Pete Hegseth shared Yemen attack details in second Signal chat
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
And then at the top of government, the most sensitive information is frequently handled without any care at all. Not to mention 19-year olds with flash drives barging into the most sensitive IT systems of the federal government.
Slight imbalance there, I would say.
> According to the Times, the private chat also included two senior advisers to Hegseth – Dan Caldwell and Darin Selnick – who were fired last week after being accused of leaking unauthorized information.
I understand the tactics of much of what Trump and his people do, even though I often disagree. I understand why Trump has DOGE moving quickly and breaking things; I understand why they show contempt for the law, rules, and customs - they want to destroy those things.
I don't understand the utter incompetence that often appears; an earlier example was team Trump's court filings challenging the 2020 elections but there is lots more. How does that furthering the neo-fascist / conservative / Trump mission? I suppose it's disruptive but if they just showed basic competence they would probably get away with much more.
Simply put, it’s a reflection of Trump’s own incompetence, or perhaps carelessness and his utter refusal to recognize and make use of expertise in others. I’m about halfway through “Lucky Loser” (Buettner & Craig) which traces his financial history. His disdain for objective data over “intuition” has always been alarming. I suspect his hiring for cabinet positions follows a similar carelessness.
Thanks for that ref! I've always maintained T is extremely dumb, He goes towards far left on the Dumb scale on the levels which you'd have never seen before. But, at the same time, he has all the luck which no one else has. Glad, I'm not the only one to see him that way.
Well, the tagline of the book is "Inheritance. Fraud. Deceit.", so "Lucky" might not be the right word.
It's interesting to look at opinion polls pre/post election. All through Obama's last term the conservative rallying cry was the economy was bad and migrant caravans were coming. As soon as Trump was elected, there was a 40 point swing on conservative's opinion on the economy. It's not just the economy. It's every position. When Bill Clinton has an affair, then family values are incredibly important. When Trump brags about grabbing women by the pussy without consent, it's just locker room talk.
I think the political instinct trump brought, and that you're alluding to, was his ability to never admit being wrong about anything. Yes politicians have always done this to some extent but he's taken it to a whole new level.
It's the method of saying what you want people to believe and think over and over with complete confidence until they actually do, even if it has no basis in reality or is stupid and wrong.
It's incompetence as a political platform.
And other politicians have noticed how well it works, so now they do it to (see: hegseth).
Simlarly, Rudy Guliani was a lawyer and mayor, but the 2020 election court filings and arguments were idiotic. How is that possible?
I don't buy that they are idiots. I don't have an explanation, however.
eg: throwing an axe and hitting a drummer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMrVdFnjEjs
That's a very narrow type of "significant success" and absolutely below the bar of qualification for Secretary of Defense, although easily clearing the bar to be considered an idiot.
It's the officer version of getting to E-4 before your enlistment ends -- as long as you're not a moron and get busted down you'll get there.
A Captain rank is in no way a qualification for Sec of Defense when there are literally hundreds of 4-star Generals and Admirals with well established track records of running operations during 20 years of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Imagine you ordered your Waymo to pretend its location, direction and velocity were what you wanted them to be, ignoring its sensors.
It's a myth that the fascists of the 1930s made the trains run on time.
Accounting for the damage done will be nearly impossible and that makes it all the harder to fully reverse. That's one of the focuses here. Making it stick.
lol.
Like, the hiring process is pretty much "who shows most loyalty to Dear Leader"; one would not _expect_ competence.
Yeah but if you were a competent person in a position to work for them, would you do it? I believe there are relatively few smart people willing to go down this hole precisely because they can understand the consequences.
I think when at the surrounding facts - a group of people who talk anti-woke but don’t seem to make a distinction between Jackie Robinson and “all white people are racist”, or willing to ignore every last economist in favor of blanket tariffs, or hiring a Fox News host to run your DOD in the first place! You’re telling me there aren’t enough conservative minds to choose from, in the fucking military! the simplest solution is that there isn’t a coherent ideology.
I think this makes sense, that sort of evil isn’t rational, but we’re so used to movie villains with a coherent ideology I think it poisons the reality. Go watch “The Last King of Scotland”. Idi Amin was the whole bag of nuts.
Trump and company want you to think that the national government is completely incompetent so they can sell as much of it off to their Wall Street oligarch ghouls as quickly as possible. They are intentionally incompetent to further that goal.
With the usual caveats about politics, my understanding is that this is because Trump such a narcissist that he genuinely cannot process the idea of not winning, or being in the wrong.
If he really is like this, this is exceptionally dangerous. Ignore any question about intelligence for a moment, because everyone makes some mistakes: purging anyone who isn't a sycophant means that when he inevitably does make a mistake, nobody will be willing to stop it.
But real change there is going to require boots on the ground. And none of the players in the region want that. So, we just spend a $80,000 on a missile for a guy to shoot that doesn't make that in a year at a guy that doesn't make that in a lifetime.
Or bombing their sponsors. I’m not an advocate of war with Iran. But it makes more sense than blowing up desert mountains.
Houthis are bombing unarmed civilian ships in the Red Sea. This makes zero sense for Yemen. But it does, politically, for the Houthis. Put another way, the extremists in one government are bombing another country because of what the extremists in that country are up to.
The Houthis are a belligerent in a civil war with multiple sides [1], none of which could stand without external backing. They're not a ragtag group of rebels. But they're also not the government of Yemen.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yemeni_civil_war_(2014%E2%80%9...
