Consider all the small business defense contractors who are held to the letter of the most minute security compliance requirements. They have to somehow meet everything, with very limited resources.
And then at the top of government, the most sensitive information is frequently handled without any care at all. Not to mention 19-year olds with flash drives barging into the most sensitive IT systems of the federal government.
> According to the Times, the private chat also included two senior advisers to Hegseth – Dan Caldwell and Darin Selnick – who were fired last week after being accused of leaking unauthorized information.
I understand the tactics of much of what Trump and his people do, even though I often disagree. I understand why Trump has DOGE moving quickly and breaking things; I understand why they show contempt for the law, rules, and customs - they want to destroy those things.
I don't understand the utter incompetence that often appears; an earlier example was team Trump's court filings challenging the 2020 elections but there is lots more. How does that furthering the neo-fascist / conservative / Trump mission? I suppose it's disruptive but if they just showed basic competence they would probably get away with much more.
When the only qualification you have for the people that you hire to advise you is absolute sycophantic loyalty, it isn't surprising when they turn out to be wildly incompetent.
Hesgeth has significant success in life and served as a captain in the Army (or Army National Guard). Those aren't sufficient qualification for Secretary of Defense, but they are for not doing stupid, self-sabotaging stuff.
Simlarly, Rudy Guliani was a lawyer and mayor, but the 2020 election court filings and arguments were idiotic. How is that possible?
I don't buy that they are idiots. I don't have an explanation, however.
Having credentials doesn't make you not an idiot. It's important to understand that you can be very educated or skilled in certain things but it doesn't make you good at everything.
That's a very narrow type of "significant success" and absolutely below the bar of qualification for Secretary of Defense, although easily clearing the bar to be considered an idiot.
I think you might want to read their comment again more carefully. Understanding and explaining someone else's terrible motivations for their terrible actions doesn't imply support.
No this is the distraction. The buffoonery and even the buffoons committing it all dilute the news cycle.
Accounting for the damage done will be nearly impossible and that makes it all the harder to fully reverse. That's one of the focuses here. Making it stick.
Folks that are more competent and considered are less likely to be involved in the first place. I think we can see that from Trump's first time in office. There were people politically aligned that fell by the wayside. Unfortunately incompetence appears to be the winning strategy.
Simply put, it’s a reflection of Trump’s own incompetence, or perhaps carelessness and his utter refusal to recognize and make use of expertise in others. I’m about halfway through “Lucky Loser” (Buettner & Craig) which traces his financial history. His disdain for objective data over “intuition” has always been alarming. I suspect his hiring for cabinet positions follows a similar carelessness.
Thanks for that ref! I've always maintained T is extremely dumb, He goes towards far left on the Dumb scale on the levels which you'd have never seen before. But, at the same time, he has all the luck which no one else has. Glad, I'm not the only one to see him that way.
Its a little more than luck. Trump has the best political instincts I have ever seen. He is able to control the narrative in a way dems can only dream of.
These are generic, and quite weak recommendations on the part of the CISA. And that was the excuse of the CIA director, while knowing very well these are for regular work not real-time battle plans.
Also those recommendations from the CISA recommend to use password managers...like Lastpass and 1Password and others, who had multiple security breaches.
If this is the type of Cybersecurity the US government applies to day to day work, its much easier to understand the field day North Korean and Chinese hackers seem to have all the time.
Your argument is that you know better than CISA? You didn't even read the linked article properly. These were not recommendations for "regular work", they were for "highly targeted individuals".
But let's assume you're right and it's bad advice. The objection in the OP isn't that there was a breach. It's just exploiting the perception that using Signal is somehow wrong, and suggesting that it is a sign that Hegseth is incompetent.
So it's rather important to know that using Signal is recommended by the government's own experts (even if those experts were wrong, hypothetically).
The concern is less about Signal, more about inviting journalists and immediate civilian family to a front row as it happens discussion about upcoming targets.
That and the deliberate lack of record keeping.
Attorneys suing the United States government over its use of vanishing Signal messages to coordinate military strikes last month in Yemen allege that new court filings by the government reveal a “calculated strategy” by Trump administration officials to evade transparency laws through the illegal destruction of government records.
