Pete Hegseth shared Yemen attack details in second Signal chat

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/20/pete-hegseth-signal-chat-yemen-attack

by n1b0m • 1 year ago

186 81 1 year ago

theguardian.com

NoWordsKotoba• 1 year ago

[flagged]

matwood• 1 year ago

Those watching and reading Fox News who will likely completely the ignore the story.

mmooss3• 1 year ago

Or they will spin it. The Democrats and othe Trump opponents have no power to communicate effectively outside their bubble, and Trump's team, the Republicans and the right wing know it. They can do anything and spin it successfully. It is the heart of their power.

threatofrain• 1 year ago

Arguably 45% of the US by job approval.

JumpCrisscross4• 1 year ago

who outside the most delusional among us is not questioning the unfittedness of the entire Trump administration?

I once saw the fall of great civilisations as tragedies. They’re not. After a certain point, after a certain generation, they’re not just inevitable. They’re deserved.

The American model of government and society may empirically not work. Hell, universal suffrage and electoral democracy may not be the fittest way to organise humanity.

I hope not. I don’t believe so, yet. But the evidence is mounting. Since the Industrial Revolution, the tendrils of fascism have tried at democracy (an institution broader than just elections) borne from the agricultural revolution. Fascism isn’t the answer. But maybe popular will is, similarly, a bad—if predictable—governing instrument.

China is making the quiet argument America made in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars. American history just doesn’t teach the consequences of O.G. Versailles.

sam_goody• 1 year ago

I am convinced that I do not have enough data to be able to assess the "fittedness" of the entire Trump administration".

And that is despite (or perhaps because) I have spent way way to much time reading articles both from the Left and the Right.

If you only read one narrative, you might think you are getting the whole picture. When you read both [which is admittedly difficult - I sometimes blanch and force myself to read just to get the options open], you might find that there are hints how much is not known.

When you have a reason to be involved at some point, you realize that Gell-Mann was on to something

scarecrowbob• 1 year ago

I'd be quite interested if you could point me to some sources who are making what you believe is a credible case that the Trump admin is executing some coherent strategy in a competent manner.

I read quite lot, everyone from anarchists an d communists to people I believe would happily describe themselves as fascists. I read self-described US liberals and conservatives. And I am having a very hard time finding folks who describe a reasoned, coherent strategy being implemented.

I have read a lot of (typically US "right wing") commentators who claim that "we just can't know", but having come of age when the same disingenuous claim was made about the US invasion of Iraq it is hard for me to take those kinds of claims seriously.

I'm not looking for an account that I can agree with, but even a simple "this is their strategy, and here is an account of why that is a coherent idea" would be a big upgrade from what I am usually hearing; my current understanding is that only God and Trump understood the big picture and that Trump is senile enough that even he has lost the plot.

hdivider• 1 year ago

Consider all the small business defense contractors who are held to the letter of the most minute security compliance requirements. They have to somehow meet everything, with very limited resources.

And then at the top of government, the most sensitive information is frequently handled without any care at all. Not to mention 19-year olds with flash drives barging into the most sensitive IT systems of the federal government.

Slight imbalance there, I would say.

mmooss3• 1 year ago

Notice why Hesgeth's aids were fired:

According to the Times, the private chat also included two senior advisers to Hegseth – Dan Caldwell and Darin Selnick – who were fired last week after being accused of leaking unauthorized information.

I understand the tactics of much of what Trump and his people do, even though I often disagree. I understand why Trump has DOGE moving quickly and breaking things; I understand why they show contempt for the law, rules, and customs - they want to destroy those things.

I don't understand the utter incompetence that often appears; an earlier example was team Trump's court filings challenging the 2020 elections but there is lots more. How does that furthering the neo-fascist / conservative / Trump mission? I suppose it's disruptive but if they just showed basic competence they would probably get away with much more.

ramchip• 1 year ago

Fascism rewards loyalty above competence.

kashunstva• 1 year ago

I don't understand the utter incompetence

Simply put, it’s a reflection of Trump’s own incompetence, or perhaps carelessness and his utter refusal to recognize and make use of expertise in others. I’m about halfway through “Lucky Loser” (Buettner & Craig) which traces his financial history. His disdain for objective data over “intuition” has always been alarming. I suspect his hiring for cabinet positions follows a similar carelessness.

jemmyw• 1 year ago

Folks that are more competent and considered are less likely to be involved in the first place. I think we can see that from Trump's first time in office. There were people politically aligned that fell by the wayside. Unfortunately incompetence appears to be the winning strategy.

bayarearefugee• 1 year ago

When the only qualification you have for the people that you hire to advise you is absolute sycophantic loyalty, it isn't surprising when they turn out to be wildly incompetent.

panarky• 1 year ago

Privileging ideology and loyalty over reality and competence causes massively sub-optimal results.

