Secret Trump order gives CIA more powers to launch cyberattacks | Hacker News Reader

Secret Trump order gives CIA more powers to launch cyberattacks

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71 pointsfurcyd41 comments

George Washington is a national hero, but I feel like arguably his greatest feat hasn't remained popular: Willfully giving up power.

Regardless of who happens to be sitting in the Oval, and if they're using their executive authority for "good" or "evil," one could very easily make the argument that congress has given up too much power to unilateral action by the executive (and or too little actionable oversight).

Going back to George Washington, the absolute hardest thing anyone can do is give up power. That's why I hope to one day see someone in the WH who is patriotic enough to call for their own political party for help in stripping their own office of unilateral powers.

Hand wringing when the "other side" is swinging the executive stick wildly isn't enough. You have to give up power, not just for you, but for who happens comes next. You also have to give up power early in your own term so it impacts you, and you cannot be accused of trying to sabotage.

The US shouldn't be a turn-key despot.

PS - I don't really expect to see this in my lifetime, but boy would it be a sight to see.

> George Washington is a national hero, but I feel like arguably his greatest feat hasn't remained popular: Willfully giving up power.

In popular history you're probably right; GW is largely known as being the first president. Historians are aware of his place in history, though, and even some of his contemporaries. Supposedly George III said this when Washington resigned from the army: "If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world." [0]

I'm leery of "American Exceptionalism" but those early leaders did something pretty remarkable: an armed revolution deposed a government and replaced it with a more peaceful one. That is very rare in history.

[0] - https://msa.maryland.gov/msa/mdstatehouse/html/gwresignation...

You can fault the man for many reasons but James K Polk didn't run for a second term because he had a pretty narrow mandate and felt he accomplished it in his first. America's first agile president!

It's worth noting that Polk was extremely exhausted by his time as president and died 3 months after leaving office.

In "western civilisation", the prototype comes from 458 BC:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucius_Quinctius_Cincinnatus#F...

Is that even true? The early days of the United States were fraught with military (or militia) action and small rebellions. Less than four score and seven years after the declaration of independence, half the state governments went to war with the other half.

I am not sure the issue fought during the revolutionary war was the "peacefulness" of the British government.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shays%27_Rebellion

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiskey_Rebellion

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northwest_Indian_War

"Peaceful" might not be the best adjective (although I think it's appropriate). For most colonists the new government was better for them than the old one but "better" is much harder to quantify. Washington is arguably the most important figure in making that transition.

The purpose of democracy is to ensure no single person enjoys too much power permanently, essentially differing from authoritarianism.

But tell that to the political leaders of several democratic countries and see who'll tell "I've been in power for too long, let me resign". Even if they die, nepotism is ripe that their family members are guaranteed to fill-in the space.

At least in US, presidents go after 2 terms, even though two party system sucks under several aspects.

There are prominent democratic countries in the world where opposition party has never won as ruling party has ensured it by biased policies.

Multiple things can be true at once.

The US can have limited term executive, and could have given too much unilateral power from congress to the executive. A two-term/8 year King is still a King.

The way the US was structured was specifically to spread power amongst a lot of people with competing interests, and congressional legislation in the last hundred years has undermined that ideal.

PS - Plus a lot of people forget that the whole "two term" thing was only a TRADITION until 1951. That's what I mean by "turn-key despot," traditions are fine until someone occupies the office who doesn't care about traditions, then you need a legal backstop. Giving up power before it is a problem is incredibly patriotic because it is an insurance against the worst future.

> traditions are fine until someone occupies the office who doesn't care about traditions, then you need a legal backstop.

Maybe its just me, but I haven't seen anything during the current "kingdom" that was at all illegal. That's what's so powerful about it, what makes it unstoppable.

Before, kings didn't really know how to wield power.

The trick with George Washington is he was the only president in the history of the United States that didn't want to run the country. Virtually everyone wanted him to lead after the war, and he obliged.

This is perhaps a sort of tyranny implied in competitive democracy. That in order to be elected takes an immense amount of work and resources, and why would someone go through the hell of running a campaign if they didn't yearn for power?

>The trick with George Washington is he was the only president in the history of the United States that didn't want to run the country.

Johnson didn't seem to be a big fan of inheriting JFKs boondoggles both foreign and domestic.

FDR didn't want to run in '44 but felt that not screwing with a winning combination was his duty to the nation and the nation mostly agreed.

Polk called it quits after 4yr because he did everything he was elected to do.

>Going back to George Washington, the absolute hardest thing anyone can do is give up power.

Perhaps true in general, but George Washington's case was a bit different. He was exhausted by the presidency, and had been continually frustrated by how poorly his beloved Mount Vernon had been managed in his absence. Giving up power was a blessing for him.

>...Perhaps true in general, but George Washington's case was a bit different. He was exhausted by the presidency, ...

