America's Cyber Defense Agency Is Burning Down and Nobody's Coming to Put It Out
threathunter.ai
threathunter.ai
> I'm a veteran. I served under both parties. I don't care which side of the aisle fixes this.
The idea that there are things entirely unpartisan or unpolitical is a polite fiction we can work with when things are somewhere around normal - usually even when things are pretty far from normal.
I get the army drilled this stance into you, but at some point the price the people pay for corruption includes their security.
It is, in fact, about politics.
Note: I'm an independent, but the current administration is incompetent on an embarrassing level.
Tbh, I don't see any way going back to democracy and rule of law is possible without completely rewriting our constitution.
there is no need to rewrite it, because it's fine. What's not fine is people not observing it, and defending it with their lives, and making sure that violations are actioned with penalties, social stigma and disdain.
You are blind. The senate and electoral college and lack of clearly distributed powers have meant that we have never functioned as a liberal democracy despite our lofty rhetoric claiming otherwise.
I'm not qualified to know who will make a good president. You probably aren't either. Pushing the process further into American Idol territory would make it worse, not better.
Indeed Virginia was a slave state at the time, and was later part of the Confederacy, and it was the most underrepresented state in the Senate and electoral college at the founding, since those bodies cause higher population states to be underrepresented relative to their population.
> The states that eventually joined the confederacy are different from those that had legalized slavery when the Constitution was signed.
All of the states had legalized slavery when the Constitution was signed. But it was already gathering detractors even then. The states that wanted to keep it the most were the ones that ended up in the Confederacy and they were both a minority of the original colonies and a minority of the states at the time of the civil war.
If the president was elected by popular vote, slaves would count as zero because they obviously weren't going to let them vote.
Which nominally gives slightly more weight to the lower population rural states, but that isn't even the primary consequence of the EC. The primary consequence is that it gives significantly more weight to swing states, which by definition don't favor any given party.
Yes, I suppose if you could accept the idea of a ludicrous hypothetical alternative that would have zero chance in reality of being implemented you can contort yourself enough to ignore that the EC is part of the compromise on slavery that forms the Constitution.
The primary thing the electoral college does in modern day is allow -- not even require -- states to allocate all of their state's voting power to the candidate that wins the majority of the state. With the result that they mostly do that and then states like New York and Texas get ignored in Presidential elections because nobody expects them to flip and getting 10% more of the vote is worthless when it doesn't flip the state.
Ironically it's the partisans who are effectively disenfranchising the people in their own state. If the states that go disproportionately for one party didn't want to be ignored then all they'd have to do is allocate their electoral votes proportionally according to what percent of the vote the candidate got in that state. Then getting 10% more of the vote in a big state would be as many electoral votes as some entire states. But the non-swing states are by definition controlled by one party and then they're willing to screw over their own population to prevent the other party from getting any of that state's electoral votes.
Randomly-selected citizens would have outperformed what we’ve gotten in the last few elections at minimum.
Genuinely think we should consider that.
This is, incidentally, how we massively screwed up the federal government. In the original design US Senators were elected by the state legislatures, the premise being that they would prevent federal overreach into the regulatory domain of the states because they would be directly accountable to the state governments.
Then populists who wanted to do everything at the federal level pushed for the 17th Amendment which eliminated the state governments' representation in the federal government and people stopped caring about local politics because it started feeling like an exercise in futility when federal law could preempt anything you wanted to do and the thing meant to keep that in check was deleted.
And the federal government was supposed to have enumerated (i.e. narrow, limited) powers. It doesn't have the scaffolding for people to hold it accountable. You can elect the local dogcatcher but the only elected office in the entire federal executive branch is the President of the United States. Which is fine when the main thing they're doing is negotiating treaties and running the Post Office but not fine if you're trying to do thousands of pages of federal regulations on everything from healthcare to banking to labor to energy.
In a fifteen year period 46 senate elections were deadlocked in 20 states, at one point Delaware had an open senate seat for four years due to this.