The use of the private group chat—in which some messages were configured to automatically delete before they could be archived—was first revealed by The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, on March 24, after he was inadvertently added to the group by Trump’s national security adviser, Michael Waltz. American Oversight subsequently filed Freedom of Information Act requests over the chats and then sought a temporary restraining order in a Washington, DC, federal court in an effort to compel the government to salvage any messages yet to be deleted.
Hegseth has invited his wife and brother to other official meetings in person. He seems to be including them as part of his team; inviting them to the Signal chat probably wasn't a mistake.
> That and the deliberate lack of record keeping.
That part seems like speculation. How would we even know if records were kept? If records were kept, they'd be classified.
> Attorneys suing the United States government over its use of vanishing Signal messages
That seems very much like the concern is about the use of Signal, so the fact that CISA recommends it is very relevant.
I imagine he trusts his wife and brother more than he trusts anyone else with access to that info. Having staff he trusts is the opposite of disregard for security.
And since this info was leaked to the press, there is clearly someone with access who he should not have trusted. Do you really think the security breach in this case came from his wife or brother?
I guess that's a reference to some fictional "Wilhoit's Law", right? I had to look it up. Turns out it's just a partisan Internet snipe from a classical music composer originally posted in the comments on a blog[1].
That sums up the case against Hegseth nicely. Just a partisan attack without substance, sustained only by ignorance.
It kinda gets buried under the utter incompetence of these clowns but why are we even bombing Yemen? How is it acceptable to brazenly destroying other countries’ civil infrastructure? It’s a US president’s pastime activity since Obama
Obama started doing it as a concession to the Saudis for our policies in the ME. More recently Yemen has pirated ships as an immediate response to our support and funding of mass murder of civilians in Palestine. So the Yemenis are not blameless and there is some sort of valid reasoning for the attacks, but to be clear we are the instigator here.
Agreed, mine was more of a rhetorical question. The concession was that we allowed the Saudis to bomb them and further excarcerbate the civil war in Yemen. Now because they are blockading shipments in protest of the current onslaught in Gaza we are pummeling them for it. We sure do have a taste for war crimes in the region.
The other issue is that these bombing will accomplish nothing of value. These rebels have been bombed to the stone age by Saudi already. The cost of the sorties is vastly larger than anything the rebels are sending. Yes, some 'show the colors' is needed to assuage allies and merchants. It ends up being very expensive 'grass cutting'.
But real change there is going to require boots on the ground. And none of the players in the region want that. So, we just spend a $80,000 on a missile for a guy to shoot that doesn't make that in a year at a guy that doesn't make that in a lifetime.
Houthis are bombing unarmed civilian ships in the Red Sea. This makes zero sense for Yemen. But it does, politically, for the Houthis. Put another way, the extremists in one government are bombing another country because of what the extremists in that country are up to.
I remember in the one UX design class I took how they stressed the apocryphal "your grandmother is using this app" which in hindsight is sadly asking too much, apparently the bar should have been lower at "the secretary of defense is trying to start a group chat and not leak national security secrets".
Or they will spin it. The Democrats and othe Trump opponents have no power to communicate effectively outside their bubble, and Trump's team, the Republicans and the right wing know it. They can do anything and spin it successfully. It is the heart of their power.
I am convinced that I do not have enough data to be able to assess the "fittedness" of the entire Trump administration".
And that is despite (or perhaps because) I have spent way way to much time reading articles both from the Left and the Right.
If you only read one narrative, you might think you are getting the whole picture. When you read both [which is admittedly difficult - I sometimes blanch and force myself to read just to get the options open], you might find that there are hints how much is not known.
When you have a reason to be involved at some point, you realize that Gell-Mann was on to something
> who outside the most delusional among us is not questioning the unfittedness of the entire Trump administration?
I once saw the fall of great civilisations as tragedies. They’re not. After a certain point, after a certain generation, they’re not just inevitable. They’re deserved.
