Nothing on Hillary Clinton’s server was classified at the time it was put on the server. Some items were subsequently reclassified to the lowest level above Unclassified.
So there’s really no comparison between the two situations. It stinks of bothsidesism for the journalist to even mention it. A better contrast is between screeching outrage at nothing, versus the current sneering complacency about a major security fuck-up, though I’m sure it pales with what Trump is sharing with Russia and what he’s waving around in front of his cronies to brag about what he knows.
Here we go with the “Democrats can do no wrong…” speech…
Ah, cool, another account to block.
Bye!
🧈 👨 s
Lock. Them. Up.
Conservative hypocrisy knows no bounds. They will only be outraged at what their talking heads tell them to be outraged at.
Shared military plans with a journalist on a private app.
I’m so tired of America letting the worst pieces of shit get away with anything. One side breaks the speed limit by 2mph and they’re euthanized. The other side rapes and kills all of Asia, and nothing happens.
The two sides you’re talking about is the rich vs the poor.
The rich get to do what they want because no one holds them accountable. The people that should be holding them accountable are corrupted by the endless money that the rich have.
The “people” could change this over night but the rich have us all divided.
If you want real change stop hating your neighbor and start banding together. That will never happen tho because the rich are winning this war.
EDIT: To be 1000% clear, they should not be using personal cell phones for this, which they probably did because everyone in this admin is braindead gutter trash. I’m suggesting that self-hosted Signal over government servers is probably fine for security with potentially some tweaks to the app. Something I neglected to think of however is that this sidesteps record keeping, and probably deliberately so. My contention here was solely about security, but this fact makes Signal use unconscionable in my book because it impedes accountability.
Okay, let’s just be clear here: Signal isn’t just another “private app”; the amount of information they have about your communications is zero (0) with the exception that I believe they can see if you have an account and the last time you connected to the server. Governments absolutely do rely on Signal. The Signal protocol is open and highly robust, the app code is FOSS and has eyes from a shitload of security researchers globally due to its importance, its server code is FOSS (although you don’t have to trust this due to the robust E2EE, and you can even self-host IIRC due to the FOSS server code), and it has reproducible builds.
This fuck-up was strictly due to the fact that they’re incompetent morons just randomly inviting people to group chats and shit with no guardrails. If I had to guess, they’d probably want to self-host the fork the Signal app and make it so that you can only invite people with some form of clearance, but this last thing is total speculation on my part. I’m sure there’s some way to sanely do this. The part about Signal being secure is just objectively true; it’s audited like absolute crazy, both the FOSS app and the protocol. I would trust it more than whatever the US government could homebrew, even.
If you, as a citizen, are looking for secure, private messaging, Signal should be at the very top of your list of possible candidates alongside Matrix, SimpleX, and Session (keep in mind that Element and Session do not yet support forward secrecy, although the Matrix protocol does).
Let’s also be clear: Signal, regardless of their encryption standards, is not an approved system for any kind of classified information. Leaks of this nature have the potential to cost people’s lives. Every single person in that group chat would have known this. Many of them have original classification authority.
Further, not only was the platform not approved for the information, the messages were set to disappear after some time. This is a violation of government record keeping laws and FOIA standards. This wasn’t an oopsie.
The mere fact it was possible to invite a random journalist to the chat is ridiculous. That shouldn’t be an option in a secure environment.
I mean we put a fox news anchor in charge, and if he’s even half as dumb as he looks, well that’s pretty fucking dumb. I doubt he understands, or if he does, doesn’t care. Just shameful. But hey, at least the libs are getting owned.
This fuck-up was strictly due to the fact that they’re incompetent morons just randomly inviting people to group chats and shit with no guardrails.
No.
These fuckwits were handling classified and top secret information in the open on their cell phones.
It doesn’t matter what specific app they used. This is not about the technology. You missed the point.
This is the same team of geniuses that kept classified files, some of which were mysteriously emptied of their contents, in the unlocked bedroom and bathroom of a members-only club in Florida, near the swimming pool whose water mysteriously destroyed all the surveillance video just when the FBI were about to look at it.
Not to mention that, in this case, the phone network was known to hacked and infiltrated by adversaries.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_Typhoon
This hack included JD Vance’s phone who was part of this chat group.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/25/us/politics/trump-vance-hack.html
These peoples phones shouldn’t be considered any more secure than a public bathroom.
I would trust it more than whatever the US government could homebrew, even.
The clowns in this administration, sure. But the NSA knows what they’re doing when it comes to cryptography.
There’s been a few articles recently about Session authors starting with Signal protocol, and then continuing without clear understanding what they do, thus that Session shouldn’t be used.
Matrix is a compromise, it’s not as much about security as it is about just modern FOSS chat.
Matrix is a compromise, it’s not as much about security as it is about just modern FOSS chat.
Pray tell. Granted again that Element doesn’t yet support forward secrecy, but describe what you see as specifically wrong with Matrix, please.
but describe what you see as specifically wrong with Matrix, please.
