The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans
The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans
The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans U.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat about upcoming military strikes in Yemen. I didn’t think it could be real. Then the bombs started falling.
By Jeffrey Goldberg
It's like an entire administration full of Rudy Giulianis. He had a history of butt-dialing and accidentally leaving unfortunate (for him) voice mails on reporter's phones.
Even my work has better OPSEC on a random stupid meeting with nothing interesting. They review every attendee to make sure no one unexpected is in the chat.
You actually can't make this shit up. WTF!
It's absurd, it's some shit you'd see in the movies
According to the lengthy Hegseth text, the first detonations in Yemen would be felt two hours hence, at 1:45 p.m. eastern time. So I waited in my car in a supermarket parking lot. If this Signal chat was real, I reasoned, Houthi targets would soon be bombed. At about 1:55, I checked X and searched Yemen. Explosions were then being heard across Sanaa, the capital city.
I wonder if there's a Simpson's episode on this or even an Onion article.
The Trump administration is so close to making the greatest post of all time on the War Thunder forums
War Thunder forums “Hold my beer.”
It geniuely concerns me that this type of stuff doesn't warrant a meeting or encrypted messaging.
Well, see, the thing is that it 100% absolutely positively no-questions-about-it does warrant a meeting and government approved, Internet-disconnected communications methods.
The fact that Trump's entire fucking cabinet apparently disagrees is what concerns me.
Come on bud this ain't reddit, if you're gonna weigh in read the article lol
Encryption doesn't uninvite randos
The messaging was encrypted, they where using Signal. The dumb fuck just "accidentally" added the reporter to the group chat 😆
elect fucking russian idiots , be surprised about the results
Good thing they fired everyone who worked in secure communications.
Didn't they try to charge Hilary Clinton for using an insecure private server?
This would matter if Republicans and their voters gave a shit about being hypocrites. That is not a new thing. Newt Gingrich went after Clinton for having an affair while he himself was having one for instance.
Newt Gingrich went after Clinton for having an affair...
I don't want to disagree with your main point, I just want to say that this is a misstatement of what happened with Clinton. He was being sued for sexual harassment by Paula Jones in civil court. He was impeached for lying under oath and obstruction during that investigation.
The hinky part of it is that Kenneth Starr was originally supposed to be investigating whether the Clintons had participated in fraudulent real estate dealings. When that investigation turned up nothing, he was directed to look into Clinton's testimony about his relationship with Lewinsky, which had nothing to do with the original investigation. It was a massive fishing expedition. At one point they had the FBI working with Lewinsky's friend to secretly record her talking about the relationship.
Gingrich was worse. His wife at the time had cancer and he served her divorce papers while in the hospital and then left her and their child pennyless.
Genuinely. I had a discussion with somebody at work which boiled down to "Yeah but Trump stored the top secret documents in an unused bathroom while Hillary had emails in a private server which ended up being poorly secured so Hillary is actually the much worse security violation."
Both sides are hypocrites. Remember Nancy Pelosi getting a haircut during Covid when regular people couldn’t? Or Gavin Newsom attending a birthday party during his own lockdown?
Didn’t they tank her presidential bid on this? How she was unprofessional and unfit for office for this? And his Perfect Ukraine Call, his hacked emails, his every other lapse of OPSEC or security clearance issues… weren’t disqualifying? Or was it just what she had in her pants, same with Kamala.
Yeah I don't think it's a fair comparison. A private email server vs dming randos by accident.
[This article reads like satire]
These are golden, absolutely brilliant
The one with Big Bird is backwards. I feel like the reporter was the only adult in the room.
Much like Big Bird is aloof but more mature than anyone around him pretty often.
There should be as much outrage over this as they did with Clinton but 1) the Republicans are hypocrites, 2) the Democrats are weak.
It's okay, they weren't emails...
Next week: the trump administration accidentally texted its war plans on my Minecraft server.
Fascists are surprisingly bad at war.
Fascism is literally all about doing what's best for the IN Crowd, in other words Cronyism, the very opposite of Merit.
If your selection criteria for people supposed to manage anything is who is mates with whom, what's their skin color, what's their gender and what's their sexual orientation, rather than, you know, managerial qualities, it's only natural that they suck at managing things.
They're bad at lots of things. Stupidity is a highly transferable skill.
#1 thing they are bad at: running a government. Kinda hard to when you don't actually believe in it. 🤷♀️
Just a reminder that they chose to use Signal for a reason, and those are also reasons we normal citizens should use Signal too! At least try and talk your closest relatives into dumping WhatsApp for it.
Yeah, this article was truly a fascinating read! The one thing that surprised me from Goldberg though, was that he continually questioned their use of signal. I mean, why wouldn't they use it?
They could try to develop their own secure messaging app, but what would be the point of that when another already exists and they can verify the code is air tight because it's open source. And, developing their own app would mean the possibility of relying on software that could contain unknown bugs or vulnerabilities.
The only safe cryptographic systems are open source ones.
Because they did so to avoid official channels which get log and recorded. And yes, the Pentagon has their own apps, what do you think? Yes, using signal is INSANE
Your logic is valid for a small business - yes a SME doesn’t need to create their own messaging app, but this is the US government, they have the resources and need for their own. Further, commercial products controlled by outsiders can be compromised, and for state level targets it’s an issue to not control the communication through its whole journey.
Are we missing an /s here? Signal is headquartered in the US, and here's me pondering if they were actually using Telegram instead. Which would've been pretty apt.
I think at this point I'd be better off trying to use WeChat.....
edit: https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/russia-targeting-signal-messenger - archive
For a bit of clarity some are not seeing. Google, sanctioned too. Crazy times.
“Powerful start”?
Of course.
This - the abhorrent security alone - should be like, 24/7 on every channel invasion of Iraq TV, but no.
To be fair, it's running at the top of BBC news here in the UK this morning which is kinda weird. They usually dunk stuff like this unless they too have some angle on it.
Well, it fits the "look at how foreigners are worse than Brits" angle, which seems to often dictate which stories the BBC runs and the spin they put on reporting of events abroad (that spin is very noticeable if you read the same story from a newspaper in another country).
Mind you, Americans are maybe the only ones generally excluded from that treatment, so this is special.
Post is constantly being deleted on Reddit. What is going on?
Yeah. Both on r/worldnews and r/europe. Not in smaller national subreddits though, where people are up in arms about the Europe comments. I don't understand why Reddit would seek to censor these leaks, as they are already disseminated across the MSM everywhere.
They’re just cunts.
Wow. Just wow.
jesus christ they're dumber than they look, and this administration already regularly looks like morons.
Well, at least it encrypted, unlike trumps bathroom.
Yo what the fuck
I think the screenshot removed your link?
Oh I think it did as well. Sorry about that!
I think I fixed it
Yikes....why am I not suprised
TIL that the US military texts around sensitive plans, reporter aside, SMS is not a secure protocol to do this.
Article plainly states it was signal, not that that is much better
No matter what the protocol is, the chat is completely vulnerable once a single chat member's phone gets infiltrated. There's not a set of higher value targets in the world than the US president and his cabinet for actors like China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and even Israel.
There is a reason national defense related discussion is meant to happen exclusively on a locked-down High-Side network, on exclusively locked-down High-Side equipment that exists exclusively in locked-down High-Side locations.
I did read the article but saw several mentions of texting, I was under the impression Signal was just another texting app.