How the US defense secretary circumvents official DoD communications equipment | Hacker News Reader

How the US defense secretary circumvents official DoD communications equipment

electrospaces.net

472 pointsHarvesterify433 comments

The other members of the five eyes had better be careful about what they share with the U.S. while this is going on.

Public key encryption, like Signal uses, offers good security for most purposes. e.g. It's fantastic for credit card transactions. The problem with using it for transmitting state secrets is that you can't rely on it for long-term secrecy. Even if you avoid MITM or other attacks, a message sent via Signal today could be archived in ciphertext and attacked ten years from now with the hardware/algorithms of ten years in the future. Maybe Signal's encryption will remain strong in ten years. Maybe it will be trivial to crack. If the secrets contained in that message are still sensitive ten years from now, you have a problem.

Anything sent with Signal needs to be treated as published with an unknown delay. If you're sharing intelligence with the U.S., you probably shouldn't find that acceptable.

Signal’s encryption algorithm is fine. The problem is the environment in which it runs: a consumer device connected to the general internet (and it’s hard to believe that someone who does this installs patches promptly). He’s one zero day or unwise click away from an adversary getting access to those messages and potentially being able to send them. Signal’s disappearing message feature at least helps with the former risk but runs afoul of government records laws.

The reason why the policies restrict access to government systems isn’t because anyone thinks that those systems are magically immune to security bugs, but that there are entire teams of actually-qualified professionals monitoring them and proactively securing them. His phone is at risk to, say, a dodgy SMS/MMS message sent by anyone in the world who can get his number, potentially not needing more than a commercial spyware license, but his classified computer on a secure network can’t even receive traffic from them, has locked down configuration, and is monitored so a compromise would be detected a lot faster.

That larger context is what really matters. What they’re doing is like the owner of a bank giving his drunken golf buddy the job of running the business, and the first thing he does is start storing the ledger in his car because it’s more convenient. Even if he’s totally innocent and trying to do a good job, it’s just so much extra risk he’s not prepared to handle for no benefit to anyone else.

An obvious issue that I noticed. He sent the exact same message to two different group chats.

I assume he copy pasted the message on his unsecured device.

How many apps had access to that text in his clipboard?

To me this isn't a technical problem with Signal, it's an opsec problem, and that's quite a lot harder to explain to people.

Yikes. Especially if it's been near a Windows PC. If I have link-to-PC switched on then I have a shared clipboard between phone and PC...

Or if it's an iPhone & Mac pair it probably synced with iCloud.

Surely they don't have iCloud on their devices though...

Signal does have a forward feature which would look the same but I don’t know if he uses it.

> Signal’s encryption algorithm is fine.

At least in the case of the leak the culprit was the UX, no?

Suppose a user wants the following reasonable features (as was the case here):

1. Messages to one's contacts and groups of contacts should be secure and private from outside eavesdroppers, always.

2. Particular groups should only ever contain a specific subset contacts.

With Signal, the user can easily make them common mistake of attempting to add a contact who already is in the group. But in this case Signal UI autosuggested a new contact, displaying initials for that new contact which are the same initials as a current group member.

Now the user has unwittingly added another member to the group.

Note in the case of the leak that the contact was a bona fide contact-- it's just that the user didn't want that particular contact in that particular group. IIRC Signal has no way to know which contacts are allowed to join certain groups.

I don't know much about DoD security. But I'm going to guess no journalist has ever been invited to access a SCIF because they have the same initials as a Defense Dept. employee.

My understanding was that the journalist's phone number was accidentally added to the existing contact of a trusted user through the following process:

1. Journalist emailed trusted user seeking comment on something. This email contained the journalist's cell phone number in the signature block.

2. The trusted user forwarded this email to the fool with Signal.

3. The fool's iPhone suggested adding the journalist's cell phone number to the trusted user's contact.

4. The fool accepted this, perhaps blindly.

You are right. Here's the discussion from a month ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43601213

This iPhone feature exists probably to save a few taps when people text you their new phone number.

But it fails to account for the fact that this is not the only reason phone numbers happen to be in texts.

Definitely - that kind of context is critical. Signal, iMessage, etc. are designed to let you securely connect to people you just met and don’t share much with other than a phone number. The DoD has the opposite problem: they have a list of people they trust enough to have access and blocking anyone not on that list is a major feature. Beyond the fact that both are sending messages, these problems are less alike than they seem at first.

Well apparently at this point it’s his phone, his wife’s phone, his lawyer’s phone, maybe anyone in the inner circle of people he cares about.

>> The problem is the environment in which it runs

Too deep. The problem is the physical environment, the room in which the machine displays the information. Computer and technological security means nothing if the information is displayed on a screen is in a room where anyone with a camera can snap a pic at any time.

That’s valid in general, but in the specific case being discussed is an official military facility with strict access control and I would assume it’s regularly checked for bugs.

well you can alway retrieve the messages from the Keylogger eh swiftkeyAIsendsItToCloud plugin

What other type of encryption would you use for state secrets? You seem to be implying that governments and three-letter agencies use some vastly superior cryptographic scheme, whereas AFAIK Signal is as close to the state of the art as it gets.

Also, to be clear, Signal doesn't use public-key cryptography in the naive way (i.e. to encrypt/decrypt messages) as was/is possible with RSA. It uses asymmetric key pairs to first do a Diffie-Hellman key exchange, i.e. generate ephemeral symmetric keys, which are then used for encryption/decryption. This then also guarantees forward secrecy, see https://signal.org/blog/asynchronous-security/ . (Add to that they incorporate an additional post-quantum cryptographic scheme these days, and I'm probably omitting a lot of other details.)

> Signal is as close to the state of the art as it gets.

For their use case, which requires communication between two (or more) arbitrary users who never communicated before among millions of users, running on cheap commodity hardware over wireless connectivity to the internet.

Leaving encryption aside, looking only at the network level, the DoD is capable of using a dedicated fiber line. Or rather a parallel fiber infrastructure.

Aside from that, there's base level authentication that it is Hegseth.

Is this device using DoD PKI [0]?

If not, then how is DoD managing access to it? Or is there a post-it with a local password stuck to it?

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Access_Card#Integrate...

The issue isn't the encryption. It's the unsecure device it's running on. Nobody has to waste time cracking Signal if they have backdoored one of the computers at the endpoints. The US government categorically doesn't use unapproved hardware for secure communications. This is something the Secretary of Defense is supposed to know about.

I agree. Yet for some reason the top comment on HN is criticizing Signal's encryption.

> You seem to be implying that governments and three-letter agencies use some vastly superior cryptographic scheme

About a month ago there was a discussion here saying Signal is preinstalled and widely used at the CIA.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43478091

It's also recommended by the government's cybersecurity agency CISA.

https://www.cisa.gov/sites/default/files/2024-12/guidance-mo...

Poking around it seems like pre shared keys are used for the secure stuff, so no public keys, no rsa. It isn't that signal isn't state of the art, it just makes compromises for usability.

Edit: I didn't state something perhaps I should have. Symmetric key is considered more secure because public key is more complicated so more room for side channel mistakes, and the computation needes to break public keys doesn't scale as fast with key size. I am not an expert but that is what I've read.

> What other type of encryption would you use for state secrets?

Maybe it’s the servers that is the problem.

How are the servers a problem in an end-to-end encrypted scheme?

The server could be recording the traffic for later analysis, and the contents revealed if the encryption is defeated.

The encryption probably won't be owned up to the point where it is practical to decrypt traffic in bulk, but it's a valid thing to look at.

I believe much of the secret government communications are accomplished using layered secret encryption algorithms. Many of these are symmetric and have physical key loading accomplished by a guy with a gun.

Store now decrypt later still defeats diffie hellman if you capture the handshake. And quantum computers break diffie hellman as easily as RSA.

