_djo_

That's not a counter-argument. You're introducing a hypothetical with no substantiating evidence, trying to create a parallel to a situation where we have unambiguous evidence of non-classified devices and software being used to discuss classified material. The onus is on you to prove the claim, not on others to prove a negative.

It has been eight years since Obama's presidency, had there been any use of this hardened BlackBerry for classified communications it would have emerged by now. Similarly, all messages on that device were subject to the Presidential Records Act, and are archived by NARA. You can FOIA them if you want to.

There were also no claims made during his administration that he ignored security protocols. Even his insistence on retaining a BlackBerry for unclassified communications was done through a compromise and an NSA-hardened device, not by ignoring the rules.

Similarly, how do we know that Reagan didn't hold cleartext phone calls with his aides on the Top Secret plans to contain the USSR? We don't, but in the absence of any supportive evidence over the years it's safe to assume he did not.

No, you can distribute custom managed apps through Apple's MDM programme. https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/deployment/dep575bfed8...

If you’d prefer, we can call it unclassified communication rather than personal communication. The point is that it was not used for Secret, Top Secret, or other classified communications. For that, he had the SME-PED device.

So, again, it’s not a parallel to the current situation. Nobody is saying the SecDef and other staff shouldn’t have unclassified devices as well as their classified devices, the issue is that they’ve been using the unclassified devices to conduct Secret or Top Secret discussions.

I don't care how usable they are, this is the DoD and NSA-approved mechanism for conducting classified conversations and viewing classified data on mobile devices. The adversaries here are other countries who are very good at what they do, security is far more important than convenience.

As for further research, there's plenty online about his programme and these devices. Feel free to Google it yourself. You're asking to be spoonfed.

He was allowed to keep his BlackBerry for personal communication only, not classified communication, and had to use a Sectéra Edge for classified communication. [0]

The Blackberry for personal use wasn't a stock BlackBerry, but hardened by the NSA and fitted with the SecurVoice software package to encrypt voice calls, emails, and messages. The few people he had on his approved communication list were given the same devices.[1]

That BlackBerry was, again, not used for classified communication. So it's not the same thing as the current scandal.

[0] https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2009/jan/24/obamas-other-p...

[1] https://www.wired.com/2009/04/obama-to-get-back-blackberry-a...

There are not just government e2e apps, but government-provided and customised smartphones specifically for them, like the DMCC-S programme. [0]

Some of the apps are listed in that brochure.

There's no excuse for using Signal on personal devices for classified conversations.

[0] https://www.disa.mil/~/media/files/disa/fact-sheets/dmcc-s.p...

You're leaving out crucial information. Obama didn't keep his BlackBerry for classified information, he was given the then-standard government secure mobile communications device, a Secure Mobile Environment Personal Encryption Device (SME-PED).

More specifically, the device Obama was given was a Sectéra Edge [0][1] by General Dynamics, a device specifically designed to be able to operate on Top Secret voice and Secret data networks. It had hardware-level separation between the unclassified and classified sides, even having separate flash memory for both. [2]

The NSA contributed to the design and certified it and another device (L3's Guardian) on the SCIP, HAIPE, Suite A/B, Type 1, and non-Type 1 security protocols.

It was absolutely not a regular BlackBerry, it didn't run any RIM software, no data ever went through RIM's servers, and secure calls were encrypted and didn't use SS7. It was a clunky purpose-designed device for the entire US government to be able to access Secret information and conduct Top Secret voice calls on the go.

Even then, there were limitations to when and where it could be used and when a SCIF was required.

The current equivalent of the SME-PED programme is the DoD's Mobility Classified Capability[3], which are specially customised smartphones again made by General Dynamics.

There is no excuse whatsoever for the current administration's use of Signal, let alone TeleMessage Signal, for Secret and Top Secret discussions on regular consumer and personal devices. It's deeply irresponsible and worse than any previous administration has done.

