Iran-linked hackers breach FBI director's personal email
reuters.com
reuters.com
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.
https://www.npr.org/2016/09/08/493133413/colin-powells-ways-...
Of course that pales in comparison with the practices of the GWB White House:
https://www.newsweek.com/2016/09/23/george-w-bush-white-hous...
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.
> 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.
Signal is one of the most secure communication platforms out there, but it is obviously not immune to human error or social engineering.
That might be true amongst the communication platforms available for the average Joe. It is definietly not the most secure communication platform available for someone high ranking in the USA government.
> it is obviously not immune to human error or social engineering
Nothing is immune. But there are systems more and systems less prone to these issues.
EDIT: I actually misread the comment; I think we're likely in agreement. My bad.
Now look at where we're at. It really is wild. Right, wrong, or indifferent. How far we've shifted is absolutely wild.
Im sure they are all doing it...
that just means the operation is a dismal failure -- nothing to see
this really undermines iran hackers' claims regarding 'big things' on trump administration
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.
* The contents of Dan Rather report on GWB was true. There was one document which was sketchy, but the whole report didn't hinge on the one document from an officer's office. (E.g. Ex-senator Ben Barnes's interview is reasonably indicting: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/transcript-barnes-on-bush/)
The media did fall down though. Only one outlet went to the the Officer's
secretary (who was still alive) to ask if she had typed the document.
She looked at it and said (summarizing here) that it wasn't the document
she typed, but it was the same contents.
It's a mess, and the only way out of it is probably limits own media ownership.
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.
I mean, if I can send troops, I would bet on sending troops, wont I?
those gamblers who aren't Trump or any 'event initiators themselves' must be idiots of extraordinary quality
https://www.amazon.com/Plot-Against-King-Kash-Patel/dp/19555...
this iran hack is a dismal propaganda failure...
nothing much to see I guess
if you're digging amazon FOR them, what's the point of their activity?
and by "digging", yes it's digging because is that link THE FIRST RECOMMENDED THING from amazon?
gosh I didn't even say "trump cabinet is the best and perfect"...
...damn did you get like 300 on SAT reading?
He sucked up to get his position and realized - through the fbi - that the cabinet and administration is crazy
The media works for the same people both parties do. If capital wanted to manufacture Democrat-aligned outrage they could easily do so overnight.
But it's a complete mistake to think about politics in a partisan manner at all. Of course the democrats won't ever fight for you. Doing anything decreases chances of getting elected again.
Whatever force will depose capital won't come from the two-party system.
Fewer outlets serving larger populations means stricter control over messaging, and a better propaganda base.
The fact that they released it publicly means that the most embarrassing part of it is just the hack in itself.
There is no evidence released to the public directly linking those two men to specific sex acts by name. There is unnamed evidence released by the US DOJ specifically describing the assault I described in the prior comment. Again, none of this is theoretical, conspiracy, or conjecture. It’s in the documents released by the government that the government has confirmed as authentic.
In the case of both Clinton and Trump, there is no evidence that either of them visited Little St. James, and plenty of evidence otherwise - for example, Epstein even says so about Clinton in an email.
> It’s in the documents released by the government that the government has confirmed as authentic.
The documents are "authentic" in that yes, a real schizo did really tell the government he heard it secondhand 30 years ago that this happened and also that he discovered Hilary Clinton was behind the WTC bombing. (For some reason, people like you always leave that part of the bombshell revelations out.) I am for total transparency generally, but this whole saga has been a major disappointment for me in that the level of public discourse is so lazy and low that its clear that in a purely utilitarian way, it would have been better to not release it. Hopefully long-term the sacrifice of many people whose reputations are being destroyed over little or nothing is worth it. Every crank call about celebrities is being treated as gospel.
No, wait:
In 2008, Epstein reached a plea deal with prosecutors after the parents of a 14-year-old girl told Florida police that Epstein had molested their daughter at his Palm Beach home.