That said the proper reform to this would've been the abolition of the senate, as it has always been and will always be an anti-democratic force, not moving for senators to be elected by the people.
That seems more like an excuse than a legitimate reason. If that was actually the problem you could solve it by adopting a mechanism to break ties, putting the vote to the public only in the event of a tie, having the state legislatures use score voting which makes two candidates getting exactly the same score far less likely, etc.
But if they want to do a power grab then they get further by saying "we have to do something about these deadlocks" than by saying "we want to do a power grab".
> That said the proper reform to this would've been the abolition of the senate, as it has always been and will always be an anti-democratic force
It's supposed to be an anti-democratic force, like the Supreme Court, the existence of Constitutional rights and the entire concept of even having a federal government instead of allowing local voters to have full plenary power over local laws. Unconstrained direct democracy is a populist whirlwind of impulsive reactionary forces.
This is a great point as is the point that the existence of a federal government itself is anti-democratic.
The Senate was initially created as a body that was incentivized to promote federalism itself (especially through their power to approve federal judges) & a federalist republic seems to be the most democratic system because it incentivizes a balance between individual liberty & the ability to restrict someone else's liberty through law.
Right now, the balance of power is too centralized which makes for radical changes every time a different political party takes control of government.
I reject this premise. I'm not omniscient but I have a pretty good idea.
Not for nothing, but the party that bangs on hardest about the sanctity and infallibility of the Electoral College is the one that is far and away the worst for "American Idol-type politicians". In recent times:
- Donald Trump
- Ronald Reagan
- Fred Thompson
Even at the state level:
- Arnold Schwarzenegger
- Jesse Ventura
- Sonny Bono
- Clint Eastwood
This doesn't make their decision good. It has consistently failed to produce politicians that represent the needs of the people who live here.
Democracy may be bad; but what we have is orders of magnitude worse.
There have been plenty of times the country has functioned extremely well with the exact same setup as it is now.
The issue is everyone being greedy cowards instead of actually fighting for what matters.
Resistance is difficult because it typically requires great personal sacrifice. It's hard to protest when you have to work to feed and shelter your family. It's hard to resist law enforcement when your life is the price.
The working class's current inability to resist tyranny isn't an accident.
it always takes sacrifice to resist tyranny. It's just that there's been less tyranny in the past half century, that the new generation raised have not had to make sacrifices, and thus don't feel they need to. Surely, somebody else will make that sacrifice when the time comes...
Which, given current incentives re: law and order does seem to be the sanest thing to do from a local minima perspective.
However, it is also one of the worst outcomes from a global perspective.
If the constitution was appropriate, the people would have the explicit legal means of remedying this situation without relying on elections several years after the constitutional crises was underway.
The fact that it was intended to be a living document and has not remained so, I would argue, is partially responsible for our current predicament.
Don't take this as disagreement with your basic assertion. Failing to declare war since 1941, failing to impeach and convict Clinton, failure to impeach and convict Trump at least once, the House checks and balances Dem presidents, and aids and abets Republicans. It's a gerontocractic farce.
The last one proposed and ratified was in 1971, 55 years ago, the 26th, around lowering the voting age. (Yes, there is a 27th, but that was proposed in 1789 and just took two centuries to be ratified - guess what it was about? Prohibiting Congress from changing their own pay in the current election cycle...).
The modern balance of power remains on a razor's edge and constantly flips because both parties have learned to run data-driven campaigns. That would be as true if neither party did gerrymandering as if both parties do as they do now. Whatever the district which is closest to being flipped, that's the one where they would concentrate their resources. If one party started to get significantly more than 50% of the seats and the other significantly less, the loser would change some of their positions until they were back in the running because getting some of what you want with 51% of the seats is better than getting none of what you want with 39% of the seats.
The actual problem is not the electoral college or gerrymandering or The Despicable Other Party, it's first past the post voting, because that's what creates a two party system. Have your state adopt STAR voting or score voting and see what happens.
