National Security Amateur Hour

[MineralMan]

That's what is going on right now. From the President and shadow President, right down to the Secretary of Defense, our national security is in the hands of rank amateurs. The President is a Vietnam Era draft dodger. The VP is a run of the mill National Guard amateur. Even the Secretary of Defense has almost no experience with the Intelligence community.

That is why military plans were openly discussed on a freaking Signals chat system. One of the participants was even in Moscow, in on the text chain from a hotel there. WTF were they thinking?

They weren't thinking. That's the simple truth. They don't know. They're amateurs.

When I was a kid of 19 to 23, I was an enlistee in the USAF. I enlisted in 1965. I was, frankly, a draft dodger. Faced with certain draft, I enlisted in the military branch least likely to send me to Vietnam with an M-16. In its wisdom, the USAF sent me to Russian Language school, gave me a Top Secret security clearance, and put me into situations where everything I did or touched had TOP SECRET (CODEWORD) at the top of the page.

I cannot even count the number of intelligence security briefings I attended. We were constantly reminded of the risks of exposure of the stuff we were doing to, well, the Russians. We worked in buildings with no windows because the technology even of that time made it possible to hear conversations by bouncing laser light off windows and listening to the conversations. Before I could work in that environment, FBI people visited my home town and interviewed people about my character. We had to read and sign multiple pages that explained what would happen to us if we gave classified information to people who weren't entitled to see it.

I could go on and on, but part of being in that environment meant learning the rules of security and safeguarding classified information. Then, we signed our names on those documents, verifying that we had read and understood them. The penalties for not doing what we were told were laid out clearly.

Was what I was doing all that important? Hell, I don't know. It was interesting, but I was just a lowly E-3 and E-4, playing with some fantastic technology in remote places. Still, I knew what I could and could not say and do. I knew that there were risks. I knew that my work affected things. I knew better than to treat security lightly, so I didn't treat it lightly. I was a professional in that area.

Then, I finished my four years of service, got the heck out of the military and returned to normal life. However, I was then, and am now, prohibited from talking about what I was doing back in the late 1960s. Some of it is no longer classified, but I don't know what is and what is not, so I simply don't talk about any of it in any detail at all. I can tell people that I went to a total immersion Russian language school for a year, and that I was stationed on the Black Sea cost in Turkey. I can tell people that I worked in the NSA building at Ft. George Meade in Maryland for a while. Those things are not classified. More than that I cannot discuss.

The point here is that almost all of the people on that moronic text chain, chatting about plans for an attack on people in another county are not intelligence professionals. If they were, they would never have done such a thing. They are amateurs, and that is freaking dangerous on several levels. Those are the people in positions of authority. We have amateurs everywhere now, from the White House to the pentagon.

It is not a good thing. Not a good thing at all.

[gab13by13]

1. Nice post MM

They are doing this purposely, running a message on Telegram that deletes itself after a specified period of time.

So when a Congressional committee or a FOIA request is issued for data the traitors won't have the data because it wasn't used on a government apparatus.

Plausible deniability.

These fuckers are traitors. Telegram is filled with Russians and Chinese hackers.

JD Vance was in on the released classified information and he was on an airplane, so the classified information was put out into the airwaves.

[Nanuke]

2. My dad was a career Army intelligence man--WW2, Korea and Vietnam. He is spinning in his grave, as they say.

[Beringia]

3. After your advice for making bank accounts more secure re Social Security benefits

I changed my password signin to a big rock in honor of MineralMan using the Dolomite that I have seen at Lake Michigan in Chicago.

[MineralMan]

4. Solid decision!

[cksmithy]

5. Regarding National Security in 1970,

my first job, I was also 19, was as a long distance operator in Monterey County, California. The application, for Pacific Bell, included the question "have you ever been or are you a member of the Communist Party." I answered no, and when I was interviewed, I had to state out loud, that I was not a communist. I got the job, union, and paid more than minimum wage. At the time, dialing long distance from your home phone, was relatively new. We as long distance operators, we handled all sorts of calls, person to person, collect, long distance calls for customers who were having trouble, and even fax transmissions (had to be done via our phone lines.). All these calls were monitored by us, the operators, to make sure they were talking or they had finished, because we filled out the billing cards, think back to ibm punch cards. So, we could listen in on anybody, at any time, but would of been fired if we did. The point is, Pac Bell didn't want communist/traitors to be in a position to gain knowledge or cause trouble. As you described, they are amateurs, and they are dangerous to our country.

Also, my brother-in -law joined the navy when his lottery number was 6, my husband's was 307 (we married very young) and we didn't have to worry any more at the time. We sure are worrying now.