Correct, the vast majority of his criminal activity appeared to be in his Palm Beach home and in New York, where he recruited high dozens to hundreds of high school girls for his personal sexualized massages. It actually appears only a very small amount of his illicit activity ever took place on the island, which makes it all the more ironic that's what the conspiracy theorists focus on.
I was willing to be more than openmminded about the conspiracists' mass trafficking ring (ie, beyond the two people charged) angle, but the ironic thing is about the Epstein files is they revealed it was almost all smoke. Of course, in the conspirational mindset, all contradicting evidence is actually, secretly, when you apply the correct hermeutics, even more damning, or else evidence of a coverup.
and a few massive conspiracy shaped holes - eg: the references to missing content regarding Trump and a few other. Oh, and the shortfall between what has been released Vs what has been indexed, the black paging, and the hints from those that have seen but are sworn to not tell about that which they have seen but cannot recount.
Still, at least we seem to agree that PedoIsland is a misdirect when it comes to determining who did what to whom and where.
I can't see Pam Bondi coming clean here anytime soon.
The people who were victimized by anyone other than Epstein and Maxwell could come forward at any time, just as dozens of Epstein's victims have. They have some of the highest-powered civil lawyers in America, hundreds of millions of dollars in settlement funds available, and vast swaths of the country behind them.
That they haven't should tell you something.
The people who have come forward about Epstein's abuses have little to worry about because that man is dead and he's a perfect scapegoat for all the the other ultra-rich who took part in the abuses.
And again, millions of dollars are available from settlement funds if Epstein was involved, there’s already some of the best lawyers in the country begging to represent you, and there’s people volunteering to pay for your security needs.
You’re also ignoring the many victims that came out before Epstein died.
This is just an excuse to perpetuate the conspiracy theories. It doesn’t hold water. And of course if anything was released from super secret “the files” they’re definitely still covering up, they’d become publicly known.
Surely you see how this line of reasoning is identical to that of any other conspiracy or moral panic.
They've been caught trying to do Trump related reactions at least three times now.
The whole thing falls apart the moment you examine the actual evidence and think about it. It’s really disappointing that smart people on even this forum get wrapped up into this junk.
Did you know that Epstein's hard drives were removed by a private investigator, and that the FBI and DOJ never had them to begin with? They were removed before they were searched by law enforcement.
https://abcnews.com/US/house-oversight-panel-seeks-testimony...
https://www.businessinsider.com/jeffrey-epstein-safe-diamond...
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/03/27/epstein-private-...
This isn’t even news, it was a big deal back in the day and is covered extensively in the report about the DoJ’s conduct. Read the reports and consider the context; this is a nothingburger. But because the conspiracy theory has been started, everything that happens will be read as supporting it. Epstein had very good reasons for destroying evidence of his own deeds without any need for anyone else being involved. (The evidence the DoJ collected was very weak and they weren’t sure it would sustain a prosecution, which is partly why they were glad to go with a plea deal.) You’re coming in primed to believe there’s already a conspiracy about something else altogether.
Did you just ask, in a post about evidence being taken and keep from investigators, why there isn't evidence?
> This isn’t even news, it was a big deal back in the day and is covered extensively in the report about the DoJ’s conduct.
Then why is it news FROM TODAY/YESTERDAY?
---
In a March 19 deposition with the House Oversight Committee, Darren Indyke, Epstein's longtime personal attorney, said he learned after Epstein's 2008 conviction that the hard drives were in the possession of Riley Kiraly, a private investigations firm.
"The Committee requests that you make yourself available for a transcribed interview to provide insight into the contents, removal, storage, and location of materials removed from Mr. Epstein's Palm Beach home," the letter to Riley says.
source: https://www.businessinsider.com/jeffrey-epstein-safe-diamond...
You can CTRL-F "computer" and get 92 matches indicating their importance:
https://context-cdn.washingtonpost.com/notes/prod/default/do....
It seems that the only "news" is the bit that you mentioned about Indyke/Riley. Indyke apparently was not involved in the Florida case. At least he isn't mentioned in the linked DOJ report among Epstein's counsel.
