The fact the Director of the FBI did not avail himself of this just reiterates how incompetent he is, in addition to being corrupt as heck.
kevin_thibedeau 14 hours ago [-]
It's possible it was breached in 2022 and they've held on to it until now.
andsoitis 2 hours ago [-]
From the article, he wasn't the director of the FBI for the time period the emails are from: "The stolen emails appear to date from around 2011 to 2022"
leereeves 9 hours ago [-]
It's also possible that he maintained security by not putting anything worth hacking on gmail.
stickfigure 3 hours ago [-]
It is also possible he is an idiot. There are few valuable sentences that begin with "it is possible..."
leptons 1 hours ago [-]
To be fair, he probably never once in his wildest dreams ever thought he would be head of the FBI. So he probably didn't think he needed the extra security, because what idiot would put him in charge of the world's largest spy network.
eps 10 minutes ago [-]
The FBI is not a spy network.
pdpi 3 hours ago [-]
Security in depth. Even if you think you don't have anything particularly valuable in there, you still protect it as if you did.
billfor 13 hours ago [-]
Read the article he wasn't the director of the FBI: "The stolen emails appear to date from around 2011 to 2022"
hughw 13 hours ago [-]
He's had over a year to enable it.
DaSHacka 12 hours ago [-]
Why would he, when he wasn't director of the FBI then?
hughw 12 hours ago [-]
Agree only a smart person would the sense in it.
buzzerbetrayed 2 hours ago [-]
Sick burn. Bet the dopamine hit was sweet.
14 hours ago [-]
ab_testing 13 hours ago [-]
Was that landing page written by Google India team !
bedatadriven 13 hours ago [-]
Uh yeah, the locale in the link is specifically an Indian locale. If you find it it disorienting you can change en_in to en_us:
The confusing thing is that googling "google advanced protection program" takes you to the en_in locale, even if you are in the US. An American has no clue what a crore is, so it is just an SEO failure on Google's part, which is funny. I didn't know there was an en_us equivalent to the page when I googled the topic.
connorgurney 13 hours ago [-]
Not sure what difference the nationality of the copywriters makes…
echoangle 10 hours ago [-]
It doesn’t really tell you where the copywriters were from but you notice that the locale of the page is Indian because the numbers are given in crore.
throwaway290 1 hours ago [-]
if this was a few years ago I would even say here on "hacker" news we could probably notice the indian locale in the damn URL and save an entire subthread of racial offtopic
bobsmooth 3 hours ago [-]
"Gmail blocks over 10 crore phishing attempts every day."
SanjayMehta 8 hours ago [-]
Petty racism, probably linked to the FBI director's ethnicity.
Gone are the days of the strong silent type running the roles of high power in the government. He is a real embarrassment and I feel sorry for his mother.
BigTTYGothGF 14 hours ago [-]
> Gone are the days of the strong silent type running the roles of high power in the government
What, like J.Edgar?
snovymgodym 15 hours ago [-]
> I feel sorry for his mother.
In all likelihood his upbringing is what made him this way.
acuozzo 13 hours ago [-]
You think so? Peers, in my experience, have an even greater impact, especially between the ages of 10 and 25.
stingraycharles 3 hours ago [-]
And it’s your upbringing that has the biggest impact on who your peers will become.
TheGRS 14 hours ago [-]
Gone only because current leadership kicked them all to the curb and told them to get out of Washington. Only loyal talking heads are wanted there now.
15 hours ago [-]
paxys 15 hours ago [-]
The strong silent types were all fired for being "woke". We collectively decided that incompetence should be the top qualification for all positions of power, and the results are obvious.
everdrive 18 hours ago [-]
Interesting, and not all that implausible. The real test: his personal email should be pretty uninteresting except for stuff like HIPAA, amazon purchases, communications with friends / family. (good for HUMINT) But other than that, there shouldn't be anything in there which should make the news. It'll be interesting to see whether or not that bears out.
If they wanted to maintain access, they certainly wouldn't celebrate it publicly, which is why I assume they want to release information. But, there shouldn't be anything damning to release. ie, there ought not to be if the director is acting professionally. We'll see how the facts bear out. I also suppose it's possible they're just going for any win they can and there's nothing interesting here whatsoever, or it's a really boring secondary address or something.
throwaway27448 17 hours ago [-]
I think this is actually the opposite of the correct conclusion—just look how influential Patreus cheating on his wife was (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petraeus_scandal). I seriously doubt that Kash Patel doesn't have a bunch of skeletons to dust off and show the world; the man is a weirdo (much like the rest of the administration).
EDIT: I actually misread the comment; I think we're likely in agreement. My bad.
Jare 17 hours ago [-]
I don't know, these days skeletons seem to be treated as funny decoration and we're in a permanent state of Halloween.
redanddead 16 hours ago [-]
Sullying Halloween's good name
_fat_santa 17 hours ago [-]
I was just reading a X thread that published some of the more notable things and overall it's pretty innocuous. The most "controversial" thing thus far is he took a trip to Cuba
nixon_why69 17 hours ago [-]
I'd like to chime in and say that that Kash Patel, while completely unprofessional and incompetent, is way less of a weirdo than the rest of the administration.
His scandals are all about shirking job responsibilities to party and sightsee. That's not great from the FBI director but its way more normal than the rest of them.
Hikikomori 1 hours ago [-]
How can you way that with a straight face when this book exists.
I dunno, a sitting FBI director testifying under oath about details that are clearly false, goes above and way beyond "to party and sightsee". At least in my world it puts him up there together with the rest of the weirdos.
mikeyouse 17 hours ago [-]
That's not remotely true of his history.. he's a full on Jan-6er, deep into Q-Anon, he was involved in numerous serious scandals during the first Trump admin (Nunes Memo / Russiagate 'parallel' investigation: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/01/the-men...), he has a number of sketchy moneymaking side-businesses, he was formerly living with a GOP megadonor 'Timeshare Tycoon' as roommates in Vegas (https://thenevadaindependent.com/article/trump-fbi-pick-kash...), he collected enemies' lists for Trump which resulted in firing of most of the Iran counterintel team right before we started launching attacks because they had the termerity to investigate why Trump was showing donors top-secret maps of Iran after he left office..
quantified 15 hours ago [-]
In the current environment, those are more expecteds than scandalous.
Insider trades around government activities, same-sex behavior, overt racism for example might nudge the needle.
16 hours ago [-]
nixon_why69 16 hours ago [-]
I'm not defending or advocating for the guy, just saying, if you're gonna be a piece of shit, he seems more relatable than the rest of them.
nickburns 17 hours ago [-]
So you mean to point out that the sitting FBI director is a bro's bro.
treebeard901 17 hours ago [-]
Maybe the hackers will release information connecting Patel to the Noem and Lewandowski grift operations with govt contracts. Out of the four companies allowed to bid for the $220 million advertising contract, 3 were linked to Noem and Lewandowski and one to Patel.
Im sure they are all doing it...
MyHonestOpinon 17 hours ago [-]
Well, if the president sets the example. What can you expect from the rest ?
close04 17 hours ago [-]
> look how influential Patreus cheating on his wife was
Those times have passed. I'll restate what I said in a comment some days ago:
>> 50 years ago the press was "impeaching" presidents. Today presidents are "impeaching" the press
The current strategy is "keep the outrage hose on full blast and eventually people get desensitized". It works.
mc32 16 hours ago [-]
The press was stupid. They were doing stupid gotchas like swiftboats, fake reports on GWB (Dan Rather), but couldn’t care less about things like the CIA and the crack cocaine connection[1], or lots of other things the government gets away with (including Clappers total information awareness unconstitutional surveillance efforts) The press is always carrying water for someone but that someone is rarely the public unless is just pure coincidence.
[1] there was one reporter who dared but the toll from the story resulted in his suicide, some years later. His colleagues poo-pooed his reporting on the connection.
hypeatei 17 hours ago [-]
There is so much corruption and impropriety in this administration that skeletons don't matter anymore. Looking at what sunk officials in previous administrations provides a sense for just how far gone we are, but it's not an indicator of what future consequences will be.
Loughla 14 hours ago [-]
Dan Quayle lost a serious bid because he couldn't spell potato.
Now look at where we're at. It really is wild. Right, wrong, or indifferent. How far we've shifted is absolutely wild.
throwaway27448 12 hours ago [-]
Dan Quayle also had the charisma of a potato. Let's not overfit this curve.
stronglikedan 17 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
snapcaster 17 hours ago [-]
This simping is such a bad look. Why go to bat for a man who wouldn't piss on you to put out a fire? Act like a man jesus christ
thejazzman 17 hours ago [-]
Trump is currently in office ;)
tencentshill 18 hours ago [-]
Surely we are currently clean on OPSEC. There couldn't be any precedent for government officials using private email servers for confidential information!
vessenes 17 hours ago [-]
obligatory - that first famous private server was done because someone wanted a blackberry like Obama had, and was told no by NSA. Man that BB keyboard was good.
I’ve been using a Clicks case since the early days and have personally loved every second of it but it’s definitely an acquired taste. Let us know how you find it.
rurp 17 hours ago [-]
Are we talking about the same FBI director here? Professional and competent are not how I would describe Kash Patel. Given his overt buffoonishness and the whole administration's disdain for procedure and expertise I would be shocked if he didn't have extremely inappropriate content in his inbox.
conception 17 hours ago [-]
I believe “if” is doing a tremendous amount of work in parent’s comment.
firefax 17 hours ago [-]
>his personal email should be pretty uninteresting except for stuff like HIPAA
medical diagnoses can be incredibly useful in understanding past and future actions
>there shouldn't be anything damning to release. ie, there ought not to be if the director is acting professionally
that "if" is doing some heavy lifting given who we are discussing
bitwank 17 hours ago [-]
Yeah, the fact they announced it proves it’s nothing. I saw a picture of him smoking a cigar. We’ve already seen him drinking beer and acting foolish; probably enough to get you executed in Isfahan, but a giant nothining in the USA.
embedding-shape 18 hours ago [-]
> his personal email should be pretty uninteresting except for stuff like HIPAA, amazon purchases, communications with friends / family. (good for HUMINT) But other than that, there shouldn't be anything in there which should make the news. It'll be interesting to see whether or not that bears out.
Aren't these the same people who apparently used Signal with a journalist in the chat, and had military conversations in that very chat?
Color me surprised if these people haven't heard of opsec before, and mix their work/personal life all over the place.
drnick1 17 hours ago [-]
> Aren't these the same people who apparently used Signal with a journalist in the chat, and had military conversations in that very chat?
Signal is one of the most secure communication platforms out there, but it is obviously not immune to human error or social engineering.
mikeyouse 17 hours ago [-]
Also wildly illegal to use to conduct government business, especially confidential government business. (and yes the messages were auto-deleting and largely lost before anyone chimes in with technically they could be archived!)
nickburns 16 hours ago [-]
It was a custom (presumably DoD-approved) build. And the story gets much better than that:
Ok? Signal is not the topic of my comment really, nor has anyone claimed it's less secure than other chat apps.
everdrive 18 hours ago [-]
Yes, and I wouldn't be shocked if there was classified information in there. I struggled with wording, but what I meant was "you're not supposed to be able to find classified or sensitive information in personal email, but I who knows what will be the case here."
throwa356262 18 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
embedding-shape 17 hours ago [-]
> The investigation has led to turmoil within the Defense Department, raising tensions and the firings and resignations of several top DoD officials, including former Chief of Staff Joe Kasper. [...] On May 1, 2025, it was revealed that both national security adviser Mike Waltz and his deputy Alex Wong would be leaving their posts in the National Security Council
Let me guess, the "leak" was intentional just to break a bunch of laws and to cause a bunch of people to get fired and leave their posts?
apercu 17 hours ago [-]
They do a lot of mental heavy lifting to support a corrupt and incompetent administration- sunk cost fallacy I imagine.
Forgeties79 17 hours ago [-]
The facts simply do not bear this interpretation out. Investigations and heads rolling for a stage whisper? Nah
dmix 17 hours ago [-]
Signal started being used during the Biden administration, the issue was how they were managing contacts which could be added to groups. They weren't carefully vetting access and a journalist with the same name as another military guy was added to the group by accident.
apical_dendrite 17 hours ago [-]
Source?
dmix 16 hours ago [-]
The public record of a contract to the Israeli company which handled archiving Signal chats for the DoD was done during Biden admin. And it's been well reported if you just Google it:
> Alexa Henning, spokesperson for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, tweeted last week that “widespread use” of Signal began under the Biden administration, adding that “at ODNI, when I got my phone, it was pre-installed.”
