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Comment by dingo_bat | Hacker News Reader

> cause a national crisis by tweeting "watch out China, nukes are coming" from Donald Trump's Twitter?

Are you serious? That would cause actual people to die. And Twitter will end up with a huge lawsuit.

We're about 1 security breach away from Twitter becoming a serious national security issue. I hope Trump has 2FA to login, but if someone got past Twitters internal system and started tweeting as DT then really bad Shit could happen.

I would hope Twitter has taken extraordinary steps to secure the US president's account.

The account for sure. I wonder about everything else though? Maybe it's naive but it seems like you could create a "presidential" tweet anywhere from their DBs to their CDNs.

not hard to imagine his tweets are sharded onto a dedicated server beneath the White House or something.

The point isn't that they wouldn't do it because of the consequences, but rather that a random company can wield this amount of power.

In that scenario a lawsuit would be the least of Twitter's problems. Best case scenario could easily be a treason charge.

US law only allows for treason charges during time of war.

I don't think that's true? Admittedly You could perhaps parse the statute[0] in a way that might imply it. But I think the point is that if you give aid and comfort to an enemy of the United States that you fall under the definition regardless of whether you are officially in a war or not.

[0]: https://www.usconstitution.net/xconst_A3Sec3.html

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