Massive Presidential level Security FUBAR

[Rideback]

Irony has arrived
In the Signalgate lawsuit: American Oversight v Hegseth the Judge has been assigned and it's Judge Boasberg. The name should be familiar.

the lawsuit: https://americanoversight.org/american- ... perations/

Jim Wright (Stonekettle Station)
"And there is.
Trump said the chat was unclassified (though he seems to think it was some sort of phone call because he has no idea what a group chat actually is, but then he thinks the fact that his 19-year-old son can open a laptop is some sort of evidence of technological genius).
So in self-defense, The Atlantic published it.
I mean, it's unclassified, right?
Yeah.
Oh boy.
Based on my own experience with numerous similar operations, it's pretty obvious everyone involved was lying during their congressional testimony yesterday. Big surprise there.
It's all there. Time. Date. Locations. Weapons. Targets. Units. All of that, made public before or during a mission (and even sometimes after) can lead directly to mission failure and put our assets at risk. Moreover, that bit where Vance is speculating regarding impact on oil prices? You're talking political and economic impact of a military operation on a global scale. You honestly think any administration would want that sort of speculation out in the open?
If any member of the military had shared this timeline with the public in advance of the strike, or had emailed it to a journalist, or sent it to a foreign agent, do you think Pete Hegseth would call that information classified and demand a court martial for treason?
Tulsi Gabbard sure as hell would.
Trump can't have it both ways.
If it's classified for Joe Private, it's classified for Pete Hegseth.
For the military, this like the fire on USS Forrestal. It's so bad that it's HISTORICALLY bad. The kind of monumental ridiculously insane terrible cascading bad that we'll use as a flaming example to teach generations of Sailors, Soldiers, Marines, Airman, and even Space Guard Whatever They're Called, how NOT to do things. They'll make training movies about this. Military who aren't even born right now will know about this in detail 30 years from now.
That's how goddamn bad it is."

[Rideback]

Trump's nat'l security team testified under oath there was no classified information on the chat. Trump himself said there was non. Now that the chat has been released it is evident even to the most uneducated that the entire chat was classified and violated national security protocols.

No amount of shoot the messenger attempts can erase that fact. And even if Trump declares that he declassified the chat, under his Presidential authority, it will only dig them all deeper into the swamp.

Meanwhile, our allies have noticed this whole fiasco and are meeting to re evaluate their sharing of intel with the US.

[mister_coffee]

In fairness pretty much all-government issued devices come with signal installed these days.

Signal was designed to defeat interception and traffic analysis by a third party. It never really considered the problem of device-level security.

Translated from techno-speak: if a Bad Guy gets physical access to your device or can get some piece of software onto your device you are SOL.

[just-jim]

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And now, the Atlantic, against it’s usual policy has published the contents of the Signal thread:

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/ar ... rg/682176/

Showing just what a lying bunch of fools we have running things.
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[Rideback]

Now we learn that the Pentagon had issued a memo, which was shared with members of the national security team widely, on March 18, that Google had determined a vulnerability in SIGNAL where Russian hackers had gained access. Everyone on that chat (except for Goldberg) received that memo.

https://www.npr.org/2025/03/25/nx-s1-53 ... nerability
The memo aside, use of SIGNAL is an infraction of the Fed'l Records Act as well as a breach of elements of the Espionage Act
The copy of the memo is in the article.

[just-jim]

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You have to ask, if a foreign power attacked the United States right now, what chance would we have?

Maybe just as important - watching these goons and all their lying about what they did and did not see - or did and did not do….

What are the chances that someone in this ABSOLUTE clown show doing something, supposedly innocently - like ordering FELON donnie another Happy Meal - actually starts an international incident? You know, something not toooo drastic, like say just a small nuclear strike on Portugal? Or blows a Chinese oil tanker out of the water off South America?

Stupid folk who barely made it out of High Skool - whose only job experience was stroking their buddies in Faux Nooz interviews - might not actually be the MOST competent folk around! Who’d a thunk it?
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[mister_coffee]

You have to ask, if a foreign power attacked the United States right now, what chance would we have?

