Consider all the small business defense contractors who are held to the letter of the most minute security compliance requirements. They have to somehow meet everything, with very limited resources.
And then at the top of government, the most sensitive information is frequently handled without any care at all. Not to mention 19-year olds with flash drives barging into the most sensitive IT systems of the federal government.
Slight imbalance there, I would say.
mmooss · 10d ago
Notice why Hesgeth's aids were fired:
> According to the Times, the private chat also included two senior advisers to Hegseth – Dan Caldwell and Darin Selnick – who were fired last week after being accused of leaking unauthorized information.
I understand the tactics of much of what Trump and his people do, even though I often disagree. I understand why Trump has DOGE moving quickly and breaking things; I understand why they show contempt for the law, rules, and customs - they want to destroy those things.
I don't understand the utter incompetence that often appears; an earlier example was team Trump's court filings challenging the 2020 elections but there is lots more. How does that furthering the neo-fascist / conservative / Trump mission? I suppose it's disruptive but if they just showed basic competence they would probably get away with much more.
panarky · 10d ago
Privileging ideology and loyalty over reality and competence causes massively sub-optimal results.
Imagine you ordered your Waymo to pretend its location, direction and velocity were what you wanted them to be, ignoring its sensors.
It's a myth that the fascists of the 1930s made the trains run on time.
ramchip · 10d ago
Fascism rewards loyalty above competence.
oliwarner · 9d ago
No this is the distraction. The buffoonery and even the buffoons committing it all dilute the news cycle.
Accounting for the damage done will be nearly impossible and that makes it all the harder to fully reverse. That's one of the focuses here. Making it stick.
apercu · 9d ago
At least you are honest in your tacit support for some of these clowns actions.
hedora · 9d ago
I think you might want to read their comment again more carefully. Understanding and explaining someone else's terrible motivations for their terrible actions doesn't imply support.
apercu · 8d ago
That'll teach me to comment quickly on something on my phone when in the middle of something else.
lol.
jemmyw · 10d ago
Folks that are more competent and considered are less likely to be involved in the first place. I think we can see that from Trump's first time in office. There were people politically aligned that fell by the wayside. Unfortunately incompetence appears to be the winning strategy.
kashunstva · 10d ago
> I don't understand the utter incompetence
Simply put, it’s a reflection of Trump’s own incompetence, or perhaps carelessness and his utter refusal to recognize and make use of expertise in others. I’m about halfway through “Lucky Loser” (Buettner & Craig) which traces his financial history. His disdain for objective data over “intuition” has always been alarming. I suspect his hiring for cabinet positions follows a similar carelessness.
mandeepj · 10d ago
> Lucky Loser
Thanks for that ref! I've always maintained T is extremely dumb, He goes towards far left on the Dumb scale on the levels which you'd have never seen before. But, at the same time, he has all the luck which no one else has. Glad, I'm not the only one to see him that way.
selcuka · 9d ago
> he has all the luck which no one else has
Well, the tagline of the book is "Inheritance. Fraud. Deceit.", so "Lucky" might not be the right word.
HDThoreaun · 9d ago
Its a little more than luck. Trump has the best political instincts I have ever seen. He is able to control the narrative in a way dems can only dream of.
tstrimple · 9d ago
I don't think he has very good political instincts at all. He just fell into a time when the conservative party was looking to exercise their spite and he gave them an outlet just by being the crude bigoted asshole he has always been. Doesn't matter what he does as long as he continues to be cruel and hurt the "right people". This is what conservatives have been asking for and are showing up to vote for. You can tell it's not about things like the economy as they often lie about because "the price of eggs" was one of the most important things before the election and they aren't saying shit about the faltering GDP and increasing inflation.
It's interesting to look at opinion polls pre/post election. All through Obama's last term the conservative rallying cry was the economy was bad and migrant caravans were coming. As soon as Trump was elected, there was a 40 point swing on conservative's opinion on the economy. It's not just the economy. It's every position. When Bill Clinton has an affair, then family values are incredibly important. When Trump brags about grabbing women by the pussy without consent, it's just locker room talk.
thunky · 9d ago
> I don't think he has very good political instincts at all
I think the political instinct trump brought, and that you're alluding to, was his ability to never admit being wrong about anything. Yes politicians have always done this to some extent but he's taken it to a whole new level.