[0] https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/obamas-new-blackberr...

[1] https://gdmissionsystems.com/discontinued-products/sectera-e...

[2] https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA547816.pdf

[3] https://www.disa.mil/~/media/files/disa/fact-sheets/dmcc-s.p...

China doesn’t spend ‘0%’ on foreign aid. It’s less than rhe US, but averaged around $7 billion a year.

If you include foreign development assistance, which you are in your ‘$62B’ number, then China has provided hundreds of billions through the BRI and other initiatives. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/can-china-fill-the-void-i...

Russia’s foreign aid is also primarily development assistance, though much less than the US, UK, EU, and China.

Moreover, the US’s larger defence budget also reflects its self-assumed role as the global stability guarantor of the post-war order it built for its own benefit. It’s that order that made the dollar the world’s reserve currency, requiring most of the world to invest in American financial instruments, and which gave it and its companies an outsized advantage for decades.

That was not an international order built for benevolence or which harmed the US. Americans are going to deeply regret how their place in the world and personal wealth shrinks after this administration is done.

You need to rethink your information environment, you are repeating many false claims that I recognise from past propaganda.

For instance your view of NATO membership is fundamentally flawed as it assumes a NATO push to take on more members, when in reality even the most shallow research shows that it was actually based on a pull from countries who lobbied to be able to join NATO and had to jump through hoops to qualify.

Why did those countries want to join NATO? Because they recognised that, alone, they were vulnerable to what’s clearly a revanchist Russia looking to annex or otherwise control other countries in the region. By being part of a broad security alliance like NATO those countries made themselves safer from Russian attacks.

As for Russian speakers in Ukraine, I know many Ukrainians, most of whom from the east who learnt Russian as a first language. All but one of them absolutely detest Russia, have nothing good to say about Russians in general, who they see as complicit, and have become even more fiercely pro-Ukrainian and patriotic than they were before the war. Many have chosen to speak Ukrainian primarily, despite it being their second language.

And why wouldn’t they? Russia’s invasion destroyed their homes and their way of life, levelling entire cities, and killed tens of thousands of Ukrainians. The idea that all of this was done in their name or to their benefit is insulting.

Exiting international operations without a clear reason used to spook the markets, so I suppose the new playbook is to blame 'wokeness and DEI' and ride the culture war wave instead. After all, the official market announcement contains no detail other than stating it's a result of 'an evaluation of its international assets.'

The kind of wording he used is so unbecoming of a CEO, too. With any normal company, in any normal time, you'd see the market pummelling the stock. But these aren't normal times and GameStop is a weird meme stock.

However, DHS was almost entirely formed from existing departments and agencies that were merely rehoused under a new structure, so Chesterton's Fence definitely applies to all of those. Even CISA, which is one of the newest elements, is now almost a decade old with a lot of accumulated expertise and experience.

There have already been high profile impersonations, one of which caused a company’s stock to dive. Another was the infamous situation where Musk freaked out over people impersonating him.

The only reason it’s not worse is because of inertia and the fact that most public figures are still using the accounts they had when verification was in place. That won’t last. It’s also why public figures who are leaving for other platforms usually opt to keep their X accounts in place but dormant.

Kanye was in fact impersonated on Twitter in the past, it was one of the key reasons behind the introduction of Verified Accounts.[0]

I have also seen impersonators for all three of those you mentioned, especially in terms of crypto bots for Trump. However those are also three of the most heavily policed and watched profiles by the company’s understaffed moderating team, who proactively monitor for impersonations. That’s not true for lesser public figures: I just searched for a hand full of well-known journalists and found several impersonation profiles for them all.

What’s worse, their impersonation reporting function does not let you report the impersonation of someone who is not an active user. I know another public figure who doesn’t have an account there, doesn’t want one, but now hasn’t been able to get them to do anything about an impersonator who is using his name to scam others.

The current model is badly broken and decidedly worse than the verification system that existed before.