You're missing some key distinctions. The issues are: 1) putting classified information into a non-classified system; 2) putting information that needs to be preserved under laws like the presidential records act into systems where it's set to be auto-deleted. Both are illegal. Simply saying that the Biden administration pre-installed Signal is irrelevant. There are legitimate uses.
Your own article makes this exact point:
> Matthew Shoemaker, a former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst who left the agency in 2021, said that while Signal was used during his time in government, “it was almost exclusively restricted to scheduling purposes,” such as letting their boss know that they’ll be late to work because of personal circumstances.
“That’s why Signalgate is all the more staggering — because these senior leaders were doing the exact opposite of what even my most junior intelligence officers knew not to do,” he said.
You're doing bullshit partisan whataboutism. "well the democrats did it first".
This has nothing to do with adding the wrong contacts. It has to do with putting highly-sensitive material into Signal to circumvent the law around records preservation and as a result creating a situation where it's possible to accidentally add the wrong contact and therefore exposing that information to a journalist.
dmix 8 hours ago [-]
> This has nothing to do with adding the wrong contacts. It has to do with putting highly-sensitive material into Signal to circumvent the law around records preservation
My comment above already mentions public records of the DoD contracting out archiving of the Signal chat, so it doesn't in fact circumvent laws around preservation.
> You're doing bullshit partisan whataboutism. "well the democrats did it first".
I don't think it's a huge sin for government workers to be using Signal, remote work and messaging is the new norm and they will use something whether we like it or not, and Signal is the least bad option. I don't blame the Biden DoD for experimenting down that road at all, as I'm skeptical they'd build something better internally - and to your hyperpolitical points I don't see large distinctions between these type of tech choices between administrations (the DoD staff largely remains the same even when presidents change).
The issue with encryption and security will always be human security practices come first-and-foremost, technology second. They failed an OPSEC checklist when using group chats and need to implement better identification management. That's the sort of lesson that large organizations frequently need to re-learn the hard way when adopting new (and often better) things.
This was just a good lesson in security hygiene
fc417fc802 1 hours ago [-]
I'm not clear on the verdict here.
1. Classified information. Was it legal to put that into the DoD approved Signal build? The media coverage at the time gave me the impression that it was not.
2. Records keeping. Were the Trump admin chats in question properly archived then? I had been led to believe that they weren't. Do you believe that to be incorrect?
> I don't blame the Biden DoD for experimenting down that road at all
The person you're replying to never criticized them for such.
GorbachevyChase 11 hours ago [-]
We’re not getting any juicy leaks from it because it’s just full of 20-year-old memes and meeting invites to look busy.
BigTTYGothGF 17 hours ago [-]
Those "should"s are doing a lot of heavy lifting.
JeremyNT 17 hours ago [-]
> The real test: his personal email should be pretty uninteresting except for stuff like HIPAA, amazon purchases, communications with friends / family. (good for HUMINT) But other than that, there shouldn't be anything in there which should make the news.
I have no idea why this would be the default assumption for somebody as sloppy and erratic as Patel. Look at how many people were emailing damning stuff to/from Epstein's personal email accounts from their own personal email accounts!
17 hours ago [-]
17 hours ago [-]
lanevich 17 hours ago [-]
[dead]
17 hours ago [-]
Razengan 3 minutes ago [-]
Oh a while ago everything bad that happened to or in the US was the fault of Russians, now I guess it's gonna be Iranians.
unparagoned 10 hours ago [-]
It’s all fine since he didn’t use it for official business right, right…
drfloyd51 8 hours ago [-]
The FBI just made a bounty to find who hacked family photos.
I am sure the FBI will do that for my family too right?
Or we’re more than family photos hacked?
kingo55 7 hours ago [-]
Maybe the family un-friendly kind?
pnw 10 hours ago [-]
Based on the links in the articles, it's personal photographs and a resume from an old Gmail account. The resume dates from 2017.
justonceokay 43 minutes ago [-]
If they got into the account they got everything. The publicly released pictures are more of a taunt meant to publicly signal that he’s fucked. I would bet (figuratively) that anyrhing of actual value is either being sold or leveraged. After all this is a man that has shown an almost infinite capacity for humiliation.
justonceokay 10 hours ago [-]
Or more likely unofficial business
jnaina 3 hours ago [-]
apparently it was a gooner account for one of the popular adult websites.
dlev_pika 10 hours ago [-]
I still can’t get over the fact that *Kash “Stay in my lane” Patel* is heading the FBI
reddozen 8 hours ago [-]
you mean best selling children's book author Kash Patel who is desperately trying to scrub the internet of his music video[0] revising the Jan 6 insurrection
A couple of DOGE teenagers were able to casually walk in and steal the entire country's social security and healthcare data (and probably more), and we were cheering them on. There is still no accountability, and it has probably already been sold to the highest bidder. So this would be the least surprising thing in the world.
Wololooo 17 hours ago [-]
We? I don't think I've seen anyone but the people absolutely not understanding the gravity of the situation were cheering on. And I'm not even American.
quantified 12 hours ago [-]
"We" is such an imprecise word for a pool of people. I believe Chinese has two flavors, "zanmen" including the listener too, and "women" excluding the listener. Obviously "we" did not elect Trump, only "a majority of the US voters who voted", and even the others may sadly use "we" though they didn't, because they are members of the political body that did. Just like the "they" of Israel that harass Palestinians and throw up West Bank settlements do not reflect all of Israel, and the average Soviet citizen did not reflect the behavior of the Soviet government.
Drakim 12 hours ago [-]
In English, you can say "we" or "they"
drstewart 17 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
magicalist 16 hours ago [-]
I don't know if this is an irony thing I'm not getting, but we know they had untracked access to data they shouldn't have (violating data access rules and orders from a judge), and there is a whistleblower accusation that the data was retained and some DOGE staffers were at least talking with other groups who could use the data.
Meanwhile how would Hunter Biden, not a government employee nor having access to government systems, get that data in the first place?
drstewart 14 hours ago [-]
Hunter Biden was accused of many crimes too. He probably got access from his dad.
Gud 13 hours ago [-]
“Probably” sources please. We know for a fact that unvetted jerks(“big balls” and so on) had access thanks to Donald Trump.
firefax 17 hours ago [-]
Allow me to put on my tinfoil hat for a moment and propose that maybe DOGE did loudly what the Solarwinds paired with OPM breach did quietly years prior.
fn-mote 16 hours ago [-]
OPM was much more serious. Equifax had already leaked the social security data and more.
paxys 15 hours ago [-]
I feel like sending phishing emails for penis enlargement pills would take down half the current administration.
penguin_booze 14 hours ago [-]
I know someone who will be interested in bigger hands--big beautiful hands.
Muhammad523 14 hours ago [-]
I must say, i'd prefer if my hands remained the same size they are now. I dont want to lose my dexterity.
Slightly offtopic
disantlor 15 hours ago [-]
worth a try
Ms-J 19 minutes ago [-]
This is great.
It couldn't happen to a more corrupt person and organization!
While it's appreciated, that isn't the original link and Ddos "secrets" gate keeps info to people they personally allow. The person who runs it also has been to court for a name change, citing something along the lines of wanting to work in intelligence.
Not a source I would trust unless there is no other option to get the dumps or leaks.
Interesting comment:
"if Iran ends up responsible for regime change in the US, i will be overjoyed as i die from irony"
demosito666 1 hours ago [-]
And it is more than likely. US and Iran probably can’t defeat each other militarily (us obviously can, but it requires full scale ground invasion which is not even contemplated at the moment). And both can’t back out of the conflict. So the likely outcome is that the conflict escalates until one of the regimes snaps and it becomes to somehow politically possible to back out.
Collapse of the regime in Iran seems unlikely at the moment because it’s hard and zealous dictatorship with unlimited power and will for violence within the country. In the US OTOH the elections are coming. An administration that started a stupid and absolutely preventable war and then effectively lost faces quite a challenge there despite everything else. This seems like a perfect moment for Iran to create a deterrent for US: attacking us ends your presidency.
pogue 14 hours ago [-]
Anybody dug through it yet?
smrtinsert 15 hours ago [-]
Is it legal to download something like this?
Ms-J 30 minutes ago [-]
Of course it's allowed. The gov will happily steal and buy all of your info. No problem to have it done to them.
paxys 15 hours ago [-]
Legal or illegal doesn't really matter. If the regime wants to come for you they will.
fluidcruft 15 hours ago [-]
You can't prove you didn't (and the fuzz will produce evidence you did).
kaliqt 13 hours ago [-]
Legality matters now least of all to either side.
Muhammad523 14 hours ago [-]
I dont know. I think downloading it with Tor would make it almost impossible to find out you downloaded this stuff anyway.
macNchz 17 hours ago [-]
I've been wondering if we'd see a cyber campaign emerge in this conflict. To my knowledge Iran seems to have pretty advanced cyber capabilities and increasingly fewer reasons to hold back. Gloves-off cyber war doesn't sound good to me. The US CISA already been cut back, has lost "virtually all of its top officials"^, doesn't have a permanent director, and is operating at a further reduced capacity because of the DHS shutdown.
> To my knowledge Iran seems to have pretty advanced cyber capabilities and increasingly fewer reasons to hold back.
Iran isn’t alone!! They are a quad along with China, Russia, and North Korea.
Painsawman123 17 hours ago [-]
that's the thing that people overlook the most in regards to this war.iran isn’t doing this on its own. Russia, China and north korea have been backing it from the start. they’re the ones helping with intel on US base locations across the Middle East, supplying drones, and working out strategies to drag things into a stalemate, plus whatever else iran needs along the way
epolanski 17 hours ago [-]
Can you blame them? Iran is fighting for its own survival and has to find help where it can.
If the US had an educated administration not composed by lap dogs they would've known that attacking Iran was going to be a terrible idea.
Saddam did the same mistake in 1980.
He thought that the Iranian Kurds, the political opponents, the Iranian Arabs, civilians were going to raise against the regime.
None of this happened. None. In fact, hundreds of thousands of people, even kids, rallied around the banner. There are documented stories of 13 year olds, jumping on barbed wire to use their bodies as bridges for infantry. Disgusting, yet telling of the fact that the Persians will do everything to defend their land even if they don't like its leadership.
It's very difficult to convince people you're bombing left that you're helping them get rid of a regime (which, you never know for sure how popular or unpopular it is).
Iranians, yet again, are rallying around the flag for what is effectively a foreign aggression.
kstenerud 17 hours ago [-]
Iran has been preparing for this war for 40 years. So has Israel. They will engage in a battle of supremacy over the Middle East. Both want the USA knocked out so that the Americans can't use their influence there anymore (both consider the USA a nuisance).
As soon as ground troops land in Iran, it's over for the USA. As it is, oil and goods shipping via the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea will be controlled by Iran for a very long time to come. All Iran has to do is withstand the pummeling, which it very likely will do. And they'll get plenty of support from China, since this plays into the South China Seas plan quite nicely as the USA moves carrier after carrier out of Asia.
40four 15 hours ago [-]
The thing getting overlooked is all of the recent moves by Trump all lead back to China. Venezuela, Cuba, now Iran. These are all tentacles of China. The aggression against these 3 countries is not a coincidence. It’s a concerted and indirect attack on China in an attempt to weaken their subsidiaries. In the eyes of this administration, this is unpleasant, but necessary housekeeping that should have been done decades ago but no one was willing to spend the political capital to do it.
In Iran, Trump was clearly hoping (and verbally requested) the same thing you say about Sadam. I think we actually do know how unpopular the regime is, the mass protests demonstrated that. But the religious hardliners are the ones with the guns. And they clearly aren’t afraid to use them. So while there was some momentum, after everyone got gunned down in the streets by the IRGC it quickly deflated. So asking unarmed protesters to step up again is kind of big ask, without any material support.
mandeepj 12 hours ago [-]
> The thing getting overlooked is all of the recent moves by Trump all lead back to China.
Are you trying to frame the twice accidental president as some sort of visionary? He doesn’t even remember what he said 5 mins ago. If he had planned or even had any clue about wars, we’d not be in this mess. He insulted Zelenskyy last year but ended up asking for his help.
Do you recall orange phenomenon was asking for China’s help just last week, let’s wait for it, to act against their friends, which you called their subsidiaries :-). You can’t script this horror show, even if you wanted to.
epolanski 10 hours ago [-]
Also, he's pushing the world towards China.