It's the method of saying what you want people to believe and think over and over with complete confidence until they actually do, even if it has no basis in reality or is stupid and wrong.
It's incompetence as a political platform.
And other politicians have noticed how well it works, so now they do it to (see: hegseth).
hdjjhhvvhga · 9d ago
> I suppose it's disruptive but if they just showed basic competence they would probably get away with much more.
Yeah but if you were a competent person in a position to work for them, would you do it? I believe there are relatively few smart people willing to go down this hole precisely because they can understand the consequences.
techpineapple · 9d ago
I remember reading a book on the Columbine shooter, and on some level I imagined evil, but a coherent evil, and it really was not, it was quite nonsensical and inconsistent. It was like 4chan logic.
I think when at the surrounding facts - a group of people who talk anti-woke but don’t seem to make a distinction between Jackie Robinson and “all white people are racist”, or willing to ignore every last economist in favor of blanket tariffs, or hiring a Fox News host to run your DOD in the first place! You’re telling me there aren’t enough conservative minds to choose from, in the fucking military! the simplest solution is that there isn’t a coherent ideology.
I think this makes sense, that sort of evil isn’t rational, but we’re so used to movie villains with a coherent ideology I think it poisons the reality. Go watch “The Last King of Scotland”. Idi Amin was the whole bag of nuts.
rsynnott · 9d ago
Because they're idiots. There is no "ahahahahah, we are deliberately doing stupid stuff as part of a sinister plot". They're just doing stupid stuff naturally, because they are stupid.
Like, the hiring process is pretty much "who shows most loyalty to Dear Leader"; one would not _expect_ competence.
AnimalMuppet · 9d ago
Classic supervillain mistake - hiring incompetent minions. Sure, they're loyal. But they don't work.
rsynnott · 8d ago
I mean, it's not a trope for no reason; there are plenty of real-world examples.
ben_w · 9d ago
> an earlier example was team Trump's court filings challenging the 2020 elections but there is lots more. How does that furthering the neo-fascist / conservative / Trump mission?
With the usual caveats about politics, my understanding is that this is because Trump such a narcissist that he genuinely cannot process the idea of not winning, or being in the wrong.
If he really is like this, this is exceptionally dangerous. Ignore any question about intelligence for a moment, because everyone makes some mistakes: purging anyone who isn't a sycophant means that when he inevitably does make a mistake, nobody will be willing to stop it.
DrillShopper · 9d ago
> I don't understand the utter incompetence that often appears
Trump and company want you to think that the national government is completely incompetent so they can sell as much of it off to their Wall Street oligarch ghouls as quickly as possible. They are intentionally incompetent to further that goal.
bayarearefugee · 10d ago
When the only qualification you have for the people that you hire to advise you is absolute sycophantic loyalty, it isn't surprising when they turn out to be wildly incompetent.
mmooss · 10d ago
Hesgeth has significant success in life and served as a captain in the Army (or Army National Guard). Those aren't sufficient qualification for Secretary of Defense, but they are for not doing stupid, self-sabotaging stuff.
Simlarly, Rudy Guliani was a lawyer and mayor, but the 2020 election court filings and arguments were idiotic. How is that possible?
I don't buy that they are idiots. I don't have an explanation, however.
defrost · 10d ago
Hegseth has years on record as a day drinking handsome face on day time TV who rushes into things without thinking ..
That's a very narrow type of "significant success" and absolutely below the bar of qualification for Secretary of Defense, although easily clearing the bar to be considered an idiot.
walls · 9d ago
The U.S. Army has approximately 72,729 captains.
peppers-ghost · 9d ago
Having credentials doesn't make you not an idiot. It's important to understand that you can be very educated or skilled in certain things but it doesn't make you good at everything.
HDThoreaun · 9d ago
anyone who goes to college can become a captain in the army. Its honorable sure but not a sign of competence.
red-iron-pine · 9d ago
You're basically guaranteed a promo to captain, after which promotion gets a lot harder and rarer.
It's the officer version of getting to E-4 before your enlistment ends -- as long as you're not a moron and get busted down you'll get there.
