Posted by m-hodges 2 days ago
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/03/doj-confirms-fbi...
Anybody have a link? You know, for science ...
Edit: Apparently, just last week the DoJ snatched their domains: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-disrupts-i...
"Search harder" is a pretty unfriendly response to a request for a link...
There's no reason to post it directly. Their server is slow today even without adding lazy (ok, HN readers not interested in applying some effort to the matter) HN readers to the mix.
The first is almost impossible to screw up, though we're really trying on the last front.
That's really it. Not moral superiority, not technical ingenuity, not the indomitable American spirit. Just imperialist opportunism.
https://landing.google.com/intl/en_in/advancedprotection/
The fact the Director of the FBI did not avail himself of this just reiterates how incompetent he is, in addition to being corrupt as heck.
- Chief of Staff to the United States Secretary of Defense (2020-2021)
- Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence (2020)
Not a big deal. No need for OpSec in those positions.maybe google doesn't advertise about this much?
Kashmir Patel went out of his way to bypass security protocols for onboarding his political hires (for the US’s premiere domestic intelligence service!). If he wanted to be secure, all he had to do was not get in the way of the FBI’s natural processes.
Also, this wouldn’t have happened if POTUS had hired someone with relevant FBI experience instead of a political hack.
well what percentage of highly-rated FBI people have actually enabled that feature?
did FBI had some internal recommendation to enable that feature?
FBI isn't NSA people...
The Director of the FBI is an immensely powerful position, unlike the average secretory/assistant in some FBI field office. Even the FBI Special Agents are taught OpsSec in depth at FBI cadet school and it is reinforced at every additional relevant training.
The reason Patel wasn’t is because he’s unqualified to be in the department and was a political hire who almost certainly bypassed the normal security protocols when he was hired. The FBI has an entire detail, not unlike that of Secret Service, who both secures the physical person / transport of the Director, but who also maintains intelligence about threats and OpsSec, which should cover this specifically scenario. In other words, Patel didn’t need to know about this security precaution himself — he just needed to not stifle his team from protecting him.
dude at least you should have brought an internal recommendation memo targeted all fbi people, not "but fbi has this and this division..."
lets say your college have astrophysics and other big departments. Are you really expert on those areas? Can you expect all highly-regarded professors to know most things from other departments? Do all 'competent' art professors know about astrophysics?
I would, yes. Maybe a director in the Small Business Administration is lower on the target list of gov officials that would need to be concerned, but certainly anyone in the Departments of Defense, Justice, Homeland Security, State, Transportation, Treasury, and probably Nuclear Regulatory Commission, for sure.
> BECAUSE NSA IS part of the government ?
I don't know why multiple times in this comment section you allude to the NSA as being the only Federal agency tasked with any sort of cyber security responsibility, that is just plain wrong.
>you should have brought an internal recommendation memo targeted all fbi people
Yes, because I have access to any and all internal memos provided by the FBI to their employees. Internal memos are by their very nature are internal, so are generally not available for public consumption.
Also, your higher ed example is terrible, because as someone with a work history at a flagship state university's IT department, I can assure you that we provide all sorts of "memos", trainings, and tools to combat cybercrime, including special onboarding sessions to ensure new hires are protecting themselves and the university. We don't depend on the Art and Physics departments to make sure they keep their faculty 'in-line' following best practices in cyber security.
Are you someone who would be inclined to look into something like that?
This is just a sad story of a partisan hack who failed upwards into one of the most sensitive and powerful offices in the nation, simply for being a loyal sycophant, not merit.
He shouldn’t be FBI Director and he shouldn’t have been in the DNI or Secretary of Staff for SecDef either. All of those are high positions of responsibility and require tremendous OpsSec. This guy’s first act as FBI Director was to waive most of the investigations into his staff to bypass security clearance checks.
Sorry if I’m not disagreeing with you. Sarcasm is a bit hard to identify these days.
I have 2 family members who are/were special agents for the FBI. Much of their job is harvesting evidence to build cases by spying, which frequently comes more in the form of “spying” in the way we saw in The Sopranos.