The American model of government and society may empirically not work. Hell, universal suffrage and electoral democracy may not be the fittest way to organise humanity.
I hope not. I don’t believe so, yet. But the evidence is mounting. Since the Industrial Revolution, the tendrils of fascism have tried at democracy (an institution broader than just elections) borne from the agricultural revolution. Fascism isn’t the answer. But maybe popular will is, similarly, a bad—if predictable—governing instrument.
China is making the quiet argument America made in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars. American history just doesn’t teach the consequences of O.G. Versailles.
I would request that you think about such situations a bit more before posting a public comment like this. Military security is first and foremost about protecting our armed forces. When the Pentagon plans an attack, it is vitally important that only our military knows about the plan and no-one else, especially the enemy.
It's only a matter of time that our maximally incompetent Secretary of Defense does something that leads to the death of our own armed forces personnel. E.g. the Houthi learning about an incoming attack and shooting down the pilots, or harassing and killing our Navy sailors patrolling the area.
Would add that out of the handful of fighter pilots I know, 100% of them are seriously considering retiring from the armed forces into private industry, something 0% of them (to the chagrin of their spouses) would have countenanced even a few weeks ago.
Private aviation is getting more dangerous too. The US is up to what, a crash a week, with more FAA cuts coming? (Maybe it's been better the last few weeks, or maybe it stopped making the news. Not sure which.)
Experts say it risks the lives of the pilots. Also, if Hesgeth and other officials are doing it with this particular information, we might be concerned they are doing it with other information.
Yugoslav spies residing near Italian NATO airbases informed the Yugoslav Air Defense HQ about lack of EA-6 Prowler electronic jammer and "Wild Weasel" anti-SAM aircraft launches during the late evening.
Interesting! Unfortunately, Wikipedia offers no citations for that story. (Also, I don't think it says anything about timing, only formation in the sense of what aircraft and capabilities were flying.)
I have an undergraduate understanding of this topic. I can solve for a firing solution against any target, stealth or not, with the details in these texts. Everything is vulnerable when coming into its own—jets’ aren’t at home on carrier decks. America would have been blessed to have a Hegseth in Berlin or Moscow during their falls.
The number innocent US citizens in Yemen dead due to US strikes exceeds US pilots killed. So the US dead lives calculus is complicated by the fact this is also Americans (government) killing Americans.
I don't know it's zero sum, but if the drone strike on a Yemen domiciled US citizen would have been anticipated I think that citizen would not have waited around to be blown up, to the extent a child has such agency.
> as a first-term Trump administration official and ex-CIA officer, I believe the reason these officials risk interacting in this way is to prevent their communications from being preserved as required by the Presidential Records Act, and avoid them being discoverable in litigation, or subject to a subpoena or Freedom of Information Act request.
not american, but wouldn't the victims in this case be 'every american'? i suppose it depends on whether you think PRA/FoIA et al. are important in holding governments to account or not.
Consider all the small business defense contractors who are held to the letter of the most minute security compliance requirements. They have to somehow meet everything, with very limited resources.
And then at the top of government, the most sensitive information is frequently handled without any care at all. Not to mention 19-year olds with flash drives barging into the most sensitive IT systems of the federal government.
Slight imbalance there, I would say.
Notice why Hesgeth's aids were fired:
> According to the Times, the private chat also included two senior advisers to Hegseth – Dan Caldwell and Darin Selnick – who were fired last week after being accused of leaking unauthorized information.
I understand the tactics of much of what Trump and his people do, even though I often disagree. I understand why Trump has DOGE moving quickly and breaking things; I understand why they show contempt for the law, rules, and customs - they want to destroy those things.
I don't understand the utter incompetence that often appears; an earlier example was team Trump's court filings challenging the 2020 elections but there is lots more. How does that furthering the neo-fascist / conservative / Trump mission? I suppose it's disruptive but if they just showed basic competence they would probably get away with much more.
When the only qualification you have for the people that you hire to advise you is absolute sycophantic loyalty, it isn't surprising when they turn out to be wildly incompetent.