There have been ongoing efforts to ban things like ranked choice or other options at the state level and now it's being pushed federally (Make Elections Great Again act MEGA).
It's also not clear that bill is going to pass. It seems full of other things Democrats have a major incentive to filibuster.
It's not even clear that Republicans have any reason to prevent score voting. One of the failure modes of ranked choice is that you can end up with more radical candidates winning where one party already had a majority because it allows the majority party to run a radical candidate next to a moderate one, but then if the radical candidate gets more votes from their own party, the race becomes the radical vs. the minority party after the majority party's moderate candidate got excluded, and then the radical candidate wins. They saw what happened in New York and didn't like it. But Democrats should have exactly the same concern -- what do you think that does if you adopted it in the South -- and in general ranked choice makes polarization worse. Ranked choice actually does suck.
Whereas score voting does something else. If you run a radical, a moderate from the major party and a minority party, the moderate from the majority party wins because there is no run off election, they just got the highest score because they scored better among the minority party than the radical and better among the majority party than the minority party candidate. And when more candidates than that run, the most likely to win is the one that best represents the entire district, which reduces polarization, and that's to the benefit of everybody.
And RCV still sucks. Let them ban that one and use the better one.
> Missouri banned RCV via ballot measure.
That's true, but it's not honest. What actually happened is there were TWO parts to it.
The first part, which is the part people actually read:
> "The amendment also changes a line in the Missouri Constitution to specify that “only” U.S. citizens have the right to vote, rather than “all” U.S. citizens."
The second part banned rank voice voting.
Nobody, I mean nobody read the second part.
The first part of the ballot measure was _already illegal_. It was simply used as a tool to scare people into voting against rank choice voting.
At least one place in Alaska, I think two boroughs, have local laws that allow RCV.
Obviously what you should then do is get a ballot measure to redundantly ban non-citizens from voting and non-redundantly adopt score voting.
But the GOP turned into the MAGA cult.
- Accepted the New Deal
- Championed the Interstate Highway system (massive federal spending)
- Pushed for higher marginal tax rates
- Supported a regulated mixed economy
- Warned against the military-industrial complex.
There's a long way to go on the path the USA is currently on. Ask anyone from India or Russia or Argentina or Egypt or Nigeria how democracy actually works.
The word politics has basically split into two meanings that we swap between without noticing. There's the original sense, the art of navigating collective decisions, how we share power and resources. That version is unavoidable and actually kind of noble. Then there's what the word has come to mean in practice, which is identity-driven team sport. My side versus your side. Performance and signaling.
When you say "it is, in fact, about politics" you're technically correct in the first sense but you're activating the second sense, which is exactly the frame he's trying to get people out of. He's trying to create a space where people engage with the substance without immediately sorting into camps. That's valuable even if the distinction is a little artificial.
It's kind of a trap honestly. The escape hatch from tribal politics has itself become a political move, so you can always say "well actually that's political too." True, but not very useful if you're trying to get anywhere.
We've got a great term for the latter, and everyone is already familiar with it. Add the adjective "party". Done.
Similarly, "computer" in "computer games" is a noun that modifies the meaning of the following noun. Modifying nouns like this always are in singular.
Not two “teams” beating each other over the head.
"Both sides" / "tribes bad" / "transcend the conflict" discourse is such cancer, because intentionally ignoring the most pertinent parameters of a conflict is not a neutral choice. When Donald Trump said he would end the Russia/Ukraine conflict on Day 1, we didn't fear that he was lying, we feared that he was serious because we all knew that the only way to actually do it would have been to force Ukrainian defeat. When your toddler is screaming because the smell of cooking has made him hungry but he has to wait, giving in to his demands is not conflict-transcending 3D chess, it's teaching your kid that tantrums are an effective tool. The same goes for politics.
To put it a different way, if America wants republicans to get good at collective decision making, they need to play team sports and vote democrats, repeatedly for at least 10 years. Probably longer, since that incompetence is so entrenched. There is no other way, and anyone who tries to be non-partisan is just wasting time.