I don't know what it would take for it to be deemed necessary to seize the equipment that the prosecution failed to get almost 20 years ago.
The sibling commenter addressed the timeline, but you still seem to be missing the point: harddrive or no harddrive, there would have been witnesses - at least the victims- of the grand conspiracy theory involving other men. Instead, you're limited to Maria Farmer (26 when she was victimized by Epstein, rarely seen in public because she makes wild accusations about random people including the journalists interviewing her - she is currently convinced that Whitney Webb murdered a chef) and Virginia Giuffre (underage victim and confirmed fabulist, who also, for the record, said Trump did nothing wrong and endorsed his Presidency). There never was any evidence of the organized conspiracy of elites part of the Epstein story. Read the testimony! Again and again the women say there were no other men.
You're concluding that computer equipment Epstein had every reason to hide from law enforcement to cover up more concrete evidence of his solicitation of minors actually contains evidence of a totally different thing that nobody was claiming at the time - a grand sex trafficking conspiracy involving powerful billionaires and politicians. But there's no reason to think that's the case.
At the end of the day, if any of this happened, these women could come forward. They're entitled to millions in settlement money already (and you don't even have to go to court to get it - its an administrative process, not a judicial one; and it's big money, Annie Farmer alone got at least 1.5 million), and naming additional names would open the door to even more! They already have some of the best civil attorneys in the country! An unrelated case has already shown that you can win a civil suit against the most powerful man in the country, even with no evidence besides your testimony! That they have not, combined with the total lack of evidence, suggests they don't exist.
But because the mindset behind this is conspiratorial, it will always be "there IS evidence - it's just being covered up!". And no amount of releases will ever be enough - because they can't show it to be true, which just proves there's a coverup! It's never-ending.
Many of these women did not want to go to court. They did not want to talk to media. They did not want to relieve the trauma of these events. Money is a huge motivator for some people but not all. Imagine decades after the event, you've settled down. Maybe you have a career or a family. Kids. Do you want to drag them through that? Have their spouse get asked questions at work or jokes made to their kids by other kids? Of course not.
When the DOJ leaked many of their names, that was a threat. That was a threat. I could also imagine many individuals involved in this wouldn't know the names of the abused. Why would they? Now they do, for many. That's enough to get pressure on people to shut the fuck up. Not all the names were released!
I'll leave you some notes:
--- Source: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/epstein-survivors-felt-...
---
"Six survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse and two members of another accuser’s family said they felt "degraded" during Wednesday's contentious House Judiciary Committee hearing"
---
[Bondi] "She was specifically questioned about why released files were heavily redacted and why several survivors' names were not."
---
"At one point, Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., asked Epstein survivors in the room to stand up and raise their hands if they hadn’t had the opportunity to meet with the Justice Department. Every single one raised their hand."
---
"Bensky has said she was 17 and a budding ballerina in 2004 when Epstein sexually abused her at his New York City mansion.
“I felt like such a ghost walking through Epstein’s mansion.
I felt like there were so many people who saw me.
There were so many people who should have spoken up," Bensky said."
---
Re: Conspiracy
I mean...
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/doj-name...
---
Source: https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2026/02/flawed-epste...
"Despite the scale of disclosures, experts warned of serious compliance failures and botched redactions that exposed sensitive victim information, with harm often occurring before records were withdrawn. Accountability has been limited, with only one close associate under investigation. Under international human rights law, States are obligated to prevent, investigate and punish violence against women and girls, including acts committed by private actors."
"“The failure to safeguard their privacy puts them at risk of retaliation and stigma. The reluctance to fully disclose information or broaden investigations, has left many survivors feeling retraumatised...”
“Any suggestion that it is time to move on from the ‘Epstein files’ is unacceptable. It represents a failure of responsibility towards victims,” they said.
“Resignations of implicated individuals alone are not an adequate substitute for criminal accountability,” the experts said. They welcomed steps by some governments to probe current and former officials and private individuals named in the files. They called on other states to do the same.