Hesgeth has significant success in life and served as a captain in the Army (or Army National Guard). Those aren't sufficient qualification for Secretary of Defense, but they are for not doing stupid, self-sabotaging stuff.
Simlarly, Rudy Guliani was a lawyer and mayor, but the 2020 election court filings and arguments were idiotic. How is that possible?
I don't buy that they are idiots. I don't have an explanation, however.
Having credentials doesn't make you not an idiot. It's important to understand that you can be very educated or skilled in certain things but it doesn't make you good at everything.
Hegseth has years on record as a day drinking handsome face on day time TV who rushes into things without thinking ..
eg: throwing an axe and hitting a drummer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMrVdFnjEjs
That's a very narrow type of "significant success" and absolutely below the bar of qualification for Secretary of Defense, although easily clearing the bar to be considered an idiot.
anyone who goes to college can become a captain in the army. Its honorable sure but not a sign of competence.
Privileging ideology and loyalty over reality and competence causes massively sub-optimal results.
Imagine you ordered your Waymo to pretend its location, direction and velocity were what you wanted them to be, ignoring its sensors.
It's a myth that the fascists of the 1930s made the trains run on time.
At least you are honest in your tacit support for some of these clowns actions.
I think you might want to read their comment again more carefully. Understanding and explaining someone else's terrible motivations for their terrible actions doesn't imply support.
No this is the distraction. The buffoonery and even the buffoons committing it all dilute the news cycle.
Accounting for the damage done will be nearly impossible and that makes it all the harder to fully reverse. That's one of the focuses here. Making it stick.
Fascism rewards loyalty above competence.
Folks that are more competent and considered are less likely to be involved in the first place. I think we can see that from Trump's first time in office. There were people politically aligned that fell by the wayside. Unfortunately incompetence appears to be the winning strategy.
> I don't understand the utter incompetence
Simply put, it’s a reflection of Trump’s own incompetence, or perhaps carelessness and his utter refusal to recognize and make use of expertise in others. I’m about halfway through “Lucky Loser” (Buettner & Craig) which traces his financial history. His disdain for objective data over “intuition” has always been alarming. I suspect his hiring for cabinet positions follows a similar carelessness.
> Lucky Loser
Thanks for that ref! I've always maintained T is extremely dumb, He goes towards far left on the Dumb scale on the levels which you'd have never seen before. But, at the same time, he has all the luck which no one else has. Glad, I'm not the only one to see him that way.
> he has all the luck which no one else has
Well, the tagline of the book is "Inheritance. Fraud. Deceit.", so "Lucky" might not be the right word.
Its a little more than luck. Trump has the best political instincts I have ever seen. He is able to control the narrative in a way dems can only dream of.
This is what happens when 99% of hires are DEI hires… :)
I'm surprised no one here has mentioned that the government's cyber security agency CISA recommends the use of Signal, as of December 2024:
> Apply these best practices to your devices and online accounts.
> 1. Use only end-to-end encrypted communications.
> Adopt a free messaging application for secure communications that guarantees end-to-end encryption, such as Signal or similar apps.
https://www.cisa.gov/sites/default/files/2024-12/guidance-mo...
These are generic, and quite weak recommendations on the part of the CISA. And that was the excuse of the CIA director, while knowing very well these are for regular work not real-time battle plans.
Also those recommendations from the CISA recommend to use password managers...like Lastpass and 1Password and others, who had multiple security breaches.
If this is the type of Cybersecurity the US government applies to day to day work, its much easier to understand the field day North Korean and Chinese hackers seem to have all the time.
https://www.upguard.com/blog/lastpass-vulnerability-and-futu...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/daveywinder/2024/08/07/critical...
Your argument is that you know better than CISA? You didn't even read the linked article properly. These were not recommendations for "regular work", they were for "highly targeted individuals".
But let's assume you're right and it's bad advice. The objection in the OP isn't that there was a breach. It's just exploiting the perception that using Signal is somehow wrong, and suggesting that it is a sign that Hegseth is incompetent.
So it's rather important to know that using Signal is recommended by the government's own experts (even if those experts were wrong, hypothetically).
