The Trump Presidency 2.0
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What they did is illegal. Period. Hillary did it, Biden did it, dozens on both sides of the aisles have done it.
Nothing will come of this, but to dismiss it or make light of it is a bit hypocritical. They broke the law.
Do you think it's actually misinformation, or are you saying the White House should just message as if it was?
No, I get it. I just wanna be the hypocrisy mirror for this little outrage carousel. Yep, Hillary- illegal. This text chain (once we verify)- illegal. I already said I’m outraged already clutched the pearls and said they should be fired, I don’t care who gets it. While we are at it, ring the reporter up for sedition for sharing national secrets. What happened to Hillary? Nothing. What will happen to the reporter? Nothing. That’s the precedent. Game is what the game is at this point.
I’m saying the White House should follow the lead of the last admin. The texts seem to be authentic, reporting leads me to believe they are- but as we’ve seen these last 4 years, what’s true doesn’t actually matter. The framing does.
BL- meh. Moving on. Nothing will happen even if it should, miss me with the outrage.
I'm assuming for a moment that the initial reporting is 100% accurate--which it almost never is.
How do people in the national security apparatus communicate digitally? I assume the SECDEF and many others have classified phones or whatever. Is it possible that the SECDEF thought he was communicating on the red phone, but put it out on the green phone? I don't know... trying to come up with ways that this isn't a gigantic self-own. We're the US, and we can't do better than the same public app that I use to communicate with members of my shooting club? Pretty pathetic.
I hope there's more to this story that the colossal f-up it appears to be.
How do people in the national security apparatus communicate digitally? I assume the SECDEF and many others have classified phones or whatever. Is it possible that the SECDEF thought he was communicating on the red phone, but put it out on the green phone? I don't know... trying to come up with ways that this isn't a gigantic self-own. We're the US, and we can't do better than the same public app that I use to communicate with members of my shooting club? Pretty pathetic.
I hope there's more to this story that the colossal f-up it appears to be.
It’s no fun unless everyone plays the game. Cmon, it’ll be fun.
People will pretend to care about “muh standards and norms and ‘tegrity” and then I’ll remind them the entire elected body they’ve supported are the ones that lowered the bar, then we will have some pithy sideline fence sitters come in to say ‘nu uh’, but they don’t wanna help they just wanna dunk on ‘not their side’- it’s our favorite game!
Mannnnnn I didn’t even want to get into this.
Let’s say you’re deployed to Africa. Let’s say you’re doing FID and some other things, and the only way you contact your partner forces through WhatsApp. They don’t have or use anything else and they also don’t know what the crap OPSEC is. So you end up on about 200 WhatsApp chains on your personal phone (because the command in its infinite wisdom didn’t get burners for you), and a lot of the information on there is at least sensitive.
Oh I forgot to mention that for all your ‘encryption’ and double speak and tradecraft none of that matters because the entire architecture you’re talking on is Chinese owned and operated because they own the cell service in Africa.
Now pretend all the teams do that in every country in Africa in every command to this day. Every flight schedule every show time every team engagement.
And it all flows through a single point- China- and out into the world.
Anyway here’s wonderwall.
I agree framing matters, I disagree they should follow the last administration's playback.
Seems like this is a good chance for Trump to demonstrate he is serious and holds his staff accountable, unlike the last adadministration.
Never been cool enough to have a red phone, so maybe I'm wrong; wouldn't Signal still be improper for that case? There's nothing that would prevent me from having my Signal account on a red phone also installed on a civilian desktop.
From a political strategy optic- lol nah. Hilarious to even think about. “Literal Hitler showed leadership; World Heals” read the Times.
Conversations like this remind me of Hiroo Onoda. Just fighting for a set of ideals, alone, while the rest of the world moved on, and the ideals you’re fighting for long gone. It feels righteous to some, I’m sire1 but you’re just a dude alone in the woods, winning a game no one else is bothering to play.
He should issue one statement, less than 240 characters.
“Mistakes happen they’ve been counseled moving on.”
Locksteady
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Less can't, more won't, I say.
I also doubt their using it to communicate wouldn't have been as big an issue if they also weren't using it to exchange classified information about an imminent counterterrorism op or, say, the identity of one of their own spies.
Yeah, I'm not saying it'll make Dems happy. It's more so a show to the base, those who are center left/right, and those who sat out last election that he's the "professional".
I think even your ending statement would fulfill that for most of the above listed group.
It wouldn’t even make this board happy, let alone ‘the base’ or people on the fence.
No one is protesting here. This won’t even rise to the level of anyone calling their elected official and call for accountability.
It’s virtue signaling. “I care about OPSEC and this is a CRIME!” they typed, taking no further action other than calling each other lil names.