[Rideback]

Friend sent me this:
"As someone who uses Signal every day, I need to explain how totally committed to being an absolute dumba** multiple people had to be in order for this security leak to happen.
Okay, so in Signal if you want to talk to multiple people you have to create a group and give it a name, for example "JD Vance Humps His Couch." You then add people from your contacts to the group. If you are a competent user of Signal, you can then restrict the permissions so that only designated admins can add people. If you are an absolute Dips**t whose only job qualification is pwning the libs on Twitter, you would create a group about war plans and not know about or activate this functionality.
If you are in a group and are allowed to add members, either because you are an admin or because the admin was raised on lead paint milkshakes, you then must do the following to add someone:
Click on "JD Vance Humps His Couch"
Scroll down to "Add Members."
Select one or more people from your phone's contact list.
Click "Update"
Confirm that yes, you want to add that member.
This is impossible to do accidentally.
Then, once you have gone through the multi-step process of adding a member, an announcement appears on the screen for literally everyone in the group to see: "JD Vance Has Added Chairry to the Group." This sentence is a line in a single-stream text thread and if anyone is reading their messages they cannot miss it. (If they are not reading their messages, one might wonder why they have been included on the chat to begin with.)
At this point, anyone can say in the chat or privately, Hey JD, why are you adding the bedroom-eyed plush chair from Pee-Wee's Playhouse to our chat about your upholstery problem?
Yet nobody in the war bro chat said a thing about the new member added to the group.
One other thing: Signal is supposedly a secure chat platform, but it is only as secure as whatever else people are doing on their phones. For example, if you send someone a Signal message asking about how to best protect your sensitive man parts against the sharp springs inside the voluptuous crack of your La-Z-Boy, you will later see ads in your browser for La-Z-Boy lube because your browser is spying on the things you do on your phone, even if the tech bros say they are not.
So even if the war bro chat were not full of hires from an affirmative action program for white fascist sycophants who graduated in the top 99% of their class, and they actually practiced basic common sense and literacy in maintaining their war bro chat, it would still be an insecure way of discussing matters of national security."

[mister_coffee]

So yeah, Trump’s National Security Adviser exercised little diligence about how he set up a list to carry on highly classified conversations involving people’s cell phones, including cell phones that might be in Russia."

You have to assume that any foreign cell phone is tapped in a country like Russia or China. Especially if you are in a big important city like Moscow. They probably are tracking your location in near real-time too.

[Rideback]

And then there's this:
"Note, at about the time Waltz made this list, 11:28 PM Moscow time, list member Steve Witkoff was meeting with Putin, after having been left waiting for hours.

So yeah, Trump’s National Security Adviser exercised little diligence about how he set up a list to carry on highly classified conversations involving people’s cell phones, including cell phones that might be in Russia."

[mister_coffee]

I was thinking about this lately. We've had a lot of examples in recent history of countries with no democratic tradition ending up being really bad at democracy. And when you put it that way, it doesn't seem like a surprising outcome. The United States has no real experience with dictatorship so I suspect we will be really bad at it.

Even in the many states with a long history of one-party rule, I'd argue that you didn't have a dictatorship so much as a "herrenvolk Democracy."

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

[Rideback]

Rep Congressman calls this out; 99.9% certain that the Russians and Chinese were reading every word and every emoji
CNN plays montage of people who were on chat commenting about HRC's emails.

While HRC's emails were the lowest level of security classifications because they were things like wedding announcements, this instance is an actual national security scenario that exposes our military forces.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/worl ... reddit.com

[just-jim]

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On the bright side, people this whacked out and incompetent aren't likely to be very good at putting an effective police state in place. While they may want to do authoritarianism, they are showing that they are really bad at it.

As somebody on the chat said, ""

Yep…incompetence prevails! Folks who can’t keep from stepping on their own d*icks are not likely to be very effective on ANY other front, either. It’s like rule by a bunch of bratty 7th graders who have - for now - taken over the lunchroom/playground.

It is actions/inaction like this - by this cadre of stumbling fools - should give us hope.
They won’t get ANYTHING, right, EVER! And will suffer the political consequences, Thankfully.

The danger - of course - is how much actual hurt they do in the interim.
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[mister_coffee]

This is kind of a tip-of-the-iceberg situation. It seems likely that a lot of high-level government discussions are being handled via signal. Signal can be set up (and usually is) so conversations are deleted after a period of time. Which would leave no paper trail or records of those discussions.

Also not being discussed: we know at least one person who wasn't supposed to be there was inadvertently put on that chat. We don't know who else was. Nobody seems to be interested in checking up on that for some reason.

It is ironic and absurd that a lot of people who were on that chat famously were very much upset about a certain person's private email server back in the day.

On the bright side, people this whacked out and incompetent aren't likely to be very good at putting an effective police state in place. While they may want to do authoritarianism, they are showing that they are really bad at it.

As somebody on the chat said, ""

[Rideback]

Nothing about this should give anyone a feeling that our national security is in competent hands.

People are picking up on the observation that among the group of Nat'l Security text group, none seem to really have any idea just what Trump's instructions really were.

[just-jim]

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Typical - entire security apparatus of US is using social media to discuss invasion plans of Yemen WITH a journalist!

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... n-war-chat

But…what about HER EMAILS!!!!

Absolutely stunning!
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