The concern is less about Signal, more about inviting journalists and immediate civilian family to a front row as it happens discussion about upcoming targets.
That and the deliberate lack of record keeping.
~ https://www.wired.com/story/heres-what-happened-to-those-sig...Hegseth has invited his wife and brother to other official meetings in person. He seems to be including them as part of his team; inviting them to the Signal chat probably wasn't a mistake.
> That and the deliberate lack of record keeping.
That part seems like speculation. How would we even know if records were kept? If records were kept, they'd be classified.
> Attorneys suing the United States government over its use of vanishing Signal messages
That seems very much like the concern is about the use of Signal, so the fact that CISA recommends it is very relevant.
Oh good, his disregard for security is flagrant rather than incompetent.
I imagine he trusts his wife and brother more than he trusts anyone else with access to that info. Having staff he trusts is the opposite of disregard for security.
And since this info was leaked to the press, there is clearly someone with access who he should not have trusted. Do you really think the security breach in this case came from his wife or brother?
Really going hard on the Wilhoit, huh?
> Really going hard on the Wilhoit, huh?
I guess that's a reference to some fictional "Wilhoit's Law", right? I had to look it up. Turns out it's just a partisan Internet snipe from a classical music composer originally posted in the comments on a blog[1].
That sums up the case against Hegseth nicely. Just a partisan attack without substance, sustained only by ignorance.
1: https://slate.com/business/2022/06/wilhoits-law-conservative...
It kinda gets buried under the utter incompetence of these clowns but why are we even bombing Yemen? How is it acceptable to brazenly destroying other countries’ civil infrastructure? It’s a US president’s pastime activity since Obama
Obama started doing it as a concession to the Saudis for our policies in the ME. More recently Yemen has pirated ships as an immediate response to our support and funding of mass murder of civilians in Palestine. So the Yemenis are not blameless and there is some sort of valid reasoning for the attacks, but to be clear we are the instigator here.
Agreed, mine was more of a rhetorical question. The concession was that we allowed the Saudis to bomb them and further excarcerbate the civil war in Yemen. Now because they are blockading shipments in protest of the current onslaught in Gaza we are pummeling them for it. We sure do have a taste for war crimes in the region.
The other issue is that these bombing will accomplish nothing of value. These rebels have been bombed to the stone age by Saudi already. The cost of the sorties is vastly larger than anything the rebels are sending. Yes, some 'show the colors' is needed to assuage allies and merchants. It ends up being very expensive 'grass cutting'.
But real change there is going to require boots on the ground. And none of the players in the region want that. So, we just spend a $80,000 on a missile for a guy to shoot that doesn't make that in a year at a guy that doesn't make that in a lifetime.
> real change there is going to require boots on the ground
Or bombing their sponsors. I’m not an advocate of war with Iran. But it makes more sense than blowing up desert mountains.
> why are we even bombing Yemen?
Houthis are bombing unarmed civilian ships in the Red Sea. This makes zero sense for Yemen. But it does, politically, for the Houthis. Put another way, the extremists in one government are bombing another country because of what the extremists in that country are up to.
To stop the houthis from sinking/pirating container ships.
Not since Bush and Iraq's non-existent WMDs? Or Vietnam or countless other conflicts got involved in under the Monroe doctrine?
Oh look it's flagged...this is HN way of saying we are clean on OpsSec... :-)
This guy would be fired at any bluechip company in America for leaking internal coms this way.
I remember in the one UX design class I took how they stressed the apocryphal "your grandmother is using this app" which in hindsight is sadly asking too much, apparently the bar should have been lower at "the secretary of defense is trying to start a group chat and not leak national security secrets".
He’s not really trying not to leak secrets, though.
Not trying at all ...
from sources common to both The Guardian article and the parallel New York Times article.At this point, who outside the most delusional among us is not questioning the unfittedness of the entire Trump administration?
Arguably 45% of the US by job approval.
Those watching and reading Fox News who will likely completely the ignore the story.
Or they will spin it. The Democrats and othe Trump opponents have no power to communicate effectively outside their bubble, and Trump's team, the Republicans and the right wing know it. They can do anything and spin it successfully. It is the heart of their power.
