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Comment by ctrlp

8 months ago

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?

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ctrlp

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digdugdirk  8 months ago

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.

  • jandrewrogers  8 months ago

    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.

  • ctrlp  8 months ago

    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?

    • Hojojo  8 months ago

      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.

      1 reply →

  • lesuorac  8 months ago

    > 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.

giantrobot  8 months ago

> 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.

  • ctrlp  8 months ago

    "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."

chihuahua  8 months ago

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)

GVIrish  8 months ago

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.