---
Final note: > there would have been witnesses
Yes, and they don't want to admit to being there because of the liability.
Also, are you suggesting we should convict people and impeach them based on anonymous accusations? Do you believe in the Sixth Amendment? Surely you don't believe that we should be able to destroy notable figures based on anonymous denouncements? There is no universe where anything happens without people coming forward!
You're caught in a bind though, because the conspiracy relies on all these victims of other men existing, but mysteriously not coming forward, unlike the dozens of the victims who say only Epstein was involved, so you have to come up with fictitious reasons why they aren't materializing. What do you even want? Presumably, it's for these shadowy pedophiles to be taken down...but they can't be taken down without the victims coming forward, files or no files!
This is particularly ironic that, instead of endlessly litigating a conspiracy theory that's fairly well exhausted, there is open child prostitution going on right now (instead of 30 years ago) in LA on "the Blade", and we are doing approximately nothing about it, and not nearly enough people care. Imagine if all the energy of these conspiracy theorists was focused on stopping something actually happening now.
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
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!
https://www.tabletmag.com/the-scroll/articles/march-25-kash-...
Or that he was participating in actively covering up the Epstein crime portfolio.
Maybe it wouldn’t be enough to get American citizens in an uproar, but the rest of the world certainly pays attention to these things.
I can honestly not come up with a single example of the distinction between 'zanmen and women' being useful besides this specific case where you really want to be able to say in 1 sentence that you identify as the same group as someone else, but that that group is subdivided into 2 groups, and you're talking about the sub-group that you're specifically not a part of.
So does Telugu.
మనము (manamu) - including the listener మేము (memu) - excluding the listener
I'm pretty sure most other Asian languages have them too.
Well over here, 30% still approve of it and they will openly praise how much money DOGE "saved us." It's quite eye opening talking to them. They live in a totally different reality
Any time they act like they disapprove of something the administration is doing, like the aimless war, they will change their tune in a few weeks when Fox gets it's talking points down.
^ 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.
The Iranian regime is doing much better so far, relative to where they should be after a joint military attack from the US/Israel and maybe even relative to where they were just a few months ago.
The previous Ayatollah was 86 and had multiple bouts of pancreatic cancer. He was on deaths door, Iran was destabilizing with bouts of protest and repression, the regime itself suffered major military blows, and a potentially rocky and fractured transition was imminent.
Thanks to the war, the regime survived a transition, and seems consolidated around the son of the former Ayatollah, who's entire family was killed by our strikes, and the US seems largely impotent as Iran chokes off a large portion of the worlds oil supply and strikes at energy assets in the ME.
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.
China is for sure providing material for drone and rocket manufacturing as well as air defense systems.
https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2026/01/28/how-china-aims-to-bloc...
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
In all likelihood his upbringing is what made him this way.
What, like J.Edgar?
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.
I have heard other units getting pre-mobilization / warnings.
https://www.stripes.com/theaters/middle_east/2026-03-27/82nd...
(This would not nearly be enough troops for large scale ground conflict, but it might be enough to go into the island tunnels looking for drones and ballistic missiles while the US tries to hold open the straight by force for... However long that takes)
After the war in Ukraine things are very different. US troops are not safe as long as they are reachable by an FPV done, i.e., the enemy has to only make it ~20km to US positions. Given the area and terrain in Iran this will be happening all the time. So any troops positioned on Iran's territory will be under constant attacks by FPV drones. This means heavy casualties.
But even if the US forces will manage to clear the FPVs, this is still not enough, because there are dozens of other types of winged long range drones, the most famous being of course Shahed. They are less precise and not so deadly for the troops. They are also much easier to intercept. But that means that you effectively can't set up a safe stationary base, because it will be attacked by hundreds of drones from hundreds of miles away 24x7. There is not enough interceptors to stop that.
This means that a new approach will have to be used by US armed forces which they never tried before. This guarantees heavy losses on the initial stage which will raise a real political shitstorm back home. It looks like the current administration doesn't particularly care about that, but chances are they will not be able to contain the consequences.