And rightfully so. China isn't killing and kidnapping world leaders, supporting genocides in Gaza, launching military operations, threatening its allies of annexation or overtly interfering in their democratic process.
chirau 14 hours ago [-]
Iranian protesters were not calling for US interference. Let's be very clear about that. They were doing it for their own regime change, not some US imposition. What they think of the US or whether they are for this war or supposed regime change by the US is a totally different consideration.
limagnolia 16 hours ago [-]
Russia and North Korea are obviously doing so, but I haven't seen any direct evidence that China is providing intelligence support to Iran, do you have any links? It is certainly plausible, China would love to see Russia tied up in Ukraine and the US tied up in Iran.
40four 17 hours ago [-]
I forget all the details but a hacker group associated with Iran already hacked the infrastructure of a major US health care tech company
derwiki 17 hours ago [-]
Stryker. FWIW a friend in ER medicine said it had very very limited effect.
40four 16 hours ago [-]
That’s right thanks. The same
Hacker group as this story. Yeah I didn’t hear much after the initial breach so I assumed it was minor.
Edit: apparently 80000 employee workstations got remotely wiped. So not so I guess I wouldn’t call that minor.
Also that’s what I get for commenting before reading the story, they mention the Styker incident in the story lol
17 hours ago [-]
mattbis 17 hours ago [-]
I really want to know how they did it.. was it some terrible password?
He doesn't strike me as the kinda person even using a local password manager; like keepass.
Somebody needs to find this out.
I doubt it was gmail support... surely it could not be via his phone sim, and if he didn't have two factor on; That would be so funny.
I'm tempted to check out the dark web or the telegram, but i'd rather not do either of those things.
danso 17 hours ago [-]
I too am very curious about this. Even if his password was exposed and he didn’t have 2-factor auth, doesn’t Google by default ask for confirmation — e.g. texting a number or backup email associated with the account — when seeing an unrecognized device? Maybe he didn’t have any alt contact methods associated with his account?
(which might not be that unusual, he’s old enough to have opened a gmail account upon launch, before extra info hoops were put in place, and maybe he never touched his account config in the past 2 decades?
mattbis 17 hours ago [-]
You are probably right... I tend to change my password semi often. It's always a super complex impossible to remember string - and always keep an eye on the account activity.
Not to mention ; you would assume he should have more than one device linked to the account and then that adds another layer, since Google will ask you " is this you trying to logon ". <-- that is the only way to get Google to do the unrecognized flow you mention.
If you are suggesting it was exposed and he didn't immediately randomise all his passwords.. WORDS FAIL ME
It's all security 101 the irony is immense...
if the US government / FBI need someone to give some talks on how to do security ...
ffsm8 16 hours ago [-]
Changing a password that's randomly generated is security theatre. It doesn't meaningfully improve security
Also it's entirely possible they only compromised a honeypot.
Considering their track record, that's actually more likely tbh
mattbis 16 hours ago [-]
Honeypot sure I didn't think of that.. But I was under the impression the FBI confirmed it ? So we can rule it out.
Making the password impossible to guess - how could that not be?
Since then you know you have a breach, as its randomised gibberish, if you then get the 2nd device asking " is this you trying to login " you can definitely know you are compromised....
I can't see your logic here, that isn't " theatre " ????
If you think that is theatre what is better then? Words and numbers.. easily brute forced.. Sorry can't agree.
ffsm8 16 hours ago [-]
Why would they willingly destroy their successful honeypot if the other party announced they've access to it?
I haven't seen what's in it either though, but I would not rule it out yet, especially when the FBI is involved - which love those tactics
When you're compromised, changing the password is obviously not theatre - but changing a password which is randomly generated with enough entropy is what's pointless theatre. A secure password is secure, esp. If you're already using a password manager then the act of changing isn't meaningfully increasing your security (unless you're aware that your password was compromised) because the way to compromise it is what...? Having a keylogger on a device you logged in on? Then the changed password will be just as compromised
mattbis 16 hours ago [-]
That's why keepass is really useful since you aren't ever typing in the password.. its generated and then copied to the clipboard.. That clipboard is then wiped after X seconds.
So then you know that you have been rooted => If that fails to resolve it.
Reduce the number of vectors to know what you have to change asap. in this scenario you don't want to be guessing about how they did it.
The randomised gibberish just means you can rule out certain things. I can agree on part of what your saying but a string high entropy password, makes it harder to brute..
Many services don't really do that whole retries thing properly. So make it take as long as possible.
If you don't use a random gibberish your password can be cracked on any consumer device in a surprisingly short amount of time...
This way you can then focus on that a session token is probably how they got in.. It's the most common vector these days...
17 hours ago [-]
mlmonkey 17 hours ago [-]
> On their website, the hacker group Handala Hack Team said . . . .
"Search harder" is a pretty unfriendly response to a request for a link...
megous 16 hours ago [-]
Just saying that there's a working link if you search. It's a useful information on its own.
There's no reason to post it directly. Their server is slow today even without adding lazy (ok, HN readers not interested in applying some effort to the matter) HN readers to the mix.
kevincloudsec 18 hours ago [-]
Forget the Iran attribution for a second. The FBI director's personal email was already in leaked credential databases from prior breaches.
bcjdjsndon 17 hours ago [-]
Every now and then something happens that makes me wonder how the fuck America is number one, this being one of them.
bobsmooth 3 hours ago [-]
One of the largest populations, and by extension, GDPs.
1234letshaveatw 17 hours ago [-]
We're ranked number one based on the summation of all the angsty teen America bad comments on social media. At least that is the stat the press goes off of I believe
vrganj 15 hours ago [-]
Don't worry, it's on its way out.
bpt3 17 hours ago [-]
Loads of natural resources, no local military threats, and historically a government that stayed out of the way and allowed individuals to reap the rewards of their efforts.
The first is almost impossible to screw up, though we're really trying on the last front.
krapp 17 hours ago [-]
America had the advantage of getting through WW2 relatively unscathed with lots of resources and intact infrastructure that it used to leverage against the reconstruction of Europe, Japan and the USSR and entrench its cultural and economic hegemony. Also the US essentially colonized the West with nuclear weapons under the guise of "Pax Americana" and making the dollar the reserve currency.
That's really it. Not moral superiority, not technical ingenuity, not the indomitable American spirit. Just imperialist opportunism.
17 hours ago [-]
basisword 16 hours ago [-]
Number one based on what metric other than they constantly say they're number one?
jorts 17 hours ago [-]
Because America is a lot more than a podcaster put into a position that he has no qualifications for.
1234letshaveatw 17 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
hmokiguess 9 hours ago [-]
Was he running openclaw on his unpenetrable system by any chance?
That’s arguably even more objectionable of a term. Jester’s role was often a critical one in the court system, serving as deliverer of uncomfortable messages in light hearted ways and often also confidant to the monarch.
These rather evil and cruel bumbling fools are an insult to clowns and jesters alike. Maybe “fool” is the applicable term.
bryanrasmussen 9 hours ago [-]
the sensible middle of the road between clowns on the left and the jokers on the right.
seemaze 9 hours ago [-]
Its hard to keep this smile off my face
4 hours ago [-]
mixmastamyk 6 hours ago [-]
…here I am stuck in the middle with you… ♪
kstrauser 6 hours ago [-]
flicks open a straight razor
Jordanpomeroy 8 hours ago [-]
When the clown moves into the palace it doesn’t make him the king, the palace becomes a circus
jameson 10 hours ago [-]
I wonder how many others are hacked but remain undiscovered
longislandguido 9 hours ago [-]
Considering 95% of spam that hits my inbox originates from compromised Gmail accounts, I'd say it's a few.
Because Google is too big to fail, all Gmail traffic is essentially whitelisted and they can't be bothered to do anything about it.
detourdog 9 hours ago [-]
Almost all phishing attempts at my domain are from google. Many Norton subscription bills for around $350. I report every single one to google. I can’t believe they aren’t using there AI to figure this out.
mcmcmc 8 hours ago [-]
> I can’t believe they aren’t using there AI to figure this out.
Why would they burn compute on it when they have zero incentive to fix the problem?
themafia 6 hours ago [-]
Meanwhile have a complaint volume of more than 0.1% and they'll consider you extremely suspicious and start actively interfering with your deliveries.
Then you get into the forgotten early 2000s era google "postmaster tools" to try to poke through the chicken entrails to divine the nature of your issue.
gzread 7 hours ago [-]
Google was banned from Usenet once, so there's hope. Every single provider was so fed up with spam they just blocked the whole network.
themafia 6 hours ago [-]
It always will be. The FBI is scandal prone and a stranger to success. I'm not entirely sure a large federal apparatus is needed anymore. It maybe made sense when local police were poorly trained and psychics were seen as credible investigative tools, but, I think we're well past that. I think it should be chopped into 50 pieces and handed over to the states to operate. A small coordinating office is all that should be left.
kjellsbells 3 hours ago [-]
Username checks out, I guess!
Seriously though I'm not so sanguine about local forces. Assuming the local PD is well trained seems like a big if, to say nothing of the risk of localized pressure or corruption. Eg would the local sheriff of a county with a very large employer be able to effectively investigate and bring charges against it? Being able to bring in federal LE brings a certain impartiality to those sorts of cases.
themafia 42 minutes ago [-]
With FOIA and Body Worn Cameras I think we're in far better position to demand accountability from local police and sheriffs. Two tools the FBI are not compelled to comply with or deploy and which many state police agencies also resist using.
In any case I think you'd want to remove their enforcement mandate and instead refocus them on information gathering and rapid secure distribution, tailored forensic investigations, and on creating, monitoring and refining police best practices and training programs.
maximilianburke 6 hours ago [-]
More than clowns, they’re all fools.
roysting 5 hours ago [-]
Not just that, clowns and jesters played critical and culturally significant roles.
“Fools” is not only not an insult to clowns and jesters, but it’s far more accurate.
I would even say without any necessary religious perspective, these people are like the origins of the term and concept of “demons”, entities representing the most heinous and nefarious instincts and impulses of humanity so vile and repulsive that they had to be emanations of hell. How would you even makes sense of such evil behavior back then. They didn’t know what the dark triad of personality flaws was, narcissism, psychopathy, and machiavellianism (yes, I understand it’s an erroneous label, but it’s the one used).
9 hours ago [-]
longislandguido 9 hours ago [-]
Did you write the software that allowed him to get hacked in the first place?
7174n6 16 hours ago [-]
I'm sure it will be embarrassing for him personally, but not a breach of U.S. government systems.
Kudos to CNN for publishing a balanced take on it.
ebiester 15 hours ago [-]
These are a group that used outside signal chats to discuss war plans. What odds do you have that he didn't use a personal email to avoid future accountability?
hnlmorg 14 hours ago [-]
That’s depressingly common with politicians the world over because Signal supports disappearing messages.
So I wouldn’t expect someone who uses Signal to automatically be the kind of person to use personal email for work.
SirFatty 16 hours ago [-]
You're assuming that he didn't use personal email for his FBI "work".
7174n6 15 hours ago [-]
The leak is from 2011-2022. He wasn't in the government then!!!!
awkwardpotato 15 hours ago [-]
per Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai
> In some cases, Patel appears to have sent emails from his former Justice Department email address in 2014 to his Gmail account. TechCrunch found that the emails sent from Patel’s DOJ account also appeared to be authentic.
phonon 15 hours ago [-]
Are you kidding? He had extremely sensitive roles as Devin Nunes' House committee aide from 2017–2019 in the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, National Security Council aide and deputy director of national intelligence (2019–2020), and then Chief of staff to the secretary of defense (2020–2021).
enoint 15 hours ago [-]
I wonder how much of 2021. Two FBI agents reported that he was the bag man for payments to alter Jan 6 cases.
What a weird looking book. The cover shows Trump as the king, lol
Anyways, if i were a parent, i'd certainly try to do everything to prevent my kids (under 10) from getting into politics. Let them live as normal kids should.
Hikikomori 12 hours ago [-]
Patel is a weird little goblin for sure.
athrowaway3z 14 hours ago [-]
The US media has a clear understanding that their reporting on the war needs to be filtered and biased. This is not some coming-to-their-senses against sensationalism, but a nothingburger they know they can't sensationalize without great risk.
As is the case in any administration; let alone with an admin as vindictive as Trump's.
This "balanced take" warrants kudos?
We're not even pretending to lift the bar off the ground when it comes to mainstream media, are we?
throwawaysoxjje 7 hours ago [-]
But his emails!
ThaDood 18 hours ago [-]
If you check their telegram channel they have some humorous photos and his resume.
k310 10 hours ago [-]
A great many experts in the military, medicine, disaster relief, and cybersecurity { the list goes on } were fired.
It's almost as if the nation were being weakened on purpose.
