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Comment by Jtsummers | Hacker News Reader

Because their claim is false and unsupported by their quote. It is absolutely unauthorized for government employees to conduct discussions like this on services like Signal. It's not even allowed for CUI level discussions, and war planning pushes into Secret and TS territory very quickly.

Organizational discussions means things like, for a standard fed on a TDY with others, "Meet in the lobby at 0700 so we can drive to the site for the meeting at 0800." Not "So we're going to use ... to attack ... at ...", which is almost certainly Secret or TS once aggregated.

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This is the sort of counterargument I'd have liked to see instead of disagreement-driven downvoting, yes.

swiftymon created an account just to post a lie. That comment absolutely should be downvoted, with or without rebuttals. This isn't about disagreement.

You disagree over opinions. Should Signal be an appropriate system for discussing classified data? I'd say no, you might say yes, we disagree and debate.

Legally, is Signal an appropriate system for discussing classified data? No. Unless you believe in alternative facts, there is no point to disagree on, it's just a fact that it is not legally an appropriate system for what they did.

And then swiftymon lied and used "evidence" to bolster their lie that didn't even agree with their lie.

You assert things strongly, but you are not an arbiter of truth about data classification in the federal government - this is certainly an area where discussion can be had and where becoming more informed increases the quality of discussion. Interestingly enough, many of the people in charge of data classification in the federal government were on said Signal thread!

I could assert that you're lying, etc - as you're effectively committing the same sin as the poster who originally got downvoted - but that wouldn't be having a conversation; it'd be a rude refusal to tolerate a conversation. I encourage you to assume good intent and engage instead of hurling accusations at people - even if they're new accounts.

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