That's why A-10s are patrolling the 6 mile wide straight for 2 hours a flight. They can take out the larger Iranian drones much cheaper than any other platform we have. The small dones can't get very far and the US is exceptional at electronic warfare. But that doesn't really change anything, it just maintains the status quo of the straight being too risky for oil tanker insurers.
Ultimately, even if the US goes into the island tunnels after the ballistic missiles and larger drones, it would take huge sums of money to try and keep it open militarily for... who knows how long.
One comment though.
> The small dones can't get very far and the US is exceptional at electronic warfare.
There is currently one county in the world which is exceptional in electronic warfare against drones - Ukraine. Then there is Russia. Everybody else is leagues behind, including US. Without real combat experience and proven technologies ready for deployment all your money and fancy equipment are worth nothing. THAADs have the most advanced radars, did it help them in UAE recently?
In Ukraine they basically had to build a network of mini-factories with 3d printers and ad-hoc repurpose of old weapons right behind the front lines. This is to be able to counter Russian drones by enabling fast iteration on EW. US has nothing like that in current doctrine and it’s not clear if this can even be deployed in an expeditionary corps model.
I’m not saying of course that it’s impossible for US to open the straight by military means or to defeat IRGC otherwise, it’s just that it’s a very hard task which got even harder after advancement in drones.
Where do you think they are getting that data?
Jfc
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
I am sure the FBI will do that for my family too right?
Or we’re more than family photos hacked?
But it feels million years away.
It's interesting to wonder how you get out of a spiral of incompetence and border-line (to be polite) corrumption at the highest level.
Putting those people in charge was quick ; sure, a future administration could put them out quickly enough ; but how long will there be decently skilled people willing to take those positions ? How long until the only ones who want to put their toes in the swamp are those who really enjoy the mud ?
Put differently: can a liberal democracy organize a "just" version of a purge ?
HRC's secret email server and the leaked Kash Patel emails couldn't be more different.
The first one is, in the words of a federal District of Columbia judge: "one of the gravest modern offenses to government transparency". [1]
The second one is the malicious leaking of some private emails. These emails are frankly none of our business (unless you are part of Kash Patel's family or friends).
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2018/12/07/politics/clinton-emails-l...
There is a difference for sure between hosting your own email server and using it for official government communications and having your own personal email address used for personal communications.
The issue that seemed to completely disappear related to the use of Signal messenger for official white house communications seems more aligned to the email server issue. It was reported heavily at the time what the reporting requirements were and that they would have to submit the full chat histories within 30 days or something like that to stay within the law. I never heard whether that actually happened or not, the story just died.
It's being down voted because it's attacking a strawman. No one is saying they are the same exact thing. It's that you will see people activatley defending this as a big nothingburger when in truth, it's still a security breach that has the potential to lower our defenses.
"Normal" people are stuck in two modes, either they ignore it or they need to descend to the same level. I put normal in double quotes since I honestly don't know what's normal any more. I would like to believe the majority of the kind of community we used to have here on HN does not operate at this level of discussion.
To some extent this is a reflection of broader polarization, tribal behavior, and social media manipulation. Even Reuters IMO have chosen a sensationalist headline and seem to have an agenda here. There's an easy tell - can you tell the political orientation of the author by reading the article/comments etc.
This topic could be an interesting one and we could actually have some good discussions about security. Instead it degenerates into what's essentially a political bashing flame war.
That's not what the "but, her emails..." reference implies. It's not saying they are the same thing. It's saying that the amount of attention and excitement made about her emails was a show. And you know it was a show, a mockery, because with cases like this where something equally bad happens and nothing will come from it. Same thing with the signalgate from last year, or all the previous times the Trump administration used private emails or private communication for government business as well.
So, no. The fact that it is not the same is immaterial. Which makes the rest of your comment immaterial.
How is this case equally bad? It's just his private email being hacked, he did nothing wrong.