A Captain rank is in no way a qualification for Sec of Defense when there are literally hundreds of 4-star Generals and Admirals with well established track records of running operations during 20 years of Iraq and Afghanistan.
lemon_zest · 10d ago
It kinda gets buried under the utter incompetence of these clowns but why are we even bombing Yemen? How is it acceptable to brazenly destroying other countries’ civil infrastructure? It’s a US president’s pastime activity since Obama
ty6853 · 10d ago
Obama started doing it as a concession to the Saudis for our policies in the ME. More recently Yemen has pirated ships as an immediate response to our support and funding of mass murder of civilians in Palestine. So the Yemenis are not blameless and there is some sort of valid reasoning for the attacks, but to be clear we are the instigator here.
lemon_zest · 10d ago
Agreed, mine was more of a rhetorical question. The concession was that we allowed the Saudis to bomb them and further excarcerbate the civil war in Yemen. Now because they are blockading shipments in protest of the current onslaught in Gaza we are pummeling them for it. We sure do have a taste for war crimes in the region.
Balgair · 9d ago
The other issue is that these bombing will accomplish nothing of value. These rebels have been bombed to the stone age by Saudi already. The cost of the sorties is vastly larger than anything the rebels are sending. Yes, some 'show the colors' is needed to assuage allies and merchants. It ends up being very expensive 'grass cutting'.
But real change there is going to require boots on the ground. And none of the players in the region want that. So, we just spend a $80,000 on a missile for a guy to shoot that doesn't make that in a year at a guy that doesn't make that in a lifetime.
JumpCrisscross · 9d ago
> real change there is going to require boots on the ground
Or bombing their sponsors. I’m not an advocate of war with Iran. But it makes more sense than blowing up desert mountains.
HDThoreaun · 9d ago
To stop the houthis from sinking/pirating container ships.
TiredOfLife · 9d ago
TIL that ballistic missiles are civil infrastructure
JumpCrisscross · 9d ago
> why are we even bombing Yemen?
Houthis are bombing unarmed civilian ships in the Red Sea. This makes zero sense for Yemen. But it does, politically, for the Houthis. Put another way, the extremists in one government are bombing another country because of what the extremists in that country are up to.
mvdtnz · 9d ago
I wish the government would stop calling them rebels and call them what they are - the defacto government of Yemen.
JumpCrisscross · 9d ago
> what they are - the defacto government of Yemen
The Houthis are a belligerent in a civil war with multiple sides [1], none of which could stand without external backing. They're not a ragtag group of rebels. But they're also not the government of Yemen.
But then it would sound as if they were bombing a sovereign nation instead of doing pacekeeping
No comments yet
morkalork · 10d ago
Not since Bush and Iraq's non-existent WMDs? Or Vietnam or countless other conflicts got involved in under the Monroe doctrine?
morkalork · 10d ago
I remember in the one UX design class I took how they stressed the apocryphal "your grandmother is using this app" which in hindsight is sadly asking too much, apparently the bar should have been lower at "the secretary of defense is trying to start a group chat and not leak national security secrets".
mcphage · 10d ago
He’s not really trying not to leak secrets, though.
defrost · 10d ago
Not trying at all ...
US defense secretary texted strike information to his family in group chat he created
from sources common to both The Guardian article and the parallel New York Times article.
xnx · 9d ago
Staying optimistic:
"Exclusive: The White House is looking to replace Pete Hegseth as defense secretary"
This is CISA telling potential target civilians (and government employees in their civilian capacity, since government employees talk to their friends too) what to do to protect themselves. The government has separate, much stricter guidelines for security compliance for cloud services used by the government.
Those guidelines are called FedRAMP, and Signal is not FedRAMP certified.
leereeves · 9d ago
It specifically says it is addressed to senior government officials.
Also, I don't know for sure, but there was a link and discussion here not long ago saying that Signal is pre-installed and widely used at the CIA.
> It specifically says it is addressed to senior government officials.
Sure, because senior government officials sometimes do things outside of their official capacity. If a senior government official's communications with their therapist or their lawyer e.g. are compromised, this could leave them vulnerable to blackmail. That's bad for everyone.
Re: other post about use of Signal, I'm not commenting on that post and/or that issue. I'm not expressing an opinion either way on whether it's relevant to this issue. I just want to point out that FedRAMP exists, and Signal isn't FedRAMP certified. If you don't think that is important (and a lot of reasonable people don't), you do you.
belter · 9d ago
These are generic, and quite weak recommendations on the part of the CISA. And that was the excuse of the CIA director, while knowing very well these are for regular work not real-time battle plans.