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2009/06/06/facing-lawsuits-and-compla...

Your post said Blue ticks had nothing to do with being "verified" or "authentic." and It was a mark of social cachet, not authenticity..

That is clearly false. The blue check was an accurate signal of authenticity through verification by Twitter. What it was not was a universal verification mechanism that scaled to being able to verify everyone who used the platform. Those are two different things, and the lack of universality does not mean that the programme was not useful in valuable in providing a means to prove authenticity and avoid impersonation of the many people it did cover.

Moreover, the company was actively working on ways to scale it up into being able to reliably verify many more people before Musk bought it.

Now all that is gone, and a blue check means nothing to other users of the platform other than as a sign that the holder is paying for premium features. It's no longer a trustworthy verification mechanism.

That’s false. The programme was explicitly launched to highlight accounts that Twitter the company had verified as actually representing the person. [0]

It was launched after the company was sued by a sports star who was impersonated. Until Musk took over it could always be relied on as proof of an account’s authenticity.

What you’re complaining about isn’t that it represented something else, but that as with any large scale verification process it doesn’t scale well and the process was opaque.

Twitter cycled through various approaches to solve the problem. At first they merely reached out to people, based on the popularity of accounts representing them, their level of fame, and their risk of impersonation (or evidence of prior impersonation) and as and when the team had capacity. Therefore celebrities, politicians, and journalists were prioritised. However, this was a flawed process that was too US-centric and too US West Coast-centric on top of that.

They later opened up public applications but closed it down when they were overwhelmed with requests and couldn’t process them all. They ran into all the usual verification challenges, including language differences and the difficulty of verifying across countries. So they reverted back to the previous model while working on a way to use external factors to allow for a scaled up verification process in the future. That process stopped when Musk bought them.

The claim that it was only handed out to people for social cachet doesn’t hold water. For one, Republican politicians, Fox News and other conservative publication journalists, and sufficiently notable right-leaning celebrities all had blue ticks. The company even verified Jason Kessler, though that stirred up a public controversy that forced it to pause the programme for a bit. [1]

It wasn’t a perfect programme of course, but it did what it said it would: If you saw that an account had a blue tick you could trust it meant it was an authentic account that Twitter had verified. That aspect of the system never failed.

[0] https://mashable.com/archive/twitter-verified-accounts-2 [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/09/technology/jason-kessler-...

You're misunderstanding why it gets mocked.

Twitter launched a paid tier, Twitter Blue, before the Musk takeover. It was a sensible move, offering additional features such as edit functionality for power users, but not harming the experience for those who chose not to buy into it.

Most importantly, it was entirely separate to the use of blue ticks to denote verified and authentic accounts. In fact, there was as far as I know no visual indication that someone was a Twitter Blue user.

When Musk took over, one of his first changes was to combine Twitter Blue and the verified programme, removing any actual verification in favour of a claim that anyone who had paid was 'verified'. The company also artificially boosts the posts of those who have bought this new premium tier, which disadvantages everyone else.

Buying a blue tick is seen, quite rightly now, as buying an artificial boosting via the algorithm and that's just pure vanity.

Exactly. Using electric drives for reconnaissance is a highly sensible thing and only just becoming truly feasible. There’s also a gain for using hybrids and their batteries to charge electronics in the field rather than using generators. The US military was looking into electric drive not because it’s ‘green’ but because it can provide a combat advantage.

This sort of knee jerk reaction that bans them from even considering it is stupid.

It's a reference to the trumpeting sound an elephant/mastodon makes, meant as the equivalent to the 'tweet' a bird such as the one in the old Twitter logo makes.

There's nothing more to it than that: A quirky name based on the chosen logo, following the Twitter example.

I agree it wasn't the best word choice, and I can understand why it has been de-emphasised in favour of 'posts', but the reasoning behind it was logical.

Such people are idiots, to be blunt.