US defense secretary texted strike information to his family in group chat he created
"Exclusive: The White House is looking to replace Pete Hegseth as defense secretary"
https://www.npr.org/2025/04/21/nx-s1-5371312/trump-white-hou...
> Apply these best practices to your devices and online accounts.
> 1. Use only end-to-end encrypted communications.
> Adopt a free messaging application for secure communications that guarantees end-to-end encryption, such as Signal or similar apps.
https://www.cisa.gov/sites/default/files/2024-12/guidance-mo...
That and the deliberate lack of record keeping.
Attorneys suing the United States government over its use of vanishing Signal messages to coordinate military strikes last month in Yemen allege that new court filings by the government reveal a “calculated strategy” by Trump administration officials to evade transparency laws through the illegal destruction of government records.
The use of the private group chat—in which some messages were configured to automatically delete before they could be archived—was first revealed by The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, on March 24, after he was inadvertently added to the group by Trump’s national security adviser, Michael Waltz. American Oversight subsequently filed Freedom of Information Act requests over the chats and then sought a temporary restraining order in a Washington, DC, federal court in an effort to compel the government to salvage any messages yet to be deleted.
> That and the deliberate lack of record keeping.
That part seems like speculation. How would we even know if records were kept? If records were kept, they'd be classified.
> Attorneys suing the United States government over its use of vanishing Signal messages
That seems very much like the concern is about the use of Signal, so the fact that CISA recommends it is very relevant.
And since this info was leaked to the press, there is clearly someone with access who he should not have trusted. Do you really think the security breach in this case came from his wife or brother?
I guess that's a reference to some fictional "Wilhoit's Law", right? I had to look it up. Turns out it's just a partisan Internet snipe from a classical music composer originally posted in the comments on a blog[1].
That sums up the case against Hegseth nicely. Just a partisan attack without substance, sustained only by ignorance.
1: https://slate.com/business/2022/06/wilhoits-law-conservative...
And now he's adding his family into the mix?
> Do you really think the security breach in this case came from his wife or brother
I don't think it's out of the question.
CISA recommends Signal, but it is not an approved tool to share classified information. That's what SCIFs are for.
Also those recommendations from the CISA recommend to use password managers...like Lastpass and 1Password and others, who had multiple security breaches.
If this is the type of Cybersecurity the US government applies to day to day work, its much easier to understand the field day North Korean and Chinese hackers seem to have all the time.
https://www.upguard.com/blog/lastpass-vulnerability-and-futu...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/daveywinder/2024/08/07/critical...
But let's assume you're right and it's bad advice. The objection in the OP isn't that there was a breach. It's just exploiting the perception that using Signal is somehow wrong, and suggesting that it is a sign that Hegseth is incompetent.
So it's rather important to know that using Signal is recommended by the government's own experts (even if those experts were wrong, hypothetically).
Those guidelines are called FedRAMP, and Signal is not FedRAMP certified.
Also, I don't know for sure, but there was a link and discussion here not long ago saying that Signal is pre-installed and widely used at the CIA.
Sure, because senior government officials sometimes do things outside of their official capacity. If a senior government official's communications with their therapist or their lawyer e.g. are compromised, this could leave them vulnerable to blackmail. That's bad for everyone.
Re: other post about use of Signal, I'm not commenting on that post and/or that issue. I'm not expressing an opinion either way on whether it's relevant to this issue. I just want to point out that FedRAMP exists, and Signal isn't FedRAMP certified. If you don't think that is important (and a lot of reasonable people don't), you do you.
Also, please stop posting snarky and/or unsubstantive comments (like this one).
Please clarify what you mean by this. Are you saying some HN users should abstain to comment on some threads?
I once saw the fall of great civilisations as tragedies. They’re not. After a certain point, after a certain generation, they’re not just inevitable. They’re deserved.
The American model of government and society may empirically not work. Hell, universal suffrage and electoral democracy may not be the fittest way to organise humanity.
I hope not. I don’t believe so, yet. But the evidence is mounting. Since the Industrial Revolution, the tendrils of fascism have tried at democracy (an institution broader than just elections) borne from the agricultural revolution. Fascism isn’t the answer. But maybe popular will is, similarly, a bad—if predictable—governing instrument.
China is making the quiet argument America made in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars. American history just doesn’t teach the consequences of O.G. Versailles.
And that is despite (or perhaps because) I have spent way way to much time reading articles both from the Left and the Right.
If you only read one narrative, you might think you are getting the whole picture. When you read both [which is admittedly difficult - I sometimes blanch and force myself to read just to get the options open], you might find that there are hints how much is not known.
When you have a reason to be involved at some point, you realize that Gell-Mann was on to something
I read quite lot, everyone from anarchists an d communists to people I believe would happily describe themselves as fascists. I read self-described US liberals and conservatives. And I am having a very hard time finding folks who describe a reasoned, coherent strategy being implemented.
I have read a lot of (typically US "right wing") commentators who claim that "we just can't know", but having come of age when the same disingenuous claim was made about the US invasion of Iraq it is hard for me to take those kinds of claims seriously.
I'm not looking for an account that I can agree with, but even a simple "this is their strategy, and here is an account of why that is a coherent idea" would be a big upgrade from what I am usually hearing; my current understanding is that only God and Trump understood the big picture and that Trump is senile enough that even he has lost the plot.