.
SCIFs are for viewing TS materials, whether or not they are SCI. Even then, SCIFs are often employed for processing things that are only marked Secret or systems only handling Secret. But yes, if we want to be specific, Secret has a lower bar and can be worked on outside of SCIFs but still not in public or at home.
Where? They recommended it for members of the public as part of their general recommendation for end-to-end encryption but that’s a very different scenario than government employees who have official systems.
Assuming this is true, how did they determine what a "top" government official is? So if you're the SecDef you should use it but not the deputy SecDef? How would this guidance not pertain to all government officials?
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.
That doesn't really make sense. If they had strong reason to believe that the secure comms systems they were supposed to be using were compromised, using personal phones to communicate outside of SCIFs is very, very far from what any competent person who understands and is briefed on the threat environment would do. Note that none of the people involved are making that argument because it would make them look even more incompetent.
Not arguing it was the best choice. But, I'm curious, if you were in the position where you had strong reasons to believe the official secure channels available to you were compromised by your political opponents who were leaking information received via those channels to undermine your policy initiatives, and needed to act and coordinate nonetheless, what would you do?
What they did is illegal. Any rank and file that did the same would be in prison for a decade, no questions asked.
In general, it seems like you're trying to "3d chess" incompetence into strategy, but try taking a step back and looking at it with clear eyes. This was a bad decision, plain and simple. Nobody is taking responsibility for it, and that makes it worse - these people are in charge of the largest intelligence and war machine on the planet. This is not okay.
The reality, which people are not acknowledging here, is that what they did may not have been according to official policy but it has been normal and pervasive for decades. It isn’t partisan, everyone does it. This is how DC works and the American public just got an education.
As a consequence, any enforcement now would be viewed as extremely selective.
I have been exposed to a lot of classified information in meetings in DC that were supposed to be unclassified. This isn’t an isolated incident, it has been a systemic issue across every administration for as long as I’ve worked in DC.
People should focus less on the incident and more on why this has been normal for decades.
The underlying tension is that doing things the official way is extremely slow and speed matters. There is a longstanding bias toward taking more risks in terms of information exposure because being slow carries its own significant risks. Speed of decision making is critical and that has proven to be impossible if every interaction has to happen inside a SCIF. It is a tension the intelligence community is still grappling with.
You're embarrassing yourself, brother. Nobody is asserting that this is OK. It was naive to assume the government was secure in the first place. Privacy advocates and whistleblowers have whistleblowers have been saying this for decades! You just weren't paying attention. WikiLeaks and Snowden leaks wasn't a "fun" news cycle, it was revealing everything you need to know about how the government operates truly. With no concern for security
Of course they haven't. Every think-tank moron knows political opsec is a joke (this is why sigint works in the first place) let alone people actually working in politics
I'm not doing anything of the sort. The kind of problem I'm flagging in is experienced every day by governments all over the world. Would anyone disagree? People on here who want to put their heads in the sand about it are just being political when there is a legitimate technical topic to discuss. The point is these aren't "rank and file" actors. They are at the top of political leadership. Those rules don't apply at this level of power politics so why get bogged down in such thinking?
Because laws should matter. Laws should apply to members of government too. Unless you're suggesting it's totally fine for Trump and his administration to be above the law. In which case the whole discussion is moot, because then it's not a democracy with a functioning rule of law anymore.
Law is a tool, and some tools are appropriate for some contexts and others are not. Do you think there is such a thing as "International Law"? If so, I would ask you what you think that actually is and where its legitimacy comes from and who enforces it? Politics and Law are two separate spheres of human conflict. You actually degrade the law by trying to weaponize it for political purposes. I would hope the past 10 years have shown that to everyone.
> What they did is illegal. Any rank and file that did the same would be in prison for a decade, no questions asked.
IIUC, the "rank and file" go to prison for violating their NDA. At the highest level these people are appointed and don't have an NDA which is why senators / representatives can leak without punishment.
> But, I'm curious, if you were in the position where you had strong reasons to believe the official secure channels available to you were compromised by your political opponents who were leaking information received via those channels to undermine your policy initiatives, and needed to act and coordinate nonetheless, what would you do?
Here's a pretty good order of operations when your policy breaks the law or is so odious as to feel the need to hide it from other duly elected representatives in government:
"The law" is for you and me. It can resolve contract disputes and punish some crimes. This is politics. It's a different order, and a category error to conflate the two. The sooner one disabuses oneself of having no distinction between the political and the legal, the sooner the world starts to make sense. Law at this level is lawfare (law as political weapon), not the normal proceedings of justice. Justice at this level is the rule of the stronger. Accept it and move on to more interesting political analysis. Or be trapped in an inescapable despair about the violations of the "rule of law."
Because I'm emphasizing the vacuity of simply asserting "the law" as if it's something we all agree on. It is not. I would be as if I said "the Pope" or "the King" or "God" says. I'm sure you would acknowledge that "the law" itself embodies conflict and there is constantly in flux, so how can anyone appeal to it in good faith as if it had an obvious meaning.
