US DoD Security breach (split from What is DEI, and why is it dividing America?)

[CharonY]

1 hour ago, MSC said:

You don't find it suspicious that a journalist was included in the chat and this just happened to be a mistake? 

Nope, I haven't seen anything that would suggest that it was deliberate. I think it is an error to assume 4d chess if it can be explained by idiocy. We had plenty of examples during the first administraiton.

 

50 minutes ago, exchemist said:

You may be right but then why drag Europe into the logic? And why this talk of making Europe pay for it?  

Just seen a headline saying the CIA director has stated Hegseth was not drunk when he ordered the airstrikes. 

This gets funnier and funnier. 🐐🎪

Within the thread there was a discussion that they thought that Europe would be more dependent on the Suez canal than the US. So they were worried that it would look that they would be bailing out Europeans. As they are currently trying to exert pressure on them and are crafting an "Europeans are worthless moochers so that is why we need to have a trade war with them" message, it could undermine it.

[exchemist]

12 minutes ago, CharonY said:

Nope, I haven't seen anything that would suggest that it was deliberate. I think it is an error to assume 4d chess if it can be explained by idiocy. We had plenty of examples during the first administraiton.

 

Within the thread there was a discussion that they thought that Europe would be more dependent on the Suez canal than the US. So they were worried that it would look that they would be bailing out Europeans. As they are currently trying to exert pressure on them and are crafting an "Europeans are worthless moochers so that is why we need to have a trade war with them" message, it could undermine it.

Oh yes I'd seen that. Vance claimed the EU depended on the Suez Canal for 40% of its trade, or something, whereas for the USA it is 3%, according to him. But as no one seems to have asked for this action, why should Vance  imagine Europe might pay for it?  

[TheVat]

1 hour ago, exchemist said:

 I can't follow the logic. Is there some background to this that I am missing, or is it just the fascist vein in Vance's neck throbbing again?  

Vein, is my guess.  American politics has become mostly manufactured outrage and playing to the peanut gallery AFAICT.

1 hour ago, MSC said:

You don't find it suspicious that a journalist was included in the chat and this just happened to be a mistake? 

Hanlon's razor ("never attribute to malice that which may be explained by stupidity or incompetence...").  

[CharonY]

2 minutes ago, TheVat said:

Hanlon's razor ("never attribute to malice that which may be explained by stupidity or incompetence...").  

With this administration I would like to introduce Charon's Y. "Why not both?"

[CharonY]

3 hours ago, MSC said:

You don't find it suspicious that a journalist was included in the chat and this just happened to be a mistake? 

Just to add to the point, Spiegel just reported that mobile phone numbers, email addresses and some passwords have been found freely accessible on the internet.

 

Quote

"Exposed data from top politicians can be used by hackers to launch convincing phishing attacks and gain access to devices and various services such as email, chat tools and PayPal,” says Donald Ortmann, a specialist in information security, information procurement and social engineering. He supports companies and authorities following cyberattacks.

 

"In addition, deepfake attacks using images and sound available online can be launched to participate in virtual meetings,” says Ortmann. Compromised accounts also enable hackers to "install malware, monitor communications and attempt political blackmail.”

 

[MSC]

2 hours ago, TheVat said:

Hanlon's razor ("never attribute to malice that which may be explained by stupidity or incompetence...").  

Greys law "Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice." Hanlons razor is a useful interpersonal safeguard in your personal life. Applied to politics, organizing, or any setting where you're dealing with relative strangers? You're setting yourself up to be taken advantage of. Bad actors WILL be part of the group, they WILL notice you deliberately putting yourself in "gullible person" mode, and they WILL exploit your hesitance to call out malice as malice. 

[J.C.MacSwell]

Nothing to see here folks. Maybe the Kremlin was following the chat but it's unlikely any Ukrainians, Canadians, Greenlanders or even Europeans were following it in real time.

[CharonY]

3 hours ago, exchemist said:

Oh yes I'd seen that. Vance claimed the EU depended on the Suez Canal for 40% of its trade, or something, whereas for the USA it is 3%, according to him. But as no one seems to have asked for this action, why should Vance  imagine Europe might pay for it?  

It is one of the more consistent aspects- they ultimately did it to protect their trade routes and there might be additional motivations prompting them to do it. But thinking that the Europeans should pay is basically the same idea as building a wall and have Mexico pay it. I.e., try to externalize cost and bully folks into doing it, if you can.

[iNow]

I find myself feeling extra safe and protected knowing folks like these are at the helm of our national security in this chaotic world everyday displaying such numerous threat landscapes:

 

https://www.wired.com/story/michael-waltz-left-his-venmo-public/

Quote

Mike Waltz Left His Venmo Friends List Public

A WIRED review shows national security adviser Mike Waltz, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, and other top officials left sensitive information exposed via Venmo—until WIRED asked about it.

This was AFTER the story in The Atlantic under discussion here.

Laugh. Cry. Rage. I don’t even know anymore.