Also those recommendations from the CISA recommend to use password managers...like Lastpass and 1Password and others, who had multiple security breaches.
If this is the type of Cybersecurity the US government applies to day to day work, its much easier to understand the field day North Korean and Chinese hackers seem to have all the time.
Your argument is that you know better than CISA? You didn't even read the linked article properly. These were not recommendations for "regular work", they were for "highly targeted individuals".
But let's assume you're right and it's bad advice. The objection in the OP isn't that there was a breach. It's just exploiting the perception that using Signal is somehow wrong, and suggesting that it is a sign that Hegseth is incompetent.
So it's rather important to know that using Signal is recommended by the government's own experts (even if those experts were wrong, hypothetically).
The concern is less about Signal, more about inviting journalists and immediate civilian family to a front row as it happens discussion about upcoming targets.
That and the deliberate lack of record keeping.
Attorneys suing the United States government over its use of vanishing Signal messages to coordinate military strikes last month in Yemen allege that new court filings by the government reveal a “calculated strategy” by Trump administration officials to evade transparency laws through the illegal destruction of government records.
The use of the private group chat—in which some messages were configured to automatically delete before they could be archived—was first revealed by The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, on March 24, after he was inadvertently added to the group by Trump’s national security adviser, Michael Waltz. American Oversight subsequently filed Freedom of Information Act requests over the chats and then sought a temporary restraining order in a Washington, DC, federal court in an effort to compel the government to salvage any messages yet to be deleted.
Hegseth has invited his wife and brother to other official meetings in person. He seems to be including them as part of his team; inviting them to the Signal chat probably wasn't a mistake.
> That and the deliberate lack of record keeping.
That part seems like speculation. How would we even know if records were kept? If records were kept, they'd be classified.
> Attorneys suing the United States government over its use of vanishing Signal messages
That seems very much like the concern is about the use of Signal, so the fact that CISA recommends it is very relevant.
aigen000 · 8d ago
From the original chat that got leaked, Walz had set the group chat up to auto delete messages every week, and 4 weeks in other cases. Official government communication is subject to the federal records act so that chat, which was used to communicate official government actions, was not compliant. If it was just used for lunch dates or something, Hesgeth wouldn't be in this mess.
CISA recommends Signal, but it is not an approved tool to share classified information. That's what SCIFs are for.
maxerickson · 9d ago
Oh good, his disregard for security is flagrant rather than incompetent.
leereeves · 9d ago
I imagine he trusts his wife and brother more than he trusts anyone else with access to that info. Having staff he trusts is the opposite of disregard for security.
And since this info was leaked to the press, there is clearly someone with access who he should not have trusted. Do you really think the security breach in this case came from his wife or brother?
nineplay · 9d ago
There is a long history of people getting betrayed by spouses and siblings. He may trust his wife and brother but the rest of the US has no reason to share that trust.
> Do you really think the security breach in this case came from his wife or brother
I don't think it's out of the question.
maxerickson · 9d ago
Really going hard on the Wilhoit, huh?
leereeves · 9d ago
> Really going hard on the Wilhoit, huh?
I guess that's a reference to some fictional "Wilhoit's Law", right? I had to look it up. Turns out it's just a partisan Internet snipe from a classical music composer originally posted in the comments on a blog[1].
That sums up the case against Hegseth nicely. Just a partisan attack without substance, sustained only by ignorance.
Without substance? Using chats without double checking who are members of the chat group is a thing not even I do when sharing some gossip, lol. That's blatant incompetence, a person responsible for the USA defence cannot be bothered to cross the members list of a group chat before sharing extremely sensitive information.
And now he's adding his family into the mix?
maxerickson · 9d ago
I don't think it's ignorant to think you are extending him an awful lot of grace.
leereeves · 9d ago
I've just seen all this - nepotism, classified info outside government channels, the occasional mistake - often enough to recognize that people only get outraged about it when "the other side" does it.
aigen000 · 8d ago
Signal is not an approved communication channel for confidential attack plans.
belter · 9d ago
Oh look it's flagged...this is HN way of saying we are clean on OpsSec... :-)
dang · 9d ago
If you keep using HN primarily for political battle, we're going to have to ban you. We've already asked you to stop, and you've continued to do a ton of it. If you want to keep posting to HN, please fix this properly.