Not sure why you're getting downvoted; I do think you're bringing up a valid point against my original comment: DH is susceptible to Shor's algorithm, too. That being said, the question is how long is it going to take to break a single DH key once we have adequate quantum computers? If it's in the order of, say, a couple months to a year, a ratchet algorithm will still protect privacy in the grand scheme of things, as it won't be feasible to decrypt more than a couple select messages per computer per year. Sure, quantum computers might improve, get cheaper and everything but on what timescale? It's not unlikely that that'll take many years and by that time no one might care about your private messages of today anymore and we might have established a new set of cryptographic schemes that are quantum-resistent.

Quantum computers don't exist. If you want to talk about a hypothetical machine which might exist in the future you should state that plainly.

Forcing the reader to parse thru the literary devices in order to get to the argument weakens the argument.

Not them but you are replying on a thread talking about how it isn't safe in the longer future. That context was already built.

Quantum computers absolutely exist and are commercially available. They're just not very useful at the moment.

came here to say similar. GGP is another great example of hn people jumping in to make comments without having even a basic understanding of what they're talking about. Frustrating as it spreads misinfo about security which is the last thing we need.

You're in a comment section where people are flipping out that there exists a computer on his desk that isn't connected to any DoD network but is connected to the public internet.

Approximately 30,000 people go to work in the Pentagon every day. There are areas in the building that are SCIFs and they don't allow cell phones and laptops. But the majority of the building is an office building used for office building type stuff. Employees and contractors bring their personal cellphones and mobile devices in there every day.

Are they using those devices to discuss upcoming military operations?

Even if Signal's encryption implementation is secure, the device on which it is running probably doesn't satisfy TEMPEST requirements. Most consumer crypto is vulnerable in some way to a side-channel attack.

None of that matters if Signal is running on what is effectively a personal device connected to the internet. That device is now the weak link and is what intelligence agencies in many countries are now probably trying to get into.

Pegasus all the way down as an example.

Exactly. And Pegasus is what we know about. I'm sure there's plenty we don't know about that's used for more high profile targets, like former Fox News hosts.

It has almost certainly already been breached.

> Anything sent with Signal needs to be treated as published with an unknown delay.

Oddly they have thought of that already, to the point all encryption systems in use in the gov are thought of in these terms.

All that matters are the different assumed times to publication (weeks to years), and then treating the strength of measures involved differently based on what is reasonable for the given use.

If you absolutely need something to never be published then encryption isn't the solution, and nor are computers generally.

It's the entire mandate of the NSA's Utah Data Center. Archive all the world's encrypted data until such a time as it can be decrypted when either the algorithms have been cracked or machines are powerful enough to brute-force.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center

More like until they'll get the keys

Or maybe they found a way to outsource brute forcing the keys.

Concur. This is part of why Suite A ciphers (algorithms) exist, and the second component includes robust key management practices are so important (this includes hardening of devices to prevent leakage of signals that could compromise those keys or the cryptographic processes themselves).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_Suite_A_Cryptography

I'd give different advice.

You shouldn't share state secrets with the US. They will be on or transferred between misconfigured cloud accounts. Some agency will eventually get authorization for analysis of them with an intention of financial espionage. The probable or confirmed loss of them will serve as a plausible deniability for the US when it misuses them.

Isn't that true for basically everything though? I'm not familiar with what other encrypted messaging systems security agencies use, but either (1) they store ciphertexts that can in theory be attacked later or (2) they delete their data after some time, but signal has that option was well.

Obviously using signal here is a terrible opsec failure, I'm just not sure how what you are saying changes anything

I worked at a videoconferencing hardware/software company. We provided systems to USA government offices like the NSA and State Department and provided an input for which they gave us hardware specs but told us nothing else, the customer did the final testing on it to make sure it worked as specified. We assumed it was for some sort of encryption method of which they revealed to us as little as possible, the hardware engineers who saw it tested only saw a large, portable black box. Otherwise our system used the standard encoding/decoding methods of the day in the 1990s.

The most secure method of communication is a one-time pad, a pre-shared private key.

"A one-time pad (OTP) is considered theoretically the most secure method of communication — when it’s implemented correctly. That means: 1. The key (pad) is truly random. 2. The key is at least as long as the message. 3. The key is used only once. 4. The key is securely shared in advance and kept completely secret.

When all these conditions are met, a one-time pad provides perfect secrecy — an eavesdropper cannot learn anything about the message, even with infinite computing power."

And you need to do that on paper, not on consumer device.

https://xkcd.com/538/

There are significantly fewer concerns about symmetric encryption, and while it doesn't scale to the size or budget of a service like Signal, it's exactly the type of thing the military is good at:

Distribute a bunch of physical artifacts (smartcards) across the globe; guard a central facility (a symmetric key exchange center) extremely well etc.

The military can also afford to run its (encrypted or plaintext) communications over infrastructure it fully controls. The same isn't true for a service provided out of public clouds, on the public Internet.

The encryption is completely irrelevant if the information is sent directly to 3rd parties.

Signal's crypto is quite good. The problem with it is that it has zero authorization functionality, otherwise the government could use something like Signal internally. The lack of military-grade IM solutions is a problem.

> Even if you avoid MITM or other attacks, a message sent via Signal today [...]

That's not the threat model. The threat model is that Signal is a tiny LLC making an app on behalf of a foundation and open source software project. It's a small group of human beings.

Small groups of human beings can be coerced or exploited by state-level actors in lots of ways that can't feasibly be prevented. I mean, if someone walks up to you and offers $2M (or blackmails you with whatever they found in your OneDrive, etc...[1]) to look the other way while you hand them your laptop, are you really going to say no to that keylogger? Would everyone?

At scale, there are auditing techniques to address this. The admins at e.g. github are (hopefully) not as vulnerable. But Signal is too small.

[1] Edit: Or, because let's be honest that's the scale we're playing at: straight up threatens to Novichok you or your family.

There’s a million threats. These are not particularly bright people. They are busy and not aware of or concerned with much beyond limiting their own accountability for when they inevitably get burned by their bosses.

You and I know that. So do the adversaries. The biggest issue for them is going to be not tripping over the intelligence collecting agencies (or corps) already on their devices.

Five eyes have been 'careful' about what they share since they got burned during the first trump presidency.

They've been careful since before Perl Harbour.

> The other members of the five eyes had better be careful about what they share with the U.S. while this is going on.

Right, but this is nothing new: Hegseth is only a recent example of Trump's camp mishandling sensitive docs; I'll bet there's been an inner secret Four Eyes group since the the Mar-a-Lago bathroom official-document-archive story dropped years ago.

What surprises me is that I expected Tulsi Gabbard to be the centre of mishandling allegations, not SecDef.

Tulsi is a competent mole, she knows better than to be this obvious.

It would be gauche to attack Tulsi Gabbard, because you would have to start with her connections to Russia's Assadist interests and to RT & the Russian web brigades, and we have established (we voted on it) that any connection to Russia is Old News and Not A Big Deal and Hillary's Dirty Tricks. But Hegseth? Hegseth leaked something to The Atlantic. A far greater threat than Russia.

The circus has only been in town for a few months. This thing is, as scandals go, an almost comically dumb scenario - even by Trump whack pack standards.

Tulsi is by all appearances more experienced in operating under the radar. That said, I’m sure she won’t disappoint.

Maybe Tulsi is just staying out of the spotlight while Hegseth was hired to be in the spotlight.

Even before thus, Ukraine learned painfully that it shouldn't share every plan and every detail with the US. It kind of looks like a sad, self-fulfilling proficy. Ukraine makes a plan, some details get leaked state side, plan goes disastrously. Ukraine plans another operation, doesn't say anything, the plan goes off ok. The US feels betrayed and Ukraine looks like an ungrateful ally abusing trust, the relationship is strained. The election happens and Trump points at how they're a bad partner yadda yadda. Ukraine is blamed for the outcome of what is originally an American problem, the US leaking like a sieve.