[J.C.MacSwell]

Some of the details they exposed to potential enemies seemed relatively accurate considering what we've come to expect from that group. Anyone who doesn't find that at least somewhat heartening isn't really being fair...poisoned by the media no doubt.

[CharonY]

1 hour ago, MSC said:

Greys law "Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice." Hanlons razor is a useful interpersonal safeguard in your personal life. Applied to politics, organizing, or any setting where you're dealing with relative strangers? You're setting yourself up to be taken advantage of. Bad actors WILL be part of the group, they WILL notice you deliberately putting yourself in "gullible person" mode, and they WILL exploit your hesitance to call out malice as malice. 

Again, I will posit that we are dealing with malignant motivations/actions paired with incompetence. The administration is full of bad actors who are trying to exploit others. But they are also terrible at their job and in hiding things.

37 minutes ago, iNow said:

I find myself feeling extra safe and protected knowing folks like these are at the helm of our national security in this chaotic world everyday displaying such numerous threat landscapes:

 

https://www.wired.com/story/michael-waltz-left-his-venmo-public/

This was AFTER the story in The Atlantic under discussion here.

Laugh. Cry. Rage. I don’t even know anymore.

Well, there are apparently some Canadians (well below 20%) who look at that and want to join. Mostly the demographic you probably expect most to do so.

[geordief]

17 minutes ago, J.C.MacSwell said:

Some of the details they exposed to potential enemies seemed relatively accurate considering what we've come to expect from that group. Anyone who doesn't find that at least somewhat heartening isn't really being fair...poisoned by the media no doubt.

They are quite clearly  being completely open and transparent.

[toucana]

CNN have put up a rolling tickertape of the Goldberg Signal log along with an annotated version with extensive marginal  comments to explain who was speaking at any given point, and what they were talking about.

https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2025/03/politics/yemen-war-plans-signal-chat-annotated-dg/

One TLA (three letter acronym) that slipped past CNN was a reference by Joe Kent the acting deputy for Tulsi Gabbard at DNI who said at 8.22 AM

Quote

“I will send you the unclass data we pulled on BAM shipping”

BAM is shorthand for Bab al Mandeb (Arabic: باب المندب ‘The Gate of Tears’) a narrow strait between Yemen on the Arabian Peninsula, and the Horn of Africa which connects the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden, and the Indian Ocean.

https://cimsec.org/tag/bam/

It’s a critical pinch-point in the world's commercial shipping lanes, which is currently under threat by Iranian backed Houthi rebels firing missiles at international shipping.

[MSC]

57 minutes ago, CharonY said:

Again, I will posit that we are dealing with malignant motivations/actions paired with incompetence. The administration is full of bad actors who are trying to exploit others. But they are also terrible at their job and in hiding things.

That I agree with; however I would point out that when dealing with a potential conspiracy between this administration and the Kremlin, the pool of bad actors to worry about is bigger and more sophisticated. We can't rule out feigned incompetence with an ulterior motive, in the same way we can't rule out actual incompetence. My point is simply that if we are going to speculate on one, why not the other? 

But I suppose in order to give my hypothesis a bit more weight we'd need to ask if the leak to a journalist could have at all benefitted Trump's administration or Putin's? If the answer is no, then there would be no need for me to speculate. But is the answer no? I'll need to think on it for a bit. 

[TheVat]

3 hours ago, MSC said:

Greys law "Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice." Hanlons razor is a useful interpersonal safeguard in your personal life. Applied to politics, organizing, or any setting where you're dealing with relative strangers? You're setting yourself up to be taken advantage of. Bad actors WILL be part of the group, they WILL notice you deliberately putting yourself in "gullible person" mode, and they WILL exploit your hesitance to call out malice as malice. 

For sure, there's malice aplenty in the whole MAGA movement - I did not mean to imply otherwise.  More saying that great incompetence can somewhat blunt the edge of malicious intent.  People who can't pour piss out of a boot when the instructions are printed on the soles are a little less scary than your standard fascist.  

18 minutes ago, MSC said:

We can't rule out feigned incompetence

If what I'm seeing is feigned, then this MAGA brigade are the finest actors of their generation.  

[iNow]

On 3/26/2025 at 12:13 AM, MSC said:

now I sound like those conspiracy Wacko's.

Agreed. In this particular case, despite intentional misdirection being a nonzero possibility, it’s almost certainly best to conclude this quoted bit is the most correct. 
 

19 hours ago, MSC said:

I don't know that I am overthinking it

From my perspective, you absolutely are. 

There’s an old saying I learned an eternity ago when studying statistics that I feel likely applies here:

When you hear whinnying and the sound of hooves out in the street, it’s generally better to think horses rather than zebra. 🦓 

[toucana]

44 minutes ago, iNow said:

When you hear whinnying and the sound of hooves out in the street, it’s generally better to think horses rather than zebra. 🦓 

One conspiracy theory that is currently exercising the minds of the MAGA faithful is the question of how Jeffrey Goldberg’s phone number wound up in the contact list of NSA Mike Waltz’s cellphone. There have been suggestions that his phone number was somehow placed there by the journalist - amplified on Fox News by Waltz himself along the lines of “I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but… “.