After. They're responding to the public and media uproar, and have to be seen as taking action in response to it, but they're clearly not massively concerned.

I don't doubt that there was some drone activity, but most likely it was regularly authorised operations or testing. Once the hysteria started you may have a few pranksters flying theirs just to add to the uproar.

But when media houses are publishing pictures of what are clearly commercial airliners and passing them off as unidentified drones you know we're in the middle of a mass hysteria moment.

The judge ruled out holding a new auction.

Same. This is a ridiculous mass hysteria driven by media sensationalism and ignorant members of the public.

Thank you, I missed that and it’s important context. I’ve upvoted your comment for more visibility.

Another poster had a nice summary: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42379288

It took place during the administration.

Another poster had a good summary: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42379288

The change was introduced in Trump's tax cuts, so I doubt he will reverse it.

Anything that increases the time and effort required for both detection and tracking is worth it, and all else being equal a LO aircraft will always be more survivable in a dense A2/AD environment than one without LO features. It's a continuum, not a binary situation where stealth is either perfect or defeated.

The USAF was well aware that it would not be able to preserve the impunity with which F-117s flew over Baghdad in 1991, but that was never the objective.

Shaping remains by far the most important factor for reducing radar cross section, followed by the use of radar-absorbent materials (RAM) in the airframe and the application of a RAM coating on the outside.

The F-35, for instance, gets most of its RCS reduction from shaping and the composition of its fuselage, and was designed with extremely low tolerances in order to rely a lot less on needing a top coating to cover seals, rivets, etc than earlier LO aircraft. So even when the LO coating degrades, as it does on long operational deployments, it doesn't catastrophically increase the F-35's RCS.

That's an example of the sort of incremental improvement I'm referring to. The F-35 has come a long way in terms of LO from earlier US aircraft. Compared to them, it needs a lot less RAM coating, it can use less hazardous materials for that coating meaning you don't need as much specialist equipment to apply it, and it's more resilient to materials degradation. Those are all things it's somewhat difficult for even peer competitors like China to catch up to.

Stealth doesn’t stand still. The latest low-observable US aircraft have lower radar and visual signatures than the previous generation.

It’s not an indefinite ‘lead’, of course, but having decades of experience with LO shaping and materials means you can keep making effective incremental improvements.

With regard to historical pricing, I agree. I suspect that's more an admin oversight than the lack of a system though. But in terms of the equivalent product price comparison database, would that really normally be in place? I would think the space of aircraft parts that could potentially be replaced with COTS parts is not a very large one, and probably not something optimised for at first. Instead, focus would first be on tracking/monitoring military parts, then of separately tracking clearly COTS parts.

Also, there's a human aspect here. Doubt any air force officer wants to be the one to approve a COTS replacement for something like this only to have something go wrong on a flight because of some or other unexpected failure.

Pretty much, yes. Broadly speaking, the US federal government's financial controls are good and prevent a ton of corruption and waste. At this scale no system can be perfect though, and there will always be some.

However, there are diminishing returns at some point. If you want to go after, let's say, the 99th percentile within which things like soap dispensers might fall, you may have to spend more in admin costs than you get back in savings.

This applies to both needing more staff and needing to add more paperwork, which also in turn can slow down projects.

This DoD IG report, for instance, faults the US Air Force for not having built a database that tracked historical prices and tracked equivalent COTS part prices on various commercial marketplaces. That means either having staff or (more usually) paying some third party contractor to maintain a database and constantly update it to track all of these commercially available products. At some level you can end up spending more than you save.

That's why in corporate audits there's always a threshold floor below which external auditors don't bother to check further. It's considered an acceptable risk.

Sure, and there are useful points in the rest of this conversation about whether you need something that special for a soap dispenser and what might be driving up costs, and whether a commercial off the shelf alternative really was an option.

I wasn't trying to cover all that, I was just pointing out that MIL-SPEC is a very wide category and therefore effectively meaningless unless you're pointing out what type of application it is.