This is silly, many countries use consumer messaging for internal communications. The UK government famously uses whatsapp for example.

Signal has been used widely in US intelligence for many, many years. Nothing about this is new, though perhaps people that never paid attention are just now becoming aware of it. As for the rest of Five Eyes, they use WhatsApp the same way. I’m not sure that WhatsApp would be considered an improvement.

It is clear there is a gap between how people imagine this works, or should work in theory, and how it actually works.

> Signal has been used widely in US intelligence for many, many years.

For lunch orders and office softball schedules. Not top secret information.

This is a factually incorrect and very naive take. The same topic has been in the news in European countries too about the widespread use of WhatsApp when discussing secret information. It isn’t just the US government, everyone is doing it.

Do you have any sources? Because I don't see any information about secret information normally going through Signal or WhatsApp.

They're paying attention to Signal now because Hegseth doesn't know his ass from his elbow when it comes to tech and secrecy, instead acting like someone who has watched too many action films and thinks those are just like real life. The problem is not Signal. The problem is incompetence. Plain and simple. Because he blindly added persons to the group that probably didn't belong there, we now have the infamous "we have OPSEC" line, but instead of questioning why this idiot still has a job anywhere near the intelligence agencies, we're wasting our breath scrutinizing what is easily one of the best opens for secure comes if the user understands how it works.

> why this idiot still has a job anywhere near the intelligence agencies

Because competence is a disqualifying attribute in the kakistocracy known as the Republican Party.

The sheer hypocrisy

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/02/hillary-clin...

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jul/05/fbi-no-charg...

Also:

https://www.fbi.gov/news/press-releases/statement-by-fbi-dir...

"To be clear, this is not to suggest that in similar circumstances, a person who engaged in this activity would face no consequences. To the contrary, those individuals are often subject to security or administrative sanctions. But that is not what we are deciding now."

What she did was wrong. There is no doubt about it. It needed to be investigated and dealt with accordingly. But let’s not pretend that the Secretary of State mishandling classified docs is is at all similar or related to the Secretary of Defense, sharing upcoming attack plans and actively circumventing information security, ESPECIALLY after the outcry and investigation of the Secretary of State.

But it’s not hypocritical of our country to want to improve our government officials and not for them to stagnate or slip backwards.

> The sheer hypocrisy

The Legal Eagle channel did an analysis of the two situations, "Signal War Plans v.s. Hillary's Emails":

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cw1tNTIEs-o

The two situations are not actually (legally) equivalent. One huge difference being that Hesgeth et al are setting communications to auto-delete, which is against records keep statues (there is no evidence Clinton purged e-mails).

Also: her email was at no time intended for classified materials and would have had all the safeguards that are now being circumvented in place.

Every single sender and recipient (excluding bcc) was aware or could have been aware that she was not using a .gov email address and is somewhat complicit or tacitly ok with her using that server.

Occasionally previously unclassified materials can later be deemed classified, or there can be a data spill where a sender transmits classified information and recipients need to participate in deletion, investigations, etc.

I agree that her using an external server was bad but it was also in plain sight the whole time.

> In looking back at our investigations into mishandling or removal of classified information, we cannot find a case that would support bringing criminal charges on these facts. All the cases prosecuted involved some combination of: clearly intentional and willful mishandling of classified information; or vast quantities of materials exposed in such a way as to support an inference of intentional misconduct; or indications of disloyalty to the United States; or efforts to obstruct justice.

Hypocrisy indeed.

Classic whataboutism.

It's literally not whataboutism.

Whataboutism is when you bring up something about person A, then the only argument against it is something relating to person B.

For example, when you point out the call the president made to the secretary of state in Georgia begging him to "find" 11,780 votes. Then, without a great excuse, the other person brings up Biden's mental decline.

Both true, both concerning, but the reply just being blatant and desperate misdirection.

There's a fine line between whataboutism and precedent.

I look forward to the FBI's thorough investigation of Hegseth then.

And Hegseth answering questions before a House committee for 11 hours, like Clinton did.

Classic what about, whataboutism, whataboutism.

I prefer the term trumpist douchery.

...no it isn't? Whataboutism is when you redirect attention from issue #1 to unrelated issue #2 in an attempt to change the conversation topic: "forget that, look at this!"

OP's comment was pointing out the similarities between issue #1 and issue #2. There's no dismissal.

Whataboutism is when you are trying to show a double standard because person A did a thing that you were upset about and person B did the same thing and you don't care. Asking why you care about a person doing a thing and didn't care when a different person did something different is not whataboutism.

I agree with the GP on the definition of whataboutism, and think that you have described something with a much older term: "pointing out the hypocrisy".

They both share in common that rather than continuing to talk about just one thing, you are now talking about (at least) two.

But whataboutism is a diversion tactic that tries to shift the attention from behavior/event A to behavior/event B; pointing out the hypocrisy notes the similarities between behaviors/events A and B and contrasts the response.

Both can be deployed in similar situations, but the motivations for choosing one over the other are substantially different.

Is a double standard good or bad?

  > The communication intent is often to distract from the content of a topic (red herring). The goal may also be to question the justification for criticism and the legitimacy, integrity, and fairness of the critic, which can take on the character of discrediting the criticism, which may or may not be justified. Common accusations include double standards, and hypocrisy, but it can also be used to relativize criticism of one's own viewpoints or behaviors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

Both Clintons private email server, Pete signal chats and Trump documents stash in Mar-a-lago are equally bad. Lack of consequences signal erosion of “Law and order” in the US. It seems that US is now not different from third rate countries where last minute exceptions, insider trading, open bribery, secret police(ICE) and targeted prosecution is a new norm.

I agree that all three are bad and shouldn’t be tolerated.

However, Hegseth’s transgression was the worst in terms of severity by orders of magnitude. Details of an in-progress military operation and all.

The dismissal is implied. And this behavior is endemic in modern reporting and political conversation.

Novel idea: what if we focus on the exact issue that was originally brought up?

'Someone else did it, or something like it, sometime, somewhere.' I'm past caring about that -- because it's used too frequently to distract from the current issue.

A. Hegseth broke the law and shared classified information on a system that wasn't approved for it.

B. Or, he unilaterally declassified operational details without informing anyone or going through a normal process.

It can only be one of the two above options, because the facts aren't in question.

Edit: But looks like National Security Advisor Mike Waltz will be taking the fall for this: https://www.bbc.com/news/live/crkx3ed5dn2t

> The dismissal is implied.

Is it? I'd think that somebody who took Hillary's hidden 3rd party communications seriously would take these seriously too.

The bizarre behavior is insisting that what Clinton did was trivial, but that this is a disaster.

Also this emphasis on security is backseat driving from a bunch of people who want to attack Iran. The real problem with them using third-party communications is that they avoid FOIA.

Valid concerns about op-sec and personal responsibility aside, I think this is another example of why "security at the expense of usability comes at the expense of security". Official DoD communications equipment sucks, so people use the less secure, more usable encrypted communications platform when they feel they can get away with it.

Maybe the DoD should work on developing some internal Android and Signal forks that focus on adding additional critical security controls without impacting usability. There's an obvious desire path here.

They are using unofficial comms to stay off the record and unaccountable, it has nothing to do with ease of use.

That's possible I suppose, but do you have any evidence of that or is it just your personal biases causing you to assume the worst motivation you can imagine must be the correct one?

I know personally that given the choice I'd probably rather use Signal than whatever messaging system the DoD contractors managed to come up with. And private conversations between senior military officials over encrypted DoD communication channels probably aren't FOIAable anyway.

Perhaps, but the simplest answer is often the correct one. People are exactly who they appear to be.

But the simple answer is that the devices suck and people don't want to use them. This is going to be more and more true as time goes on because new people coming in will be used to the creature comforts they have from their personal equipment. I'm not defending anyone here, the people in power need to be held to a higher standard than some rando citizen on the street.