Imagine you ordered your Waymo to pretend its location, direction and velocity were what you wanted them to be, ignoring its sensors.

It's a myth that the fascists of the 1930s made the trains run on time.

oliwarner• 1 year ago

No this is the distraction. The buffoonery and even the buffoons committing it all dilute the news cycle.

Accounting for the damage done will be nearly impossible and that makes it all the harder to fully reverse. That's one of the focuses here. Making it stick.

apercu2• 1 year ago

At least you are honest in your tacit support for some of these clowns actions.

rsynnott2• 1 year ago

Because they're idiots. There is no "ahahahahah, we are deliberately doing stupid stuff as part of a sinister plot". They're just doing stupid stuff naturally, because they are stupid.

Like, the hiring process is pretty much "who shows most loyalty to Dear Leader"; one would not _expect_ competence.

hdjjhhvvhga• 1 year ago

I suppose it's disruptive but if they just showed basic competence they would probably get away with much more.

Yeah but if you were a competent person in a position to work for them, would you do it? I believe there are relatively few smart people willing to go down this hole precisely because they can understand the consequences.

techpineapple• 1 year ago

I remember reading a book on the Columbine shooter, and on some level I imagined evil, but a coherent evil, and it really was not, it was quite nonsensical and inconsistent. It was like 4chan logic.

I think when at the surrounding facts - a group of people who talk anti-woke but don’t seem to make a distinction between Jackie Robinson and “all white people are racist”, or willing to ignore every last economist in favor of blanket tariffs, or hiring a Fox News host to run your DOD in the first place! You’re telling me there aren’t enough conservative minds to choose from, in the fucking military! the simplest solution is that there isn’t a coherent ideology.

I think this makes sense, that sort of evil isn’t rational, but we’re so used to movie villains with a coherent ideology I think it poisons the reality. Go watch “The Last King of Scotland”. Idi Amin was the whole bag of nuts.

DrillShopper• 1 year ago

I don't understand the utter incompetence that often appears

Trump and company want you to think that the national government is completely incompetent so they can sell as much of it off to their Wall Street oligarch ghouls as quickly as possible. They are intentionally incompetent to further that goal.

ben_w• 1 year ago

an earlier example was team Trump's court filings challenging the 2020 elections but there is lots more. How does that furthering the neo-fascist / conservative / Trump mission?

With the usual caveats about politics, my understanding is that this is because Trump such a narcissist that he genuinely cannot process the idea of not winning, or being in the wrong.

If he really is like this, this is exceptionally dangerous. Ignore any question about intelligence for a moment, because everyone makes some mistakes: purging anyone who isn't a sycophant means that when he inevitably does make a mistake, nobody will be willing to stop it.

morkalork2• 1 year ago

I remember in the one UX design class I took how they stressed the apocryphal "your grandmother is using this app" which in hindsight is sadly asking too much, apparently the bar should have been lower at "the secretary of defense is trying to start a group chat and not leak national security secrets".

mcphage• 1 year ago

He’s not really trying not to leak secrets, though.

defrost3• 1 year ago

Not trying at all ...

  US defense secretary texted strike information to his family in group chat he created

from sources common to both The Guardian article and the parallel New York Times article.

lemon_zest2• 1 year ago

It kinda gets buried under the utter incompetence of these clowns but why are we even bombing Yemen? How is it acceptable to brazenly destroying other countries’ civil infrastructure? It’s a US president’s pastime activity since Obama

ty6853• 1 year ago

Obama started doing it as a concession to the Saudis for our policies in the ME. More recently Yemen has pirated ships as an immediate response to our support and funding of mass murder of civilians in Palestine. So the Yemenis are not blameless and there is some sort of valid reasoning for the attacks, but to be clear we are the instigator here.

lemon_zest2• 1 year ago

Agreed, mine was more of a rhetorical question. The concession was that we allowed the Saudis to bomb them and further excarcerbate the civil war in Yemen. Now because they are blockading shipments in protest of the current onslaught in Gaza we are pummeling them for it. We sure do have a taste for war crimes in the region.

morkalork2• 1 year ago

Not since Bush and Iraq's non-existent WMDs? Or Vietnam or countless other conflicts got involved in under the Monroe doctrine?

JumpCrisscross4• 1 year ago

why are we even bombing Yemen?

Houthis are bombing unarmed civilian ships in the Red Sea. This makes zero sense for Yemen. But it does, politically, for the Houthis. Put another way, the extremists in one government are bombing another country because of what the extremists in that country are up to.

mvdtnz• 1 year ago

I wish the government would stop calling them rebels and call them what they are - the defacto government of Yemen.

HDThoreaun3• 1 year ago

To stop the houthis from sinking/pirating container ships.