I would use a private service like Signal, and make sure to add a journalist that will leak information to undermine my policy initiatives - obviously! (because I'm a genius)
So you're using the word 'compromised'. In this context that would mean malware, unauthorized access, circumvented logging, etc. If someone thought this was happening the answer would be to lock the system down, perform forensic audits, and prosecute anyone who compromised these systems.
If you're talking about fear of leakers, the response to that is to tighten the distribution of information and start a counterintelligence investigation.
In any case the simple risk calculus is, what is the risk of adversaries getting a hold of this information and causing grave and lasting damage to national security and death vs the risk of political rivals leaking something. Pretty simple decision there and one that any cabinet member should get right.
If the CIA and NSA (let alone Russian and Chinese intelligence) are illegally spying on you, your civilian phone is toast. You shouldn't be ordering DoorDash on the thing.
Imagine the resources the Chinese and Russian governments devote to accessing these phones. The value to them could be trillions of dollars and/or existential differences in national security outcomes. The owners have to assume they are hacked, and that China and Russia know where they are going to dinner (which itself is a problem - they know who is meeting with who and when).
Likely a sock puppet account taken over to spread inversion propaganda, where Trump denouncers get called MAGA just to screw with people’s perceptions and beliefs. Gaslighting, essentially.
Russian operated puppets have been spreading similar stuff everywhere they can. When MAGA ppl do something stupid, they’re instantly there flat out calling them lefties and communists, etc. to shift blame, confuse readers and devolve meaningful discussions into name-calling and pointless debate.
I fear there's a ton of that going on rather indiscriminately just to sow outrage, waste everyone's time, and demoralize people. I don't believe it's a left/right phenomenon. Anything that trivializes or antagonizes the discourse benefits American global competitors.
The argument is that there are many organizations in the current government, a lot of them independent agencies, that are politically aligned against the Trump administration. Many people in these organizations have backdoor or spying access to government communications, and so members of the Trump admin can't trust government systems for communication.
I'd be interested in knowing which independent agencies have backdoored the military's operational communication channels. Wasn't aware that was a well known thing.
So why did this conversation needed to be kept from malign rogue anti-Trumpers in the NSA (who would be risking very real jail time) but did not require the basic level of OPSEC that would keep the editor of the Atlantic out?
Is this really such a strange thing to be concerned about? Snowden, NSA, etc...people remember. It’s well known that Trump’s campaign team was spied on by the FBI. Government is just a bunch of people, some of whom have strong political leanings, so intra-government leaks, spying, sabotage can happen and in all likelihood do happen.
But this is an unfounded conspiracy theory you’ve made up.
There is no evidence, reporting etc that says the government has deliberately compromised the government’s own secure systems. And for what purpose is beyond me.
1. Trump’s team was spied on by the FBI.
2. Government employees have access to government systems.
Conclusion? There is a possibility that Trump’s team again be spied upon through the government systems and consequently have sabotage done upon them. Therefore, avoid government systems as much as possible.
Calling this unfounded conspiracy theory is just running away from this very straightforward and simple argument.
Also, is there proof that these government systems are completely secure? Without that proof, why should they be using those systems? (He who controls the null hypothesis and all..)
I respectfully reject the first premise, specifically "spied on". The FBI wasn't spying. They were investigating communications between many Republicans, including the Trump Campaign, and known Russian intelligence operatives. I would expect the FBI to do this.
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.
I'd love to hear how a modern national elected government can function without executive agencies, and how those agencies resist strongman corruption and ensure stability without guaranteeing the independence of some roles.
I'm aware of the branches of government. It's not relevant. Neither is protests, as no one is in the streets protesting about government secure communication policies.
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?
I don't think it was a particularly good tactic, but if there was some motivation, it may have been more about political sabotage than foreign adversaries. I think that is the more interesting conversation, personally. What do you do if your political (domestic) antagonists control your comms? This question applies to all sides politically. Signal itself is promoted for "activist" use cases to protect comms from domestic antagonists. I'm presenting a similar dilemma. If one part of the government, (e.g., the military) controls secure comms, then another (e.g., the political) may have no choice but to opt-out. This problem is maybe better seen in the context of another country. It may be "too close" for us to see it clearly in the U.S. Other countries face this problem all the time, and Signal is used for the same reasons. I find it an interesting security problem.
> but to attack the core idea as essentially wrong is anti math, science, and rationality
The way Microsoft implemented stack ranking was anti math. You're supposed to measure the data then calculate the level of fit to a distribution, not artificially shoehorn the data into buckets to create the curve. If you analyze the data honestly you may find you have a bimodal distribution, or a heavily skewed distribution, who knows.
Stack ranking just clumsily says, I'm gonna give x% a bad score, y% a middle score, and z% the top score.
>Stack ranking just clumsily says, I'm gonna give x% a bad score, y% a middle score, and z% the top score.
as long as the ordering top/middle/bad is preserved, I don't see a problem. there are entire respected statistic methods based on rank ordering, not raw metrics.
People don't have a right to fall on a normal distribution. Employers do have a right to grow or trim the workforce, and those numbers are driven by factors that are not necessarily normally distributed.
the people who downvote me simply want participation trophys, and "no" is the answer.