> That's possible I suppose, but do you have any evidence of that

Yes, in the chat where a reporter was accidentally present, many of the messages were set to be disappearing. I don't know why anyone would do that if not to avoid recordkeeping laws.

> The images of the text chain show that the messages were set to disappear in one week.

https://apnews.com/article/war-plans-hegseth-signal-chat-inv...

Further, Project 2025 suggests bypassing federal record keeping legislation by simply holding in-person meetings without record.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxe55mU4DA8

Oddly, the Project 2025 training videos that presumably the members of the executive cabinet have seen say _not_ to delete messages or set messages to auto-deleting _because_ that would be in violation of federal record keeping legislation.

IIRC, DoD uses Wickr RAM for TS messaging and Teams for non-sensitive comms.

Both are fairly "meh" WRT to usability, but neither are so awful people should be breaking the law over it.

Wickr is supposed to only used for unclassified info like health data.

They have a completely sepearate internet for TS/SCI (JWICS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Worldwide_Intelligence_C...)

That is not the worst motivation I can imagine.

Tell us the worst one you can imagine, please.

The real answer is that none of the people Hegseth wants to show off to have access to those networks.

> when they feel they can get away with it.

It's not just this. Security involves compromises and trade-offs. Humans will be stupid humans and re-use passwords, install better but insecure software, not ever update, etc. It's an old story.

In the year 2025, if communication with any other human on the globe isn't as simple as opening and app and typing, then people will find another way because there are about a thousand better ways.

So I doubt they are trying to get away with anything. They're just preferring the trivial option over the option that probably involves a physical token or slow biometrics or 15-second logout or whatever arduous security features the government comms probably have. Just like any human would.

Perhaps this will force the government COMSEC people to re-evaluate their practices.

Updated to add: I'm not defending their practices, just giving a likely explanation. Blaming the users is not always the best way to evaluate a security failure.

I would hope that when it comes to OpSec, SecDef, DoD, NSA, etc, don't act "Just like any human would."

All humans act like humans would. From a security standpoint, it is a mistake to assume otherwise in any context.

https://www.google.com/search?q=computer+security+human+natu...

It's partly true. They even had Android that runs on General Dynamics OKL4 and Green Hills' INTEGRITY RTOS. Signal could be ported to that. They could fund their own separation layer if they wanted which any vendor could use.

I think big companies' influence on purchasing decisions (aka corruption) drives a lot of this.

The dude has a staff of 30 people who's whole job is to connect him to literally anyone he wants to communicate with -- you're telling me that the usability of concierge service with more than two dozen staffers is inferior to using signal in a building with shitty cell service?

I've wondered about this quite a bit and imagine there's got to be a "telephone" (the game of message distortion) like aspect where if some of the communication was explained, even a little push back might change the outcome. For example, a human intermediary presented with "send these details to these people" might get a "are you sure this person should have access to this?" ultimately preventing a bad/illegal action. People avoiding this kind of accountability, even just to a communications staffer, seems like it would have to be to reduce the subtle steering that happens when people are faced with conflict they don't want to, or have run out of psychological budget to, address.

If you're going to put a guy in charge who is completely unqualified and has a history of alcohol abuse you should at least make sure he's competent. It's actually very grating to see someone operating at this highest level of authority and treating it like its beneath them. It feels like we're watching history get written by the most entitled and inept among us.

What kind of tickles me is that any new poltical thriller tv series or movie that posits that matters of state in the US are conducted by serious and knowledgable people is now virtually unwatchable for me. It's virtually impossible to suspend the disbelief required to enjoy something that is so far removed from the reality of today's politicians.

(The recent cringe inducing Deniro series comes to mind)

Yeah it has ruined the old zombie movies where the government ends up the bad guy but a competent bad guy that makes unilateral decisions like quarantining a city or bombing a civilian center to contain infection. I am pretty sure they are gonna all be either 1) running around panicking with the rest of us 2) infighting and useless 3) denying the truth before their eyes if such a catastrophic crisis ever were to happen.

You should watch Civil War (2024) some time. The disbelief is shrinking on that one.

As I recall the battle lines were a bit awkwardly drawn for that one. The realism would increase if Cali and Texas were governed by the same party for some time in real life (as I recall they were allies in that movie).

I would like to see someone take up the idea of Canamerimex Union in a movie for kicks -- that is, the idea of Canada, California and Mexico forming a union on the west coast (and maybe continuing down the east coast, with Canada bridging both coasts)

I found that movie to be disgusting as it takes real footage of war horrors such as 20 days in Mariupol, suicide bombers, etc. and sanitizes that for American audiences. Using this visual style of movies like 20 days in Mariupol indicates the filmmakers watched those movies and thought that could make them buck. Then it gives you some bullshit feel good call of duty action at the end to go kill the president which is tonally different both in visual style and in the context of the narrative. And it replaces the horrors of war such as bombing maternity hospitals and watching pregnant women be dragged from the wreckage with stereotypical racist Americans. And it justifies all this because it tells the tale of some war time reporters and asks the question what if they are just adrenaline junkies which is why they do their jobs? Thereby undercutting the real value and heroism of those who report on these conflicts who are captured, tortured, and murdered (e.g., Viktoriia Roshchyna). It does nothing to connect the audience with anything that is actually happening in the world and even serves to insulate Americans from the horrors of Ukraine and elsewhere while attacking journalists. I thought that movie was disgusting.

In that case, you may enjoy Veep.

Yes, I am familiar. When the dust has settled, it should probably go down as one of the best written shows this side of the century.

On the other hand, the UK Spitting Image puppet series of sketches The President's Brain is Missing holds up remarkably well, due to being about Reagan.

I'm currently watching 24 again and it now feels even more like fiction than it ever did.

True, anything that doesn't approximate Idiocracy is now not realistic enough.

The entire administration is selected for loyalty. In this environment competence is a threat.

> It feels like we're watching history get written by the most entitled and inept among us.

I suspect this is somewhat common in history (this is not meant to excuse it), but we can’t tell because those people still wrote the narrative.

So Trump will be looked back on as a good president? Highly unlikely, I'd say. Trump is quite uniquely awful in the history of the US.

Trump is awful and so was G.W. Bush and Reagan and Nixon and Andrew Jackson and even George Washington[1].

We don’t learn much in school about George Washington burning down Iroquois villages because we focus on other things. It’s entirely possible that Trump becomes so bad that the people who remember his misdeeds get erased like so many Iroquois or Vietnamese people or gays with HIV under these other presidents.

Here’s a clip [2] of Noam Chomsky describing the war crimes of every post WW2 president. Many people still regard those people as good presidents because they ignore their misdeeds.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town_Destroyer

[2] https://youtu.be/5BXtgq0Nhsc

Japan's WWII history is uniquely bad but they don't learn about it.

Can threaten authors with treason for negative books like he did in an EO recently. Change school curriculums. Then Maga can start revising history..

Was the 2025 recession from tarrifs? Nah it was Biden's inflation, or Ukraine aid. Actually.. didn't China impose tarrifs on US and US just reciprocated?

The reality will be altered and murky

I think your suspicions are wrong. Yes, there are plenty of less competent people in history, but not to this level. Trump is an imbecile who just happens to be good in one direction (bullying and manipulation). Put him in an escape room on his own and he'd die in there. While I can think that many previous UK leaders have not been genius-level, I can't think of one who was anywhere near as stupid and beligerent as Trump. Other than maybe Liz Truss, who is thick as two short planks, but fortunately was ousted quickly. That won't be happening with Trump, and the US (and the larger world) will pay for these pocket-lining morons' mistakes.

George HW Bush, Reagan, Nixon, Andrew Jackson, George Washington. They all did horrible things and their incompetence or evil led to widespread suffering of people most of us have forgotten.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43860662

Competence is part of qualification, so what you're asking for is not possible even in theory

> history of alcohol abuse

Should be a disqualifier for US security clearance.