Don't get mad, get Vlad. Or just prepare for the long-desired Rapture.[0] and which politicians seem to be working very hard to being about (the Apocalypse part, anyway)
> Prophecy, not politics, may also shape America’s clash with Iran
So, is prophecy OK in a pitch deck? Asking for a friend.
vrganj 8 hours ago [-]
The Manchurian Candidate.
idiotsecant 10 hours ago [-]
Its both dumber and more dangerous than that. Competent people are not valuable to governments that value loyalty more than competence.
gotwaz 7 hours ago [-]
"Competent" people are not valuable and over rated because they will flake out in such jobs when the group holds them responsible for all sorts of things they have no control over. They are the first people who recognize lumits. Their own, their teams and the systems. But people dont want to hear about Limits. They want saviors and messaihs. They want fantasy and magic. So the system runs not optimized for efficiency but illusion of control, for damping of anxieties and fears.
genxy 5 hours ago [-]
Over 90% of my managers got into their positions by either stabbing someone in the back, or walking across their dead body.
hackable_sand 3 hours ago [-]
That's how hierarchies work. It's an circumstantial constraint. Some people just keep trying to make hierarchies permanent for whatever reason.
trinsic2 6 hours ago [-]
and that will be there eventual downfall luckily.
RobRivera 10 hours ago [-]
When do the Raptor puppets go on sale?
refurb 7 hours ago [-]
Yes, the “experts” like the head of the HHS that was a lawyer and former DA in California.
leereeves 10 hours ago [-]
Were any of the people fired responsible for security on personal gmail accounts?
For real, I wouldn't be shocked if Trump drafted everyone between 18 and 42, sent them all to Iran and then let Israel nuke Iran
k310 5 hours ago [-]
No. DRAFT ICE!
• They are already "trained" (in random violence against civilians. Checks one box)
• Bonespur "victims" have already been weeded out.
• They are already government employees and must go where assigned. (saves TONS of paperwork)
• They already have weapons, and unspent budget money.
• They already have swell masks to protect from radioactive dust that bombing reactors creates, and (this is big)
• Their kill to loss ratio is infinite.
Oh, and ...
• It's them or Barron.
conception 5 hours ago [-]
No, I’m convinced the one thing that Trump wants to do is to launch a nuke before he dies. That’s what he wants his legacy to be. and his name everywhere.
bcjdjsndon 17 hours ago [-]
Looking good there, murica, looking good
chao- 10 hours ago [-]
From the administration that brought us "We are currently clean on OPSEC", I can't claim surprise. Disappointment, but not surprise.
Nor, however, can I take the statements of malicious actors at face value. They hacked a personal email address, but that does not mean "the FBI’s security was nothing more than a joke".
calvinmorrison 10 hours ago [-]
These government officials are idiots. Jeffery Epstein, idiot. Why do even rich and powerful use easily hackable stuff?
Lest us not forget bObama@yahoo.com or the IT guy who worked for the Clinton foundation who posted about bleachbit on recdit
tomjakubowski 9 hours ago [-]
Obama's old personal email was at defunct ISP ameritech.net, not Yahoo. I only remember because that's the ISP I grew up with.
Trump using yourefired as his Twitter password well into his 2016 campaign was amazing, too.
lostlogin 7 hours ago [-]
I'm surprised he put the 'e' on 'you're'.
dhosek 6 hours ago [-]
Ameritech.net was backed by yahoo’s mail and IIRC, joefish@ameritech.net and joefish@yahoo.com would be the same mailbox.
calvinmorrison 7 hours ago [-]
Idiots
gzread 7 hours ago [-]
Because they are experts in acquiring riches and power, not experts in computer security.
17 hours ago [-]
CrzyLngPwd 18 hours ago [-]
Where did the article go?
18 hours ago [-]
mjmsmith 7 hours ago [-]
"Iran, if you're listening..."
pixl97 16 hours ago [-]
>“This isn’t an FBI compromise — it’s someone’s personal junk drawer,” he said.
Eh, with how many people in the current administration seem to use out of band channels to communicate very important things who knows what else they located.
ranyume 16 hours ago [-]
This isn’t a written by a human — it's a AI-accelerated piece.
Spellinator 15 hours ago [-]
As if this is the first time this has ever happened.
How many former officials used personal accounts about government business?
How many corporate executives communicate business via personal accounts to avoid legal discovery?
How many individuals communicate outside their main email accounts to avoid scrutiny or attribution?
Point is, nobody should feel superior or shocked that such things like this happen. I understand some enjoy the privacy of their perceived enemies being exposed, but IMHO, nobody should be happy about invasion of anyone's privacy.
sirbutters 16 hours ago [-]
Most incompetent administration in the modern era.
helterskelter 16 hours ago [-]
Think about it this way, this administration is the most competent administraion we've ever had at being incompetent.
Muhammad523 14 hours ago [-]
I dont know why your comment got grayed out but it made me smile.
b8 15 hours ago [-]
Not surprising as email providers like Yahoo's security are a joke. A former CIA director got his personal emailed pwned as well.
noosphr 10 hours ago [-]
Imagine a world where gpg encryption was the norm instead of something that only works reliably in Emacs.
jonathanstrange 10 hours ago [-]
This wouldn't have happened if Kash Patel used Emacs, that's right.
AndrewKemendo 6 hours ago [-]
You know, thats really my main takeaway from all this. Once you really boil it down
bryanrasmussen 9 hours ago [-]
I think it's a pretty cynical take that an Emacs user will never be made FBI director.
razingeden 9 hours ago [-]
are you saying someone can’t key information into an NCIC profile with EMacs? Ha! furious typing
bryanrasmussen 3 hours ago [-]
aw damn, you're keying my information into an NCIC profile right now aren't you!!?
noncoml 8 hours ago [-]
How would GPG help? GPG is as safe as your private key is. If someone gets "hacks you" and gets access to your private key, it's over
> "Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing, I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press," Trump said in a July 27, 2016 news conference.
nickpinkston 13 hours ago [-]
Haha - yes exactly.
huggerl88 17 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
AngryData 17 hours ago [-]
All the time, just those military aged men don't call them their enemy because they know they aren't. Vietnam, Korea, Iraq, Afganistan, etc, most people don't consider the majority of those peoples the enemy whether they are fighting or not because they don't think we should have been trying to kill or subjugate them in the first place.
The goals and ideals of politicians and powermongers rarely aligns with the majority of the population.
flipgimble 17 hours ago [-]
I’d never support a repressive theocracy like the current Iranian regime and will not cheer on their propaganda operations.
But let’s not confuse this Iran conflict with a legitimate war. Only congress can declare war and appropriate funds for a war. What we have is a rogue authoritarian executive that was incompetent enough to ignore military assessments and be manipulated by Netanyahu to strike.
People should protest like there is no tomorrow when la senile demagogue is destroying the international world order, free trade and freedom of the seas. That is not the same as rooting for the enemy!
guzfip 17 hours ago [-]
> What we have is a rogue authoritarian executive that was incompetent enough to ignore military assessments and be manipulated by Netanyahu to strike.
Yeah, except we’ve had that for the entirety of this century so far at least.
embedding-shape 17 hours ago [-]
Maybe we need to get rid of the concept of "enemy" and "ally", as seemingly those labels matter less and less as time goes on.
Maybe one is the "enemy", and the others can be "less enemy" and "more enemy". So we're all enemies in reality, but some more enemies than others.
fhdkweig 17 hours ago [-]
how about "useful" and "not useful"?
Zigurd 17 hours ago [-]
We had allies. Now they are treaty signatories asking themselves WTF?
paxys 17 hours ago [-]
Iran has done nothing to harm the average American. Who is the enemy, really?
There are 193 countries in the world other than America and whichever country they are bombing this week.
SG- 17 hours ago [-]
this is where you find out you're the bad guy.
huggerl88 17 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
ProllyInfamous 17 hours ago [-]
The time is now, fellow old men.
—older #millenial (recently re-enlistable ha ha ha ja ha ha)
taytus 17 hours ago [-]
Who said they are the enemy?
bcjdjsndon 17 hours ago [-]
Yeah lol, if you're suddenly policeman of the world going after evil regimes, how is North Korea still standing? They're forced to be robots or they're killed
pasquinelli 17 hours ago [-]
consider that the same people that tell you what's going on in the DPRK also said iran was two weeks away from nuking the middle east, that something called the cartel of the sun was responsible for the drug trade in the united states, and that epstein killed himself.
guzfip 17 hours ago [-]
At the end of the day. There are enough idiots to fall for it not once, but twice. The exact same lie.
We’re doomed because the people are idiots.
pasquinelli 17 hours ago [-]
look up revolutionary defeatism.
17 hours ago [-]
griffzhowl 16 hours ago [-]
But just a personal account with materials reportedly from 2011-2022, not an FBI breach
caaqil 13 hours ago [-]
If you read the news with enough cynicism, you'll realize that rules like formality, password strength or cybersecurity hygiene are for the average Joes, not the morons/perverts who run the world.
morkalork 15 hours ago [-]
No worries. As long as rigorous due diligence was followed when vetting him as a candidate, there will surely be nothing embarrassing or harmful found in his personal emails.
basisword 16 hours ago [-]
How the heck is the buried down to page 4 after one hour?? The head of the FBI having his email hacked is a pretty big tech story.
rationalist 6 hours ago [-]
Lots of personal opinions and low-effort jabs in this thread.
nickburns 15 hours ago [-]
Negative voting.
PilotJeff 7 hours ago [-]
BRING IT ON
ck2 15 hours ago [-]
I'm sorry but nothing can ever be more embarrassing for that man who wrote this book to get that job
But far more seriously, imagine the danger he has put this country into by firing so many critical people, some specifically and uniquely for Iran and Middle-East defense
Let's hope we don't get another 9/11 in the next 1000 days because they are completely unprepared and won't ever see it coming, maybe even on purpose
autoexec 15 hours ago [-]
> Let's hope we don't get another 9/11 in the next 1000 days because they are completely unprepared and won't ever see it coming, maybe even on purpose
Why would anyone bother to attack us now? This entire administration has done more to make The US weak and vulnerable than any outside attacker could have hoped to accomplish. They can just sit back and watch rome burn
We've given a lot of people a lot of reasons to hate us sure, but no matter how much you hate someone, if you see them kicking their own ass it just makes sense to let them finish before you jump in.
Oarch 15 hours ago [-]
How am I only finding out about this now... my sides
lern_too_spel 5 hours ago [-]
This is the end of his high profile bureaucrat career. Inevitably, something will show up in the emails that will get airplay as embarrassing to Trump, and Trump will just say that he should have protected his password better and ask for his resignation.
He doesn't have a face for Fox News, so he'll have to try to parlay his past closeness with the administration for lobbyist money, but if he gets shunned by the people left in the administration, he's got to go back to his public defender job.
jameskilton 16 hours ago [-]
But ... but her emails!
Levitz 16 hours ago [-]
I mean, yes? You can give whatever weight you want to the whole thing, but the core issue with Hillary Clinton and the emails was that she was storing material on a private server rather than in official infrastructure.
If Patel didn't do such thing here, the breach should only expose personal stuff, if he did, then it's much more of a problem, but either way this is a really clear example of why concern was raised back at the time.
BenFranklin100 14 hours ago [-]
I’m surprised no group has hacked the Epstein files, given the extreme interest.
saltyoldman 1 hours ago [-]
hacking groups are generally funded by the people that are in the files. -> government leaders.
trhway 10 hours ago [-]
Hegseth - Signal app
Noem - habeas corpus definition she gave at the Congress hearing
Kennedy Jr - vaccines and the rest of his view on medicine
Now Patel's unhackable FBI.
I think the world has changed, and i really need to update my expectations of what is new normal. It is like in tech when paradigm shift happens, and you're either go with the new paradigm or get irrelevant.
conductr 10 hours ago [-]
If Idiocracy was made today, I wonder how far in the future they’d place it. In 2006, they thought 500 years which seems optimistic now.
mattkevan 8 hours ago [-]
We’re way beyond Idiocracy now, we left that timeline six years ago.
For all his flaws, Camacho was a good leader - he recognised there was a problem, knew he couldn’t fix it and actively rallied the world around the one person who could.
This bunch of dipshits expressly denigrated the experts, refused to take the slightest precaution to protect themselves and others from a deadly virus and caused hundreds of thousands of deaths.
And that’s not even thinking about the industrial levels of fuckery and bullshit they’ve perpetrated over the last year.
jrumbut 6 hours ago [-]
Camacho is aspirational at this point. I would have a lot of sympathy for someone trying to do the right thing but unaware what that is.
nyc_data_geek1 5 hours ago [-]
Go away, 'batin'!
antonvs 8 hours ago [-]
> caused hundreds of thousands of deaths.
