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Comment by jmull | Hacker News Reader

I don’t see how this “clears” Waltz.

For one thing, as far as I know, the iphone doesn’t attach phone numbers to contacts automatically, it just asks. The article claims the iphone did it, but I think Waltz must have.

Also, this why you don’t use a random group chat app for national security conversations. Your general app is designed for engagement which includes building out the social network. Of course it’s going to err on the side of inclusion, when here you want to err on the side of exclusion.

For national security, contact info would be vetted, verified, and strictly up-to-date. There would be multiple guards that would prevent a thoughtless tap months earlier from leading to the wrong person being given national security information.

It sure is frightening that these bozos are in charge of things that have high stakes.

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It was Hegseth, not Waltz, that suddenly started dropping classified operations details (without promoting) into a group chat that was just set up for the purpose of planning for a future meeting. He's the one who really fucked up here.

I don’t like Waltz but I think this is the better take that has no really taken hold well in the media. Why was Hegseth posting information that should be in a need to know basis and to folks that have no benefit know before hand. This is the primary issue and I believe a disqualification for being SECDEF. Others would get immediately fired and a healthy chance of being prosecuted.

The other issue is having this chat outside of formal means. I am not as well educated but having civilians that serve at the pleasure of the president I would assume must follow some rules around formal and recorded communications.

Hegseth's primary qualification for being the Secretary of Defense is being a yes-man who owes the administration for his job.

It's not surprising that given a choice between {serving the needs of the military} and {serving the needs of the administration}, he defaulted to the latter.

I agree with Hegseth not being qualified and everything, so +1 for the snark, but.. how was this "serving the needs of the administration"?

(I assume/will try to interpret as...) Meaning that the role has some rules (written and unwritten). I can gossip about what went wrong at work today when out drinking with friends without breaking any laws/contracts, or I can just shut up and not gossip/brag that "today we killed 100 people", especially when celebrating the death of people.

In this particular situation, Hegseth had two choices.

1. Limit what was shared in the Signal group to non-operational details and refer all involved to their secured systems.

2. Make it easier for everyone else and just post the details directly in the chat.

He chose the one that he thought would curry favor with other members of the administration.

I thought his primary qualification for being the secretary of defence was:

——

Being a Major in the Minnesota Army National Guard.

And the following Overseas deployments:

- Guantanamo Bay (2004-2005): He served as a second lieutenant with a security platoon, guarding detainees.

- Iraq (2005-2006): He deployed with the 3rd Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division, serving as an infantry platoon leader in Baghdad and later as a civil-military operations officer in Samarra.

- Afghanistan (2011-2012): He served as a captain and senior counterinsurgency instructor at the Counterinsurgency Training Center in Kabul.

Awards

Hegseth earned two Bronze Star Medals for his service in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as a Combat Infantryman Badge, which recognizes soldiers who have directly engaged in ground combat. He also received two Army Commendation Medals and the National Defense Service Medal with Bronze Service Star, along with Expert Infantryman and Combat Infantryman badges.

His military career spanned from 2002 to 2021, including active duty and time in the Individual Ready Reserve.

In addition to his military service, Hegseth holds a Bachelor of Arts in Politics from Princeton University and a Master of Public Policy from Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, which complement his practical experience with academic credentials relevant to leadership and policy.

———-

You can argue he’s good at the job or bad at the job.

I would have no issue if you said he was completely incompetent.

But saying that hs a ‘primary qualification is being a yes man’ is a ridiculous laughable argument.

You do not seriously believe that he got hired based solely or even primarily on that, let's face it, quite mediocre military service resume.

I realize much has been made of his military service.

If he was the only reserve O-4 with combat experience we could find to serve as Secretary of Defense, then yes, that would be a primary qualification.

Given the rank, that's ridiculous. Ergo his primary qualification is something else.

A decent military record is table stakes, if he did not have a reasonable military record at all he would not have the position - so that’s his primary qualification. People that were close to the administration that didn’t have a military record would not have been eligible for the job.

Not you, but many others were arguing at the time that his primary qualification was ‘being a Fox News anchor’, which is infuriating. It’s not - it’s his military service. There are many people that are Fox News anchors, none of them were eligible for the job because they do not have a military record.

I have no argument with claiming he won the job because of his connections.

