6 ms·
Setting aside the obvious shock of the actual subject, I'm going to try the herculean task of bringing this back to being a HN-related topic... My guess is tha
by atonse 2y ago
Setting aside the obvious shock of the actual subject, I'm going to try the herculean task of bringing this back to being a HN-related topic...
My guess is that there is someone named Jeffrey Goldberg in the NatSec team (or high up, it seems like a common combination of first and last name at least), and likely that they meant to add him, rather than the EDITOR IN CHIEF of the Atlantic of all people. Could this be a UI/UX thing with Signal? (not differentiating between two Jeffrey Goldbergs on your contact list?).
- rnjesus 2y agoi think this is likely what happened, though i also find it just as plausible that he was fat-fingered or drunk-added into the group (i’ve been added to group chats accidentally by both these “methods”)
- outer_web 2y ago[flagged]
- jredwards 2y agoThere is someone with the same initials, not with the same name. I saw someone else point out a potential candidate here but I don't recall the exact name.
- nkurz 2y agoI've seen Jamieson Greer as US Trade Representative (same initials) and Jeffrey Kruse of the Defense Intelligence Agency (same first name) mentioned as possibly being the intended invitee.
- roughly 2y agoI mean, I expect the actual approved governmental secure messaging apps would make it much harder to accidentally add a journalist to the thread, so I don’t know if this is a Signal problem per se.
- runamok 2y ago100%. Let's not blame Signal where it's on you to only invite the proper potentially anonymous contact you want to communicate with. Very different goals.
- ttyprintk 2y agoSignal could fundraise on new flair for DOGE implants, cabinet members, and folks who have side-loaded FSB certs.
- ocdtrekkie 2y agoThis also highlights why the conversation being held on Signal is so bad. Imagine if "J G" expressed concerns about going forward with the attack. Making actual decisionmaking on go or no go over a non-classified system is insanely stupid.
- Vurdentium 2y ago[flagged]
- ineedasername 2y agoCan users in a group add/invite others in? My firth though was someone doing it on the sly, to leak deliberately.
- fzzzy 2y agoThis is what I started thinking last night. Any of the people who were added to the chat could be disgruntled and add a reporter to the chat to leak it. Is there even any log of who added who to a chat? There might not even be any way to pin it on the leaker. If the leaker had been involved in several such chats and knew the intent was to intentionally violate federal recordkeeping laws, not only would this accomplish the leak, but there might not even be any record of who caused the leak.
- LorenzoGood 2y agoI don't think that new people added to group chats are able to see past messages on signal.
- readthenotes1 2y agoGoldberg is not a fan of Trump I did not believe there was any way this was done accidentally...
- petre 2y agoHanlon's razor begs to differ. Trump sent his golf buddy Waltz to negotiate with Putin and he came back brainwashed with Russian propaganda. Russian psyops is either really good or some of these people in the administration are just morons.
- ineedasername 2y agoHanlon’s razor still has to account for why Goldberg was in Walt’z phone to begin with. If you’re going to butt dial or fat finger the editor of a publication into your super classified bombing plans I don’t think even Hanlon could reconcile it to random number dialing instead of just hitting the wrong contact.
- jajko 2y ago> Setting aside the obvious shock of the actual subject, I'm going to try the herculean task of bringing this back to being a HN-related topic... Is that so shocking? I watch often some forums on reddit related to combat footage, not frequently but enough to see various patterns. Before houthis started attacking shipping lanes, there were tons of videos of them kicking ass of Saudi military but way more often some subsaharan African mercenaries in their uniforms. Like, really badly kicking ass, smart ambushes, devastating results even on heavy machinery. The opposite side had almost nothing. Then with change of this, the tone and content turned 180 degrees. Almost always absolutely precise laser guided bomb strikes even if for 1-2 guys seemingly in the middle of nowhere, and a lot of them popping up all the time (to the tune of few every single day). Always titled cca 'Saudi air force doing XYZ'. Like sure, if you are clueless and don't know state of their army, their discipline, level of training and so on you can believe that. I didn't believe this since the switch was sharp, US is simply flying there for quite some time, together with Saudi air force. TBH I don't care, just sharing observations. No way we can know hard facts obviously, but its easy to connect those very few dots. A bit of failure from opsec point of view - if you do this stuff, at least keep it secret and not broadcasting to whole world so politicians can keep big smiles and grand statements, at least for clueless civilians who barely know where Yemen lies on the map. What others write it matches my observation - “Houthi PC small group”, seemingly short term group about specific attack. US attacks themselves are already happening for a year and something.