Excess mortality in the US during the pandemic was around 1.2 million.
ModernMech 5 hours ago [-]
Yes, people forget that in the early days of the pandemic, they were playing political games with PPE, sending it to red states with no population or cases, while NYC was running out of space in hospitals. It got so bad, RFK's grandson became a whistleblower because he was dismayed that he and other 20-somethings with no relevent experience were in charge of the government response.
It "was like a family office meets organized crime, melded with Lord of the Flies," Kennedy said. "It was a government of chaos." Kennedy says was shocked that he and a dozen other twenty-somethings with no experience in the medical sector were tasked with procuring much-needed PPE for the country, using their personal laptops and email addresses.
"We were the team. We were the entire frontline team for the federal government." Kennedy added, "It was the number of people who show up to an after-school event, not to run the greatest crisis in a hundred years. It was such a mismatch of personnel. It was one of the largest mobilization problems ever. It was so unbelievably colossal and gargantuan. The fact that they didn’t want to get any more people was so upsetting." [1]
That kind of executive negligence and dereliction of duty absolutely cost lives.
What Kennedy described during COVID is now the entire government from top to bottom. DOJ, FBI, DOD, FEMA, DHS, ICE, NASA, USPS, SSA etc etc, rotting from the head.
It would literally just be a compilation of TikToks
8 hours ago [-]
thereisnospork 10 hours ago [-]
Future? I'm thinking a Borat style mockumentary in the present.
scotty79 9 hours ago [-]
I think it's the future of entertainment. Ruthlessly mocking idiots in power (and others). To be honest it's the present of some entertainment.
petre 4 hours ago [-]
What's the use of mockery after they bombed a girls' school and killed at least 175 innocent people? I'd like to see the IRGC erased off the face of the Earth, but not like this. This is exponentially worse than Bush jr. reading a children's book on 9/11.
root_axis 8 hours ago [-]
Don't forget "the files are on my desk" and many other classics.
9 hours ago [-]
ToucanLoucan 10 hours ago [-]
“Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.” ~Hannah Arendt
trhway 10 hours ago [-]
i'm from USSR, so pretty familiar with it. The issue here is whether it is a fluke, or the world is really going into new phase where totalitarianism and authoritarianism are going to become dominating state of affairs.
For example many attribute rise of totalitarianism back then in 20th century to the power of broadcasting radio and "formation of mass society". We have a similarly transformative factor now - social media. And with the new tech power - propaganda (sounds dated, today it is more like mind control) through social media and total surveillance plus AI "minority report" - we can get a hyper-totalitarianism orders of magnitude more totalitarian than those of the 20th century. And may be we're witnessing the birth of such a new world order.
gzread 7 hours ago [-]
Totalitarianism and authoritarianism has been the norm for the majority of human history. The last century of technological progress created a bubble where the power of sycophancy wasn't strong enough to counteract the power of actual technology. Now that the technology is widely distributed and easily available to sycophants, and that they've had time to learn how to leverage the technology, sycophancy again brings an advantage.
Fricken 9 hours ago [-]
Authoritarianism is a spectrum and all states are on it. We all have brain slugs now, it was voluntary. We'll be going back to that old time religion, but with a new twist. With AI every man will, in a much more literal way, be able to have an ongoing private conversation with god. And you won't need money or the government anymore. God has a special plan for you and you follow it.
epistasis 10 hours ago [-]
The people of the US were converted into functional Putin-subservient Russians for the last election, and the media environment is not getting better, and in fact seems to be getting much worse.
However there is revolt amongst a good chunk of the fractured coalition that barely brought Trump into office.
Trump's Epstein coverup and sheltering of Ghislaine Maxwell took off the shine with a large number of people. The ghastly behavior around the deaths of major figures takes off more. Exempting producers of the pesticide glyphosate has taken off most of the MAHA coalition. And then, of course the wars, when he promised not to launch any and accused his opponent of doing exactly what he's currently doing...
It remains to be seen just how permanent this is, and whether the post-Trump US can be reattached to reality instead of reality TV, but I use hope.
ToucanLoucan 9 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately that leaves us with the Democrats who have shown time and again that they are unwilling or unable to confront this movement for what it is.
I'm frankly far more concerned that the Republicans lose next election, and we get Democrats in power who then prioritize "getting back to normal" and once again utterly failing to hold accountable the utter BUFFET of mediocre wannabe dictators who brought us to the brink already.
I also hope. But I'd be lying if I said I thought it was rational.
Avicebron 7 hours ago [-]
The real fear is that they don't solve any of the problems that caused this in the first place... it's not about some vindictive punishment, it's about solving the problem.
nyc_data_geek1 5 hours ago [-]
I beg to differ, as I see it, it's both. Solving the problem necessarily entails punishing the malicious actors attempting to subvert and demolish our governance, justice system, society and way of life. Allowing Jan 6th to go unpunished at the highest levels was a key factor in what brought us here.
Avicebron 4 hours ago [-]
> demolish our governance, justice system, society and way of life
"Our" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. There were many "ours" whose ways of life, governance, and society were destroyed on the road to making the Jan 6th thing possible..
parineum 6 hours ago [-]
>The people of the US were converted into functional Putin-subservient Russians
It's crazy that you continue to push this narrative despite the entire "Russia-Gate" thing turning out to total bullshit oppo followed by Trump being currently at war with one of Putin's allies and having jailed another.
The evidence supporting this claim is what, he wasn't nice to Zelenskyy that one time (despite still financially supporting Ukraine in their war against Russia)?
fooster 6 hours ago [-]
The Russians certainly did interfere in the 2016 election. It was not bullshit.
parineum 24 minutes ago [-]
Define "interfere". Be specific.
cyberax 7 hours ago [-]
Totalitarianism is not becoming more popular. Russia is not totalitarian, Venezuela is not totalitarian, and even China is not really totalitarian anymore.
These are authoritarian countries. Meaning that they don't have an official ideology, the real one that has people willing to die for it. If anything, they are focused on suppressing people and keeping them passive.
Iran is a notable exception here. They _are_ a totalitarian theocratic state, and this makes them more resilient. They are not governed by a single person but by ideology, even if it's unpopular among the people.
Authoritarian states are fragile in comparison. They struggle to survive the removal of their leader, especially the ones that had governed for a long time. The long-time ruler inevitably becomes the arbiter between the elites, a focal point of their undercover agreements.
And once the ruler is gone, the elites are now faced with a new round of struggles. So the smarter ones decide that perhaps it's a good idea to have some kind of collegial power, where people can discuss their disagreements rather than shoot each other. This usually results in the country becoming milder and not so carnivorous towards its citizens.
The USSR was a good example. Stalin died, and his successors decided that a new Stalin was not a good idea. Instead, they gave power to the Politburo, where the General Secretary was "the first among equals". The USSR did not become a human rights paradise afterwards. But it never had any more mass purges, deportations, or mega-projects built with slave labor of GULAG inmates.
trhway 6 hours ago [-]
>Totalitarianism is not becoming more popular. Russia is not totalitarian,
Russia is totalitarian today. It transitioned from authoritarian to totalitarian slowly starting about second half of 201x and very quickly down hill during 2022 with the introduction of all those "discreditation" laws and the likes and especially with extreme hardening of application of such laws.
>Meaning that they don't have an official ideology, the real one that has people willing to die for it.
That is the point. In a contrast to being just a kleptocracy for the first ~15 years of Putin, Russia does have such an ideology at the state level today - "Russian world" (known outside as "Russian fascism" - "rushism") with Ukranian war (where at least several hundred thousands of Russians have already died) being one of the real-world implementations of that ideology.
cyberax 5 hours ago [-]
> Russia is totalitarian today.
It's really not. There is no ideology. There are no mass rallies in support of the government. No official sets of books, there's no "My Struggle" by Putin that everyone in the country needs to have.
> That is the point. In a contrast to being just a kleptocracy for the first ~15 years of Putin, Russia does have such an ideology at the state level today - "Russian world"
Not really. It's trying to do that, but it looks comical even for people inside Russia. Even true believers in "Russian World" are now either dead or silenced. Russian government systematically punishes _any_ true belief.
Another example to watch is Venezuela. I predict that it'll slowly transform into being a more open country, with at least some electoral freedom. It won't become a liberal democracy overnight, but it won't be completely authoritarian for long.
trhway 2 hours ago [-]
>There are no mass rallies in support of the government.
new unified history textbook. The "Talks about Important" school ideology lessons. Putin's propaganda article on Ukraine history (of course no relation to real history).
>It's really not. There is no ideology.
the foundational ideology of a fascist state is "interests of state trump any and all rights/freedoms/interests of an individual". One can see that in Franco's Spain, Salazar's Portugal, Mussolini's Italy, and in Putin's Russia these days. Of course that was also the case in Germany in 1933-1945, yet the Germany went further - it was a fascism where state had a political nationalism as an official ideology. Similarly Russian state in recent years took "Russian world" as its official ideology, and thus now you see Lebensraum, Volksgemeinschaft, Blut and Boden and Dolchstoßlegende in the words and actions of Russian state.
>Not really. It's trying to do that, but it looks comical even for people inside Russia.
There is nothing comical here. One of the cornerstone of "Russian world" ideology is Russians being the master-nation (and by the way the words to pretty much that effect were even put into the Russian Constitution in 2020) while Ukranians are declared "inferior". The state TV openly talks about "Ukrainess" being a brain decease needing eradication (reminds a lot how "Jewishness" was talked about back then in Germany). It definitely lost any chance of being even remotely comical when they actually declared and started that eradication in 2022.
>Even true believers in "Russian World" are now either dead or silenced. Russian government systematically punishes _any_ true belief.
State ideology never requires true believers. Even more - true believer may happen to follow his/her beliefs even when state orders the other way - that of course would conflict with the basic tenets of totalitarian state.
That was electoral event with mandatory presence. This is nothing like Stalin's rallies where people themselves organized and attended, e.g.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eC6bzBTmmhU
> new unified history textbook. The "Talks about Important" school ideology lessons. Putin's propaganda article on Ukraine history (of course no relation to real history).
Yup. They are _trying_ but without at least semi-coherent ideology, it just looks comical. I suggest reading that textbook, it's just trash. It's badly written and is just a collection of unconnected facts. All it can teach is the late USSR norm: "Say what they want to hear, think what you want, and do what you actually need to do".
There can be no ideology in an authoritarian state, ideology binds the leadership. Khomeini in Iran can't just go to a gay party or eat during Ramadan. Putin (and his ilk like Maduro) does not want to get limited in any way.
> the foundational ideology of a fascist state is "interests of state trump any and all rights/freedoms/interests of an individual"
If you want to talk about fine details of political science, then fascism is not necessarily totalitarian. It can be practiced in a far-right authoritarian state. Nazism is indeed different, and it _is_ a totalitarian ideology.
Nazism had its foundational work ("Mein Kampf") and a doctrine fortified by a set of "scientific" proofs of German superiority. And they had plenty of true believers, including the actual core of the Nazi party. It also imposed binding restrictions on everyone. For example, nobody in the Nazi party could (openly) marry a Jewish person and expect to stay in power.
Putin doesn't want any of this. He loves that one day the US is the enemy number one for him, and the next day Trump is his best friend.
> The state TV openly talks about "Ukrainess" being a brain decease needing eradication (reminds a lot how "Jewishness" was talked about back then in Germany).
Yes, and these TV channels now have less popularity than gardening channels. This is another point of difference. In a totalitarian state, the ideology must be, well, _total_ and omnipresent.
The Russian government is trying to make sure the war stays as invisible as possible. Try to find any mentions of it here: https://yandex.com/maps/-/CPVwbS-t
> It definitely lost any chance of being even remotely comical when they actually declared and started that eradication in 2022.
Unfortunately, you don't need ideology to wage wars.
> State ideology never requires true believers.
It does. And that is the true difference. A significant part of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in Iran really sincerely believes that they're fighting for Islam. It's not _just_ a way for them to get into power to run protection rackets.
pwarner 10 hours ago [-]
Only the best people
0xbadcafebee 8 hours ago [-]
The real paradigm shift is coming in 2028.
add-sub-mul-div 10 hours ago [-]
I don't think people appreciate enough how much it mattered that Trump was a celebrity buffoon/reality show personality for decades before "politics". Stupid people eat that up. Other Trumpy candidates have not been able to reproduce his success. Let's not assume this is the new normal.
