Comment by ctrlp
8 months ago
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.
8 months ago
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?
Follow the SOP (and the law) and use a SCIF.
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.
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> 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:
1. Stop breaking the fucking law.
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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.
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So what would the smart move have been in that case?
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).
The administration has not made this argument though. You have.
So why should we default to the position of not trusting those systems when every previous administration has used it without issus.
Many people are making the argument that this administration is unlike all previous administrations. I infer you disagree with that.
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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.
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Yes. Thank you for making it succinctly.
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Once again you are making this assertion.
No one in the Trump administration has come out and said the secure systems can’t be trusted.
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.
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.