According to this BBC interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, NSA Mike Waltz now plans to get some of the ‘best and brightest brains’ in Elon Musk’s team to figure out this inscrutable mystery.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8rk7vyg83xo

The embarrassing truth  - which is blindingly obvious to any experienced journalist - is that Mike Waltz had Jeffrey Goldberg’s number in his contacts, because Waltz has previously acted as confidential source of non-attributable background information to this journalist. Mike Waltz entered Goldberg’s details into his own phone contacts list under the initials JG to disguise their presence from casual view - and then fat-fingered JG instead of JV when building the Signal group.

[MSC]

4 hours ago, iNow said:

From my perspective, you absolutely are

Maybe, I haven't exactly been sleeping well recently either but yeah if y'all are all checking my rationality here I can only conclude there is nothing to it absent harder evidence. 

Now the Witkoffs phone as a possible deadrop of other messages between Trump and Putin; is that one feasible? How credible is the idea that there is a secret line of communication between Trump and Putin?

[swansont]

4 hours ago, toucana said:

According to this BBC interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, NSA Mike Waltz now plans to get some of the ‘best and brightest brains’ in Elon Musk’s team to figure out this inscrutable mystery.

I wonder how long they will try and insist this was a technical issue, rather than PICNIC (Problem In Chair, Not In Computer)

[geordief]

8 minutes ago, swansont said:

I wonder how long they will try and insist this was a technical issue, rather than PICNIC (Problem In Chair, Not In Computer)

A space laser/tweaser?

37 minutes ago, MSC said:

Maybe, I haven't exactly been sleeping well recently either but yeah if y'all are all checking my rationality here I can only conclude there is nothing to it absent harder evidence. 

Now the Witkoffs phone as a possible deadrop of other messages between Trump and Putin; is that one feasible? How credible is the idea that there is a secret line of communication between Trump and Putin?

I have wondered that ( as a requirement that may have led to a blunder) 

1 minute ago, geordief said:

A space laser/tweaser?

I have wondered that ( as a requirement that may have led to a blunder) 

Are lines open now anyway?

 

[MSC]

1 hour ago, swansont said:

I wonder how long they will try and insist this was a technical issue, rather than PICNIC (Problem In Chair, Not In Computer)

Also a possibility that they will throw whomever under the bus as a "traitorous leaker" to the press. 

[toucana]

1 hour ago, MSC said:

Now the Witkoffs phone as a possible deadrop of other messages between Trump and Putin; is that one feasible? How credible is the idea that there is a secret line of communication between Trump and Putin?

Not quite as strange or unprecedented as you might think.

You may recall a press story from December 2016 when it became known that Jared Kushner had asked the Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak if the Trump transition team could set up a back-channel communication link with the Kremlin *inside* the premises of the Russian embassy - because they trusted Russian diplomatic communication systems more than the official American ones.

https://edition.cnn.com/2017/05/26/politics/jared-kushner-russian-ambassador-kremlin/index.html

Then there was the matter of a Trump loyalist and former Moscow resident called Carter Page who was placed under investigation by the FBI in October 2016 as a potential foreign agent.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jul/22/trump-administration-releases-carter-page-wiretap-documents

Carter Page travelled to Moscow in July 2016, and again on 8 December 2016 (just after Trump’s election) ostensibly to help arrange a $500M brokerage fee for the sale of a 19% stake in Rosneft (part of the Russian state energy giant Gazprom). But there have long been allegations (Steele dossier et passim) that he also met a Russian intelligence operative Igor Divyekin, and discussed a deal involving the acquisition of compromising material on Hillary Clinton, and the use of Russian bot-farms for a weaponised disinformation campaign to help Trump win the 2016 US presidential election.

One version of this conspiracy theory says that Vladimir Putin asked for a pledge of Trump’s good faith, and received a copy of a recording of Trump speaking in person to accept the deal.

[CharonY]

1 hour ago, swansont said:

I wonder how long they will try and insist this was a technical issue, rather than PICNIC (Problem In Chair, Not In Computer)

My guess is until people forget and/or get distracted by the other 10000 screw ups and unlawful actions.

[swansont]

1 hour ago, toucana said:

You may recall a press story from December 2016 when it became known that Jared Kushner had asked the Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak if the Trump transition team could set up a back-channel communication link with the Kremlin *inside* the premises of the Russian embassy - because they trusted Russian diplomatic communication systems more than the official American ones.

The “trusted” here is not that the comms weren’t secure. It was that official American comms would be recorded by the US, as required by law, and they didn’t want that to happen. Much like how using Signal would not leave a record. No “paper trail” of wrongdoing or incompetence (like Vance’s “excellent” comment)

[swansont]

In case there was any question, the CENTCOM classification guide says that both the starting time/date for a mission/operation, and schedules, are classified at the “secret” level

https://sgp.fas.org/othergov/dod/r380-14.pdf

(I-3, numbers 15 and 16)
Declassify happens after mission is over