OhMeadhbh 9 hours ago [-]
I heard some of the best advice I ever heard at a Subgenius devival in Dallas in the 80s: "Act like a dumb-shit and they'll treat you like an equal." Every year that quip seems more and more relevant.
dogemaster2025 10 hours ago [-]
I don’t think people appreciate enough how much it mattered that Trump was the only candidate explicitly saying they were working to Make America Great Again, as opposed to foreign interests or illegals.
OhMeadhbh 9 hours ago [-]
I recently read one of the best descriptions of why middle of the road, non wealthy voters went for Trump in the book "The King in Orange," a book about the "magickal" aspects of the 2016 campaign by John Michael Greer, the former (?) head of the Ancient Order of Druids in America.
I expect cogent commentary about ritual magick by a Druid, but was a little surprised to find well laid out political commentary. I guess that was a failure of my imagination. Worth a read, even if you consider the topic bollocks. Greer sticks mostly to psychology and musings about using metaphor to engineer the mass imagination. Much less woo-woo than you might expect.
I mention it in support of the previous poster's commentary about the Dems messaging being irrelevant to most Americans. Seemed to me middle America doesn't love Trump as much as they weren't able to hear Harris address any issues they were concerned about.
I can recommend The King in Orange, What's the Matter with Kansas and Metaphors We Live By for more musings about such things.
rexpop 5 hours ago [-]
Wat we are witnessing is not just traditional totalitarianism, but the emergence of a suicidal state driven by a fascist death drive.
Under MAGA, the state no longer pretends to be guided internally by reason and progress, but is instead founded on non progress and terror, a scorched earth approach to slashing government agencies, and the accelerated destruction of state institutions: rather than seeking to resolve societal crises, MAGA produces constant crises to feed off of, preferring to annihilate its own systems rather than stop the destruction.
Yes, the world has changed. We have entered a reality where insanity has become the goal of the authoritarians, ie the self-destruction itself is the actual end goal.
s5300 10 hours ago [-]
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pugchat 6 hours ago [-]
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techpulse_x 18 hours ago [-]
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pugchat 15 hours ago [-]
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4k0hz 15 hours ago [-]
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joe_mamba 16 hours ago [-]
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vrganj 16 hours ago [-]
Is that the latest spin to defend the pedophile class?
I see you updated your comment, but in a way that doesn't make any sense. Of course the pedophiles in the files will say it's a hoax.
bigyabai 14 hours ago [-]
The DOJ acknowledges that over 100,000 files are still withheld.
fbilol 9 hours ago [-]
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throwawa1 9 hours ago [-]
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8 hours ago [-]
DSingularity 8 hours ago [-]
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0xbadcafebee 8 hours ago [-]
Nothing anti-semitic about pointing out close ties between political allies. Like how Jared Kushner's family is so close with Netanyahu he slept in Jared's bed. If anything it's patriotic & pro-Israel.
7 hours ago [-]
paxys 9 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
root_axis 9 hours ago [-]
Doesn't gmail opt people into 2fa automatically?
dyauspitr 16 hours ago [-]
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akdev1l 15 hours ago [-]
>just a slow decline into incompetence.
Give them some credit, it’s been quite rapid.
chrisweekly 14 hours ago [-]
when were they anything other than incompetent?
15 hours ago [-]
Tostino 15 hours ago [-]
This was an extremely limited leak. Just looked through the zip. I wouldn't doubt he does use his personal email for government purposes, but it's not in here.
knowaveragejoe 16 hours ago [-]
Remember when that was considered an actual issue in 2016? I remember congressional hearings over this.
e2le 15 hours ago [-]
For those who decried Hillary's E-Mail server but fail to apply the same standards to the current administration, it was never a real issue to begin with. Just performative nonsense.
add-sub-mul-div 16 hours ago [-]
And it's not a coincidence that they're also the ones who shout about "meritocracy" the loudest.
creantum 17 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
thejazzman 17 hours ago [-]
Hacked
creantum 17 hours ago [-]
Leaked
danso 17 hours ago [-]
yeah it’s totally plausible that Google would risk the reputation and legal status of its global multi-trillion empire to dunk on one of the handful of people who have the near-unilateral authority to dismantle them
mikeyouse 16 hours ago [-]
Also - there's zero chance any employees at Google could decide to leak the contents of a specific inbox. That'd be an insane security hole which would've been exploited multiple times already.
creantum 15 hours ago [-]
Sysadmins have full access.
john_strinlai 17 hours ago [-]
i am eagerly awaiting your evidence for this claim
upheaval7276 10 hours ago [-]
I'm no fan of this administration, at all, but this seems like a big fat nothingburger. They hacked a personal gmail account, not a government account, not government infra. Why is this not a failing of Google instead of the government? And surely the hackers would have eagerly released anything damning, but nothing damning seems to exist. What am i missing here?
claaams 8 hours ago [-]
Remember when this admin used a Signal group chat to coordinate an operation against Houthi forces in Yemen and left in some journalists. Do you think he cares care whether he sent an email with his gov email on a gov device or if he sent it with his personal email?
weaksauce 9 hours ago [-]
you don't think that it's relevant and concerning that the director of the FBI didn't take operational security seriously enough that his account got compromised? even if they didn't get anything incriminating (which maybe they did and are going to blackmail him later) that show a shocking lack of competency for someone in that kind of position.
upheaval7276 9 hours ago [-]
we don't even know how it was compromised. was his password "password", or did the hackers exploit a gmail/google vulnerability?
weaksauce 9 hours ago [-]
i think the facts of the matter are that a gmail vulnerability is on the very low likelihood kind of event. they wouldn't burn their insanely valuable vulnerability on showing how much of a fratboy kash is. the most likely possibility is that he either clicked on something dumb and gave access through phishing(really bad) or had a really weak password without 2fa(also really bad).
pkilgore 9 hours ago [-]
are you suggesting the former is not a demonstration of a shocking lack of competency?
upheaval7276 9 hours ago [-]
I'm suggesting we don't know how the account was hacked, which is true. could be due to incompetence or not. i don't know, nor do you
jeroenvlek 8 hours ago [-]
True, but don't you think the FBI director should be held to higher standards of security hygiene than average people? Because I'm interpreting your tone as "it could happen to anyone". At some point the doubt is gone and there's no more benefit to give...
alexandre_m 8 hours ago [-]
Comments in this thread mostly reflect people’s own biases, that is a shallow projection based on the headline.
drfloyd51 8 hours ago [-]
Did the director have his email on a vulnerable server? Yes. Yes he did.
He should have known better.
jimbob45 4 hours ago [-]
Operational security doesn’t apply to personal accounts, no? Otherwise, they wouldn’t be personal.
margalabargala 10 hours ago [-]
It's not a big deal, for the reasons you mentioned. But it's interesting to a lot of people, and therefore newsworthy.
upheaval7276 9 hours ago [-]
it's definitely newsworthy, no doubt there. but i see so many people in this thread pointing to this as somehow a failing of the fbi, which it's not. i'm all for calling out this administration for its many many failings, but this is not one of them, and calling this a failure of the administration just hurts the credibility of everyone pointing out real issues with this administration.
reddozen 8 hours ago [-]
True yeah. but uh anyway what about HILLARYS EMAILS we need to hear about those for the next 4 decades (no convictions despite "Lock Her Up" slogans for 5 years)
wmf 9 hours ago [-]
People are concerned because every government official uses their personal email for work.
drfloyd51 8 hours ago [-]
The director of the FBI should not be hacked in anyway ever for any reason.
If Gmail isn’t secure, he should be using something else.
nradov 9 hours ago [-]
How is this a failing of Google? They can't be blamed for users who fail to secure their own accounts.
m_ke 10 hours ago [-]
just think of what could someone do if they got into your personal email account?
upheaval7276 9 hours ago [-]
yes, and...?
ohyoutravel 9 hours ago [-]
Major public figure who is currently in a position of power in the USA. That’s bad news because it reveals sensitive details which may lead to their further compromise. Imagine you’re compromised by a corrupt administration with pics of CSAM or something already, now imagine a foreign actor also having compromised you. It’s a sticky situation.
upheaval7276 9 hours ago [-]
Yes, that's all true, all potential issues in theory. I'm still not seeing why this points to or supports the (valid) claim of incompetence in the FBI. That seems to be the angle most posters in this thread are taking, and it seems...misguided to me. Tilting at windmills. Let's call out the admin for their real failings, not nonsense like this. Getting your gmail account hacked does not reflect on you as a professional.
blooalien 8 hours ago [-]
> "Getting your gmail account hacked does not reflect on you as a professional."
Doesn't it though? Especially when your profession involves the security of a nation and you can't even secure your own personal email account successfully?
eclipticplane 8 hours ago [-]
Shouldn't the FBI be protecting its own members -- especially its executives -- personal digital footprint, given the risk?
ohyoutravel 9 hours ago [-]
Leaking one’s credentials to sensitive personal repositories of information is a “real failing” lol, how could one think any differently? I would be mortified and immediately rectify the situation.
antonvs 8 hours ago [-]
> Getting your gmail account hacked does not reflect on you as a professional.
Why not? Most professionals at larger organizations have to do security training. These kinds of attacks are far less likely to succeed on anyone who follows the basic precautions taught in such training. E.g., if he had MFA enabled on his account - as he certainly should have had - they would not have been able to compromise it externally, i.e. it would have had to be much more than his email that was hacked.
I don’t get the propensity some people seem to have for defending this shameful collection of incompetent criminals, bullies, and clowns.
ImPostingOnHN 8 hours ago [-]
> Getting your gmail account hacked does not reflect on you as a professional
If you work in security: it *absolutely does*, because 99+% of the time you are the primary contributing factor, whether from password reuse or downloading malware or clicking bad links or opening random emails or being susceptible to social engineering, etc.
If you are the head of a security organization: obviously you should not expect to retain that job, as your poor reputation is now an albatross around the company's neck.
If you are the head of the FBI: lol. lmao. what the actual fuck. my money is on someone spearfished him with an email subject about a book deal and he'll just click fucking anything.
OhMeadhbh 9 hours ago [-]
Certainly the FBI and GMail having gaps in their operational information security isn't news.
buttersicle 8 hours ago [-]
Do you think the FBI manages his personal email?
Kind of defeats the purpose of it being a personal email don't you think?
michaelmrose 8 hours ago [-]
The FBI does because he is included in "the FBI"
bloppe 9 hours ago [-]
I read the headline and first thought was seriously, that's it? Surely this is one of the least concerning things about the administration
rixed 53 minutes ago [-]
This is quite misleading and partisan to present this as "FBI director's personal email" when the emails far predate his current role.
If I had downloaded those emails, which I haven't because I know of no website that archives the internet, and if I had read them, which I haven't because that would be a breach of someone's privacy, then certainly I would have figured out that it contains no spicy state secrets. But why spend one hour assessing an information when you can get clicks by suggesting something bigger?
Those supposedly Iranian hackers surely know how to hack the western media to get attention.
I found it actually more informative to read on the sad history of the Dena, the ship whose victims this leak was dedicated to, so it's not been a complete waste of time.
https://landing.google.com/intl/en_in/advancedprotection/
The fact the Director of the FBI did not avail himself of this just reiterates how incompetent he is, in addition to being corrupt as heck.
https://landing.google.com/intl/en_us/advancedprotection/
Archive: https://archive.ph/ILFFH
Download: https://link.storjshare.io/raw/jxoxwyp7qosgdwldereecudqpbva/...
Password: handala
What, like J.Edgar?
In all likelihood his upbringing is what made him this way.
If they wanted to maintain access, they certainly wouldn't celebrate it publicly, which is why I assume they want to release information. But, there shouldn't be anything damning to release. ie, there ought not to be if the director is acting professionally. We'll see how the facts bear out. I also suppose it's possible they're just going for any win they can and there's nothing interesting here whatsoever, or it's a really boring secondary address or something.
EDIT: I actually misread the comment; I think we're likely in agreement. My bad.
His scandals are all about shirking job responsibilities to party and sightsee. That's not great from the FBI director but its way more normal than the rest of them.
https://www.amazon.com/Plot-Against-King-Kash-Patel/dp/19555...
Im sure they are all doing it...
Those times have passed. I'll restate what I said in a comment some days ago:
>> 50 years ago the press was "impeaching" presidents. Today presidents are "impeaching" the press
The current strategy is "keep the outrage hose on full blast and eventually people get desensitized". It works.
[1] there was one reporter who dared but the toll from the story resulted in his suicide, some years later. His colleagues poo-pooed his reporting on the connection.
Now look at where we're at. It really is wild. Right, wrong, or indifferent. How far we've shifted is absolutely wild.
medical diagnoses can be incredibly useful in understanding past and future actions
>there shouldn't be anything damning to release. ie, there ought not to be if the director is acting professionally
that "if" is doing some heavy lifting given who we are discussing
Aren't these the same people who apparently used Signal with a journalist in the chat, and had military conversations in that very chat?