TiredOfLife• 1 year ago

TIL that ballistic missiles are civil infrastructure

leereeves8• 1 year ago

I'm surprised no one here has mentioned that the government's cyber security agency CISA recommends the use of Signal, as of December 2024:

Apply these best practices to your devices and online accounts.
1. Use only end-to-end encrypted communications.
Adopt a free messaging application for secure communications that guarantees end-to-end encryption, such as Signal or similar apps.

https://www.cisa.gov/sites/default/files/2024-12/guidance-mo...

defrost3• 1 year ago

The concern is less about Signal, more about inviting journalists and immediate civilian family to a front row as it happens discussion about upcoming targets.

That and the deliberate lack of record keeping.

  Attorneys suing the United States government over its use of vanishing Signal messages to coordinate military strikes last month in Yemen allege that new court filings by the government reveal a “calculated strategy” by Trump administration officials to evade transparency laws through the illegal destruction of government records.

  The use of the private group chat—in which some messages were configured to automatically delete before they could be archived—was first revealed by The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, on March 24, after he was inadvertently added to the group by Trump’s national security adviser, Michael Waltz. American Oversight subsequently filed Freedom of Information Act requests over the chats and then sought a temporary restraining order in a Washington, DC, federal court in an effort to compel the government to salvage any messages yet to be deleted.

~ https://www.wired.com/story/heres-what-happened-to-those-sig...

leereeves8• 1 year ago

Hegseth has invited his wife and brother to other official meetings in person. He seems to be including them as part of his team; inviting them to the Signal chat probably wasn't a mistake.

That and the deliberate lack of record keeping.

That part seems like speculation. How would we even know if records were kept? If records were kept, they'd be classified.

Attorneys suing the United States government over its use of vanishing Signal messages

That seems very much like the concern is about the use of Signal, so the fact that CISA recommends it is very relevant.

belter5• 1 year ago

These are generic, and quite weak recommendations on the part of the CISA. And that was the excuse of the CIA director, while knowing very well these are for regular work not real-time battle plans.

Also those recommendations from the CISA recommend to use password managers...like Lastpass and 1Password and others, who had multiple security breaches.

If this is the type of Cybersecurity the US government applies to day to day work, its much easier to understand the field day North Korean and Chinese hackers seem to have all the time.

https://www.upguard.com/blog/lastpass-vulnerability-and-futu...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/daveywinder/2024/08/07/critical...

leereeves8• 1 year ago

Your argument is that you know better than CISA? You didn't even read the linked article properly. These were not recommendations for "regular work", they were for "highly targeted individuals".

But let's assume you're right and it's bad advice. The objection in the OP isn't that there was a breach. It's just exploiting the perception that using Signal is somehow wrong, and suggesting that it is a sign that Hegseth is incompetent.

So it's rather important to know that using Signal is recommended by the government's own experts (even if those experts were wrong, hypothetically).

amalcon2• 1 year ago

This is CISA telling potential target civilians (and government employees in their civilian capacity, since government employees talk to their friends too) what to do to protect themselves. The government has separate, much stricter guidelines for security compliance for cloud services used by the government.

Those guidelines are called FedRAMP, and Signal is not FedRAMP certified.

leereeves8• 1 year ago

It specifically says it is addressed to senior government officials.

Also, I don't know for sure, but there was a link and discussion here not long ago saying that Signal is pre-installed and widely used at the CIA.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43478091

aigen0002• 1 year ago

Signal is not an approved communication channel for confidential attack plans.

belter5• 1 year ago

Oh look it's flagged...this is HN way of saying we are clean on OpsSec... :-)

ZeroTalent• 1 year ago

OopsSec

dang2• 1 year ago

If you keep using HN primarily for political battle, we're going to have to ban you. We've already asked you to stop, and you've continued to do a ton of it. If you want to keep posting to HN, please fix this properly.

Also, please stop posting snarky and/or unsubstantive comments (like this one).

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

belter5• 1 year ago

If you keep using HN primarily for political battle

Please clarify what you mean by this. Are you saying some HN users should abstain to comment on some threads?

josefritzishere• 1 year ago

This guy would be fired at any bluechip company in America for leaking internal coms this way.

xnx• 1 year ago

Staying optimistic:

"Exclusive: The White House is looking to replace Pete Hegseth as defense secretary"

https://www.npr.org/2025/04/21/nx-s1-5371312/trump-white-hou...

AnimalMuppet2• 1 year ago

Deserved. Nice if true. But the article says the White House denies it. Make of that what you will...

belter5• 1 year ago

This is how secure information need to be treated...acording to Pete: https://youtu.be/iV8-a1yUGNo?t=319

thunky2• 1 year ago

Fully expect some new bonehead executive orders to distract us from this.

Pete Hegseth shared Yemen attack details in second Signal chat

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