Is easily manipulable - either give them booze to pry secrets or encourage "booze mind" in 1-1 conversations to pry secrets. Plus the huge slip-up of using Signal #signalgate.

There was a related HN submission yesterday that didn’t get traction: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43846682

This is highly competent.

One skirts the official tools like this to prevent accountability from a written record. Completely sensible if you're planning to be judged for your actions.

True. But what did you think was happening before, with previous governments?

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/23/us/politics/23berry.html

For a High-Tech President, a Hard-Fought E-Victory

For more than two months, Mr. Obama has been waging a vigorous battle with his handlers to keep his BlackBerry, which like millions of other Americans he has relied upon for years to stay connected with friends and advisers. (And, of course, to get Chicago White Sox scores.)

He won the fight, aides disclosed Thursday, but the privilege of becoming the nation’s first e-mailing president comes with a specific set of rules.

“The president has a BlackBerry through a compromise that allows him to stay in touch with senior staff and a small group of personal friends,” said Robert Gibbs, his spokesman, “in a way that use will be limited and that the security is enhanced to ensure his ability to communicate.”

[...]

The presidency, for all the power afforded by the office, has been deprived of the tools of modern communication. George W. Bush famously sent a farewell e-mail address to his friends when he took office eight years ago.

While lawyers and the Secret Service balked at Mr. Obama’s initial requests to allow him to keep his BlackBerry, they acquiesced as long as the president - and those corresponding with him - agreed to strict rules. And he had to agree to use a specially made device, which must be approved by national security officials.

There was also all that nonsense about Hillary's laptop and emails.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/02/hillary-clin...

It's fascinating to see the difference in coverage.

This is an example of the False Equivalency logical fallacy.

When you feel real love for your favorite celebrity convict, whose incompetence is beyond denying, you'll put your mind to work to search for any device that will enable you to excuse anything he does and who he nominates.

People will talk about "politicians being incompetent", or act like actually anyone who has ever been in the office was like this. It's a pretty close and comforting way to deal with the reality of supporting a fraud without having to admit that you were duped.

"A false equivalence or false equivalency is an informal fallacy in which an equivalence is drawn between two subjects based on flawed, faulty, or false reasoning"

What is the faulty reasoning here? Apart from "My side good, your side bad."

Stuff like this I would imagine: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jan/20/hillary-clin...

"Some of the classified emails found on former secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s home server were even more sensitive than top secret, according to an inspector general for the intelligence community."

Generally there would be a few garbage appointments, not an avalanche, and more important people have been shitcanned for lesser scandals.

they at least had to pretend. and to pretend they had to let competent staffers do the work so they could take credit.

even bush fooled everyone he was literate (save from the two times he held books upsidedown) while in office.

And this is coming from the supposedly "anti-DEI" administration. What a fucking joke.

Imagine Hegseth was a black woman…

UK comparison: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-47996907 ; black woman MP has a train can, everyone treats it as a massive scandal. I think someone had a survey once where they found that one third of all hate mail and death threats directed at UK MPs was aimed at her.

For anyone else confused by the phrasing:

"Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott has apologised after a photo emerged of her sipping a can of M&S mojito on a London Overground train."

Meanwhile in Australia, the opposition leader visited a pub during his campaign and the crowd yelled at him to drink a beer out of his shoe.

There are no excuse for death threats but she is widely acknowledged as borderline competent at best.

(It’s easy if you try…)

Let's pretend you work for a non-US state intelligence agency. How would you find Hesgeth's personal computer in his office on the public Internet? A genuine thought experiment.

Write an article that he's likely to be interested in reading, spread the link, then mine the browser data just like every other website.

Literally just @ him on X. These are the moments of strategic ineptitude you hoard zero days for decades to score.

I don't want to derail the conversation too much with this but this is the kind of thing that blows my mind with seeing obscenely wealthy/powerful people like Musk and Trump on social media.

At some level of wealth you reach a point where no one can get to you physically. You're completely physically safe and isolated and can't be hurt. That means that the only way someone can get to you is through communicating with you and making you hurt yourself.

That means that social media is your only weakness. This is how adversaries can affect your plans and goals and disrupt your mind. Yet so many of these people seem so oblivious to this and are as terminally online as your average 4channer or facebook mom.

Does this speak to some sort of weakness in these kinds of people or the addictiveness of social media?

> Does this speak to some sort of weakness in these kinds of people or the addictiveness of social media?

They're online because their followers are online. Social media may be the actual lead pipes to our empire [1].

So yes, they are absolutely weaker than leaders with digital hygiene. But the reason they're there is because the American public is similarly weaker.

[1] https://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/wi...

Rich people that eschew fame are largely ignored and rarely talked about. Just like the local rich person that takes private jets to their family vacations every three months, but drives a fully loaded, but unassuming, Toyota is not going to be noticed next to the one driving a purple Lamborghini.

But there probably is something to be said about people that pursue power or money endlessly. That their insatiable need for more money and power could be seen as proxies for a need for validation, so the need to seek out validation online (and to aggressively lash out at criticism) would be just another manifestation of that.

If you are born poor, then maybe you end up telling tall tales at the bar and falling for every get rich quick scheme out there because you cant imagine being wrong. If you are born on third base because of daddy’s emerald mine or real estate company, then you tell your tall tales to millions of people.

> At some level of wealth you reach a point where no one can get to you physically.

Just want to point out that physical security is never 100%. Someone with enough skill, determination, and resources can always get to you.

Sorry, you think it's impossible to hurt Trump? Are you forgetting the bullet that passed an inch from his brain? A crazy person with a gun can change history in a second, and it would've been a terrible violent occurrence throughout society if it had come to pass.

Yep. The CIA uses these same techniques to track foreigners of interest (e.g. Putin's entourage) so we should assume other countries are attempting to use similar techniques on American officials.

I would make Witkoff sit on his ass in hotel for 8 hours while my team one room over wirelessly breaks into his phone and gets into those Signal chats.

https://news.sky.com/story/trumps-fixer-was-made-to-wait-eig...

His personal PC? Send Big Ballz his way to do some upgrades

https://www.npr.org/2025/04/15/nx-s1-5355896/doge-nlrb-elon-...

maybe a free Starlink dish

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/17/us/politics/elon-musk-sta...

This assumes that the patsy needs to never discover that his device was compromised.

I'm guessing there are a few scenarios where they could be tortured / blackmailed into compliance, even if it meant that the DoD would know about it in a day or two, and it would still be worth it.

E.g., shortly before a real fight over Taiwan began.

I really, really hope Hegseth gets his OPSEC act together, yesterday.

Once they're in, often professionals will create many forms of hidden access and then remove evidence of the initial breach.

You would just send him a link in a Signal message. His phone number is widely known and he has Signal installed on his desktop computer.

Signal’s protocol secures the message in transit. But their desktop app may or may not have client-side vulnerabilities. And if he clicks a link, you’re out of Signal and into the browser. If the link downloads a file, you’re into the OS.

There is a Signal social engineering vulnerability where the attacker gets people to click a link that links the attacker's device to the target's Signal account.

There is a Signal social engineering vulnerability where you just happen to exist and have a Signal account and the SecDef invites you to what should be classified communications.

I don't know why people think these incompetent buffoons would need 0-day vulnerabilities to get. Trump just tweeted pictures from classified spy satellites. If you want to know a secret of America's right now, you can either purchase it for a small amount out of Trump's bathroom, or just needle him with a "I bet you don't know/have...." and he will tell you whatever you want to know as a "Brag".

At least one of the members of that chat was IN MOSCOW, I think even IN THE KREMLIN at the time.

Several Republican party leaders were in a meeting with Putin in Moscow on July 4th 2018. They aren't TRYING to keep info out of the Kremlin's hands. They are so incompetent they couldn't keep it out of Beijing's hands if they wanted to.