- nopelynopington 2y agoI think the poster was talking about the shock of the lapse in security, not the shock of houthi air strikes
- bsimpson 2y agoThis sounds less like a Signal problem than an information organization problem. Signal can only show what's in its datastore (your contact list). I just checked on Android - if you try to add someone to a group chat, it shows their name and profile pic. One potential Signal-side wrinkle is that it allows you to add people to a group chat who are in another chat you're in, but who aren't in your contacts list. There are strangers I was apparently at a dinner party with years ago who are eligible to be added to a group chat. If Jeffrey Goldberg has his Signal profile name set to JG and he wasn't in Mike Waltz's phone with a more specific name, that could lead to this mistake.
- petre 2y agoThen it's a good thing there's not an Abdul-Malik al-Houthi in the administration, as they might have included the wrong person on the private group chat.
- tehjoker 2y agoThey should add one then, because the operation described is illegal under international law and should not have been executed. They are punishing Yemen for resisting the US backed Israeli genocide in Gaza. It is ghastly.
- shitpostbot 2y ago[dead]
- ChuckMcM 2y agoEntirely possible. Which is why Government services for 'chat' explicitly don't allow contacts to appear who aren't already in the government. You've also no doubt seen email as it appears in Government inboxes with the big red banner "Came from outside, don't trust this" kinds of things will all the links disabled. Two things that are really troublesome. The first, as Josh Marshall of TPM points out, "No one on that chat asked 'Why are we doing this on Signal?'" which suggests that it isn't the first time Signal was used for 'off books' stuff and that perhaps there are many such conversations. The second is that the conversation was set up while one of the participants was in the Kremlin waiting to talk to Putin. So either 'Kremlin Free WiFi' or the local cell tower providing connectivity? Most pundits feel like this administration is trying to keep things out of FOIA and discoverability reach which has its own problems. So yes, tools for Government communications don't have this problem, hell even Microsoft Teams on their US cloud get better protection than this.
- mullingitover 2y ago> Most pundits feel like this administration is trying to keep things out of FOIA and discoverability reach which has its own problems. I don't think we need to ponder so hard about this. This administration is headed by a man who kept stolen TS/SCI national secrets in a bathroom at his house. A fish rots from the head.
- lbarron6868 2y agoI believe they meant to contact Jamieson Greer (JG), and maybe Waltz had both of them listed by initials? That's the leading theory.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- rattray 2y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamieson_Greer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamieson_Greer US Trade Representative
- Alupis 2y agoI don't use Signal, and am unfamiliar with the UI/UX. However, it seems more plausible to me that Jeffrey Goldberg is in someone's contact list from previous on-purpose leaks (to control narrative, etc, typical "anonymous sources say" stuff) - and was accidentally added to this group.
- Vox_Leone 2y agoIt could happen on Whatsapp. I've seen a lot of groups where everybody is an admin.
- Zak 2y agoWhen adding people to a chat, it shows the contact list from the device, with avatars. It is also possible to manually enter a phone number or username. It's very likely that senior government officials have a phone with journalists saved in the contacts. It's easy to imagine why there are rules against using the same phone for secret war stuff, yet here we are.
- GoblinSlayer 2y agoIt could be just a different profile.
- Zak 2y agoThat would solve the problem of accidentally adding journalists to chats, but phones belonging to high level officials are surely targets for the intelligence services of hostile nations. A phone that's used casually, taken to foreign countries, and not actively managed by security professionals is at high risk of being compromised given that threat model.
- snickerbockers 2y agoI'm putting my money on somebody fat-fingering the wrong contact. Maybe it's just me but I swear every phone I've ever owned has had extremely unreliable UIs, stemming from a combination of phantom touches being detected, and the phone moving buttons around as I'm trying to interact with it, as if it's on dialup line struggling to load somebody's Sonic the Hedgehog fanpage on GeoCities one gif at a time in 1996. And it's just phones too, this never happens on my PCs. Of course, none of this excuses the failure to verify the identities of everybody in their chat, the choice to use a (probably) unvetted app on a (probably) unvetted personal device, or any other of a number of basic opsec rules that should be obvious to anybody who is vested with the authority to order an airstrike on the other side of the planet.
- abeyer 2y agoAgree, though I 100% see it on PC too, when web pages try to override standard scroll behavior to do some visual trick at the expense of well tested platform and browser scrolling support.