Even without going to this signal usage as a comparison. Musk’s DOGE department is literally doing the exact same thing that Hillary did, but with more security holes.

Conservatives have no real principles. They happily engage in behavior they criticize - it’s all just about political attacks, its never about substance.

I keep seeing Hillary’s server brought up to highlight the red team’s hypocrisy, but there’s some introspection to be had for us as well on that topic.

Hillary’s email server was one of many stepping stones on the path of increasingly fucked infosec. Now, the vast majority of neanderthals foaming at the mouth over her emails only gave a damn about it because of the (D) next to her name, but those idiots getting angry at it for the wrong reasons doesn’t mean it wasn’t a big deal.

My perspective on all that when the story was first breaking: I was fairly new e-nothing junior enlisted medic in the USAF. The closest thing to classified info I ever dealt with was ‘confidential’ medical shit covered by HIPAA, and like people’s social security numbers. That’s it. But even with zero-access to military secrets, at the absolute rock-bottom of the chain of command, I still had to take lengthy infosec courses every year (or every quarter? idr) to ensure I knew how to identify and properly handle classified information. Fuckups in infosec are NOT tolerated: like if I took a single page of classified info home without authorization, that’d be a court martial / potential jail time / stripped of rank / dishonorable discharge level offense. Then we have a fucking Secretary of State - someone who handles classified info all the time and should be a subject matter expert on the do’s and don’ts of it - running her own shady-ass server away from the prying eyes of FOIA, claiming to not recognize classified indicators?? Then before anything could be done about it, we got the whole bleach-bit and hammer-to-harddrives scene, so some nice destruction of evidence as the cherry on top.

100% we should have crucified her.

Just like we should have crucified the dipshits before her using private email platforms like gmail or some shit to send or receive official / classified communication. Every one of those fuckers knew better.

Then Trump happens and makes everything prior, Hillary and all, look like fucking j-walking compared to the scale and blatancy of his crimes. ‘Crucified’ doesn’t even begin to describe what needs to happen to that fucking traitor.

…but the dismissiveness regarding the email server does kinda strike a nerve for me - she fucked up BAD, and we dropped the ball by not holding her accountable, as that left the door open for dipshits like Trump to continue the trend of worse and worse infosec.

Again, it’s peanuts compared to Trump - I hate writing shit like this for even the flicker of a possibility of drawing a false equivalence. There is no equivalence here. But I really wish we’d collectively change our tone about handwaving the ‘buttery males!’ shit because it is hypocritical to do that and then get pissy about the red team’s conceptually-similar-albeit-orders-of-magnitude-more-severe fuckups.

At the end of the day, we should expect our leaders to do their job and do it correctly. If they don’t, then get angry - it’s your security they’re playing with. None of them get the benefit of the doubt, regardless of which color their campaign stickers are.

[/rant]

I won’t argue against that either, the whole administration is just pure incompetence.

While what they did is really really stupid, and funny given how much of a stink was made over Hillary’s emails. On a technology level, I would trust Signals encryption way more than I would whatever random email server software was running that server that Hillary had. If they were going to do something as stupid as they did, they picked about the best tool to do that stupid thing with that you could choose.

How is Signal unsecure?

Possibly, but by private company owned chat? Also while in a foreign country known to be hostile to the US. If you apply this logic it smacks of lack of thought towards control of sensitive information which is pretty much the incompetence this administration has shown since well a long time.

To be clear, the Signal protocol has not been cracked. Russia has been using phishing attacks to get victims to link their signal account to a device Russia controls.

Please don’t spread FUD. That memo does NOT claim Signal has been compromised by Russia.

The actual claim is that Russia has used deceptive e-mail style tactics to trick people into authorizing a malicious “linked devices” request. This is a social engineering vulnerability, not a technical one.

There are lots of protests going on, as well as lots of angry people going to their representatives’ town hall meetings and/or calling and sending messages to them. Unfortunately it’s Congress who has the Constitutional power to act and they’ve abdicated. The Repubs are fully on board with the trump regime and the Dems are in the minority and have very little power. Most of them are just wringing their hands as usual. There are 3 branches of government and two are fascist-ruled. The third (judiciary) has no actual power if the other two don’t abide by their rulings.

It’s hard to know what more the average person can (legally) do right now.

our big problem is too many people hooked into propaganda machines like they’re in the matrix. too many people on bluesky, twitter, facebook, lemmy, and at their local mcdonalds watching mass media news, all without connecting to anyone else who can help them muster resistance or help them direct their feelings.

the revolution will not be televised. people need to go outside and start talking to their neighbors to dislodge them of the notion that this is politics as usual