It is barely an effective CYA strategy.
I am willing to believe this is 90% incompetence and male stupidity (I am not going to waste my time backing this shit up) because anything that would require the entire agency to be complicit is way beyond the ability of any group of people. I am more than willing to believe there were probably quite a few messages that would be of interest that got flushed in the ill conceived and ill-performed “data migration” to the delight and joy of a select group of traitorous miscreants.
After more than 2 years, I finally got Covid and have been quite sick for the past week so I have had more than my share of rumination time. The one thought I keep having is that no matter what happens, whether Trump or any of the other big players get indicted, the J6 committee has done more of a public service for us than any other congressional committee in recent memory - perhaps even standing out as such in any historical context. In a town that runs on apathy, inertia, greed, cynicism and hypocrisy, the committee’s work has been not only thorough and competent but actually served up in a way that modern Americans can digest and understand. Seeing people like Liz Cheney working side by side with a Jamie Raskin has been nothing short of inspirational.
Big diff between your government superiors noticing you’re selling secrets to Iran and turning that info over to the FBI, versus FBI just suspecting you might be selling secrets to Iran and, without probable cause, ransacking your government office and seizing servers and such. I’m pretty sure the latter requires a search warrant.
In normal circumstances, I would tend to agree. And it still might just be incompetence. But mere negligence as the reason for substantial amounts of data getting lost just days after receiving multiple preservation demands from Congress and FOIA requests from reporters in the immediate aftermath of the most serious SS security threat in at least four decades seems at least somewhat improbable to me. And it certainly warrants some heavy duty investigation to confirm or refute the excuse.
No, Trump’s use of his personal phone was 100% terrible. A gift to every foreign intelligence service. Throwing up your hands and letting Trump’s conversations be heard by anyone with the appropriate tech is not “dealing” with the situation.
I know you like to take contrarian stances, but do you really believe that a President using a personal unsecured phone is a good idea?
No. But I remember when Obama came in and they basically forced him into the stone age, rather than figure things out and how to get him the tech.
Unlike most of the service industry, which figures out how to deliver what the customer wants, the IT folks like to sit in their ivory towers and tell the minions, from peon to president, what they can’t do.
I’m not mad at a paradigm shift and IT people being forced to actually serve their customers.
Google’s cloud auto-backups everything on my Android phones. Three generations of them.
J6C needs to enlist and loose digital forensics experts on the USSS. The idea that there’s a way to delete and purge their entire system is contemptable.
Carol Leonnig said they traditionally claim the text portion of their phones as ‘personal’, only used to arrange drinks & lunch*. They have a link where they are supposed to upload anything they deem ‘important’. But zero enforcement of that. A culture of impunity.
Where’s the Benghazi & Her Emails crowd when we really need them?
*how much ‘drinks & lunch’ arranging do you need to do during an insurrection??!!
That’s a good question and I have another serious question: Does the Secret Service have the expertise to wipe those records so they’re really gone to people like the FBI who know how to recover stuff people only think is wiped? My understanding is if the drive isn’t physically destroyed there can still be retrievable information on it. That could be wrong but it’s what I’ve heard.
Okay, but I think we can agree that organizations that require a much higher degree of security than your typical workplace, are going to be slower to change methods and hardware that have worked in the past.
Anyway, Trump’s use of a personal phone isn’t even in the category of IT paradigm shifts. It’s a failure of Congress to make laws that cover operational security for high government officials, including for their own members who use both personal phones and government-issued phones.
There was no law anyone in the WH could refer to, that would force Trump to give up his personal phone use. Like many of the things Trump exposed as weaknesses in our system, it was one of those “gentleman’s agreements” that assumed a President would understand why that was a bad idea and comply willingly.
On-another-note; reports are coming in that yesterday’s over-hyped “star” witness Garrett Ziegler (of Hunter Biden laptop infamy ) has put on quite a Shit Show and pled the 5th at least 100 times; still can’t figure out why the Committee would place any significance in his testimony.
