The best part is that, in trying to comply with this guidance, the government chose Telemessage to provide the message archiving required by the Federal Records Act.
The only problem is that Telemessage was wildly insecure and was transmitting/storing message archives without any encryption.
Military personnel are currently only allowed to use Signal for mobile communications within their unit. Classified information is a different story, though.
I don't think I agree with the following from this guide:
> Do not use a personal virtual private network (VPN). Personal VPNs simply shift residual risks from your
internet service provider (ISP) to the VPN provider, often increasing the attack surface. Many free and
commercial VPN providers have questionable security and privacy policies. However, if your
organization requires a VPN client to access its data, that is a different use case.
> Personal VPNs simply shift residual risks from your internet service provider (ISP) to the VPN provider, often increasing the attack surface.
That's true. A VPN service replaces the ISP as the Internet gateway with the VPN's systems. By adding a component, you increase the attack surface.
> Many free and commercial VPN providers have questionable security and privacy policies.
Certainly true.
> if your organization requires a VPN client to access its data, that is a different use case.
Also true: That's not a VPN service; you are (probably) connecting to your organization's systems.
There may be better VPN services - Mullvad has a good reputation around here - but we really don't know. Successful VPN services would be a magnet for state-level and other attackers, which is what the document may be concerned with.
Come on, man. We're talking about classified information, not general OPSEC advice. I worked in a SCIF. Literally every piece of equipment, down to each ethernet cable, has a sticker with its authorized classification level. This system exists for a reason, like making it impossible to accidently leak information to an uncleared contact in your personal phone. What Hegseth did (and is doing?) is illegal. It doesn't even matter what app is used.
IIRC, there was a similar problem on aircraft carrier flight decks, where they had to induce some randomized amount of dispersion to keep the tailhook from hitting the same spot over and over again.
I work at a self-driving car company and we observed a similar problem when we did some off-road testing on dirt tracks. The cars were too precise and they were cutting deep ruts into the soil. We too solved it by adding a pseudo-random offset to the track.
I believe Google Maps adds a bit of a rng in which route it will recommend when two otherwise similar in distance/time. Obviously the traffic input also affects this, but that's a slower feedback mechanism; better to distribute the cars all leaving the airport for downtown across the 2-3 possible routes upfront rather than dumping them all onto route A until it's a jam and then all onto route B until it's a jam, etc.
I'm sure Google Maps has had to put their thumb on the scale in numerous instances. I recall reading articles about it "discovering" more optimal routes between Point A and Point B only to find things like the new "optimal" route being down a neighborhood street, and then the locals started squawking.
Before the current wave of automation there was a previous technology to automate buses using optical sensing and lines in the road which had the same issue.
There are entire subway systems built with tire-on-concrete where the trains ride precisely the same routes down to the millimeter. Montreal’s is a famous one. These systems are not as efficient as rail, but they are quieter and gentler than the typical subway.
I suspect the ocean in its various states provides quite a bit of dispersion. Replacing deck plates on a ship is a normal part of maintenance. I find it very hard to believe they'd induce randomness rather than having just that one plate get a different hardness (I know some people will screech about that but trust me, the warship industry is well practiced at such things).
I interpreted the effect here not to be on the deck plates but to be the point of impact between the cable and the hook. Sudden bends in cables can wear them fairly quickly in the immediate vicinity. I'm sure you can extend cable life proportionally to the spread of the loading.
Citation is my professional network as a former Naval Flight Officer who flew off aircraft carriers, and it's not the deckplates, it's the nonskid coating that goes on top of them. It's expected to wear and be replaced every so often, but when you have to do it more often than that, it becomes a pain logistically and operationally.
And the entire point of the system is to counter the dispersion the ocean provides, much like a Naval Aviator is already required to in order to trap successfully. You are literally flying through a very narrow window that is moving in three dimensions.
I wouldn't call it a "long time." MAGIC CARPET per se, especially as a default mode of operation, did not become mainstream until the last 10 years, and that's only for the aircraft that have it.
People can't even have a conversation about any kind of societal issues these days without pointing at the other political tribe and casting aspersions about "what they really meant" instead of engaging with what's actually being said.
Forgetting that if you really can hear a dogwhistle, you're also a dog.
As a former Naval Flight Officer, it's somewhat ironic how the private sector is more "sir, yes sir" command and control than the military ever was, and they're the ones who stereotype servicemembers for being drones who can only follow orders.
The other thing I've seen incredibly less of in software than in uniform is a bias for action at all levels. Combined with understanding the mission, a mentality that "in the absence of being told what to do, I will act." Better to ask forgiveness than permission, etc. etc. So many people in the private sector just wait for the boss to push them around like chess pieces, and I can't understand how they're OK living like that.
When my boss (non prior service) at Amazon found out I was prior service he said "I want to run my group like a military unit." Without thinking I blurted out "what? you want to spend 80% of your budget on training?"
> So many people in the private sector just wait for the boss to push them around like chess pieces, and I can't understand how they're OK living like that.