You could locate the traffic to The White House using this triangulation trick: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42780816

Title:”0-click deanonymization attack targeting Signal, Discord, other platforms”

Maybe not 0-click anymore, but still applies if the user browsing the internet.

Would that be illegal or are you simply just using public(?) data available to you?

Compromise the device of one of his contact and send him a juicy link via telegram that renders "Error: Not viewable on mobile" when opened a phone. Bonus points if the link has 0-day malware dropper

> Compromise the device of one of his contact ...

Yes, I should have thought of that old and obvious one. It opens up a universe of possibilities.

Drop a usb stick outside of his house. 100% he'll pick it up and plug it in. 1000% if you brand it with his favorite whiskey.

I think a pretty good show would be something written like West Wing, where everyone takes themselves very seriously, but with rampant, blatant incompetence. Like, not funny at all. Nothing tongue in cheek, no winks to the audience. A drama of morons.

Get me inside the minds of these freaks.

That's basically "Veep". You might also enjoy "In The Loop", "The Thick Of It", or most of Armando Iannucci's oeuvre.

Veep. You're describing Veep. I guess that's more "assholes" than "morons" but there's plenty of both.

“Burn After Reading”: only adjacent to the halls of power, but a great portrayal of a majority of morons trying to impose themselves into a mostly-offscreen world of aghast professionals. It’s a harbinger.

The office. In White house.

Veep is a documentary.

The contrast betweeen

a) beaurocrats' real comms setups (3 telephones, four monitors all sitting on the desk – versus mounted on arms/wall) full of clutter and sitting on an anachronism of a wood desk

and b) what you'd see in any "spy" movie with dark-mode graphics displaying fancy l33t charts displayed on quad-monitor setups mounted on arms, probably in a low-light setting and the beaurocrat doesn't look at the "small" monitors himself, his cronies do that, the only monitor he looks at is the single 136" on the wall used for teleconferencing with villains

is hilarious

and c) looking at spy comms on their civilian phone while in Russia, probably taking a dump.

I can only imagine two possible explanations:

1) He is avoiding some sort of corrupt signals intelligence folks from knowing what he's working on.

2) He is avoiding the government catching him in some corruption by avoiding the official records act.

Anything else?

3) He's an idiot who hasn't given it a shred of thought, and was hired for loyalty, not brains.

I try to apply Hanlon's Razor to this administration, but it's hard not to occasionally entertain other explanations with the sheer volume of incompetence.

I think that as someone's power and authority grows, the risks of applying Hanlon's Razor get too high. It's best applied to peers.

The same reason teenagers might use Instagram DMs to communicate about school projects - It's just the platform he's familiar with.

Or the same reason I have Whatsapp - communication in my social groups happens there, and if I don't have it I get left out.

Your explanations assume there is some deeper meaning, looking at the tradeoffs for each communication platform, and then coming to some rational conclusion. I don't think there's much evidence for that.

The people around trump just happen to be used to using signal to communicate, and if Pete doesn't get on board he gets left out.

Incompetence only applies if you're not running the literal federal government.

We have to assume malicious intent. These people could start a nuclear war. They get zero flexibility or grace.

Like with a cloth right?

I feel bad for the Signal devs. If they weren't personally targets for state level actors before, they are now.

Say what you want about the usability of DoD home grown solutions, but it was a military system backed up by military budgets and guns - civilians are less likely to be collateral damage in an attack against these systems.

Now, all the civilians using Signal are potential splash damage casualties in a military conflict.

I also suspect Signal does not have the budget, staffing, or desire to serve as a front line soldier in a cyber war; but this exposes them to military-grade risks, whether they like it or not.

Given it's usage in the past, Signal and it's developers have definitely been a target before now. Not to mention by law enforcement and forensic companies like Cellebrite, which lead to them hitting back in a rather amusing blog post a while back:

https://signal.org/blog/cellebrite-vulnerabilities/

If some tech geniuses wanted to improve government efficiency, one thing they could do is create secure yet easy to use collaboration software. Maybe give the app a catchy one-letter name.

Somewhat related: does there exist a technology where I can encrypt something in a manner that it can only be decrypted after a specific future date? If theoretically possible, what would it take for something like that to exist? ie. "We'd need an authority to broadcast some ongoing pseudorandom number generator that can be trusted" or whatnot.

What you're describing is a time-lock puzzle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-lock_puzzle) and there are ways to do it but none of them are perfect

https://crypto.stackexchange.com/q/606/time-capsule-cryptogr...

Not necessarily requiring encryption: Shoot it into space on a carefully calculated trajectory. Alternatively, send it as a laser pulse towards something that will reflect it back at the right time.

a smart contract on solana.

Surely you would have to store something off-chain in order for it to be inaccessible until a given point in time.

Unless you can predict the future, I'm not sure how you would generate a key that would be unknowable now but generally available in the future.

You might be on to something there.

I was thinking of encrypting a secret in the structure of a Rust program so it can only be decrypted by compiling and running it.

? Where's the time component there

Can’t you just fork the chain?

Site’s being hugged hard - mirror: https://archive.is/kMZ2A

I'm simply going to point out the blaringly obvious that has somehow missed the armchair commentariat for this whole narrative debacle:

1) DoD and other departments have either tacitly or explicitly approved the use of Signal for internal matters for several years now, with proper opsec.

2) You cannot govern exclusively from a SCIF, hence 1.

"With proper opsec" is doing a lot of work here, and I would presume one very fundamental piece is it is only to be used for non-sensitive conversations. Unless you are going to argue sharing attack plans ahead of the attack on a personal device is okay, which seems absurd on its face in a post-Pegasus world.

Did you read the transcripts?

Does "proper opsec" include adding random journalists to your chat, and sharing classified intel with your friends?

Did you read the transcripts?

If you're talking about the chat messages published by the Atlantic, yes, I did.

>2) You cannot govern exclusively from a SCIF, hence 1.

If you have the resources available to the SecDef, you frankly should be able to. Mobile SCIFs are something private companies can provide off the shelf for a few hundred thousand dollars. That's a drop in the bucket.

Obviously, nobody can or should spend all their time in one unless you're some kind of watch officer, but when handling TS/SCI material, there really is no reason for a principal to not have access to a SCIF within a moment's notice if they make it a priority. And there's no reason to be sharing TS/SCI with anyone that is not themselves in a SCIF. We have a declassification/reclassification process if information needs to be more widely disseminated.

This is nonsense. The government simply could not function if all classified data had to be born in SCIFs and kept in SCIFs.

> 2) You cannot govern exclusively from a SCIF, hence 1.

(1) doesn't have to be Signal. It should be some "enterprise" solution that DoD can own and operate, and it should federate with the same thing used in other executive agencies, and the WH itself. And it should have military grade authorization (meaning labeled, multi-level security).

That said, (2) is quite right: you cannot govern from a SCIF. SCIFs are mainly tools of control to access to long-ago classified information. New classified information cannot be born in a SCIF for the simple reason that SCIFs cannot scale to the needs of those who govern.

Exactly. Signal and Wickr are widely used, and default installed in some orgs.

Since NSA Waltz just got fired for this, shouldn't Hesgeth as well?

They're just going to keep hammering this dude until he bombs Iran, then MSNBC will say that he's finally grown into the role of a statesman and learned to make the hard choices.

I get that he’s senior but surely someone else signed off this farce?

He's SecDef. AFAIK he calls all the shots within DoD's operations, as long as Trump allows it.

I guess the Treasury Department could stop transferring funds into DoD accounts, but that seems unlikely.

Perhaps he could be prosecuted for violating various laws, but that would require action by the DoJ, which also seems unlikely.

Congress could also hold Trump responsible for Hegseth's actions, but that also strikes me as unlikely.

The past 9 years have been a really good education in why the Separation of Powers is important, and what's at risk when it doesn't function properly.