I'm saying to consider if we've reached the point where the effects of political corruption is shaping reality beyond that point.
The right sure said that a lot, but it repeatedly failed to materialize. The twitter files were especially embarrassing, where Elon alleged government censorship but his "detective" was forced to admit that it didn't exist. Oops!
> [@mtaibbi] Although several sources recalled hearing about a “general” warning from federal law enforcement that summer about possible foreign hacks, there’s no evidence - that I've seen - of any government involvement in the laptop story. In fact, that might have been the problem...
Contrast this to "we can do it the easy way or the hard way" from the current administration. Yikes!
Nah, this didn't come from there.
The answer is right at the beginning. Current administration has the explicit goal to not have free elections going forward. It has been stated plainly, on TV. The rest is collateral damage, and an attack on critical infrastructure will be a good excuse to invade the next country, declare state of emergency or outright war and get rid of elections completely.
Where do you get this from?
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/donald-trump-laura-ingraham-f...
Repeated statements by Trump and his circle claiming he’ll run in 2028. Statements by Trump that his supporters won’t ever need to vote again. That little insurrection they tried on January 6th 2021. Their current weaponization and staffing of ICE by people with questionable backgrounds and morals and deploying them against their political enemies under the pretext of illegal immigration (Texas has a bigger problem than Wisconsin For what it’s worth). Constantly praising dictatorial leaders like Putin and Xi while threatening and talking shit about Democratic allies.
So whether or not metastasizes to that point, pretending like this concern has no grounding in actual actions taken and statements uttered is wild, because this playbook isn’t new and the intended direction seems more clear than not.
We’ve torched cooperation, shown we cannot protect classified information - if one didn’t know better one would think it was on purpose - but in general incompetence typically reigns. They just don’t think the agency should exist after they said elections in 2020 were generally secure.
Extremely embarrassing that the current POTUS should be in prison specifically for his mishandling of classified information
There is a certain type of mentality that just doesn’t believe that government should do anything, and that private enterprise will always have the solution.
Those people appear to be in control of all levers of power in the United States.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/02/trumps-latest-plan-t...
So on the one hand they're saying government shouldn't do anything, but on the other hand they love having the government put its finger on the scales of the market.
I think you can make that ~80%, but maybe you've done the calculations more diligently than I have.
In before "No clearly the party that helps the billionaires the most and is mostly comprised of billionaires and is backed by all the tech billionaires are the good guys, they are the true party of the people"
Rather: They don't want the government to impede capitalist interests (greed), so they're using the government to further their corruption and greed
On top of that, there is the whole accelerationist ideology factor, which is also deeply insane to me.
For example - The ratio of government employees (including contractors) to US population is at an all time high[1], and the ratio of GDP to government expense is at an all time high[2].
It should be obvious if you have a profilgate printer priting dollars left and right, and the printer's controllers livelyhood depends on the printer working, workers will eventually lease printing to anyone willing to pay the controllers.
Thus, doesn't seem like a problem of wealthy people to me. You are always going to have wealthy people in any society. But it seems the fault is at having a printer, and letting people who aren't your neighbor, to control it.
I'm open minded in this being a "Chicken or egg" Problem. But I'd need to hear a compelling argument for it.
[1] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-true-size-of-governme...
And completely ignores who is President and his explicit words.
Separately but equally damaging in terms of spending is one party is consistently doing everything in their power to fuck over the most vulnerable, provide tax breaks to corporations and the wealthy, and generally make life miserable for anyone who isn't a wealthy (soon white) dude.
This means the other party being the only sane choice for people with morals, but also being subject to various types of capture corporate or otherwise, gets to spend their time in power bumbling around trying to undo the damage and make sure the wheels don't completely fall off, so the "welfare" state expands by necessity since the only thing the two parties can agree on at this point is that all problems should be solved by throwing absurd amount of money at them and nothing else.
SNAP is peanuts. About a trillion dollars out of the seven trillion goes to the military and by far the largest amount goes to retirees.
