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Comment by zmmmmm | Hacker News Reader

> Hawley said "please reach out immediately to the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation and take any necessary measures to secure the site before this breach expands

It's kind of bizarre when you have the highest levels of government doing their critical communication on a free social media service to the point where they are critically dependent on it, then begging for support when things go wrong.

Maybe you shouldn't use a free service that is not under your control or any proper regulatory or quality constraints for your most important messaging to the public then?

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The next time we swing the other way:

"Maybe government should embrace popular communication media instead of spending billions on custom IT infrastructure to post a message on a custom page that everyone screenshots and copies to their timeline anyway."

(Also if they don't create an "official account", someone else will do it for them)

Kind of a false opposite you got there.

The government could put it's decisions and publications on a website, official, verified, more or less controlled by them. There's no reason that has to be done with consultant scams - oppositely, posting on Twitter doesn't guarantee consultants aren't raking in money for adding or removing periods or whatever.

I don't know, it'd probably take 18F like a month to add a page to whitehouse.gov called "Things the President said", add 2FA and whatever else it needs to be installed on his government phone, and a little bot that listens for whenever he writes something on there and tweets it on Twitter. Then you have a source of truth that we know wasn't modified between the government and the reader, and it doesn't break the social following.

But I guess its easier to just complain about Twitter.

> (Also if they don't create an "official account", someone else will do it for them)

What do you mean? How would anyone not affiliated with a given government agency convince human verifiers at Twitter that they're official?

They don't have to convince any verifier. They don't have to be verified. If there's no official account and you create an account with a reasonable name, reposting every post from the official feed, you can get significant following. A lot of the followers will not care whether it's official or not and may not question an extra information appearing on the feed one day.

Well, put it this way: why is Donald Trump listed on Twitter as @realDonaldTrump?

If you don't snatch up your (organization's) name first, someone will surely do so for you.

(Honestly not trying to incite anything by using him as an example; I just hardly use Twitter and he was the first to come to mind.)

They own the non “real” one too, he’s just too much of a tool to use it.

Probably acquired later and didn't want to lose his followers.

Once a public official leaves office twitter should remove all followers to zero.

> Also if they don't create an "official account", someone else will do it for them

Yes, but this account will still not have the same legitimacy. Right now, if Trump tweeted a declaration of war, it would have been reasonable to assume that it was real, because, for all we know, it's an official channel. Previously at lot of people would've at least checked back with the official channel before taking it for granted.

And, to make matters worse, having Twitter as an official channel now gives everyone at Twitter the possibility to make official announcements - hardly a good state of affairs.

Why do you say this? What about "the other way" would make the logic any different?

The FBI is very commonly involved in cyber crimes and the other departments have a role to play as well. Calling the FBI during a major security incident is not unusual at all, I’ve done it a number of times.

In the early days of the internet the FBI was kind enough to call my employer and inform us that we had left open an anonymous FTP server, and it was serving up Disney movies. Those were good times.

FBI warned a non-profit 8 hours before news broke that the US had bombed an Iranian general. Indeed, they saved many lives.

Are there any articles where someone could read about this? What was the non profit?

what was the outcome? did they catch the criminals?

>Maybe you shouldn't use a free service that is not under your control or any proper regulatory or quality constraints for your most important messaging to the public then?

But we hate it when governments spend money on things. And no one would trust a word that came from any service the government controlled or regulated.

A simple official website is enough for hosting a list of short statements.

If the goal is to simply publish statements, the press already exists for that. The value of a platform like Twitter is in the network and communication. Twitter already has politicians and official accounts from around the world, and millions of users. I don't know how a particular state-owned platform could replicate that... and let's not get into the technical acumen that government contracts lead to. Remember the debacle that was the Obamacare website right after launch.

And on top of all of that, people will still complain that their tax dollars are being used rather than existing public platforms (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) Whichever administration puts it up, the next administration of the opposing party will call it waste and propaganda and burn it down.

An RSS feed is not expensive. As one example it'd be great to have RSS feeds for e.g. the US Forest Service or Bureau of Land Management about camping/hiking conditions, wildfires, etc.

Let's not forget the ongoing breach is being used to con people. Maybe that was the representative's concern.

> Maybe you shouldn't use a free service that is not under your control or any proper regulatory or quality constraints for your most important messaging to the public then?

What are you referring to exactly? I thought the govt had their own IT and websites across the board, and only used things like twitter to aid in communicating to the public.

> Maybe you shouldn't use a free service that is not under your control or any proper regulatory or quality constraints for your most important messaging to the public then?

No, I think they should use best-in-class media and Twitter is exemplary for that. Twitter is only dangerous for this because it is very effective at being a communication medium.

Yeah no one is going to fall for the 5th ColdFusion site with an admin backend left open on sqolkla7.info.gov.us/press-releases but that's because no one is reading that site.

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