I’m somewhat surprised to see that they use a KVM to switch between back and forth between a JWICS and SIPRNET. I would imagine it’s a special KVM as it’s essentially bridging the airgap between the two.

I’m guessing that’s the product in question: https://www.vertiv.com/490454/globalassets/products/monitori...

They use special secure KVM from the major vendors and they are tempest resistant meaning they are shielded from bleeding signals between devices. They also have devices that can use multiple levels on the same screen and keyboard! See Everfox TTC

Not a fan of the Trump administration but I imagine the official pentagon communications systems must be extremely clunky and annoying, and about 20 years behind civilian tech.

During the UK Covid-19 enquiry into gov decision making at that time it came to light that most of the UK cabinet were co-ordinating via Whatsapp groups. Again, I'm not a fan of Boris and Dom Cummings but this makes some sort of sense to me. I recognise the need for government teams to have quick convenient chat available to them. Things move too fast these days to wait for the next cabinet meeting or to arrange things via a series of phone calls.

Similarly we can look back to Obama having to fight to keep his Blackberry in 2009 https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna28780205

The problem here is that the convenience is coming at the expense of proper identity management. SignalGate is a good example of the principle. Some Apple convenience feature helped the user by putting the phone number of the reporter into the addressbook under the identity of a government official. Signal then cheerfully used that incorrect phone number to add the reporter to the group chat.

That 20 year old tech is simply more secure... specifically because it is less convenient. By doing things the way they do them they can enforce access to desired levels of security by controlling physical access to the equipment. With something like Signal, that access is entirely the responsibility of the user. The user will inevitably mess that up, particularly when things get exciting. ... and Signal is not even really all that good at preventing the user from messing the identity thing up.

* https://articles.59.ca/doku.php?id=em:sg (my article)

You are right, but I'd also say that high security brings a lot of friction that slows down decision making. Irrespective of Trump and his friends (whom I dont like) as a point of principle I think world leaders have to choose between secure and slow vs fast and risk of leaks. For most purposes, fast and risk of leaks is going to be more optimal.

I hear you both. Frankly, I think we could use a little friction in communication to slow it and the resulting decisions down. I don't know about everyone else, but I don't make best decisions on the fly.

> quick convenient chat available to them.

And unarchived. It's very convenient to not have to do things in meetings with minutes where people might later question your decisions. Or report them to the police.

To be fair, quite a lot of in-person meetings among U.S. federal government leaders are private and do not produce minutes.

Yes you are right and these people probably are crooks. But in principle I think politicans should be able to have private conversations. These used to happen in literal back rooms but these days everyone is geographically spread out and thats not so possible. Formal decisions should be ratified in official minuted meetings but informal chat should also be possible. Because people need to actually talk to each other in an unguarded way to figure things out sometimes. At the moment the principle seems to be 'anything that a politican types to anyone else should be archived for later perusal' and I'm not sure that thats going to give us better decisions.

My kneejerk reaction is the same as yours, but the fact that they were using disappearing messages - they're using Signal to get around their legal reporting requirements. Even if they have other motivations, what they're doing is illegal.

Also, I complain a lot about Teams, but my understanding is modern DoD basically runs on Microsoft, AWS, (also Google?) just the same as private companies. Probably not Zoom, which is unfortunate from a usability perspective but also wise I think.

The British government was officially using Zoom for cabinet meetings during lockdown which was a whole lot worse.

The whole world had to shift online with about 2 weeks notice, so I'll forgive them that. At the time I was kind of impressed to be honest that red tape didn't bring the govt machinery to a halt and that they were actually able to improvise a bit. But yes Zoom is not generally the platform I'd want them to use.

There were better alternatives and they had more time than that (when lockdown was possible but not enforced) to prepare.

IIRC the French installed gov controlled Jitsi server. That plus a VPN would be a whole not more secure.

If you do not have things in place I think "we need to discuss state secrets securely" would have been clearly sufficient to justify an exemption to lockdown rules.

Behind, or aligned with different goals?

Can you name a popular civilian tech that blocks adding random journalists to small chat groups? That includes strong identity guarantees? That meets compliance requirements around logging calls?

Bloomberg might come the closest on this. Why don't you go out and price a Bloomberg terminal for yourself, at the grade that lets you trade options with other Bloomberg terminal owners over the chat interface?

> but I imagine

Do you know at all or are you just relying completely on your imagination to justify the Trump admin's actions?

I dont like Trump but I'm interested in the idea of what technology we want our politicians to use if we actually want them to be functional teams. This seems like a topic that might be good to talk about on HN.

Interestingly, this comment ended up getting a roughly equal number of upvotes and downvotes

> It is remarkable to what great lengths Hegseth went to use the Signal app, because as defense secretary he has his own communications center which is specialized in keeping him in contact with anyone he wants. This center is commonly called SecDef Cables and is part of Secretary of Defense Communications (SDC) unit.

... but unlike Signal, SDC respects laws requiring accurate record-keeping. And that's why this bunch of lawbreakers want to use Signal. They want to evade any and all accountability once this administration is over.

Where is the "but her emails" crowd now? There are three main issues here:

1. The Defense Department bans the use of Signal for everybody else. Why is that? Why is the Secretary exempt?

2. As we've seen it's pretty easy to add unauthorized people to what should be secure communication channels where classified information is shared; and

3. There are laws around the preservation of governmental records. Expiring Signal messages seems like it's intentionally meant to circumvent these legal requirements ie it's illegal.

We're only 100 days in. We've got 1200 more days of this.

Re: 1. If a team at work has a long-standing policy implemented by and applying only to that team and I come in as the new team lead, I can change that policy.

NB: I’m not arguing that this change in policy was done after a careful Chesterton’s Fence analysis and weighing of all relevant factors, but it would seem stranger if a new leader couldn’t change any policies than if they can.

But did they change the policy, or did they do whatever because they felt like it regardless of what the policy said?

> Where is the "but her emails" crowd now?

Same place everyone else is now. Nobody cares about the flagrant violations by the executive. This is the foxes walking around freely now.

Nobody? Including yourself?

That’s a common idiom which isn’t literal. (Obviously?)

Huh? I am still here and I am still annoyed by both. If anything, people who opposed 'but her emails' crowd to sufficiently penalize Hillary, made the current situation possible to begin with.

edit: To the lazy down voters. Address the 'my side never does anything wrong' issue and I might concede.

Why are your police not investigating this? The guy is actively breaking the law

If you're not aware, these are federal laws, and the force responsible for investigating and arresting people who break them are a part of the executive branch.

And the attorney general just confirmed in a cabinet meeting that the U.S. marshals would not be arresting any of them (marshals handle court orders, e.g. if you're in contempt)

And the top executive is arguing that they are only accountable to him

If you really want to blow your mind, think about the fact that Hunter Biden was being prosecuted by the DOJ run by Joe Biden, just a few months ago. Can you imagine anything like that happening in the Trump administration if a Trump family member was accused of a crime?

Judges are investigating and holding trials. The Executive is being obstructive and outright ignoring court orders. Rule of law and the balance of powers have collapsed. Turns out that running a decade+ long misinformation campaign to sow distrust of all legal institutions, as well as expertise and professionalism in general is sufficient to topple the world's oldest democracy. If only there had been any effective counter-messaging things may have been different, but that's impossible with our "left" hollowed out by capital.

How many politicians have you seen blatantly breaking the law like this and having no problem? It happens over and over again. A lower-level flunky would be in prison, but a political appointee is going to be just fine, forced resignation is the worst that could possibly happen to him. Our system is just that corrupt. The same thing happens with leaks - politician or cabinet member leaking is normal, rando bureaucrat leaking is enemy of the state.

Because Trump does not investigate himself, and the once independent Attorney General is now just another political arm of Trump, but with prosecutorial power and discrtion. We are in dark times.

> the once independent Attorney General

This has never been the case; JFK appointed his little brother AG. The problem is that the Congress should be investigating and prosecuting the president but will not.