If there were secrets shared on a non-approved message app and you got caught? Cool, we all agree that’s retarded. Counsel everyone and hold that non-whistleblower protected reporter to the same standard we all hold for Snowden. Information was true and verified? Yep. Did you use the system correctly? Nope. Ok, you’re guilty of sedition (in Snowden’s case it’s treason). Ring him up, counsel or fire whoever made the group chat.
Now what if I told you *every politician and appointed official is fucking retarded and pretending they should be held to your own personal standard (by either defending OR SUPPORTING these retards) makes YOU retarded*? Cause that’s what this is.
I'm not sure. I imagine if the device is secure, the means of comms on it are also secure. Otherwise why use it?
Many years ago, when my father was in charge of TFO, he had a secure phone at our house (STE? STU? IDK). I didn't know what it was, he never talked about it, I never saw him use it, and I didn't know what it was until years later when I was in the community. So this type of thing has been around for a long time.
I never had a cool-guy comms device either. Back when I was in JSOC, we had unclass pagers. The pager went off, we came into the office and got on JWICS.
You don’t even need 2 phones anymore, @Marauder06 . I had a ‘work phone’ for most of my career, and even the 2 shop would tell you it’s as secure as the network you’re talking on.
All that talk about WICKR earlier- secure messaging approved by AFSOC, on your personal phone, on a network owned by China.
I want to make this super clear- in no way am I using the argument “This happens all the time”. That’s a dumb reductive argument. But I am also not looking at this situation as if it exists in a silo completely and totally separate from the long history of OPSEC/sensitive material mishandling.
Again- burn everyone to the ground over this. I do not care. Strip their clearances, find another SECDEF, put people in jail. None of that will happen, so the question I’ll ask (like a million times in different threads) is this.
Why do you care about this now as if the sky is falling? Could it be you don’t like the people doing it and you were totally willing to extend all the grace in the world over this sort of thing until about 48 hours ago when this story broke?
All that talk about WICKR earlier- secure messaging approved by AFSOC, on your personal phone, on a network owned by China.
I want to make this super clear- in no way am I using the argument “This happens all the time”. That’s a dumb reductive argument. But I am also not looking at this situation as if it exists in a silo completely and totally separate from the long history of OPSEC/sensitive material mishandling.
Again- burn everyone to the ground over this. I do not care. Strip their clearances, find another SECDEF, put people in jail. None of that will happen, so the question I’ll ask (like a million times in different threads) is this.
Why do you care about this now as if the sky is falling? Could it be you don’t like the people doing it and you were totally willing to extend all the grace in the world over this sort of thing until about 48 hours ago when this story broke?
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I pour "whataboutism" all over my pancakes...
...I sweeten my coffee with it
Hell, when I go TDY - I use it as hand lotion.
Whatabout that time when your guy did the same thing as my guy that did the same thing as your other guy that did the same thing as my other guy that did the same thing as those other guys that did that thing?
That shit was FUCKED up - except for the times when my guys did it for all the right reasons.
I'm outraged - for sure - I just don't care anymore.
...because it's MY guys doing it now
Rinse and Repeat
...I sweeten my coffee with it
Hell, when I go TDY - I use it as hand lotion.
Whatabout that time when your guy did the same thing as my guy that did the same thing as your other guy that did the same thing as my other guy that did the same thing as those other guys that did that thing?
That shit was FUCKED up - except for the times when my guys did it for all the right reasons.
I'm outraged - for sure - I just don't care anymore.
...because it's MY guys doing it now
Rinse and Repeat
- Joined
- Sep 12, 2012
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- 13,655
I’ve worried about the sky falling under every president I can remember, and I’ve never been one to “extend all the grace” just because it was “my guy.”
I voted for this guy knowing what I was signing up for (or so I thought), and I still believe I’m better off than I would’ve been with the alternative.
Sometimes, the emperor has no clothes—Trump and this administration have been exposed from the start—and I find it baffling that calling that out gets me labeled as disingenuous or hypocritical.
No one here will ever convince me that if Kamala and her team had won and made the same decisions, especially this last debacle by our Secretary of Defense, many of the same people defending Trump now would be losing their minds with outrage and finger-pointing.
It’s still okay to hold our own side accountable. Or are we so insecure that doing so embarrasses us just because it might make the other side feel like they scored a point?
Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.
Well that’s what happens when you make the tactical error of defending politicians. They’re (I mean this literally) all garbage people. We just get caught up in grading them on a sliding scale from “wants to murder children” to “slept with a Chinese operative for two years and was hard compromised” to “insider stock trading and threatening to kill journalists on video.” It’s all very nuanced grading we give to some of the worst people, held to a standard no one satisfies.
I agree with the ‘sides’ part of your argument, but I disagree with the intent. It’s not left/right, it’s the American people/the entire elected (and unelected) government.
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