Color me surprised if these people haven't heard of opsec before, and mix their work/personal life all over the place.
Signal is one of the most secure communication platforms out there, but it is obviously not immune to human error or social engineering.
https://youtu.be/KFYyfrTIPQY&t=724
Let me guess, the "leak" was intentional just to break a bunch of laws and to cause a bunch of people to get fired and leave their posts?
> Alexa Henning, spokesperson for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, tweeted last week that “widespread use” of Signal began under the Biden administration, adding that “at ODNI, when I got my phone, it was pre-installed.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/02/inside-the-hazy-fra...
Your own article makes this exact point: > Matthew Shoemaker, a former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst who left the agency in 2021, said that while Signal was used during his time in government, “it was almost exclusively restricted to scheduling purposes,” such as letting their boss know that they’ll be late to work because of personal circumstances. “That’s why Signalgate is all the more staggering — because these senior leaders were doing the exact opposite of what even my most junior intelligence officers knew not to do,” he said.
You're doing bullshit partisan whataboutism. "well the democrats did it first".
This has nothing to do with adding the wrong contacts. It has to do with putting highly-sensitive material into Signal to circumvent the law around records preservation and as a result creating a situation where it's possible to accidentally add the wrong contact and therefore exposing that information to a journalist.
My comment above already mentions public records of the DoD contracting out archiving of the Signal chat, so it doesn't in fact circumvent laws around preservation.
> You're doing bullshit partisan whataboutism. "well the democrats did it first".
I don't think it's a huge sin for government workers to be using Signal, remote work and messaging is the new norm and they will use something whether we like it or not, and Signal is the least bad option. I don't blame the Biden DoD for experimenting down that road at all, as I'm skeptical they'd build something better internally - and to your hyperpolitical points I don't see large distinctions between these type of tech choices between administrations (the DoD staff largely remains the same even when presidents change).
The issue with encryption and security will always be human security practices come first-and-foremost, technology second. They failed an OPSEC checklist when using group chats and need to implement better identification management. That's the sort of lesson that large organizations frequently need to re-learn the hard way when adopting new (and often better) things.
This was just a good lesson in security hygiene
1. Classified information. Was it legal to put that into the DoD approved Signal build? The media coverage at the time gave me the impression that it was not.
2. Records keeping. Were the Trump admin chats in question properly archived then? I had been led to believe that they weren't. Do you believe that to be incorrect?
> I don't blame the Biden DoD for experimenting down that road at all
The person you're replying to never criticized them for such.
I have no idea why this would be the default assumption for somebody as sloppy and erratic as Patel. Look at how many people were emailing damning stuff to/from Epstein's personal email accounts from their own personal email accounts!
I am sure the FBI will do that for my family too right?
Or we’re more than family photos hacked?
[0] https://youtu.be/TPF_e2E5F74
Meanwhile how would Hunter Biden, not a government employee nor having access to government systems, get that data in the first place?
It couldn't happen to a more corrupt person and organization!
The Handala group has promised even more.
Get it while it's hot!
Not a source I would trust unless there is no other option to get the dumps or leaks.
Real link from Handala (dead): https://handala-team.to/kash-patel-current-director-of-the-f...
Archive: https://archive.ph/ILFFH
Download: https://link.storjshare.io/raw/jxoxwyp7qosgdwldereecudqpbva/...
Password: handala
Collapse of the regime in Iran seems unlikely at the moment because it’s hard and zealous dictatorship with unlimited power and will for violence within the country. In the US OTOH the elections are coming. An administration that started a stupid and absolutely preventable war and then effectively lost faces quite a challenge there despite everything else. This seems like a perfect moment for Iran to create a deterrent for US: attacking us ends your presidency.
^ https://www.cybersecuritydive.com/news/cisa-senior-official-...
Iran isn’t alone!! They are a quad along with China, Russia, and North Korea.
If the US had an educated administration not composed by lap dogs they would've known that attacking Iran was going to be a terrible idea.
Saddam did the same mistake in 1980.
He thought that the Iranian Kurds, the political opponents, the Iranian Arabs, civilians were going to raise against the regime.
None of this happened. None. In fact, hundreds of thousands of people, even kids, rallied around the banner. There are documented stories of 13 year olds, jumping on barbed wire to use their bodies as bridges for infantry. Disgusting, yet telling of the fact that the Persians will do everything to defend their land even if they don't like its leadership.
It's very difficult to convince people you're bombing left that you're helping them get rid of a regime (which, you never know for sure how popular or unpopular it is).
Iranians, yet again, are rallying around the flag for what is effectively a foreign aggression.
As soon as ground troops land in Iran, it's over for the USA. As it is, oil and goods shipping via the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea will be controlled by Iran for a very long time to come. All Iran has to do is withstand the pummeling, which it very likely will do. And they'll get plenty of support from China, since this plays into the South China Seas plan quite nicely as the USA moves carrier after carrier out of Asia.
In Iran, Trump was clearly hoping (and verbally requested) the same thing you say about Sadam. I think we actually do know how unpopular the regime is, the mass protests demonstrated that. But the religious hardliners are the ones with the guns. And they clearly aren’t afraid to use them. So while there was some momentum, after everyone got gunned down in the streets by the IRGC it quickly deflated. So asking unarmed protesters to step up again is kind of big ask, without any material support.
Are you trying to frame the twice accidental president as some sort of visionary? He doesn’t even remember what he said 5 mins ago. If he had planned or even had any clue about wars, we’d not be in this mess. He insulted Zelenskyy last year but ended up asking for his help.
Do you recall orange phenomenon was asking for China’s help just last week, let’s wait for it, to act against their friends, which you called their subsidiaries :-). You can’t script this horror show, even if you wanted to.
And rightfully so. China isn't killing and kidnapping world leaders, supporting genocides in Gaza, launching military operations, threatening its allies of annexation or overtly interfering in their democratic process.
Edit: apparently 80000 employee workstations got remotely wiped. So not so I guess I wouldn’t call that minor.
Also that’s what I get for commenting before reading the story, they mention the Styker incident in the story lol
He doesn't strike me as the kinda person even using a local password manager; like keepass.
Somebody needs to find this out.
I doubt it was gmail support... surely it could not be via his phone sim, and if he didn't have two factor on; That would be so funny.
I'm tempted to check out the dark web or the telegram, but i'd rather not do either of those things.
(which might not be that unusual, he’s old enough to have opened a gmail account upon launch, before extra info hoops were put in place, and maybe he never touched his account config in the past 2 decades?
Not to mention ; you would assume he should have more than one device linked to the account and then that adds another layer, since Google will ask you " is this you trying to logon ". <-- that is the only way to get Google to do the unrecognized flow you mention.
If you are suggesting it was exposed and he didn't immediately randomise all his passwords.. WORDS FAIL ME
It's all security 101 the irony is immense...
if the US government / FBI need someone to give some talks on how to do security ...
Also it's entirely possible they only compromised a honeypot.
Considering their track record, that's actually more likely tbh
Making the password impossible to guess - how could that not be?
Since then you know you have a breach, as its randomised gibberish, if you then get the 2nd device asking " is this you trying to login " you can definitely know you are compromised....
I can't see your logic here, that isn't " theatre " ????
If you think that is theatre what is better then? Words and numbers.. easily brute forced.. Sorry can't agree.
I haven't seen what's in it either though, but I would not rule it out yet, especially when the FBI is involved - which love those tactics
When you're compromised, changing the password is obviously not theatre - but changing a password which is randomly generated with enough entropy is what's pointless theatre. A secure password is secure, esp. If you're already using a password manager then the act of changing isn't meaningfully increasing your security (unless you're aware that your password was compromised) because the way to compromise it is what...? Having a keylogger on a device you logged in on? Then the changed password will be just as compromised
So then you know that you have been rooted => If that fails to resolve it.
Reduce the number of vectors to know what you have to change asap. in this scenario you don't want to be guessing about how they did it.
The randomised gibberish just means you can rule out certain things. I can agree on part of what your saying but a string high entropy password, makes it harder to brute..
Many services don't really do that whole retries thing properly. So make it take as long as possible.
If you don't use a random gibberish your password can be cracked on any consumer device in a surprisingly short amount of time...
This way you can then focus on that a session token is probably how they got in.. It's the most common vector these days...
Anybody have a link? You know, for science ...
Edit: Apparently, just last week the DoJ snatched their domains: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-disrupts-i...
"Search harder" is a pretty unfriendly response to a request for a link...
There's no reason to post it directly. Their server is slow today even without adding lazy (ok, HN readers not interested in applying some effort to the matter) HN readers to the mix.
The first is almost impossible to screw up, though we're really trying on the last front.
That's really it. Not moral superiority, not technical ingenuity, not the indomitable American spirit. Just imperialist opportunism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wayne_Gacy#/media/File:Jo...
These rather evil and cruel bumbling fools are an insult to clowns and jesters alike. Maybe “fool” is the applicable term.
Because Google is too big to fail, all Gmail traffic is essentially whitelisted and they can't be bothered to do anything about it.
Why would they burn compute on it when they have zero incentive to fix the problem?
Then you get into the forgotten early 2000s era google "postmaster tools" to try to poke through the chicken entrails to divine the nature of your issue.
Seriously though I'm not so sanguine about local forces. Assuming the local PD is well trained seems like a big if, to say nothing of the risk of localized pressure or corruption. Eg would the local sheriff of a county with a very large employer be able to effectively investigate and bring charges against it? Being able to bring in federal LE brings a certain impartiality to those sorts of cases.
In any case I think you'd want to remove their enforcement mandate and instead refocus them on information gathering and rapid secure distribution, tailored forensic investigations, and on creating, monitoring and refining police best practices and training programs.
“Fools” is not only not an insult to clowns and jesters, but it’s far more accurate.
I would even say without any necessary religious perspective, these people are like the origins of the term and concept of “demons”, entities representing the most heinous and nefarious instincts and impulses of humanity so vile and repulsive that they had to be emanations of hell. How would you even makes sense of such evil behavior back then. They didn’t know what the dark triad of personality flaws was, narcissism, psychopathy, and machiavellianism (yes, I understand it’s an erroneous label, but it’s the one used).
Kudos to CNN for publishing a balanced take on it.
So I wouldn’t expect someone who uses Signal to automatically be the kind of person to use personal email for work.
> In some cases, Patel appears to have sent emails from his former Justice Department email address in 2014 to his Gmail account. TechCrunch found that the emails sent from Patel’s DOJ account also appeared to be authentic.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/02/us/politics/house-weaponi...
As is the case in any administration; let alone with an admin as vindictive as Trump's.
This "balanced take" warrants kudos?
We're not even pretending to lift the bar off the ground when it comes to mainstream media, are we?
It's almost as if the nation were being weakened on purpose.
Don't get mad, get Vlad. Or just prepare for the long-desired Rapture.[0] and which politicians seem to be working very hard to being about (the Apocalypse part, anyway)
[0] https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/29/us/iran-israel-evangelicals-p...
> Prophecy, not politics, may also shape America’s clash with Iran
So, is prophecy OK in a pitch deck? Asking for a friend.
Nor, however, can I take the statements of malicious actors at face value. They hacked a personal email address, but that does not mean "the FBI’s security was nothing more than a joke".
Lest us not forget bObama@yahoo.com or the IT guy who worked for the Clinton foundation who posted about bleachbit on recdit
Trump using yourefired as his Twitter password well into his 2016 campaign was amazing, too.
Eh, with how many people in the current administration seem to use out of band channels to communicate very important things who knows what else they located.
How many former officials used personal accounts about government business?
How many corporate executives communicate business via personal accounts to avoid legal discovery?
How many individuals communicate outside their main email accounts to avoid scrutiny or attribution?
Point is, nobody should feel superior or shocked that such things like this happen. I understand some enjoy the privacy of their perceived enemies being exposed, but IMHO, nobody should be happy about invasion of anyone's privacy.
We'd love to see all of those Epstein files.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-asked-russia-to-...
> "Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing, I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press," Trump said in a July 27, 2016 news conference.
The goals and ideals of politicians and powermongers rarely aligns with the majority of the population.
But let’s not confuse this Iran conflict with a legitimate war. Only congress can declare war and appropriate funds for a war. What we have is a rogue authoritarian executive that was incompetent enough to ignore military assessments and be manipulated by Netanyahu to strike.
People should protest like there is no tomorrow when la senile demagogue is destroying the international world order, free trade and freedom of the seas. That is not the same as rooting for the enemy!
