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IDK I don't actually think a very large portion of the US security apparatus actually cares about or follows the ostensible security protocols, and SCIFs are only as good as said protocols.
I've certainly heard this opined about high-level political types. In my experience the contractors and low level folks take it pretty seriously, and I know there was a lot of annoyance from those groups in particular about Hillary's email server, for example. There is (perhaps rightfully) a pretty strong view of a two-tier system there.
ETA: I've also heard rumblings that different departments within the government handle things like this very differently too.
We take it seriously because we’d get absolutely reamed for fucking it up. Even if it were something mild/unintentional enough to avoid criminal charges, if I triggered some sort of audit, I wouldn’t expect to keep my job.
That’s the other thing about the various “improper storage” scandals. Responsibility was diluted. Sure, the government could find out who dumped files in Joe’s garage, but they elected not to spend the money. Not when there was no actual leak involved. This case doesn’t have that excuse.
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I've heard extremely hair-raising anecdotes set both inside high-level Pentagon circles and big military contractor circles where high-level political types probably weren't a problem (although political correctness might be). Think things along the lines of knowingly improper access controls on HUMINT or phone calls to foreign countries placed in secure areas.
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It's very schizophrenic. A coworker of mine told me a story about a base he worked on. To finish a step in acquiring your clearance to work there, you had to log into a secure system. You could not log into the secure system because you hadn't completed all the steps in acquiring your clearance. Therefore, someone who was already cleared had to log into the system for you, so that you could finish all the steps to get your own clearance. This itself was a violation of the rules for both the person who logged you in, and yourself.
Nobody cared. Everyone knew the system was bullshit.
But it's hard to imagine having to break the rules to get inside the circle of trust a clearance represents doesn't input a certain fundamental disrespect for said circle of trust.
Yeah that sounds about right, and I 100% think it nudges (in the mind of the practitioners) OPSEC out of the category of "important to prevent people from dying" into "more of this dumb bureaucratic paperwork stuff."
Which is really bad if it's actually important.
One part of the CIA triad (which sounds like some kind of military secret, but I’m told it’s just a cool-sounding cybersecurity acronym) is Availability — users should have access to everything they need to do their jobs without undue hurdles. If the government is violating that principle, it invites a cavalier attitude towards security and damages it in the process.
This Signal chat situation sounds like a particularly pernicious case of Shadow IT, as much as I dislike the term. But I’m very much curious how government officials are supposed to communicate with each other, particularly with how interconnected the world is now.
Yes - I appreciate the invocation of cybersecurity principles (which I know little about) here, but yeah I think that's right, and a real problem.
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