I am convinced that I do not have enough data to be able to assess the "fittedness" of the entire Trump administration".
And that is despite (or perhaps because) I have spent way way to much time reading articles both from the Left and the Right.
If you only read one narrative, you might think you are getting the whole picture. When you read both [which is admittedly difficult - I sometimes blanch and force myself to read just to get the options open], you might find that there are hints how much is not known.
When you have a reason to be involved at some point, you realize that Gell-Mann was on to something
> who outside the most delusional among us is not questioning the unfittedness of the entire Trump administration?
I once saw the fall of great civilisations as tragedies. They’re not. After a certain point, after a certain generation, they’re not just inevitable. They’re deserved.
The American model of government and society may empirically not work. Hell, universal suffrage and electoral democracy may not be the fittest way to organise humanity.
I hope not. I don’t believe so, yet. But the evidence is mounting. Since the Industrial Revolution, the tendrils of fascism have tried at democracy (an institution broader than just elections) borne from the agricultural revolution. Fascism isn’t the answer. But maybe popular will is, similarly, a bad—if predictable—governing instrument.
China is making the quiet argument America made in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars. American history just doesn’t teach the consequences of O.G. Versailles.
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I would request that you think about such situations a bit more before posting a public comment like this. Military security is first and foremost about protecting our armed forces. When the Pentagon plans an attack, it is vitally important that only our military knows about the plan and no-one else, especially the enemy.
It's only a matter of time that our maximally incompetent Secretary of Defense does something that leads to the death of our own armed forces personnel. E.g. the Houthi learning about an incoming attack and shooting down the pilots, or harassing and killing our Navy sailors patrolling the area.
I highly recommend reading Secretary Gate's memoir about being the Secretary of Defense for Bush Jr. and Obama. There is so much at stake that very few people ever talk about. https://bookshop.org/p/books/duty-memoirs-of-a-secretary-at-...
Would add that out of the handful of fighter pilots I know, 100% of them are seriously considering retiring from the armed forces into private industry, something 0% of them (to the chagrin of their spouses) would have countenanced even a few weeks ago.
Private aviation is getting more dangerous too. The US is up to what, a crash a week, with more FAA cuts coming? (Maybe it's been better the last few weeks, or maybe it stopped making the news. Not sure which.)
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Experts say it risks the lives of the pilots. Also, if Hesgeth and other officials are doing it with this particular information, we might be concerned they are doing it with other information.
One of the most famous recorded surface-to-air missile kills on a stealth aircraft was enabled by spies reporting formations and timing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_F-117A_shootdown
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zolt%C3%A1n_Dani
Interesting! Unfortunately, Wikipedia offers no citations for that story. (Also, I don't think it says anything about timing, only formation in the sense of what aircraft and capabilities were flying.)
I have an undergraduate understanding of this topic. I can solve for a firing solution against any target, stealth or not, with the details in these texts. Everything is vulnerable when coming into its own—jets’ aren’t at home on carrier decks. America would have been blessed to have a Hegseth in Berlin or Moscow during their falls.
The number innocent US citizens in Yemen dead due to US strikes exceeds US pilots killed. So the US dead lives calculus is complicated by the fact this is also Americans (government) killing Americans.
... not that it's a zero sum situation as you've laid it out.
It's reasonable to be critical of both details, but not to hold them in any sort of balance.
I don't know it's zero sum, but if the drone strike on a Yemen domiciled US citizen would have been anticipated I think that citizen would not have waited around to be blown up, to the extent a child has such agency.
> I'd point out it is a victimless crime
is it though?
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/apr/05/why-tr...
> as a first-term Trump administration official and ex-CIA officer, I believe the reason these officials risk interacting in this way is to prevent their communications from being preserved as required by the Presidential Records Act, and avoid them being discoverable in litigation, or subject to a subpoena or Freedom of Information Act request.
not american, but wouldn't the victims in this case be 'every american'? i suppose it depends on whether you think PRA/FoIA et al. are important in holding governments to account or not.