Yeah, except we’ve had that for the entirety of this century so far at least.
Maybe one is the "enemy", and the others can be "less enemy" and "more enemy". So we're all enemies in reality, but some more enemies than others.
https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2026/03/06/iranian-and-iranian-...
—older #millenial (recently re-enlistable ha ha ha ja ha ha)
We’re doomed because the people are idiots.
https://www.amazon.com/Plot-Against-King-Kash-Patel/dp/19555...
What an absolute clown
But far more seriously, imagine the danger he has put this country into by firing so many critical people, some specifically and uniquely for Iran and Middle-East defense
Let's hope we don't get another 9/11 in the next 1000 days because they are completely unprepared and won't ever see it coming, maybe even on purpose
Why would anyone bother to attack us now? This entire administration has done more to make The US weak and vulnerable than any outside attacker could have hoped to accomplish. They can just sit back and watch rome burn
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_Uni...
He doesn't have a face for Fox News, so he'll have to try to parlay his past closeness with the administration for lobbyist money, but if he gets shunned by the people left in the administration, he's got to go back to his public defender job.
If Patel didn't do such thing here, the breach should only expose personal stuff, if he did, then it's much more of a problem, but either way this is a really clear example of why concern was raised back at the time.
Noem - habeas corpus definition she gave at the Congress hearing
Kennedy Jr - vaccines and the rest of his view on medicine
Now Patel's unhackable FBI.
I think the world has changed, and i really need to update my expectations of what is new normal. It is like in tech when paradigm shift happens, and you're either go with the new paradigm or get irrelevant.
For all his flaws, Camacho was a good leader - he recognised there was a problem, knew he couldn’t fix it and actively rallied the world around the one person who could.
This bunch of dipshits expressly denigrated the experts, refused to take the slightest precaution to protect themselves and others from a deadly virus and caused hundreds of thousands of deaths.
And that’s not even thinking about the industrial levels of fuckery and bullshit they’ve perpetrated over the last year.
Excess mortality in the US during the pandemic was around 1.2 million.
What Kennedy described during COVID is now the entire government from top to bottom. DOJ, FBI, DOD, FEMA, DHS, ICE, NASA, USPS, SSA etc etc, rotting from the head.
[1]: https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/robert-f-kennedys-grandson-w...
For example many attribute rise of totalitarianism back then in 20th century to the power of broadcasting radio and "formation of mass society". We have a similarly transformative factor now - social media. And with the new tech power - propaganda (sounds dated, today it is more like mind control) through social media and total surveillance plus AI "minority report" - we can get a hyper-totalitarianism orders of magnitude more totalitarian than those of the 20th century. And may be we're witnessing the birth of such a new world order.
However there is revolt amongst a good chunk of the fractured coalition that barely brought Trump into office.
Trump's Epstein coverup and sheltering of Ghislaine Maxwell took off the shine with a large number of people. The ghastly behavior around the deaths of major figures takes off more. Exempting producers of the pesticide glyphosate has taken off most of the MAHA coalition. And then, of course the wars, when he promised not to launch any and accused his opponent of doing exactly what he's currently doing...
It remains to be seen just how permanent this is, and whether the post-Trump US can be reattached to reality instead of reality TV, but I use hope.
I'm frankly far more concerned that the Republicans lose next election, and we get Democrats in power who then prioritize "getting back to normal" and once again utterly failing to hold accountable the utter BUFFET of mediocre wannabe dictators who brought us to the brink already.
I also hope. But I'd be lying if I said I thought it was rational.
"Our" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. There were many "ours" whose ways of life, governance, and society were destroyed on the road to making the Jan 6th thing possible..
It's crazy that you continue to push this narrative despite the entire "Russia-Gate" thing turning out to total bullshit oppo followed by Trump being currently at war with one of Putin's allies and having jailed another.
The evidence supporting this claim is what, he wasn't nice to Zelenskyy that one time (despite still financially supporting Ukraine in their war against Russia)?
These are authoritarian countries. Meaning that they don't have an official ideology, the real one that has people willing to die for it. If anything, they are focused on suppressing people and keeping them passive.
Iran is a notable exception here. They _are_ a totalitarian theocratic state, and this makes them more resilient. They are not governed by a single person but by ideology, even if it's unpopular among the people.
Authoritarian states are fragile in comparison. They struggle to survive the removal of their leader, especially the ones that had governed for a long time. The long-time ruler inevitably becomes the arbiter between the elites, a focal point of their undercover agreements.
And once the ruler is gone, the elites are now faced with a new round of struggles. So the smarter ones decide that perhaps it's a good idea to have some kind of collegial power, where people can discuss their disagreements rather than shoot each other. This usually results in the country becoming milder and not so carnivorous towards its citizens.
The USSR was a good example. Stalin died, and his successors decided that a new Stalin was not a good idea. Instead, they gave power to the Politburo, where the General Secretary was "the first among equals". The USSR did not become a human rights paradise afterwards. But it never had any more mass purges, deportations, or mega-projects built with slave labor of GULAG inmates.
Russia is totalitarian today. It transitioned from authoritarian to totalitarian slowly starting about second half of 201x and very quickly down hill during 2022 with the introduction of all those "discreditation" laws and the likes and especially with extreme hardening of application of such laws.
>Meaning that they don't have an official ideology, the real one that has people willing to die for it.
That is the point. In a contrast to being just a kleptocracy for the first ~15 years of Putin, Russia does have such an ideology at the state level today - "Russian world" (known outside as "Russian fascism" - "rushism") with Ukranian war (where at least several hundred thousands of Russians have already died) being one of the real-world implementations of that ideology.
It's really not. There is no ideology. There are no mass rallies in support of the government. No official sets of books, there's no "My Struggle" by Putin that everyone in the country needs to have.
> That is the point. In a contrast to being just a kleptocracy for the first ~15 years of Putin, Russia does have such an ideology at the state level today - "Russian world"
Not really. It's trying to do that, but it looks comical even for people inside Russia. Even true believers in "Russian World" are now either dead or silenced. Russian government systematically punishes _any_ true belief.
Another example to watch is Venezuela. I predict that it'll slowly transform into being a more open country, with at least some electoral freedom. It won't become a liberal democracy overnight, but it won't be completely authoritarian for long.
for example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzaoHPWfkbE
>No official sets of books,
new unified history textbook. The "Talks about Important" school ideology lessons. Putin's propaganda article on Ukraine history (of course no relation to real history).
>It's really not. There is no ideology.
the foundational ideology of a fascist state is "interests of state trump any and all rights/freedoms/interests of an individual". One can see that in Franco's Spain, Salazar's Portugal, Mussolini's Italy, and in Putin's Russia these days. Of course that was also the case in Germany in 1933-1945, yet the Germany went further - it was a fascism where state had a political nationalism as an official ideology. Similarly Russian state in recent years took "Russian world" as its official ideology, and thus now you see Lebensraum, Volksgemeinschaft, Blut and Boden and Dolchstoßlegende in the words and actions of Russian state.
>Not really. It's trying to do that, but it looks comical even for people inside Russia.
There is nothing comical here. One of the cornerstone of "Russian world" ideology is Russians being the master-nation (and by the way the words to pretty much that effect were even put into the Russian Constitution in 2020) while Ukranians are declared "inferior". The state TV openly talks about "Ukrainess" being a brain decease needing eradication (reminds a lot how "Jewishness" was talked about back then in Germany). It definitely lost any chance of being even remotely comical when they actually declared and started that eradication in 2022.
>Even true believers in "Russian World" are now either dead or silenced. Russian government systematically punishes _any_ true belief.
State ideology never requires true believers. Even more - true believer may happen to follow his/her beliefs even when state orders the other way - that of course would conflict with the basic tenets of totalitarian state.
That was electoral event with mandatory presence. This is nothing like Stalin's rallies where people themselves organized and attended, e.g.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eC6bzBTmmhU
> new unified history textbook. The "Talks about Important" school ideology lessons. Putin's propaganda article on Ukraine history (of course no relation to real history).
Yup. They are _trying_ but without at least semi-coherent ideology, it just looks comical. I suggest reading that textbook, it's just trash. It's badly written and is just a collection of unconnected facts. All it can teach is the late USSR norm: "Say what they want to hear, think what you want, and do what you actually need to do".
There can be no ideology in an authoritarian state, ideology binds the leadership. Khomeini in Iran can't just go to a gay party or eat during Ramadan. Putin (and his ilk like Maduro) does not want to get limited in any way.
> the foundational ideology of a fascist state is "interests of state trump any and all rights/freedoms/interests of an individual"
If you want to talk about fine details of political science, then fascism is not necessarily totalitarian. It can be practiced in a far-right authoritarian state. Nazism is indeed different, and it _is_ a totalitarian ideology.
Nazism had its foundational work ("Mein Kampf") and a doctrine fortified by a set of "scientific" proofs of German superiority. And they had plenty of true believers, including the actual core of the Nazi party. It also imposed binding restrictions on everyone. For example, nobody in the Nazi party could (openly) marry a Jewish person and expect to stay in power.
Putin doesn't want any of this. He loves that one day the US is the enemy number one for him, and the next day Trump is his best friend.
> The state TV openly talks about "Ukrainess" being a brain decease needing eradication (reminds a lot how "Jewishness" was talked about back then in Germany).
Yes, and these TV channels now have less popularity than gardening channels. This is another point of difference. In a totalitarian state, the ideology must be, well, _total_ and omnipresent.
The Russian government is trying to make sure the war stays as invisible as possible. Try to find any mentions of it here: https://yandex.com/maps/-/CPVwbS-t
> It definitely lost any chance of being even remotely comical when they actually declared and started that eradication in 2022.
Unfortunately, you don't need ideology to wage wars.
> State ideology never requires true believers.
It does. And that is the true difference. A significant part of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in Iran really sincerely believes that they're fighting for Islam. It's not _just_ a way for them to get into power to run protection rackets.
I expect cogent commentary about ritual magick by a Druid, but was a little surprised to find well laid out political commentary. I guess that was a failure of my imagination. Worth a read, even if you consider the topic bollocks. Greer sticks mostly to psychology and musings about using metaphor to engineer the mass imagination. Much less woo-woo than you might expect.
I mention it in support of the previous poster's commentary about the Dems messaging being irrelevant to most Americans. Seemed to me middle America doesn't love Trump as much as they weren't able to hear Harris address any issues they were concerned about.
I can recommend The King in Orange, What's the Matter with Kansas and Metaphors We Live By for more musings about such things.
Under MAGA, the state no longer pretends to be guided internally by reason and progress, but is instead founded on non progress and terror, a scorched earth approach to slashing government agencies, and the accelerated destruction of state institutions: rather than seeking to resolve societal crises, MAGA produces constant crises to feed off of, preferring to annihilate its own systems rather than stop the destruction.
Yes, the world has changed. We have entered a reality where insanity has become the goal of the authoritarians, ie the self-destruction itself is the actual end goal.
I see you updated your comment, but in a way that doesn't make any sense. Of course the pedophiles in the files will say it's a hoax.
Give them some credit, it’s been quite rapid.
He should have known better.
If Gmail isn’t secure, he should be using something else.
Doesn't it though? Especially when your profession involves the security of a nation and you can't even secure your own personal email account successfully?
Why not? Most professionals at larger organizations have to do security training. These kinds of attacks are far less likely to succeed on anyone who follows the basic precautions taught in such training. E.g., if he had MFA enabled on his account - as he certainly should have had - they would not have been able to compromise it externally, i.e. it would have had to be much more than his email that was hacked.
I don’t get the propensity some people seem to have for defending this shameful collection of incompetent criminals, bullies, and clowns.
If you work in security: it *absolutely does*, because 99+% of the time you are the primary contributing factor, whether from password reuse or downloading malware or clicking bad links or opening random emails or being susceptible to social engineering, etc.
If you are the head of a security organization: obviously you should not expect to retain that job, as your poor reputation is now an albatross around the company's neck.
If you are the head of the FBI: lol. lmao. what the actual fuck. my money is on someone spearfished him with an email subject about a book deal and he'll just click fucking anything.
Kind of defeats the purpose of it being a personal email don't you think?
If I had downloaded those emails, which I haven't because I know of no website that archives the internet, and if I had read them, which I haven't because that would be a breach of someone's privacy, then certainly I would have figured out that it contains no spicy state secrets. But why spend one hour assessing an information when you can get clicks by suggesting something bigger?
Those supposedly Iranian hackers surely know how to hack the western media to get attention.
I found it actually more informative to read on the sad history of the Dena, the ship whose victims this leak was dedicated to, so it's not been a complete waste of time.