It's actually not table stakes nor a matter of eligibility. We've had several SecDefs, all dramatically more competent than Hegseth, who did not have any military experience.

Recently, from review:

   William J. Perry (94-97, 2+5yr Army)
   William Cohen (97-01)
   Robert Gates (06-11, 2yr AF)
   Leon Panetta (11-13, 2yr Army)
   Chuck Hagel (13-15, 1yr Army)*
   Ash Carter (15-17)

* To be fair, Hagel's year was volunteering to be drafted and sent to Vietnam as an infantry squad leader

> We've had several SecDefs, all dramatically more competent than Hegseth, who did not have any military experience.

Who do you have in mind? Carter, Cohen, and Cheney were the only confirmed secretaries from the past 40 years who fit "no military experience".

There are a handful of recent secretaries with < 5 years of military experience who did not even reach the rank of Captain (e.g. Rumsfeld, Robert Gates, Panetta, Perry).

To be clear: I agree with you that military experience is not really a qualification for the job, unless the individual has achieved high enough rank (i.e. General) to be involved in strategic planning. And certainly most secretaries of defense don't have that (Austin and Mattis are quite rare on that front, doubly so because they needed congressional waivers to serve in the position while still being active-duty military).

He was on Fox being a yes man with some military experience

Trump saw him and liked him on TV

Trump made him SecDef

The comment you were replying to already addressed this point.

A reasonable definition of "primary qualification" is that feature which most significantly narrows the set of candidates under consideration.

There are hundreds of thousands (millions?) of people with a similar or greater military record.

There are probably less than a dozen who have a clearer record of being a yes-man (by virtue of very few people being on TV to begin with, and even fewer willing to rhetorically fellate POTUS unconditionally)

You intersect the two and you get Hegseth, but the criterion that did the heavy lifting is absolutely the yes-man one.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You're saying that pretty much any career officer is qualified to be secretary of defense? Even "completely incompetent" ones (your words)?

"...a ridiculous laughable argument"

Right back at you.

No. I’m stating that ‘being a yes man’ is not this man’s primary qualification. The comment you are relying to mentions this.

> better take that has no really taken hold well in the media.

The media ... not covering a story accurately, or with integrity?!

Say it isn't so!

everyone else in the chat is responsible for not shutting it down

Yeah, ultimately they are all morons.

If I was on Slack at work and someone tried sharing secrets I would immediately say hey, we have protocols for this. Now we have to rotate keys. Please follow the protocols. Let’s walk you through it if you don’t remember. Etc.

And those are just API keys or similar data. We take it seriously because 1. It actually matters and 2. The habit will save your ass when it counts. Make it a habit

These guys have not made security a habit. It doesn’t actually matter to these guys. That’s scary. This is so much more than access to my org’s AWS services.

If you worked for the Trump administration, you would then be fired for getting in the way of what he wants.

Sure they are all morons and culpable but still the largest failure is the person who leaked details.

There is something bigger at play when so many people make mistakes all at once. Considering the seriousness of the topic, wasn't there any sort of protocol or monitoring system that would alert them that the information is too privileged for that medium? I have seen ordinary institutions behave more sensibly. I don't have any experience in national security matters. But even as a tech professional, I would expect at least one dedicated official to be watching the channel for compliance. How does such an experienced institution make such fundamental mistakes?

> But even as a tech professional, I would expect at least one dedicated official to be watching the channel for compliance.

The group already had the supposed who's who of dedicated security professionals .. as appointed by Trump admin, of course.

Vice President JD Vance, senior White House staff, three Cabinet secretaries, and the directors of two Intelligence Community agencies.

Oh, and Marco Rubio .. the actual "acting archivist of the United States" responsible for ensuring that such conversation chains are preserved for posterity and not auto discarded on Signal.

~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_government_group...

Speaking from an allied five eyes perspective .. it was an amateur hour clown show of epic proportions.

Followed up by Trump trashing America’s intelligence capability on the say so of a far-right conspiracy theorist and 9/11 truther.

I don’t disagree, but I think GP means someone who is not a political appointee, like the non-partisan national security officers whose role is basically exactly what GP discussed. I don’t know if it’s usual for NSC officers to be included in these kinds of chats that are ostensibly just for coordinating secure meetings between principals though - maybe it should be

Sure, the equivilant of a professional court reporter with a standards enforcing role ... but that was never ever going to be a thing on a non SCIF casual signal group setup to gossip and swap fire emoji's outside of the official chain of defence command ...