The FBI is also the premier counter-espionage organization within the US, so it is tasked with spying on suspected foreign / turned spies.
It is much more than a spy network, but it is exactly that as well.
We don’t know how much the Trump political officials managed to avoid those onboarding requirements. It has been widely reported that at least some of them bypassed eligibility requirements and polygraph. It’s probably not a huge leap to assume these same people were not required to consent to these forever-after-searches.
That claim deserves a source.
Also, they do head up the main counterintelligence effort of the US.
How the mighty have fallen.
Most of the time, actual harm is the most important issue. In this case because that office holds so much centralized power and authority over many aspects of American life (domestic law enforcement, some foreign law enforcement, domestic counterterrorism / counterintelligence / counterespionage, and security clearance background checks for all VIPs), the means are equally as important as the ends.
And I would throw in a wrinkle: what evidence is there that the dumps were not stripped of the most useful blackmail material? If I were in charge of a hack operation, I would dump the low impact stuff to show the world how much of a joke this guy’s security is, but only after I already used the best stuff to blackmail him months ago.
A successful blackmailer doesn't want the security breach exposed or investigated, they want to continue to use the victim.
The reality is that officials are targetted by various states looking to get some leverage, so not properly securing an email account is a serious failing unless it's part of a wider honeypot scheme. Personally, I'm not convinced that the current U.S. administration is competent enough to plan ahead and implement honeypots.
It's not really much of a debate as it's widely acknowledged that letting enemy states get access to the email accounts of officials is a really bad idea.
Patel specifically bypassed security clearance protocols for Bongino and other staff he hired. His top priority isn’t protecting government secrets — it’s to take down what he thinks is the part of the US government that resists bending to Trump’s will.
And you are wrong that the FBI shouldn’t care about securing the Director’s private life information. Anything and everything can and will be used to blackmail him by foreign governments, criminals, political actors.
I highly doubt the first public dump of messages would include the most compromising content — that’s like handing away a maximum severity zero day for the most common OS in the federal government. There’s no logical reason to do that for free, so I suspect the really incriminating/ salacious stuff was withheld for private use.
And if the FBI didn’t enable the high security setting on the FBI Director’s private email account, they might not have known what, if any, compromising materials were in there.
well even I haven't seen/heard about this...
maybe google should advertise more?
(or... maybe I don't look important to google :( ?)
Really?
It's ten million of something, or (currently) about $11,000 US dollars in money.
You might also see "lakh" which is one hundred thousand of something, or about $1100 when it's used to describe money.
Now you know.
I have no problem with racism; I have a problem with hypocrisy.
You might as well be complaining someone notes ‘it’s Chinese’ when something written in Simplified Chinese by the CCP gets posted?
It's almost as if the nation were being weakened on purpose.
Don't get mad, get Vlad. Or just prepare for the long-desired Rapture.[0] and which politicians seem to be working very hard to being about (the Apocalypse part, anyway)
[0] https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/29/us/iran-israel-evangelicals-p...
> Prophecy, not politics, may also shape America’s clash with Iran
So, is prophecy OK in a pitch deck? Asking for a friend.
• They are already "trained" (in random violence against civilians. Checks one box)
• Bonespur "victims" have already been weeded out.
• They are already government employees and must go where assigned. (saves TONS of paperwork)
• They already have weapons, and unspent budget money.
• They already have swell masks to protect from radioactive dust that bombing reactors creates, and (this is big)
• Their kill to loss ratio is infinite.
Oh, and ... • It's them or Barron.Kudos to CNN for publishing a balanced take on it.
So I wouldn’t expect someone who uses Signal to automatically be the kind of person to use personal email for work.
> In some cases, Patel appears to have sent emails from his former Justice Department email address in 2014 to his Gmail account. TechCrunch found that the emails sent from Patel’s DOJ account also appeared to be authentic.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/02/us/politics/house-weaponi...
As is the case in any administration; let alone with an admin as vindictive as Trump's.
This "balanced take" warrants kudos?
We're not even pretending to lift the bar off the ground when it comes to mainstream media, are we?
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