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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
Readit News
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.
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.
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.
Dead Comment
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.
"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
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.
Deleted Comment