Those watching and reading Fox News who will likely completely the ignore the story.
mmooss · 10d ago
Or they will spin it. The Democrats and othe Trump opponents have no power to communicate effectively outside their bubble, and Trump's team, the Republicans and the right wing know it. They can do anything and spin it successfully. It is the heart of their power.
threatofrain · 10d ago
Arguably 45% of the US by job approval.
JumpCrisscross · 9d ago
> who outside the most delusional among us is not questioning the unfittedness of the entire Trump administration?
I once saw the fall of great civilisations as tragedies. They’re not. After a certain point, after a certain generation, they’re not just inevitable. They’re deserved.
The American model of government and society may empirically not work. Hell, universal suffrage and electoral democracy may not be the fittest way to organise humanity.
I hope not. I don’t believe so, yet. But the evidence is mounting. Since the Industrial Revolution, the tendrils of fascism have tried at democracy (an institution broader than just elections) borne from the agricultural revolution. Fascism isn’t the answer. But maybe popular will is, similarly, a bad—if predictable—governing instrument.
China is making the quiet argument America made in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars. American history just doesn’t teach the consequences of O.G. Versailles.
sam_goody · 9d ago
I am convinced that I do not have enough data to be able to assess the "fittedness" of the entire Trump administration".
And that is despite (or perhaps because) I have spent way way to much time reading articles both from the Left and the Right.
If you only read one narrative, you might think you are getting the whole picture. When you read both [which is admittedly difficult - I sometimes blanch and force myself to read just to get the options open], you might find that there are hints how much is not known.
When you have a reason to be involved at some point, you realize that Gell-Mann was on to something
scarecrowbob · 9d ago
I'd be quite interested if you could point me to some sources who are making what you believe is a credible case that the Trump admin is executing some coherent strategy in a competent manner.
I read quite lot, everyone from anarchists an d communists to people I believe would happily describe themselves as fascists. I read self-described US liberals and conservatives. And I am having a very hard time finding folks who describe a reasoned, coherent strategy being implemented.
I have read a lot of (typically US "right wing") commentators who claim that "we just can't know", but having come of age when the same disingenuous claim was made about the US invasion of Iraq it is hard for me to take those kinds of claims seriously.
I'm not looking for an account that I can agree with, but even a simple "this is their strategy, and here is an account of why that is a coherent idea" would be a big upgrade from what I am usually hearing; my current understanding is that only God and Trump understood the big picture and that Trump is senile enough that even he has lost the plot.
And then at the top of government, the most sensitive information is frequently handled without any care at all. Not to mention 19-year olds with flash drives barging into the most sensitive IT systems of the federal government.
Slight imbalance there, I would say.
> According to the Times, the private chat also included two senior advisers to Hegseth – Dan Caldwell and Darin Selnick – who were fired last week after being accused of leaking unauthorized information.
I understand the tactics of much of what Trump and his people do, even though I often disagree. I understand why Trump has DOGE moving quickly and breaking things; I understand why they show contempt for the law, rules, and customs - they want to destroy those things.
I don't understand the utter incompetence that often appears; an earlier example was team Trump's court filings challenging the 2020 elections but there is lots more. How does that furthering the neo-fascist / conservative / Trump mission? I suppose it's disruptive but if they just showed basic competence they would probably get away with much more.
Imagine you ordered your Waymo to pretend its location, direction and velocity were what you wanted them to be, ignoring its sensors.
It's a myth that the fascists of the 1930s made the trains run on time.
Accounting for the damage done will be nearly impossible and that makes it all the harder to fully reverse. That's one of the focuses here. Making it stick.
lol.
Simply put, it’s a reflection of Trump’s own incompetence, or perhaps carelessness and his utter refusal to recognize and make use of expertise in others. I’m about halfway through “Lucky Loser” (Buettner & Craig) which traces his financial history. His disdain for objective data over “intuition” has always been alarming. I suspect his hiring for cabinet positions follows a similar carelessness.
Thanks for that ref! I've always maintained T is extremely dumb, He goes towards far left on the Dumb scale on the levels which you'd have never seen before. But, at the same time, he has all the luck which no one else has. Glad, I'm not the only one to see him that way.
