Comment by leereeves

1 day ago

It's also possible that he maintained security by not putting anything worth hacking on gmail.

It is also possible he is an idiot. There are few valuable sentences that begin with "it is possible..."

  • To be fair, he probably never once in his wildest dreams ever thought he would be head of the FBI. So he probably didn't think he needed the extra security, because what idiot would put him in charge of the world's largest spy network.

    • The same idiot who pushed him into SecDef’s office and DNI in 2020.

      He shouldn’t be FBI Director and he shouldn’t have been in the DNI or Secretary of Staff for SecDef either. All of those are high positions of responsibility and require tremendous OpsSec. This guy’s first act as FBI Director was to waive most of the investigations into his staff to bypass security clearance checks.

      Sorry if I’m not disagreeing with you. Sarcasm is a bit hard to identify these days.

    • World’s largest spy network? The FBI wouldn’t even be the largest spy network within the US.

Security in depth. Even if you think you don't have anything particularly valuable in there, you still protect it as if you did.

  • I'd rather he worry about securing government secrets, not spend one second worrying about "personal photographs of Patel sniffing and smoking cigars, riding in an antique convertible, and making a face while taking a picture of himself in the mirror with a large bottle of rum".

    • Obviously government secrets need to be properly secured, but the personal info/photos of a top official can often be used for blackmail or for determining close friends that could be used to compromise Patel.

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    • Bad take.

      Patel specifically bypassed security clearance protocols for Bongino and other staff he hired. His top priority isn’t protecting government secrets — it’s to take down what he thinks is the part of the US government that resists bending to Trump’s will.

      And you are wrong that the FBI shouldn’t care about securing the Director’s private life information. Anything and everything can and will be used to blackmail him by foreign governments, criminals, political actors.

      I highly doubt the first public dump of messages would include the most compromising content — that’s like handing away a maximum severity zero day for the most common OS in the federal government. There’s no logical reason to do that for free, so I suspect the really incriminating/ salacious stuff was withheld for private use.

      And if the FBI didn’t enable the high security setting on the FBI Director’s private email account, they might not have known what, if any, compromising materials were in there.

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