> This has never been the case;

Independence of the Justice Department has been the norm since and because of Watergate.

always have been, its just current admin is less subtle about it

And you have hit the nail on the head for how Trump is operating this term.

How can he do these things?

Turns out they all could've, they just chose not to.

Maybe we should strengthen the checks and balances, and Congress shouldn't abdicate ANY of its authority to the president. Maybe the system should work how it's supposed to instead of how is easiest.

So you say, but I've seen plenty of independence...see Trump's first term for some examples.

Of course, there will be no consequences for his complete lack of... everything

Oh there will be, just not for him. We’ll never know how many state secrets have been leaked through these shenanigans.

> there will be, just not for him

Everyone in this administration has to know they’re spending the decade after Trump in front of the Congress and various investigators.

Let’s hope so. But of course this is also a heavy incentive for all of them to make sure their regime never leaves power.

Can't Trump just pull a Biden, and toss a blanket decade-long pardon to his entire staff? Would anyone bother to investigate them after that?

Nah, because the Dems can’t win elections, and Republicans will never hold any Trump ally accountable.

I'm sure they're absolutely terrified. I mean look at what happened to James Clapper, straight to the gulag of a cushy CNN gig.

There will be none if you do nothing.

But what about her emails. /s

That throught-terminating cliché propaganda line generated by a bunch of campaign strategists at a whiteboard is what got us into this situation.

The extreme bipartisan view is that government business done by public officials should be hidden from the public record at their whim, even with the explicit goal of avoiding FOIA. Democrats believe that this is not only justified but virtuous, because Hillary Clinton lost an election.

He should probably be investigated. He's giving off major "Russian Asset" vibes.

Of course the guy needs to have an end-to-end encrypted direct line to the president. It's the president that runs the show and all decisions must go through him.

Maybe just let the man use Signal?

If someone gave me a whole set of locked down _windows_ computers and a bunch of achaic phone lines and told me to use them in 2025, I’d also try to circumvent such inconvenience.

Are you in charge of federal secrets?

I think they should just use X and post publicly, I don't see what the fuss is all about :)

My understanding is that the use of signal started during biden's term. Is this not true?

Are you being intentionally nonspecific? The use of Signal for some purpose doesn't somehow mean it is appropriate for any purpose.

During Obama they used a shared Gmail account by passing messages using the drafts feature.

Who is "they"?

The director of the CIA sending sexts (and as it later turned out, classified materials) to his mistress.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petraeus_scandal

He was fired the day after it reached Obama's desk, and eventually got a slap on the wrist and two years' probation.

Nope

Do you have any evidence?

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

Very different. See my response here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43859373

Not true at all. The use of Signal started during Obama's first or second term. While the app's first release was during his second term, it existed under various names and forms way back. Wikipedia has a great article on its history.

I personally started using signal some time around 2018 and I'm sure there were millions of users by the time Biden began his term.

I thought the GP means that goverment officials such as the Secretary of Defense started using Signal during Biden's administration (though with no basis for that offered, yet).

I wish more people, especially media writers, would start with the presumption that "circumventing the state-approved security machine" is a _feature_ of this administration.

Not to pick on this in particular – nearly all the reporting on this starts and ends with "Signal is insecure" as if that was all it took to be wrong. And in other eras, that was enough.

The man likes Signal. For better or worse, he is the Secretary of Defense...The man we've entrusted to help coordinate our national defense.

There's so many questions I genuinely don't have an answer for...

Has Congress made it illegal to use an off-brand messaging app for secure communications? _Why_ is it insecure? What is the probability that China is reading these messages in real-time? 100%? 25%? 0.2%?

We need to start from the presumption that the people-in-power don't care that it's always been done this way...in fact, they have a ton of pressure to be different. But, in some cases, these people may be willing to listen to reasonable arguments which clearly establish _why_ using Signal is unreasonably worse than using US Government Issue messaging.

> What is the probability that China is reading these messages in real-time

Real-time might be nice but there's value in reading material at this level with almost any delay.

In 1949 a US counter-intelligence program(me), the Venona project[1] decrypted Soviet cables from 1945 which made it almost certain the First Secretary to the British Embassy in Washington DC [2] was a Soviet asset. That wouldn't have happened if the Soviets hadn't misused their channels of communication.

[1] https://www.osti.gov/opennet/manhattan-project-history/Event... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Philby

It doesn't only matter if its secure or not.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidential_Records_Act

I don't understand it either. It's not as if you can accidentally message war plans to unauthorized parties on Signal.

I think one of the issues is that at least some of the Signal war-plans chat group participants had their messages set to auto-delete. If that's the reason that they're using Signal, it is indeed a problem, even if Signal is secure.

> There's so many questions I genuinely don't have an answer for...

> Has Congress made it illegal to use an off-brand messaging app for secure communications? _Why_ is it insecure? What is the probability that China is reading these messages in real-time? 100%? 25%? 0.2%?

Is your point that, in the space of your own lack of knowledge, that reasonable rational may exist? Could you share what gives you trust in this administration to be so generous?

The issue is much deeper and more concerning. They’ve been using Signal like this across multiple administrations because the “official” tools are broken to the point of being almost useless. Signal has been one of the major workarounds.

It isn’t enough to say “don’t use Signal”, at some point they need to address the reality that there are no functional alternatives.

Bingo. If a hacker did this it would be understood as a sign that the comms aren’t secure and praised. He was clearly briefed on Salt Typhoon.

The thing I am more bothered by is why would he take a picture of his desk, thereby narrowing the attack profile.

> Has Congress made it illegal to use an off-brand messaging app for secure communications?

Yes. The law requires that classified information be handled under certain standards.

> _Why_ is it insecure?

Classified data is being transmitted on an unsecured device. If Hegseth's personal phone has Uber, Tinder, ... whatever apps installed, that software is running on a device that's contains national secrets.

Systems which handle classified data are meant to be airgapped from the normal internet/normal software.

The issue is not that signal is insecure, but rather that sensitive government information demands additional precaution (e.g. airgapping).

There's a separate issue that there are legal requirements for maintaining records of government communication. Using a personal device (especially with disappearing messages) is illegal since it doesn't maintain this documentation.

Additionally, classified information is tracked to see who read it and when. In the event of a security leak, this can help isolate where the leak happened. If the information gets posted on Signal, then there's nothing more that can be tracked.

> For better or worse, he is the Secretary of Defense...The man we've entrusted to help coordinate our national defense.

That's not the way rule of law works. The Secretary of Defense doesn't get to _decide_ we're doing things differently now. His actions, as well as the actions of his staff, are bound by the laws that congress has passed.

> We need to start from the presumption that the people-in-power don't care that it's always been done this way...in fact, they have a ton of pressure to be different. But, in some cases, these people may be willing to listen to reasonable arguments which clearly establish _why_ using Signal is unreasonably worse than using US Government Issue messaging.

The onus should not be on the general public to convince the Secretary of Defense to adhere to bog standard requirements for handling sensitive information. If he has an idea, "I think using Signal on my personal phone to discuss imminent military actions is better than using a secure line," he could push that idea forward. Have the Pentagon's security staff evaluate the idea. Instead, he simply did it.

Anyone in the military who did this, and didn't have the president personally protecting him would be cooling his heels in an 8x8 cell in Fort Leavenworth for a very long time.

The issue is that it has all been done with great incompetence, and with apparent glorification of ignorance as a sign of bravado. I, for one, want serious people in charge of my defense, not sycophants more concerned with their stage makeup, hair, fitted suit, and with 'owning the libs' than defending our nation.

Regarding Signal:

Check out what happened to the Signal FOSS fork.

Then check out what Molly is doing, and why.

Personally I'd favor Briar over Signal any day.

> help coordinate our national defense

I mean, thinking the DoD is actually defending the U.S. is where you went wrong. The stakes are so incredibly low that none of this actually matters.

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