There are probably about a thousand things you could point to in the Trump administration that are worse than Clinton's private email server, but this isn't one of them.
But it is literally no different than what the Trump administration did [0] after all of their finger pointing. Idiocracy runs deep across both political camps.
[0] https://www.politico.com/news/2024/12/18/federal-officials-n...
you get out when the thing dies because these kinds of organizations always end the same way; competence is usurped by sycophancy and flattery until there's no one left to keep it functioning and it collapses under the weight of it's own bullshit.
hopefully, there will be something to salvage but the longer these folks are in charge the bigger the splash will be when they finally bottom out
take your inability to draw a clear-as-day conclusion and state it plainly and multiply it by another ~50M "centrists" who continue to believe that staying "not political" and "avoiding the news" is a viable strategy to just wait the problem out.
until the checked out cowards realize that strategy isn't going to work, things will continue to get worse.
"no politics" might as as well be the second maga slogan.
Both sides are culpable here. In the US, both parties were literally claiming that the elections were stolen (Republicans in 2020, Democrats with the since-debunked 2016 Cambridge Analytica scandal). Other countries had different issues, but the shape of the problem was basically the same everywhere.
If you keep being called bad words for years for no reason, seeing your side do the exact same thing, no surprise you tune out.
> Simultaneously, the Republican-led Senate and House Intelligence Committees conducted their own investigations into the Russians' activities. The Senate committee's report, released in five volumes between July 2019 and August 2020, found that the Russian government had engaged in an "extensive campaign" to sabotage the election in favor of Trump
I'm also curious how you think Cambridge Analytica was debunked. I don't see any mention of debunking on their wikipedia page, but I do see facebook being fined billions for it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...
I say "kinda", in the sense that "it matters to people interested with dispassionnately learning about the subject", not "it will convince anyone to change their mind".
This is not even remotely true.
One party broadly mobilized a country wide effort to overthrow an election and usurp the incoming duly elected government, culminating in a violent attack on congress itself.
The other party had concerns about foreign interference in our elections.
This guy, while incompetent, had his personal email hacked.
Important distinction.
On the other hand, Patel's emails "appear to show a mix of personal and work correspondence". We already know that people in government - this isn't a partisan point: folks of all factions do it - use private communication channels to discuss "official business" specifically to avoid mandated disclosure and archival requirements. If (and I emphasize "if", because we don't yet know if this was the case), if Patel was doing that, and especially if he was sharing / discussing classified material, then the facts of the case would bump right up against what Clinton and Powell did.
Trying to distinguish between the two acts is like splitting hairs on the same arse.
Just makes you look silly.
Hard to imagine what would constitute "full blown corruption" based on this standard?
Absolutely, it happened before on January 30, 1933
This is how all of them started.
But once you have a liberal democracy, people will refuse another purge. For very good reasons.
A) Used for Official business as secretary of state
B) Full of national security strategically important decisions.
C) Improperly secured.
FBI directors personal email feels less cutting in that context.
Breaching my personal email (or my own mail server, I host one) will tell you literally nothing about my employer except perhaps the conversation from when I joined and my own employment contract.
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...
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.
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.
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.
The reality is that officials are targetted by various states looking to get some leverage, so not properly securing an email account is a serious failing unless it's part of a wider honeypot scheme. Personally, I'm not convinced that the current U.S. administration is competent enough to plan ahead and implement honeypots.
It's not really much of a debate as it's widely acknowledged that letting enemy states get access to the email accounts of officials is a really bad idea.
Most of the time, actual harm is the most important issue. In this case because that office holds so much centralized power and authority over many aspects of American life (domestic law enforcement, some foreign law enforcement, domestic counterterrorism / counterintelligence / counterespionage, and security clearance background checks for all VIPs), the means are equally as important as the ends.
And I would throw in a wrinkle: what evidence is there that the dumps were not stripped of the most useful blackmail material? If I were in charge of a hack operation, I would dump the low impact stuff to show the world how much of a joke this guy’s security is, but only after I already used the best stuff to blackmail him months ago.