I think a lot times, office workers will be reprimanded for taking action if they don't realize their chain of command are not supportive. Have this happen a couple of times, and you will quickly move into this mode of "I'm not going to do anything I'm not told to do." I can recall more than one former company where taking the initiative to perform some action independently was very risky to your career there.
Because every time I've done something of my own initiative, one of three things happens:
1/ I'm punished or reprimanded for doing something that my time wasn't explicitly scheduled for. This comes from managers.
2/ Nobody cares and I'm now further behind on the things I committed to.
3/ People care, are happy I took the initiative, but I'm not materially rewarded in any way. At worst, I'm given more work.
In all cases I am no better off. I just don't do it anymore. Employers don't want employee autonomy, so they don't get employee autonomy. Employers only want to give paychecks not profits, so they get employees who only want paychecks.
The US has lost multiple wars to goat herders in pickup trucks with small arms.
As Ukraine has demonstrated, a shaped charge and consumer drone is highly effective against even heavy mechanized armor. ERA doesn't work well for multiple hits, and drones and HMX/RDX are cheap.
Tell your history lesson to a Reaper drone. You can see how modern version of people's insurgency could look like in modern Gaza. This is exactly how would citizens vs. US play out. With Palantir painting the targets on the appropriate backs and declaring anyone in the blast radius as domestic terrorist.
Sure, and from what I hear that's at the level of "war crimes", but those civilians the US armed forces are killing aren't US civilians.
People sign up for a variety of reasons; to keep their own safe is one of them, and that reason is incompatible with being the aggressor in a civil war.
Bro the way you brush off the US military already moving into the 'murderous war crimes' phase and thinking there is an upper bounds of the direction already in motion.
Did you think you would ever so casually brush off the US Navy straight murdering people with 'sure, we're doing that but...'?
Edit: A large group of Federal agents just murdered a 37 something American on the street, on video. He had a permit to carry, and his largest crime appears to have been traffic tickets. Prior to shooting him to death they were video'd pistol whipping his face.
These people are just fine with murdering Americans.
> Did you think you would ever so casually brush off the US Navy straight murdering people with 'sure, we're doing that but...'?
As I'm not American, I was already in the set of people they'd be willing to kill when ordered.
Are *the military* more likely to kill other Americans today? I do not think so.
But as I'm not American, I'm more worried that the chance of a B83 heading my way has gone from "No way!" to "3%".
> A large group of Federal agents just murdered a 37 something American on the street, on video. He had a permit to carry
There was a kid a few years back, killed for a toy in an open-carry state.
My country of birth is not, contrary to what some claim, envious of the 2nd amendment; rather, it is glad to ban firearms. Even so, we see the hypocricy of killing those who exercise their rights.
Americans harassed my mom for wearing a mask during COVID when she was going through cancer treatment. They would rather she just died than 1. They wear masks 2. Be made to feel bad they didn't care about her dying.
The grocery store she shopped at literally had to setup special hours people like my mom could shop without being harassed and pushed to tears. She died knowing most of her community didn't care if she died if it inconvenienced them. 1 million Americans died and today they say 'COVID wasn't a thing'. 1 million Americans died and they say it's nothing.
Americans don't care who dies. They/we are fucking trash now. My grandfathers' generation were good people but whoever we are now, we are so lost. I grew up on Star Trek TNG American ideals and grew up Catholic and believing in the 'be kind' parts and thought my neighbors shared that but they don't.
My condolences about your mum; I lost mine during the pandemic, though Alzheimers' causing her to forget to drink water rather than cancer, and the frequent closing of international borders meaning I couldn't even be there for the funeral.
That said, you've shifted the goalposts here: the one and only thing I was disagreeing about was the military. The military are the final arbiter of what happens, when the civilian government turns evil.
Seeing all the toadying and the way red hats are becoming the new brown shirts… I hope the ocean separating us is sufficient to keep me safe.
I cannot say, an am not saying, for certain that *the US military* are going to be not-evil, because unlike everyone else in the US federal government today the majority of the US armed forces are competent enough to keep quiet, and quiet makes it impossible to tell.
But what little gets out, from specifically the military? It suggests they take their oath of allegiance to the constitution seriously.
If the military is as bad as all your other non-military examples… well, even 25 years ago I was wondering how a new American civil war would play out, and if nukes would get involved.
I didn't know how to respond. I'll concede the discussion. It's nothing compared to your loss. I am so sorry that you went through that and that your mother passed. Wasn't going to say something, but I need to acknowledge how sad/horrible that is.
The current US administration is not competent to ensure continual financing in real terms.
If the White House keeps up current threats against allies it may find nobody willing to lend them money, and therefore the government will be forced to inflate its way to balancing the books each year; if they follow through with kicking out the undocumented migrant workers (even if they improve their current behaviour and limit themselves to *only* undocumented migrant workers), they mess up US agriculture at the same time; there is also visible corruption and self-dealing within the government.
The question is the level, rather than the existence of these factors.
There's been another authoritarian in my lifetime who messed with farms by actually kicking out non-native people in the way Trump threatens, demonstrating even worse corruption, and that actually did try to fund the government with inflation rather than my hypothetical of "will be forced to": Mugabe. It didn't go well for Zimbabwe, and the US military can observe what happened there and decide if that's what they want to see in the US.