Humor me here, but i thought using e2e encryption was less bad than other forms of communication

>Why was Hegseth posting information that should be in a need to know basis

He was tripping on power (reminds any other washed out alcoholic talking). It was a collective orgasm in that chat.

It seems reasonably likely they were using signal to avoid records keeping requirements and public scrutiny. If you found a group of employees using signal with disappearing messages to talk about work outside of your normal work chat (slack etc.) you'd be pretty suspicious, let alone if they were working in public office!

Also if you then saw colleagues discussing company secrets or legally privileged information on a group chat, the onus is on everyone in the chat to call that out as wrong.

>the onus is on everyone in the chat to call that out as wrong

that would be in a group of even minimally qualified professionals, not the clowns who got their jobs on a whim of the bigger clown. You know the monkey with a nuclear bomb. I hope we wouldn't see how they handle the real bomb, and for now just the tariffs have like an extremely large nuke just wiped $10T+, and it isn't "just stock market", it is large complicated efficient logistics chains and trade relations that were built over years and were powering this civilization. To compare, the damage from the Ukraine war - you'd need several tens of nukes to produce such damage - is just around a "meager" $1T.

Should be, but the US is run by cults of personality where they defer to people they see as their superiors - that is, "if Hegseth does it, it's ok, right?"

Most large companies monitor devices. You start GMailing source code to yourself, you get fired.

A very friend of mine was going through a nasty divorce. Although we weren't talking about the divorce/case he set our messages on auto-delete. Apparently his (now, ex-wife) had SMS and WhatsApp messages in court to be used for her cased.

Any 'loving message' to her from the early days ("you are so perfect") and any 'nasty message' to others ("oh that bitch!!") sent to anyone was presented in court. So for caution he auto-deleted even the messages that were innocuous, just in case it could be used against him "oh he wanted to spend money for a new phone/laptop, thus he has money, thus I will take it"

Oh, absolutely, I try to remind people that even starting this group chat was criminal, because it's an attempt to break public records laws.

100%, we have public records requirements for a reason and that needs to be followed. I assume you take the same issue with private email servers.

Yes. This is as bad or worse than Clinton's email servers. It deserves to be talked about at least as long and investigated at least as thoroughly. Which in the case of Clinton involved bringing it up for nearly a decade, an FBI investigation, an Inspector General's report on the FBI's and DOJ's handling of the case and a three year State Department investigation. It's only fair to apply the same standard here

To offer a concrete example, their choice to delete everything after 7 days is an unambiguously worse aspect. Premeditated spoliation of evidence.

We wouldn't know if a private email was configured similarly, or if emails on a private server were manually deleted.

Either way, yes using a communication system on the public internet and outside of official documentation processes is bad no matter how you do it. Deleting those communications could be a bad sign, though to be fair it could also be a sign of someone trying to do what they think is more secure (avoiding old messages being leaked or hacked later).

Absolutely. And it’s astounding that Waltz also uses private email for official business[1]

This is a problem and it needs to be stopped.

1. https://americanoversight.org/investigation/the-trump-admini...

By all means, bring up something vaguely similar from ten years ago to somehow justify the idiotic and criminal actions of the current batch of clowns. Why can't people just say "this is bad and they deserve to be punished"?

How did I justify their actions today? I specifically agreed that its a problem and referenced a very public case where something similar happened 9 years ago and we still haven't done anything about it.

There was literally no point in referencing it. It's classic "whataboutism" and it adds nothing to the conversation.

Where in my originally raising it did I say anything along the lines of whataboutism, or imply that this situation shouldn't be taken seriously?

The other commenter covered this:

"in the case of Clinton involved bringing it up for nearly a decade, an FBI investigation, an Inspector General's report on the FBI's and DOJ's handling of the case and a three year State Department investigation. It's only fair to apply the same standard here"

Does that clear it up for you? Do you still need justification to treat this seriously? Or are you a person unwilling to try and address poor leadership because of the (R) after their names?

I think both should be treated seriously, I'm not sure why you'd assume otherwise from what I've said here.

There should be just as thorough of an investigation into this one, and assuming there isn't that's a miscarriage of justice.