You absolutely can argue that Microsoft pursued a system that hurt both Microsoft and its employees, but not by attacking rank ordering.
>Ah, "participation trophies" and "if you disagree you're a snowflake."
actually, my comments have all been about math, and i gave an explanation as to why some people don't like the math. It's your comment that talks about snowflakes.
That's not the point. The test giver has free discretion to say either answer is correct or incorrect. You could argue that if the intent was to underline "word" that it would have quotes around it, but it doesn't matter because the test is not supposed to be fair or consistent.
Things like this were at the heart of what Jim Crow was in America. Selective and capricious enforcement of the law to disenfranchise and disadvantage black people at best, enable unaccountable violence against them at the worst.
It's not cheating administrators, it's ambiguous questions with multiple possible answers.
As the judge of this test, I interpret your answer as incorrect. I expected the phrase, "the last word in this line" to be underlined. Test failed, no cheating required.
(Note that had you underlined the phrase, "the last word in this line", I would have still judged it incorrect, claiming that "word" or "line" should be underlined. Again, this requires no cheating.)
> If it was this, there would be quotes around those 6 words, just like in your comment.
If there were quotes around those 6 words, it would make the question unambiguous, sure. But without the quotes, my interpretation and judgement is still valid.
> The quotes are needed to change this sentence from its clear meaning to these other ones.
Actually, they are optional for that purpose, not required. Without them, the meaning is ambiguous. Just as you claim your interpretation is the "clear meaning", others have exactly as valid a claim to their interpretation being the "clear meaning".
Microsoft pay isn't the best in the industry so if compensation is the only thing that matters to someone, Microsoft shouldn't even be in their top five.
> People refuse to acknowledge that their conservation efforts for a year are undone by some guy in Texas in five minutes
I don't think that's a good way to look at things. Some guy in Texas is polluting a lot more than you, ok, but would it be better if that guy keeps polluting and you pollute just as much? We can't get hung up on, 'well some person/company somewhere else is undoing my savings'. That kind of gets into tragedy of the commons thinking.
It is disheartening to see parts of the country going in the opposite direction than we should be going for sure. And well-meaning but not very useful policies can be a pain. But I try not to be disheartened at backward thinking in other locales, I try to look at the places making advances (for example, India is ahead of schedule in the shift to renewables) to be find some optimistic amidst the bleakness.
It's not "just as much" by any stretch. A more comparable scenario is – you pollute by 10 units, your neighbor pollutes by 1000 units, and people knock on your door and say, well the neighbor is hopeless, but to save the environment you need to stop showering every day and get your usage down to 5 units. Have you made a difference? Technically, sure. But ultimately (1) you have drastically reduced your own quality of life for no measurable gain and (2) the real problem (next door) stays unsolved.
The only way out of the tragedy of the commons is strict regulation, not "ignore the bad actors and do the right thing yourself".
Indeed. Individuals doing their bit is great. But structural problems (such as the undue influence of the fossil fuel lobby) need structural solutions (such as tax and legislation). A change of culture can also work, but that can take a long time.
Typically you're not asking for a price(salary) upfront. Ideally you've done a bit of homework to figure out what positions can pay in the ballpark of what you want. Then you get their offer at the end of the interview process and negotiate as appropriate.
Yeah you may go through hours of interviews and not end up with an offer in some cases but think of it this way: you could potentially earn tens of thousands to over one hundred thousand extra dollar per year off that time investment in interviewing.
Attempting to line up multiple interviews and balancing offer timelines is hard, but the payoff can be huge. Considering that people spend 4 years or more working in college to get into their career, making a time investment of a few weeks to get a potentially large raise is nothing.
I think the author is taking a bit of the wrong lesson from his experience.
One of the challenges of coordinating a group of people is getting everyone to buy into the same vision. Fact is that other people see the world differently and may have different goals. Here the author is attributing that to narcissism and maliciousness when most of the time it isn't that.
So yes, as you add more people it gets more challenging to get everyone rowing in the same direction. This is why setting a clear direction and clear communication is key, but the increase in communication overhead as the team grows is always going to be difficult. In this case, as others have said, he could've just open-sourced his code so the people who had a different idea were free to run with it.
Reputation may not affect Google's ad based revenue, but it absolutely affects their ability to profit in lines of business outside of ads.
Google might have made more inroads with enterprises with G suite and GCP if they didn't have that reputation. The gaming industry is a 200 billion/year market that Google could've captured a decent size of if potential customers trusted that they wouldn't quickly give up. All of that represents billions of dollars in lost opportunities.
Since 9/11 there's been a shift towards not siloing information as aggressively as before in order to make intelligence failures less likely. Don't know if that was at play in this case though.
At the very least, access control systems should've flagged unusual access to more information that this person would've had a need to know. But as big as the US intelligence and defense apparatus is, not every agency, program, and office is gonna have rigorous enough controls to catch people like this. Seems like the lesson should've been learned after Manning and Snowden.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2025/03/13/elon-mu...