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Notes -
Seems like the real screw-up here is that USG does not actually have an encrypted secure internal chat that they can use for cross department collaboration. With USG's intelligence budget, that is absolutely inexcusable. Goldberg in the article says that they should have used a SCIF which they all have installed at their home. That is utterly impractical, trying to coordinate two dozen officials to all be home or at the office in their SCIF at the same time is just not going to be possible. So if the option is 1) communicate over something highly secure but imperfect and with a lousy UX that makes it hard to quickly see who everyone is and that mixes internal and external contacts or 2) simply don't communicate at all, it's not actually obvious to me that 1) is worse. Ultimately, even as bad as this mistake was ... nothing actually bad happened as a result of accidentally adding Goldberg and so it's not clear to me that it would have been better if these officials had simply never had the conservation at all.
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