Trump says he fired top cybersecurity official Christopher Krebs | Hacker News Reader

Trump says he fired top cybersecurity official Christopher Krebs

axios.com

116 pointslightlyused91 comments

There was a recent article about this latest purge in the nytimes[1]. Apparently, it has more to do with "score settling" and replacing officials with loyalists and "yes" men/women.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/11/us/politics/trump-pentago...

Goddamnit. Krebs and not-fired-but-leaving Jim Bridenstine are the few people in the Govt I consider very good at their jobs

Biden can rehire him. I don't think anyone will look at his firing by Trump as anything but a plus as far as integrity and decision making go.

I see you were in the Trump administration. Hmm... Looks like all positions are full...wait, says here you were fired? Well, you can't be all that bad, welcome aboard!

A tweet from Chris Krebs responding to the news: https://twitter.com/c_c_krebs/status/1328859222071783424?s=2...

Thanks. Is there something behind "tomrorow [sic]" e.g. in the direction of fixing the mistakes of today, or just a typo?

Guess the Republicans should have passed the election security bills that the Democrats requested, but they'd rather sow division and chaos after they already lost. What poor losers!

I’m not familiar with that. What bills are those?

https://thehill.com/homenews/house/482569-senate-gop-blocks-...

Apparently this isn't the same Krebs as https://krebsonsecurity.com/ [0]

[0] Funny enough, the website has a broken SSL cert at the time of writing.

Expired an hour ago from the time you posted.

It has expired. A nice example for why shorter lifetimes encourage a healthier approach to renewals with better monitoring and so on.

Krebs has a (now expired) certificate from Sectigo (were Comodo CA) but with a long lifetime. There's a good chance that it was so long ago nobody remembered it needs to be periodically renewed.

Doesn't this actually mean "Krebs on vacation until Jan 21st."

If people are brought back, do their years of service for pensions start over or continue from where they left off?

I'm sure the President can make it thus.

unpaid one

Odd, but I am more familiar with Brian Krebs than Christopher Krebs, in the security space.

I like Krebs, but I think Schneier would be my pick for the job if I were allowed to make decisions like this.

I doubt Schneier would want the job.

I listened to C Krebs talk on a conference call to mayors around the country about basic cyber security concepts and government resources available to them. It isn’t a very technical job but it’s an important one.

Totally unrelated, but I’ve been wondering, is he related to Brian Krebs?

He is not, according to this tweet from Brian Krebs: https://twitter.com/briankrebs/status/1328859929214595072?s=...

I know oddly many people with the last name "Krebs" working in cyber security.

No, just happen to the the same surname.

Lol was wondering the same thing myself haha

I fear that the measures needed to see power properly transferred will soon require remedies that the judiciary is unequipped for.

Another bit of lunacy, but no doubt his supporters will continue to attack anyone who tries to deal with reality.

Reality is whatever Conservatives tell each other it is.

Why is this flagged?

Because political discussions (except a few narrow events) are not encourage on HN, it goes against the spirit of the site AFAIK.

Thanks for clarifying.

> it goes against the spirit of the site AFAIK.

The usual argument is that most political news do not lead to healthy debates. The mods prefer having no debate over people throwing mud at each other.

Heh, I suppose that’ll be a two month vacation then? It’s a strange thing to feel sorry for the DHS though, which I wouldn’t mind seeing shuttered entirely. Petty alternative for a lack of evidence by someone with access to all intel.

Pretty sure his position was senate confirmed, so he can’t just be instantly brought back.

Hire. Fire. Hire. == the Krebs cycle

> The Pentagon’s top policy official, James Anderson, resigned in anticipation of being fired by Trump.

What is the reasoning behind resigning when (presumably) disagreeing with being fired? Is it all optics?

Some folks feel strongly about serving "at the pleasure of the President" and resign if they feel the President would prefer they do so.

Some folks don't like the idea of news articles about them saying "fired."

Some folks believe inaction cannot be the solution to a problem, even if it's the right choice.

Perhaps the method of leaving could have an impact on benefits or the ability to get future high level positions in the government?

Why sit around waiting and wondering if you can just pack your bag and go home?

The tweets said Krebs called it the most secure election in history.

I like Krebs, but how can an election with anyone on the voter rolls getting a ballot mailed to them possibly be the most secure ever? We are 100% certain our voter rolls are not entirely clean. I’m not saying there was voter fraud, but Kreb’s statement just seems odd. Best possible case, there was no chain of custody for ballots, so even if there were no issues or reasons to be suspicious, it just isn’t a great claim.

If you look at the Trump tweets (ugh), it says dead people voting, software glitches switching voters, and observers being unequally treated. I’m sure in tiny tiny doses thats all possible.

Should Krebs be fired just for saying the election was the most secure ever? Obviously not! ... but devil’s advocate, I don’t see how it could have been. We relaxed integrity requirements because of Covid, not increased them.

Edit: look how little room there is to step out of line, hmm

He didn't say it was the most secure election possible. He said it was the most secure election in USA history. There's a difference.

I wrote “in history” and “ever”. Where did I write “possible”?