Well, the tagline of the book is "Inheritance. Fraud. Deceit.", so "Lucky" might not be the right word.
It's interesting to look at opinion polls pre/post election. All through Obama's last term the conservative rallying cry was the economy was bad and migrant caravans were coming. As soon as Trump was elected, there was a 40 point swing on conservative's opinion on the economy. It's not just the economy. It's every position. When Bill Clinton has an affair, then family values are incredibly important. When Trump brags about grabbing women by the pussy without consent, it's just locker room talk.
I think the political instinct trump brought, and that you're alluding to, was his ability to never admit being wrong about anything. Yes politicians have always done this to some extent but he's taken it to a whole new level.
It's the method of saying what you want people to believe and think over and over with complete confidence until they actually do, even if it has no basis in reality or is stupid and wrong.
It's incompetence as a political platform.
And other politicians have noticed how well it works, so now they do it to (see: hegseth).
Yeah but if you were a competent person in a position to work for them, would you do it? I believe there are relatively few smart people willing to go down this hole precisely because they can understand the consequences.
I think when at the surrounding facts - a group of people who talk anti-woke but don’t seem to make a distinction between Jackie Robinson and “all white people are racist”, or willing to ignore every last economist in favor of blanket tariffs, or hiring a Fox News host to run your DOD in the first place! You’re telling me there aren’t enough conservative minds to choose from, in the fucking military! the simplest solution is that there isn’t a coherent ideology.
I think this makes sense, that sort of evil isn’t rational, but we’re so used to movie villains with a coherent ideology I think it poisons the reality. Go watch “The Last King of Scotland”. Idi Amin was the whole bag of nuts.
Like, the hiring process is pretty much "who shows most loyalty to Dear Leader"; one would not _expect_ competence.
With the usual caveats about politics, my understanding is that this is because Trump such a narcissist that he genuinely cannot process the idea of not winning, or being in the wrong.
If he really is like this, this is exceptionally dangerous. Ignore any question about intelligence for a moment, because everyone makes some mistakes: purging anyone who isn't a sycophant means that when he inevitably does make a mistake, nobody will be willing to stop it.
Trump and company want you to think that the national government is completely incompetent so they can sell as much of it off to their Wall Street oligarch ghouls as quickly as possible. They are intentionally incompetent to further that goal.
Simlarly, Rudy Guliani was a lawyer and mayor, but the 2020 election court filings and arguments were idiotic. How is that possible?
I don't buy that they are idiots. I don't have an explanation, however.
eg: throwing an axe and hitting a drummer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMrVdFnjEjs
That's a very narrow type of "significant success" and absolutely below the bar of qualification for Secretary of Defense, although easily clearing the bar to be considered an idiot.
It's the officer version of getting to E-4 before your enlistment ends -- as long as you're not a moron and get busted down you'll get there.
A Captain rank is in no way a qualification for Sec of Defense when there are literally hundreds of 4-star Generals and Admirals with well established track records of running operations during 20 years of Iraq and Afghanistan.
But real change there is going to require boots on the ground. And none of the players in the region want that. So, we just spend a $80,000 on a missile for a guy to shoot that doesn't make that in a year at a guy that doesn't make that in a lifetime.
Or bombing their sponsors. I’m not an advocate of war with Iran. But it makes more sense than blowing up desert mountains.
Houthis are bombing unarmed civilian ships in the Red Sea. This makes zero sense for Yemen. But it does, politically, for the Houthis. Put another way, the extremists in one government are bombing another country because of what the extremists in that country are up to.
The Houthis are a belligerent in a civil war with multiple sides [1], none of which could stand without external backing. They're not a ragtag group of rebels. But they're also not the government of Yemen.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yemeni_civil_war_(2014%E2%80%9...
No comments yet
"Exclusive: The White House is looking to replace Pete Hegseth as defense secretary"
https://www.npr.org/2025/04/21/nx-s1-5371312/trump-white-hou...
> Apply these best practices to your devices and online accounts.
> 1. Use only end-to-end encrypted communications.
> Adopt a free messaging application for secure communications that guarantees end-to-end encryption, such as Signal or similar apps.
https://www.cisa.gov/sites/default/files/2024-12/guidance-mo...
Those guidelines are called FedRAMP, and Signal is not FedRAMP certified.
