President Biden: The NEW one and only politics thread

Maybe tonight, thy really are nothing like you have seen before, professional, mature, full of real facts. I am so impressed by the process.

Just thinking, also, nothing breathless at all about the actual hearing. I glad you said that, it helps me nail down the specific reasons for how awesome it is.

 

You really have to see it to appreciate what they have put together.

 

I am sadly disappointed in these answers. They don't know what they are missing.

 

That is exactly why you all should watch.

 

Is tonight the sixth or seventh hearing? I've been watching. Missed a couple on vacation but got the highlights.

I'll have tonight's on while I work. And, as others have said, they've been really well done. Don't know if they're changing any minds, but they're important.

 

Some thoughts from an IT security consultant about the Secret Service text message debacle, from a purely technical perspective:

"For context, this is 2022 (not, say 2005) and the USSS is =supposed= to be one of the most sophisticated cyber investigative agencies in the world. With that level of experience and expertise, the failures of the USSS are almost beyond comprehension.

Consider:

1) The deletions were apparently part of a message system migration. Who does a migration that is not backward compatible and doesn't preserve existing messages?

2) If you think it is essential to migrate to a new system that doesn't preserve old messages, who doesn't do a system-wide backup before migration?

3) Who, as the USSS apparently did, leaves backup to the discretion of the individual users?

4) The broad factory reset that wiped the data had to have been handled at the IT Admin level. If so, why did the Admin not do a backup at that time?

5) For that matter, in 2022, how can any Federal agency not have an automated system-wide utility that routinely makes copies of messages since they are all records subject to federal record retention laws? Especially a "cyber sophisticated" one like USSS?

6) Even if the contents of the text messages were wiped in factory resets of the agents' devices, why isn't there metadata available about who texted whom, and when, etc. That metadata would
NOT be exclusively resident on agents' mobile devices.

7) Likewise, did none of the agents send messages outside of the USSS to other agencies (or to non-government accounts)? Those messages would also be available from these other sources.
And ALL of this is before we get to questions like whether the migration continued even after the USSS received a data retention notice from the DHS IG and/or the J6 Committee.
How could those notices NOT have gotten to the IT department? Were USSS lawyers not aware of the retention notices -- much less the agency's obligations under Federal records laws to generally preserve all records for the National Archives?

9) Of even greater salience, at least to me -- did nobody in USSS management think to preserve contemporaneous records of Jan 6? For posterity?
Was nobody at USSS at all interested in doing an after-action report on how the agency performed on the day? And would not the records have been useful for that? In short, almost nothing about this episode makes sense.

I am =not= one to rush to conclusions of malevolence (though I do still wonder why VP Pence refused to get in the car with the USSS agents) and so I don't see this as necessarily indicative of collusive USSS behavior. Nor do I think it likely (though this is more likely) that USSS is covering up its own errors on the day (perhaps, e.g. in a failure of Pence's security or Trump's). But if neither of those is the case, then at a minimum, the loss of these texts is evidence of systematic radical level of cyber incompetence at the very agency that is charged with investigating cyber crimes. And THAT is more than enough to be deeply troubling."

https://twitter.com/RosenzweigP/thread/1549845618662801412

 

Yeah "we migrated systems" does not absolve you from the requirement to preserve government records.

 

If someone in corporate IT did a systems migration and lost data on that scale heads would roll.

 

Start calling in any Secret Service personnel remotely connected to the actions of J6 and the data loss. Tell them to talk. If they don't, immediately transfer them to a town of 40 somewhere in the Nebraska panhandle or northern Alaska to investigate counterfeiters until they can be processed out and their criminal trial begin.

 

Still some idiots out there asking why Biden got COVID if he's vaccinated.

 

Well, the changes in the virus involve evolution, so...