That said, I'm of the opinion that its great and all that they investigated Clinton's email server but the fact that nothing came of it is a problem. It absolutely violated the intent of the law in my opinion. The mere fact that they found so many emails with information that should have been marked confidential is, in my opinion, a violation of the intent of confidential information protection laws.

From what I've gathered, Signal use was prolific among people in this administration and the past one.

I'm not surprised. My own company sends out several emails that Whatsapp can't be used as it's not secure, yet I get Whatsapp messages from leadership I work with constantly.

People ignore directives all the time. Usually out of convenience.

People have even called it out in a Whatsapp chat "hey guys, we're not supposed to use Whatsapp" and people usually ignore it.

That's not at all what's it's like to work with classified data, even deep down the subcontractor chain. They constantly drill into you to respect data classification and the consequences of ignoring these rules. Nobody ever does what you describe.

https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/03/27/biden-authorized-sign...

During Biden's administration the CISA even encouraged the use of Signal.

I’m not excusing it, just saying it was and still is, incredibly common among Whitehouse people.

The parent poster is right though, signal is permitted and encouraged for any discussion that would’ve happened over SMS, the issues are somebody dropping details into a channel meant for planning a meeting, as well as somebody accidentally adding somebody that should not have been there.

HN has recently adopted a habit of downmodding inconvenient facts to oblivion but you can easily confirm Signal is approved for this use yourself.

We do not know for sure but this would be very unlikely. Several of the participants does not need to know this information and it should be compartmentalized.

Information concerning capability or location should not come near unclassified networks or civilian phones. Somebody could drop or steal that phone or glance over a shoulder which could necessitate cancelling the operation or much worse.

Nothing good comes out of keeping records so it is natural that people do not want to keep them.

Wait, what? Sarcasm or implicit “if you’re a criminal”?

For most people and companies record keeping is important and valuable.

It is sometimes legally mandatory, but in what context does a company ever look again at old slack chats or work sms?

I find value in old slack messages daily. You seriously never consolt any records at all in your work?

None of them seemed at all surprised though, and a bunch of them responded positively. The group didn’t act like the chat was just for setting up a meeting.

Hegseth, the DUI hire?

Hegseth's messages were the worst but not the only ones. E.g., Waltz goes on to share details of targets hit.

And no one ever says, "Don't share operational details in this chat," either before Hegseth's details message or after. It's perfectly clear that was normal and expected.

The chat starts with pulling together the group, continues with high-level agreement to proceed, then the details start dropping... You know... exactly the way work-related chats go. I've had innumerable work chats like this.

Hegseth's own severe incompetence doesn't somehow absolve Waltz of his. I used "bozo" in the plural for a reason.

You don't have to carry water for these idiots. They may nominally be on your "side", but they aren't holding up their end of it. They are making huge mistakes which have real consequences for us all. Time to start calling them out on it, not trying to defend them with technicalities, false dichotomies, and misdirection.

Among all the promoted opinions that are trying to muddy the waters on the subject to make them seem innocent, there shines a beam of truth:

>It's perfectly clear that was normal and expected.

Their lack of protocol, lack of humility, and just lying about everything shows how unfit they are for leadership.

> And no one ever says, "Don't share operational details in this chat,"

The work I do isn't 1/10th as sensitive as this but we have this branch in our threads all the time. I can't imagine the carelessness required for this to happen this way.

It’s an interesting point, but are they even allowed to communicate on these devices with this app? I feel that has to be a question with an answer and i would assume it’s no?

Yes they are, but explicitly not for non-public DoD information. It's for stuff like "hey get to a SCIF so we can talk" and otherwise replacing what you'd normally use SMS for.

I don't think we need to go out of our way to exonerate any of them. "Really fucking up" isn't something exclusive.

Hegseth's posts were the most egregious, but there was a lot of sensitive information that could have been inferred from the rest of it -- basically that the U.S. was planning some sort of attack against the Houthis, they debated whether to do it or not and chose to go ahead, and the approximate timing of the attack is implied by the timing of meetings and decision windows.

https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2025/03/politics/yemen-war-p...

They were all still breaking Presidential Records Act. They knew it.

Including Waltz.

They deserve punishment at the Executive level.

I want a President who follows laws.

Are you sure it war not intentional?

They wanted to send a message to the recipients without going through an official channels. What is a better way than adding a journalist to the "secret" group to "leak" it?

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