A successful blackmailer doesn't want the security breach exposed or investigated, they want to continue to use the victim.
Patel specifically bypassed security clearance protocols for Bongino and other staff he hired. His top priority isn’t protecting government secrets — it’s to take down what he thinks is the part of the US government that resists bending to Trump’s will.
And you are wrong that the FBI shouldn’t care about securing the Director’s private life information. Anything and everything can and will be used to blackmail him by foreign governments, criminals, political actors.
I highly doubt the first public dump of messages would include the most compromising content — that’s like handing away a maximum severity zero day for the most common OS in the federal government. There’s no logical reason to do that for free, so I suspect the really incriminating/ salacious stuff was withheld for private use.
And if the FBI didn’t enable the high security setting on the FBI Director’s private email account, they might not have known what, if any, compromising materials were in there.
Also, they do head up the main counterintelligence effort of the US.
How the mighty have fallen.
I have 2 family members who are/were special agents for the FBI. Much of their job is harvesting evidence to build cases by spying, which frequently comes more in the form of “spying” in the way we saw in The Sopranos.
The FBI is also the premier counter-espionage organization within the US, so it is tasked with spying on suspected foreign / turned spies.
It is much more than a spy network, but it is exactly that as well.
That claim deserves a source.
We don’t know how much the Trump political officials managed to avoid those onboarding requirements. It has been widely reported that at least some of them bypassed eligibility requirements and polygraph. It’s probably not a huge leap to assume these same people were not required to consent to these forever-after-searches.
He shouldn’t be FBI Director and he shouldn’t have been in the DNI or Secretary of Staff for SecDef either. All of those are high positions of responsibility and require tremendous OpsSec. This guy’s first act as FBI Director was to waive most of the investigations into his staff to bypass security clearance checks.
Sorry if I’m not disagreeing with you. Sarcasm is a bit hard to identify these days.
This is just a sad story of a partisan hack who failed upwards into one of the most sensitive and powerful offices in the nation, simply for being a loyal sycophant, not merit.
- Chief of Staff to the United States Secretary of Defense (2020-2021)
- Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence (2020)
maybe google doesn't advertise about this much?
Are you someone who would be inclined to look into something like that?
Kashmir Patel went out of his way to bypass security protocols for onboarding his political hires (for the US’s premiere domestic intelligence service!). If he wanted to be secure, all he had to do was not get in the way of the FBI’s natural processes.
Also, this wouldn’t have happened if POTUS had hired someone with relevant FBI experience instead of a political hack.
well what percentage of highly-rated FBI people have actually enabled that feature?
did FBI had some internal recommendation to enable that feature?
FBI isn't NSA people...
dude at least you should have brought an internal recommendation memo targeted all fbi people, not "but fbi has this and this division..."
lets say your college have astrophysics and other big departments. Are you really expert on those areas? Can you expect all highly-regarded professors to know most things from other departments? Do all 'competent' art professors know about astrophysics?
I would, yes. Maybe a director in the Small Business Administration is lower on the target list of gov officials that would need to be concerned, but certainly anyone in the Departments of Defense, Justice, Homeland Security, State, Transportation, Treasury, and probably Nuclear Regulatory Commission, for sure.
> BECAUSE NSA IS part of the government ?
I don't know why multiple times in this comment section you allude to the NSA as being the only Federal agency tasked with any sort of cyber security responsibility, that is just plain wrong.
>you should have brought an internal recommendation memo targeted all fbi people
Yes, because I have access to any and all internal memos provided by the FBI to their employees. Internal memos are by their very nature are internal, so are generally not available for public consumption.
Also, your higher ed example is terrible, because as someone with a work history at a flagship state university's IT department, I can assure you that we provide all sorts of "memos", trainings, and tools to combat cybercrime, including special onboarding sessions to ensure new hires are protecting themselves and the university. We don't depend on the Art and Physics departments to make sure they keep their faculty 'in-line' following best practices in cyber security.
