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PaperclipPerfector  9d ago (text post)   32298 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 24, 2025

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But it doesn't say that. In fact, when they talk about any actually sensitive military planning type things, they explicitly refer anybody in the group to an appropriate channel:

At 8:05 a.m. on Friday, March 14, “Michael Waltz” texted the group: “Team, you should have a statement of conclusions with taskings per the Presidents guidance this morning in your high side inboxes.” (High side, in government parlance, refers to classified computer and communications systems.) “State and DOD, we developed suggested notification lists for regional Allies and partners. Joint Staff is sending this am a more specific sequence of events in the coming days and we will work w DOD to ensure COS, OVP and POTUS are briefed.”

That's how they started out. But the article later says people (including SECDEF) are posting clearly sensitive info, including the exact time of the strike. Which is a known hazard of trying to discuss unclassified parts of classified things in an unclassified environment, which is why in general that's discouraged (though political appointees in particular probably do it all the time).

Well today we had congressional testimony where they claim there was nothing secretive shared, and that signal was approved for the type of use they were doing.

So maybe everybody is lying. Certainly everybody involved here has an incentive to lie.

As others have pointed out, several of the people in the chat (including the SECDEF) are the original classification authorities for the informations shared, so in some sense if they say it isn't classified it isn't, even if it's the sort of thing that would typically be classified. But that's a technicality; it may make it legal (as far as classified information goes) but it doesn't make it not-stupid. As for using Signal, my understanding is that's a violation of the Federal Records Act (because it doesn't keep records), but I'm not familiar enough to say there isn't a loophole.

Looks like Goldberg released the chats and, yeah, what Hegseth posted was inappropriate.

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