Also, I don't know for sure, but there was a link and discussion here not long ago saying that Signal is pre-installed and widely used at the CIA.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43478091
Sure, because senior government officials sometimes do things outside of their official capacity. If a senior government official's communications with their therapist or their lawyer e.g. are compromised, this could leave them vulnerable to blackmail. That's bad for everyone.
Re: other post about use of Signal, I'm not commenting on that post and/or that issue. I'm not expressing an opinion either way on whether it's relevant to this issue. I just want to point out that FedRAMP exists, and Signal isn't FedRAMP certified. If you don't think that is important (and a lot of reasonable people don't), you do you.
Also those recommendations from the CISA recommend to use password managers...like Lastpass and 1Password and others, who had multiple security breaches.
If this is the type of Cybersecurity the US government applies to day to day work, its much easier to understand the field day North Korean and Chinese hackers seem to have all the time.
https://www.upguard.com/blog/lastpass-vulnerability-and-futu...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/daveywinder/2024/08/07/critical...
But let's assume you're right and it's bad advice. The objection in the OP isn't that there was a breach. It's just exploiting the perception that using Signal is somehow wrong, and suggesting that it is a sign that Hegseth is incompetent.
So it's rather important to know that using Signal is recommended by the government's own experts (even if those experts were wrong, hypothetically).
That and the deliberate lack of record keeping.
~ https://www.wired.com/story/heres-what-happened-to-those-sig...> That and the deliberate lack of record keeping.
That part seems like speculation. How would we even know if records were kept? If records were kept, they'd be classified.
> Attorneys suing the United States government over its use of vanishing Signal messages
That seems very much like the concern is about the use of Signal, so the fact that CISA recommends it is very relevant.
CISA recommends Signal, but it is not an approved tool to share classified information. That's what SCIFs are for.
And since this info was leaked to the press, there is clearly someone with access who he should not have trusted. Do you really think the security breach in this case came from his wife or brother?
> Do you really think the security breach in this case came from his wife or brother
I don't think it's out of the question.
I guess that's a reference to some fictional "Wilhoit's Law", right? I had to look it up. Turns out it's just a partisan Internet snipe from a classical music composer originally posted in the comments on a blog[1].
That sums up the case against Hegseth nicely. Just a partisan attack without substance, sustained only by ignorance.
1: https://slate.com/business/2022/06/wilhoits-law-conservative...
And now he's adding his family into the mix?
Also, please stop posting snarky and/or unsubstantive comments (like this one).
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Please clarify what you mean by this. Are you saying some HN users should abstain to comment on some threads?
I once saw the fall of great civilisations as tragedies. They’re not. After a certain point, after a certain generation, they’re not just inevitable. They’re deserved.
The American model of government and society may empirically not work. Hell, universal suffrage and electoral democracy may not be the fittest way to organise humanity.
I hope not. I don’t believe so, yet. But the evidence is mounting. Since the Industrial Revolution, the tendrils of fascism have tried at democracy (an institution broader than just elections) borne from the agricultural revolution. Fascism isn’t the answer. But maybe popular will is, similarly, a bad—if predictable—governing instrument.
China is making the quiet argument America made in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars. American history just doesn’t teach the consequences of O.G. Versailles.
And that is despite (or perhaps because) I have spent way way to much time reading articles both from the Left and the Right.
If you only read one narrative, you might think you are getting the whole picture. When you read both [which is admittedly difficult - I sometimes blanch and force myself to read just to get the options open], you might find that there are hints how much is not known.
When you have a reason to be involved at some point, you realize that Gell-Mann was on to something
I read quite lot, everyone from anarchists an d communists to people I believe would happily describe themselves as fascists. I read self-described US liberals and conservatives. And I am having a very hard time finding folks who describe a reasoned, coherent strategy being implemented.
I have read a lot of (typically US "right wing") commentators who claim that "we just can't know", but having come of age when the same disingenuous claim was made about the US invasion of Iraq it is hard for me to take those kinds of claims seriously.
I'm not looking for an account that I can agree with, but even a simple "this is their strategy, and here is an account of why that is a coherent idea" would be a big upgrade from what I am usually hearing; my current understanding is that only God and Trump understood the big picture and that Trump is senile enough that even he has lost the plot.