Maybe he’s right and even with all the unsolicited sending to everyone on the rolls and having USPS handle them it was still more secure. IDK. Maybe someone can explain it?

It can simultaneously be the case that everyone gets mailed a ballot AND it was the most secure election to date.

It's certainly not axiomatic that mail in voting has a higher rate of fraud than any other system.

Washington State is 100% mail in for years, and there's no evidence that things are any more fraudulent here than anywhere else, but it is much easier for people to vote.

In what ways was the election made more secure?

What states increased their voter integrity laws by means of legislature or policy or governor’s order?

I’m not being facetious. I looked for added regulations, I only found relaxed rules because of Covid. Now. What Covid does that means you can’t sign your ballot, IDK, separate topic.

If it was made more accessible, but not less secure, then the rate of fraud is lower. More participants means the impact of fraud is lower if everything else stays the same.

I don't see any evidence that there was any reduction in "voter integrity". (Whatever that means.)

No. You aren’t talking security. You are talking about a rate of fraud. If I occasionally steal $5 from you sometimes when we meet, your solution to this isn’t to just meet up more and count the number of times I don’t steal from you as higher.

> I don't see any evidence that there was any reduction in "voter integrity".

Must not have looked very hard. PA, NV, WI, MT, GA, and others and others all changed their rules about curing, harvesting, signatures required, naked ballots allowed. Changes per state. In PA the big deal is that the Gov did this unilaterally, but the PA constitution clearly defines that voting laws are by legislature only, the gov did this under emergency powers.

If you aren’t aware that many states relaxed their voting requirements along with unsolicited mail voting - you need a new news source.

Making it easier for people to vote (and make sure their vote is counted correctly, as is the overwhelming primary use case in "curing") is not fraud, it's democracy. The fact that one party is (and historically has been) opposed to this is not something to be proud of.

How is temporarily removing the signature requirement from the secrecy envelope, and removing the requirement for the election office to compare that signature to a previous signature making it “easier to vote” vs weakening the election integrity?

What about Covid changes your ability to abide by the election laws the legislature in the states had determined?

Signatures are an awful security measure in this day and age. It's compared by underpaid and overworked poll workers, definitely not by handwriting experts. There's also the problem that they're often having to compare a digital pen-and-stylis signature to a "wet" signature on the ballot.

Additionally, most people below the age of 30, and anyone without reason to spend time signing legal documents, won't have a consistent signature that matches the one on file that they provided when they were 16. It's also no coincidence to the discussion that those signatures also have a comparatively extremely high rejection rate among black people.

All of these are demographics that tend to vote a particular way, by the way, which is why you hear the other side complaining.

Once again, it's purely about expanding democracy.

I'm aware that these changes were made.

I'm challenging the idea that these things reduce voter integrity.

You seem to think it's obvious and axiomatic that these processes meaningfully improve voter integrity. Do you have evidence that they make things more secure? Or could it be they are security theater?

> Do you have evidence that they make things more secure?

If that’s your question, where is the evidence that Krebs used?

I gave you examples that under the pretext of Covid, governors removed verification requirements that state legislatures had pre-determined. I can’t help that your hand waving away decades old requirements.

But if you’re gonna ask me for proof, where is yours? show me one way this election was made MORE secure, please.

> decades old requirements.

Old voting requirements does not mean good or secure voting requirements. In many ways, the vote is less secure because these requirements likely exclude many valid votes.

> show me one way this election was made MORE secure

Efforts to drive voter turnout were clearly effective. Many more people voted this time than in 2016. (And yes, turnout is a parameter in election security. There are many efforts to undermine elections by depressing turnout.)

> Efforts to drive voter turnout were clearly effective.

That is in no way an answer to the question of how elections were made more secure.

If you believe that voter access isn't a clear part of election security, you need to do more research on the space.

There was also far more scrutiny of the entire process than there ever has been before, at least in recent memory. It’s possible that an inherently less secure but more vigilantly executed process can be better than a more foolproof method where everyone is just going through the motions.

Is that enough to make it the most secure ever? I’m not sure - but I wouldn’t rule it out completely.

Election so secure and so beyond reproach, that the largest county in Michigan refused to certify the results today. s/

https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/politics/2020/11/17/w...

Hello, I have worked on campaigns in Detroit and throughout the state, so I have some clarity on the ways in which the city and the state’s elections can be fraught. If the supposed anomalies in voting patterns amounted to meaningful misconduct, the 2 GOP commissioners would not have certified Livonia, which experienced anomalies at a proportionately higher rate than Detroit. What you are sharing is evidence that the process has been increasingly captured by partisan interests, which is bad for everyone.

Be that as it may, even you concede these were "anomalies". So Krebs sounds like a partisan hack to me. Some places are still counting ballots. Some are finding misplaced ballots, or "glitches" which just happen to always benefit Biden, and so on. Dead people voted. This is all fishy AF.

There are small and infrequently consequential anomalies in every election, in every state. A physical corollary of this fact is that most recounts at the statewide level result in perhaps ~100 ballots changing. That's because voter fraud in the US is very uncommon and does not demonstrate reliable partisan lean, and neither do alleged "glitches".