You really think the US government can bomb its own citizens with impunity and not completely destroy their own industrial base that makes bombing citizens possible? The US government would very quickly collapse.
Refineries and factories don't work without people and are exceedingly vulnerable to locals.
At the moment the government with 15% hardcore support is rounding up people on the streets en masse, violating decades of established practices, while harming industrial base that depend on work of those people. And somehow pretty much everyone peacefully goes along with it. Or get occasionally shot.
That is exactly the point. It's working because everyone is peacefully going along with it. They have the consent - or at least acquiescence - of the governed. That's why they have no issues.
It is, therefore, not remotely relevant to your post starting this whole thread off saying that the consent of the governed is irrelevant and all you need is tanks.
> They have the consent - or at least acquiescence - of the governed.
They don't have the consent. And all they needed to get acquiescence was a bunch of poorly trained goons with masks, weapons, suv-s and official mandate. Not a single tank was needed yet.
Consent is irrelevant.
The only saving grace is that actual people with tanks (ie military) might at some point say 'nah'. Which I think they did in case of Greenland. Simply because it was too weird for them as opposed to Venezuela and Iran.
And? Minnesota is under strike right now and Arizona's AG just told its citizens that they can legally shoot ICE if they don't properly identify themselves or have a warrant or legal cause to arrest them. Still 95% of the nation is operating as normal, but that isn't possible when people are being actively bombed.
You can't imagine 95% of the nation operating as normal when they see in the news that another armed domestic terrorist cell got bombed every few days while being told the country is safer now?
The US government has made it pretty clear that we're two countries. There's the USA, and "democratic-controlled cesspools". Dropping a bomb on Chicago isn't that nuts when you don't think of Chicago as part of your country.
The Supreme Court has told Trump to pound sand as often as it's upheld his policies. As dangerous as many of the things the Trump administration is doing are, there are other dangerous narratives out there, and the caricaturing of the Supreme Court is one of those.
There's a huge difference between "I disagree with this legal rationale" and "this court is illegitimate." Like it or not, every Justice on the Court is there legitimately. One of them via bare-knuckle hardball politics, to be sure. But according to the rules.
One of them is there because Congress made up rules to deny a sitting president his legitimate right to make a nomination. So I would say that judge is illegitimate to a lot of people.
There's a difference between putting a nomination to a vote and denying versus "we don't accept nominations in last year of an outgoing POTUS" yet turned right around and did it for Trump's third nomination. In that sense, 2 out of 3 would be deemed illegitimate on the same rule being applied in opposite ways. If you can't see the hypocrisy in that, then we really can't have an honest conversation
Legitimacy can mean more than just following the letter of the rules. There's a pretty good argument to be made that refusing to even hold hearings for a nominee is a violation of the Senate's Constitutional duties. And refusing to uphold norms is a completely reasonable basis for calling something illegitimate as well. A pretty big chunk of our legal system is based on precedent and norms rather than written law.
An anecdote - it is maybe lesser known fact in the west, but Putin deems himself a very law abiding person, and he proudly repeats this many times over his 26 year reign. The only tiny problem is that he himself first changes those laws as he sees fit. And then he can play pretend to be law abiding.
I think you get the hint. In despotias laws mean nothing really. USA is not there yet, but the process is very gradual, glacial even. But irreversible.
This deeply misunderstands the Court. The legitimacy of the Supreme Court rests not simply on the justices being placed on the Court via the letter of the law, but also on the Court being an impartial arbiter of what the Constitution says. With verdicts like Trump vs. USA, the Court (especially certain justices) has pretty well jettisoned even trying to convincingly appear to like a judicial body and instead is behaving as a purely political actor. The Court has never been immune from politics, but its legitimacy rests in restraining itself by what the Constitution says, even when the justices don't like it.
Giving Trump “Presidential Immunity” instead of allowing him to be tried for the insurrection and auto coup he attempted really tips the scales though. In terms of eroding democratic norms, that was a landslide.
Overturning multiple precedents coming from decades ago, citing legal theorists from before the creation of our country to do so, and the increasing use of the shadow docket to geld the lower courts seems pretty illegitimate to me.
Also lol, this court is turning into heads Trump wins, tails everyone loses.
They ruled that Biden couldn’t forgive student loans but Trump has absolute immunity.
> The Supreme Court has told Trump to pound sand as often as it's upheld his policies.
Has it? Last I saw, they had overturned nearly 90% of lower conservative court rulings to be in Trump's favor, and a huge portion of those were on the shadow docket.
They also said it's fine to gift the justices, just not before they make a ruling.
And they gave the President a lot more immunity than he previously had.
If they're not actually corrupt, they look exactly as if they are.
I frankly can't see how someone can look around at the world in 2026 and come to the conclusion that "military" == "automatically bad." There are bad actors in this world who would be more than happy to kill you and take your stuff because they feel like it, and these days some of them run countries.
Yes, but some of them run countries where we live in (and therefore working for military contractors in this country is literally helping kill people to take their stuff). This includes US where tech is so heavily concentrated.
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