> The elected representatives (all parties) of this country have voted to increase military spending year over year and most of the population is fine with this.
How can you tell if they're fine with it if all of their alternatives lead to the same result?
> Separately but equally damaging in terms of spending is one party is consistently doing everything in their power to fuck over the most vulnerable, provide tax breaks to corporations and the wealthy, and generally make life miserable for anyone who isn't a wealthy (soon white) dude.
The party that set up Social Security so that it has an income cap on the tax, makes larger payouts to people who had higher incomes up to the cap and max payouts to people who hit the income cap, and pays out more to white people in aggregate even proportional to their income because they live longer, was the party of FDR. The party that has been obstructing housing construction in San Francisco and other major cities for decades to the detriment of renters, young prospective home buyers and the homeless is the party with the majority in those cities, and you can't even pin that one on the filibuster.
You don't get to blame the other party for the things they screwed up and the things you screwed up.
IMO even the stuff that they boast about was load bearing stuff that they simply didn't understand, not as they claimed "waste", but perception is key here: they did what they themselves would describe in this way.
* I think "elected king" is a better description of Trump's goals; he seems to want the justice department to be his personal legal team, the armed forces (all armed forces, including police) to be his personal forces, etc.
Un-bias intelligence in this operation is not welcomed. One is told what is "factual truth" (not facts themselves) by those who operate out of Pennsylvania Avenue in DC.
If you're not blindly loyal and in line with the administration, then you'll be at risk of losing whatever role you have unless your loyalty is proven then you may receive some of that back based on how much you have demonstrated.
--
The problem in infosec in this world is not competence, it is cult of personality. This is why black t-shirt dislike black polo shirts not so secretly.
Fallout's storyline from the live-action series, where Vault-Tec dropped the first nuke and started the apocalypse simply so they could wipe out the competition and rebuild later, is a little too on-the-nose.
What are these living-off-the-land techniques?
These behaviors generate distinctive evidence of compromise in-progress, active, and after the fact, so your AV software or forensics team can identify it.
“Living off the Land” means minimizing or eliminating the payloads and the system modifications, and leveraging anything and everything that is found already existing in the system.
Obviously while presenting extra logistical challenges, LOL can be stealthier and easier to deploy on your target systems.
Chaos ensues.
Average American - "This isn't about politics. Both sides are to blame. We must work together."
Unless people collectively get their heads out of their asses the situation isn't going to magically reverse itself.
"It's getting hard to not be conspiracy minded here. They closed CSRB, destroyed CISA. CISA has no confirmed director. This just adds to kind of a complete surrender at least on the cyber side. We are spectacularly poorly prepared right now for a cyber attack."
Then we will deserve it. (Sad to say.)
I mean, I'd far rather that that US had both offensive capability and a solid defense. But the situation is not totally hopeless - or so I hope.
Or is this like the DHS where you just get to say that we haven't had any more 9/11s, so clearly the money and complete transformation of how we think about personal liberties was worth it?
Theoretically, it makes sense that we would need something like a cyber defense agency. Realistically, this doesn't seem like something the government (even at the best of times) would be capable of doing effectively.
By getting CISA involved in speech regulation, former directors made CISA into a political football, risking its core mission. (This actually happened during the first Trump admin, under a Trump appointee, but continued into the Biden administration.) There is no reason that an organization established to tackle cyber threats should be involved with regulating speech via third parties in NGOs and industry. None. Not even if that speech takes place “on the internet.”
I work in a cabinet level agency running an $350M IT program. I'm good what I do, including cyber. We're too focused on paperwork compliance and vendor agents that provide little to no value for 8-9 digit annual costs.
Anonymous Account because I'd like to keep my job.
I'm glad you're good at what you do, but to me, and this attitude of "I know this is an issue but I'm still gonna waste taxpayer funds as part of my job and perl-clutch on HN" is concerning.
Outside of your paycheck contributions and otherwise, that isn't your money friend.
There, fixed the title with some subbtle edits. /s