Federated with huge load on servers. I’d prefer something like old Skype with auth servers part interacting via activitypub or something like that.
Do you see anything wrong with it security-wise? The wording of your previous comment has me confused where you fall on this.
An app that multiple intelligence agencies have likely cracked
The app is likely secure.
The personal phones they installed this app on, however…
I don’t run a magazine so I couldn’t report it but I was included on a top secret Signal group chat where administration officials talked about how long you should wait after Trump or Elon absolutely explodes a White House bathroom. A friend at OSHA accidentally added me.
The younger staffers were given a map of nearby Starbucks locations because sometimes, it would take hours for the West Wing loos to be re-certified as a safe workplace environment. And if the inspector forgot his Geiger counter, forget it. Bathrooms were off limits that day.
They accidentally added a random guy to a Signal group. Not quite the same as classified documents on a self-hosted email server. I’ve heard US military uses Signal quite officially.
This should, of course, raise concerns that if they like Signal - they might want to self-host it, the client and the server are FOSS. They might even consider paying Signal the company to help them.
Dod specifically disallows Signal by name https://dodcio.defense.gov/Portals/0/Documents/Library/Memo-UseOfUnclassMobileApps.pdf
OK, humans err. And also make mistakes, like being so confident on something they don’t know for sure.
If it’s specifically disallowed, then some people should be locked up.
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Like all the people on that signal group chat that work for the government?
Yes.
It’s almost like excusing neoliberals for breaking the law just normalizes republicans doing it…
And they’re a lot stupider, so when they do it there’s more likely to be negative consequences.
The solution is higher standards and holding someone responsible even when they have the right letter by their name.
Letting neoliberals be as shitty as they want hasn’t been working out for 30 years since they tried to convince us a president lying about sexually taking advantage of interns in the oval office and then lying about it under oath to Congress was a “nothingburger” to use their own vernacular.
All lowering Dem standards does, is make us look like hypocrites. And that depresses turnout, which lets fascists into office.
I’m all for accountability and yes there should have been repercussions for Hilary Clinton for using a private email server but in 2016 Republicans used the emails as a cudgel to keep scoring points and drag out investigation after investigation and hearing after hearing to keep the buttery males in the news cycle and keep constant attention on smearing her and making her seem like the incompetent evil mastermind behind benghazi and the pizza parlor and the adrenochrome.
We go high. They go low. And when they go low, they win elections.
a president lying about sexually taking advantage of interns in the oval office
I think the intern was willing and the problem was with lies.
Anyway, sometimes you have to release the steam even in the oval office.
Clinton is an unpleasant person (being best buddies with the current president before the latter’s brain rot due to neurosyphilis became irreversible, for example), but why the hell fscking someone there is a bigger deal than, for example, just ordering murders overseas or legally starting this whole mass surveillance thing?
I think the intern
Was an intern…
And he was the fucking president.
Think of a scenario where anyone in management at a company can have “sexual relations” with an intern in their office and it can be described as “willing”.
Now, despite what Biden spent four years saying, understand that a US president is more powerful and has more of an effect on their interns careers and lives than some random CEO.
For fucks sake, it’s 2025, do you really understand how the implict and explicit power dynamic prevented consent at least during working hours.
You think she did what she did with a guy 3 times her age because he was charismatic? It’s because he was the president.
Just…
I feel like I’m rambling but there’s so many obvious ways this was problematic, and you’re still just fucking ok with it?
but why the hell fscking someone there is a bigger deal than, for example, just ordering murders overseas or legally starting this whole mass surveillance thing?
That was never the big deal, it was wrong and fucked up…
But the big deal was Bill lying under oath to Congress about it, and Dem politicians and voters closed ranks and said it didn’t matter.
The coverup, not the crime.
That was the beginning of the end of the two party system. Only one party had any integrity and we gave it away to protect Bill Clinton and neoliberalism.
I guess this was all 30 years ago, and a lot of people weren’t old enough to remember it happening, but it was also too recent to be in history books yet.
There’s not really an excuse to not learn about it now, political literacy literally saves lives. We need more informed voters.
You think she did what she did with a guy 3 times her age because he was charismatic? It’s because he was the president.
Generally you would be right, but it seems Clinton really did have the kind of charisma to attract women almost unnaturally, long before he became the guy 3 times her age and a president.
I feel like I’m rambling but there’s so many obvious ways this was problematic, and you’re still just fucking ok with it?
No, just everything is relative, and some bad things are solved at the expense of other bad things.
But the big deal was Bill lying under oath to Congress about it, and Dem politicians and voters closed ranks and said it didn’t matter.
That’s what I said.
There’s not really an excuse to not learn about it now, political literacy literally saves lives. We need more informed voters.
LOL, I live in a country where most of the populace doesn’t understand what was wrong with mass repressions. They think some bad rich people were the majority of victims, and not typical Ukrainian and Siberian farmers. And of course they don’t understand that the government is not the property of its employees and politicians in power.
You have a long way to fall to reach that. But all those idiots were sufficiently informed. They chose to believe something worse.
