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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   29632 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 24, 2025

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This seems like too big of a fuckup to put in just "whoopsie we made a mistake" territory. If a journalist can just get accidentally added onto it without them constantly doing security checks then what about all the highly motivated and talented bad actors from foreign nations?

I figure this only happened because Goldberg was already in Waltz's contacts and he selected the wrong name by mistake. Maybe had a brainfart and mixed him up with somebody else who did belong in the chat - maybe just clicked the wrong option in a slide. Who knows. Either way, not that big of a security concern unless there are foreign spies on Waltz's speed-dial.

It doesn't necessarily matter how it happened so much as that it happened and speaks to a wider failing in OPSEC procedures. They're sending sensitive information across the internet without even verifying who the recipients are.

A career government employee who misclicked in a way which resulted in classified information being unintentionally shared with a journalist would lose their job and security clearance. I expect MAGA would be calling for criminal charges, although they wouldn't stick because the Espionage Act has a mens rea requirement.

"Lol I misclicked but no harm no foul" doesn't cut it.

A career bureaucrat has one primary job: follow bureaucratic process, so yeah, of course they would be fired for that. Top-level officials by nature must have a lot more flexibility in their jobs and they can't be sitting at a SCIF all day long and following processes is not their primary job requirement or part of their life-long training. (This is among the reasons why I didn't think Hillary should have been charged for a crime). And this goes five-fold for officials who were specifically selected by the American people for being outsiders.

I'm not saying it's all good or that the guy shouldn't get heat over it, just that in practical terms this isn't necessarily a massive security hole that Chinese spies could walk into by the dozens.

I strongly disagree. If this guy was stupid enough to let in not just a journalist, but one part of an organization that is an ideological enemy of the administration, who's to say he can't be spearphished by an adversary with a passing knowledge of the English language?

It is an enormous fuckup.

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