The Director of the FBI is an immensely powerful position, unlike the average secretory/assistant in some FBI field office. Even the FBI Special Agents are taught OpsSec in depth at FBI cadet school and it is reinforced at every additional relevant training.
The reason Patel wasn’t is because he’s unqualified to be in the department and was a political hire who almost certainly bypassed the normal security protocols when he was hired. The FBI has an entire detail, not unlike that of Secret Service, who both secures the physical person / transport of the Director, but who also maintains intelligence about threats and OpsSec, which should cover this specifically scenario. In other words, Patel didn’t need to know about this security precaution himself — he just needed to not stifle his team from protecting him.
Really?
It's ten million of something, or (currently) about $11,000 US dollars in money.
You might also see "lakh" which is one hundred thousand of something, or about $1100 when it's used to describe money.
Now you know.
well even I haven't seen/heard about this...
maybe google should advertise more?
(or... maybe I don't look important to google :( ?)
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.
• 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.
• It's them or Barron.Kudos to CNN for publishing a balanced take on it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/02/us/politics/house-weaponi...
> 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.
So I wouldn’t expect someone who uses Signal to automatically be the kind of person to use personal email for work.
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?
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...
Archive: https://archive.ph/ILFFH
Download: https://link.storjshare.io/raw/jxoxwyp7qosgdwldereecudqpbva/...
Password: handala
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.
These rather evil and cruel bumbling fools are an insult to clowns and jesters alike. Maybe “fool” is the applicable term.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wayne_Gacy#/media/File:Jo...
“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).
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.
It couldn't happen to a more corrupt person and organization!
The Handala group has promised even more.
Get it while it's hot!
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Nobody knowing anything about Russia would make such a gross mistake like you've just made. It is like you'd be discussing physics problems while not knowing Newton's laws.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_in_Russia
"Television is the most popular medium in Russia, with 74% of the population watching national television channels routinely "
As it happens you just don't know what you're talking about. Most of the other things you said about Russia is similarly just incorrect. It looked strange to me how and what you've been arguing about, and in good faith i thought that we're discussing while each being well informed, and may be you just have different opinion/view and may be a bit less understanding and information than me. Well, it happens you just don't know basically anything about Russia. In such a case instead of arguing, you should just look for and consume the information, and not waste other people's time with uninformed arguments.
I'm Russian with parts of my family in Russia.
> It is like you'd be discussing physics problems while not knowing Newton's laws. > "Television is the most popular medium in Russia, with 74% of the population watching national television channels routinely "
Yes, and according to MediaScope, a company that tracks the TV ratings in Russia, "Evening with Solovyiev" is at the 78-th place: https://mediascope.net/data/
You might not know this, but Russia still has multiple TV channels, and people can (and do) switch between them.
This is both good and bad news. Good news is that there are very few actual rabid nationalists in Russia, and once the war is over, Russian population will gladly return to normality. The bad news is that the war will be over only once Putin dies or is deposed.
>"Evening with Solovyiev" is at the 78-th place: https://mediascope.net/data/
again, it sounds like you don't know what you're talking about. Have you ever watched the Russian TV in recent years? They repeat the same stuff with slight variations again and again. It doesn't matter whether it is Soloviev today or Soloviev yesterday or Skabeeva or Sheinin or any other spawn of Goebbels there - they all would make him proud - their message reaches everybody in Russia.
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.
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.
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]
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...
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.
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.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/foreign-hacker-2023-comprom... (reported last year)
Perhaps a little embarrassing related to communications security but come on, of all the people's email to grab they had to grab one of the most boring individuals? Ice hokey, cigars, classic cars...? Is that taboo in Iran? It is not taboo in the USA.
Be careful Iran. The country you are targeting know how to use AI and can make ultra realistic videos and images of your leaders doing unspeakable things and upload them to decentralized platforms. Such things can not be erased from the internet.
This hack of his emails is hilarious, though. And it made my day.
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.
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.
He should have known better.
If Gmail isn’t secure, he should be using something else.
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.