When people refer to Washington giving up power, they are generally referring to him resigning from the army after the revolutionary war was complete. There certainly wasn't a lot of precedent for that.

> his greatest feat hasn't remained popular: Willfully giving up power.

Hopefully, Hamilton made it popular: https://youtu.be/CPgDZBADR3Y

In the near future it's just constantly going to be countries launching cyber-attacks on each other, stealing private citizens' data, taking public utilities down, engaging in disinformation campaigns, etc.

And the ones who'll be affected worst by the whole ordeal will be innocent people around the world who aren't very tech-savvy and are just trying to get through the day.

Was going to write something. You wrote basically all I had to say. I'm so apathetic at this point :(

Just as in other areas where countries use violence against each other's populations, it will be a question of the state defending its citizens.

Maybe, some day, there will be some sort of international agreement about what can be done and what must not be done. Like with ABC weapons.

> Just as in other areas where countries use violence against each other's populations, it will be a question of the state defending its citizens.

Unfortunately the state seems to be more interested in using these same attacks against its own citizens.

> Just as in other areas where countries use violence against each other's populations, it will be a question of the state defending its citizens.

And for this reason, the innocent civilians of third-world/underdeveloped/developing nations will be affected the worst.

There has already been such an agreement (The Hague Land Warfare Order, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hague_Conventions_of_1899_and_...), but "cyber warfare" wasn't a thing then and thus not included.

In other words, business as usual. All that has changed are the means by which it is conducted.

This has been happening for many years already.

the cyber domain is like the plains of WW1 right now. Everyone's got a machine gun, but tactics havn't evolved yet. So yeah, a lot of people are going to get mowed down. But there's an opportunity to make personal cyber security easy and marketable so governments have to be more targeted with what they do.

Is the game theory in favor of this? It seems like it would be a lose-lose situation for everyone involved, thus unlikely to happen.

Sure everyone should just be kind to one another and live in total peace and harmony. Unfortunately not everyone sees it that way. You can't force other people to see things your way, and you can't have détente without demonstrated capability.

The future is now, I mean in 2016 there were conferences about how easy it is to turn off utilities with a USB key on the ground or checking if they run Windows 98 in their control plants. By law, the power network is listed online to combat climate change and pollution.

In the sense that information has always dictated war, has the world really changed since WW2 in this regard?

> By law, the power network is listed online to combat climate change and pollution.

Which law is that?

It feels like Shadowrun was ahead of its time.

Legal bases aside, How any of these attacks are useful though? It just gives them an excuse to retaliate.

" - Publishing hacking tools (malware) from APT34, an Iranian government hacking unit, on Telegram.

- Doxing Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) intelligence agents on Telegram by revealing their full names, home addresses, phone numbers, and social media profiles.

- Dumping details about 15 million payment cards from three Iranian banks linked to Iran's IRGC.

- Hacking two contractors that provide cyber-weapons and surveillance solutions for Russia's FSB intelligence agency and sharing the data online via a hacktivist group called Digital Revolution. "

https://www.zdnet.com/article/report-cia-behind-apt34-and-fs...

You could have said the same thing about the Iraq war. Obviously there are wildly differing definitions of "useful".

> How any of these attacks are useful though? It just gives them an excuse to retaliate.

You could say that to the other side as well.

> The finding allows the CIA to more easily authorize its own covert cyber operations, rather than requiring the agency to get approval from the White House.

What a horrible policy. Not only do we get covert acts of war not authorized by Congress, without a declaration, in defiance of the War Powers Act, but now they don't even need specific executive authorization. Unelected permanent bureaucrats in times of peace can now launch major aggressions against foreign countries without direct approval of anyone accountable to the electorate.

Congress devolves power to the presidency, and now the president devolves power not only to unaccountable bureaucrats, but to the most professionally conspiratorial, paranoid, secretive among them.

I don't believe they are conspiratorial or paranoid. The mission of the CIA is information gathering and analysis to gain knowledge, not paranoia. The current president may not listen to facts, but that doesn't mean everyone in government follows his lead. Or even most. I believe they are good people overall, who take their mission to protect democracy seriously.

I know this isn't a popular opinion here, but I've been following this for 4 years now and I don't believe the CIA or the FBI can be described as "unaccountable bureaucrats". Furthermore I believe it is dangerous spreading such beliefs without good evidence to the contrary about people who are out there every day trying to do heroic things in our defense.

If hacking is an act of war, we should have nuked Iran years ago...

Seems not so secret.

This is hardly a new "secret" order. It has been going on since I can remember, or is this the new parody? Parody is getting harder by the day.

This relatively new order made it significantly easier for them to get permission to engage in these attacks, and the order's exact provisions are still a secret.

If it was secret how come you know about it?

The statement "We are easing restrictions on when and how to engage in cyber attacks" is not secret. The secret part is exactly what is changing

The document is still marked as secret, and as I said the exact contents are unknown. We know of what it allows as members/former members of the CIA told the reporters about it.

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