I cannot demonstrate from my keyboard that there are no cases of "dead people voted". It probably happens very infrequently. But I would note that in this election, at least some of these accusations have been proven inaccurate by diligent journalists.

I lived through listening to liberals whine about Diebold in 2004 in Ohio and through their complaints that Cambridge Analytica somehow stole the election in 2016. Both of these complaints were powered by motivated reasoning, and ultimately unfounded. Yours is too. I would evidence my claims by noting that the board just certified Wayne County.

> I would evidence my claims by noting that the board just certified Wayne County.

Is that the example you want to use?

Because on that Zoom call, Ned Steabler and Abraham Amiyah’s threatened the two withholding members, called them racists, and read the names of their children’s schools. Shortly after one of them changed their vote.

Yes, the two reversed their decision and certified with a request for an audit... but does that sound like good evidence for your point?

Regardless of how anyone feels about election fraud, I’m pretty sure the people doxing children are not doing the right thing.

https://streamable.com/yhl89p

and

https://mobile.twitter.com/correctthemedia/status/1328969920...

Hooray for threatening women/children and mob rule?

If choosing to certify the more proportionately anomalous Livonia and not Detroit, disenfranchising hundreds of thousands of Black voters while accepting White voters, is not a form of racism, I don’t know what is. I don’t throw the word around lightly, but it is the right one in this context. I realize you’re unlikely to agree.

Are you saying there’s no truth to the claim that they were more votes in Wayne County than registered voters? And that you don’t think an election board officer may find that suspicious? Did Lavonia County say they would stop counting at 10:30pm until the next morning but at 4am dump vote totals a higher rate than previously? Then continue on slowly for the rest of the week like Wayne county did? Were election observers kicked out of Lavonia County into a different room while election officers put wallpaper and window blockings up to prevent oversight like happened in Wayne?

You were either uneducated about the facts of the matter in Wayne County, and want to explain anything you don’t like away with racism, or you were maliciously trying to gaslight people.

https://mobile.twitter.com/MattFinnFNC/status/13240846370109...

> is not a form of racism, I don’t know what is.

Yes, I agree with your latter claim.

I think you’ve made your position pretty clear. threatening women and children because you disagree with an official officers opinion is OK.

I am not going to convince you that this was morally just, or that the actions of the commissioners was not racist. I am okay with that, so I will focus on leaving a record for anyone who stumbles on this unfortunate thread.

You do not have even the fundamental facts of the situation. "Lavonia County" is not a real place. Livonia is a city in Wayne County. There are some precincts where there are small gaps between the expected number of ballots and the actual number cast. This is typical, and its ubiquity reflected in the fact that statewide recounts reliably produce shifts in ballot counts on the order of ~100. The relative sizes and frequency of these gaps is actually larger in Livonia than in Detroit. These gaps do not demonstrate partisan lean, nor do they evidence voter fraud. Voter fraud is extremely uncommon, it does not shift the outcome of state-wide elections, and it does not demonstrate reliable partisan lean: there are dishonest people of all political stripes.

In spite of these facts, the commissioners asked to certify the results of Livonia and the rest of Wayne County, excluding Detroit. My position is that disenfranchising Detroit is immoral, racist, and a brazen attempt to subvert our electoral system.

They just certified it, the page that your link goes to has been updated.

From which we conclude that they are gullible idiots. They certified it on the condition that there will be an audit. There's not going to be audit if county has certified already. This does not change my point. With 70% of precincts showing unexplained anomalies, there are serious questions about fairness of this election.

Here's why it was certified: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6BFYOuCY_c. Race card, fire and brimstone, you're going to hell, he threw at them everything he had without disputing any of the facts. They folded like cheap suits.

That video is everything that’s wrong with this hyper partisan nonsense. Those are direct threats to officials.

You should check out his Twitter account. He's a real piece of work.

Actually, Trump just tweeted that they refused to sign the certification. This being Trump I don't know if it's true or not, but it is possible that they did not formally certify after all. In which case, kudos to them. Audit that thing first, then certify.

Perhaps this counts as optics, but I see it as a way of offering evidence to the outside world that the feeling is mutual. If you were satisfied with the job/conditions/policies, then you might choose to continue to try to stay employed there.

Of course, it's not strong evidence because nobody knows how much choice you had in the matter. If you quit when you have a 75% chance of being fired, that means something different than quitting when you have 100% chance of being fired in the next 30 seconds, and the outside world doesn't know which is the case.

In 10yr Wikipedia will say "resigned" instead of "fired" and that's as deep as anyone will care to dig.

Do you have another example of this happening?

> Reuters recently reported he expected to be fired after he pushed back against false claims that Democrats "rigged" the election, a claim that Trump has heavily promoted.

Sad day when doing your job means you get fired.

Title is "Trump says he fired top cybersecurity official Christopher Krebs".

... okay, but did he? Trump also says he won the election. Can we get facts back into headlines and reporting in general?

Was it in uppercase like "I WON THE ELECTION", because that means it's true.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com