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Comment by dogman144 | Hacker News Reader

It’s probably against the rules to self-link old comments. And it’s hard to be remotely proud about having a good take on this news as it unfolded.

However, when this first broke, select HN users were claiming this was OPSEC 4D chess and not deeply irresponsible cybersec practices.

That was a terrible take then, and it’s a terrible take now.

Clear as day when this started there was a nasty vendor supply chain risk lurking, and if it was 4D cybersec chess it was done by some absolute muppets.

Bad setups get exploited in natsec.

A bad setup exploited.

Sounds like a brutal US natsec leak is brewing.

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Brewing? This is it. All of these messages have been leaking; that's what the article is about.

Have you found info on the chat texts?

Referring to “a leak” as in these chats go public in some form vs into a RU SCIF somewhere, and that there’s some verification of what the clear text chats were/who’s in it.

I am speculating it’ll be the latter scenario, with periodic strategic leaks.

A leak to the press is one of the least damaging (relatively speaking) categories of leak, because intelligence officials quickly become aware. What's far more damaging is when secret communications are leaked to outside intelligence.

Right. What evidence is out there on the leak contents?

All I have found is putting 2 and 2 together that this Signal variant has been used for months, the vendor was exploited and lost data, and vendor worked with clear texts logs.

That leaves a lot of room for interpretation still. certain agencies on certain tenants, certain tenants were hacked but others, technical info like that.

If it was your life on the line, how comfortable would you be with all of that room for interpretation?

> It’s probably against the rules to self-link old comments

It's not against the rules to link past comments - in fact it's preferred to repeating the same or similar content across stories.

At the same time, does 'look, I had the right take once in the past' make for interesting conversation? I'm keen to see it unfold!

I think it's good to compare and contrast the items you got right and wrong in the take and discuss why it did or did not play out that way.

No, I rarely think self-referential comments are useful, let alone interesting.

I do think it’s useful however to claim information space on a serious topic before, interestingly, various apologists show up as is happening ITT now.

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