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Trump Ignores 'Inconvenient' Security Rules To Keep Tweeting On His iPhone, Says Report (politico.com)
According to Politico, "President Donald Trump uses a White House cellphone that isn't equipped with sophisticated security features designed to shield his communications." The decision is "a departure from the practice of his predecessors that potentially exposes him to hacking or surveillance." From the report: The president uses at least two iPhones, according to one of the officials. The phones -- one capable only of making calls, the other equipped only with the Twitter app and preloaded with a handful of news sites -- are issued by White House Information Technology and the White House Communications Agency, an office staffed by military personnel that oversees White House telecommunications. While aides have urged the president to swap out the Twitter phone on a monthly basis, Trump has resisted their entreaties, telling them it was "too inconvenient," the same administration official said. The president has gone as long as five months without having the phone checked by security experts. It is unclear how often Trump's call-capable phones, which are essentially used as burner phones, are swapped out.
Yeah, and he had non-stop criticisms of how much golf Obama played, yet he plays twice as often. Railed against Obama for tax-payer funded vacations; he and his family take more of them and they each cost more. Went after Obama for his use of executive orders; is doing the same himself now. Tip of the iceberg.
He's a shameless hypocrite, you're just now noticing?
And Trump wants her in jail for her security practices, and railed against them non-stop. It's just as big a problem if anyone else is doing it, and 'but she did it!' stops being an acceptable justification around age 4... although I suppose acting like a toddler isn't unfamiliar for Trump.
You realise that an iPhone has a GPS, microphone and camera on it? DoD has policy for such things specifically to maintain an certain national security posture, and he is deliberately ignoring it. When I work for federal gov this was a dismiss-able (and possibly criminal depending on severity) offence.
Hoe many here know a CxO who wanted to get rid of some security or ignored their company policy?
Difference is that a CxO as an executive of a private company has that power to make such decisions. And this pretty much sums up Trump's stupidity. He still thinks POTUS is the boss of the country, rather than a servant of the people. Govt policy is our our policy which all must follow.
This shouldn't be a surprise.
The guy is a pathological narcisist, so of course he'll do as he pleases. The only type of respect he has is self-respect, and fuck the rest.
He already dismisses everything that was ever done previous to his administration as errors, worst mistakes, wrong, criminal, swamp or whatever.
And it hasn't been a problem for him every single time he was proven wrong. It's either treated as a joke, or the new norm.
Nobody knew x could be so complicated. President Trump isn't at fault because he just didn't know better. It's just fake news. It's media persecution. Things we hear every freaking day on the news.
If it's content he doesn't like, it's fake news. If he does something wrong he was just unaware or it's someone else's fault. Any press that says anything wrong about him is being unfair. Any politician that raises a voice against his command is either a democrat trying to attack him, or a republican traitor. The guy acts exactly like politicians in countries like Venezuela, Phillipines and other proto-dictatorships and populist nations and people are just watching it happen.
None of this has put him out of his position up to now, leaking smartphone information also won't. At most, some fuzz will be made about it, they'll create some comitee for investigation, and some people will cry foul, but he'll still be there.
I doubt there's anything there to be leaked or hacked anyways... I mean, anything that foreign countries and whatnot don't already know. People shouldn't expect any sort of internal security from the current administration. You just have to see how many incompetent people are occupying all sorts of positions right now. Why would anyone be under some illusion that US government data isn't already being hacked, stolen, spied upon and even directly willingly sent by people on this administration? I'd believe first that the US government is already, knowingly or not, a puppet of other countries. I'd believe first that every piece of communication is already being monitored, specially around Trump. Look at the people he has surrounded himself with. There's a whole ton of people there now or that has come and gonne that I'd have no problems believing they'd just leak stuff or spy for foreign governments with either profit or because they were being blackmailed.
Foreign countries probably already have plenty of info on him, it's just more convenient to let the guy wreck havok in US international relations as this weakens US economy and gives more opportunities for foreign countries to strenghten theirs.
And should Trump do too much against other countries with access to his dirt, the information just comes in handy for blackmailing and whatnot, something I wouldn't doubt already happened anyways.
His supporters already blindly follow him. I'm willing to be that for the vast majority of them, should news come tomorrow that his phones were hacked and all the info stolen, they'd see no fault in Trump's position. It'd only be something to fuel his and his followers nationalist spew, more reason for isolationism, more fuel for immigrant persecution, more reasons for baseless accusations against foreign companies, and overall more reasons for the FUD that this administration feeds on.
When people have bought the narrative that every single mistake of the current administration is the fault of someone else, and even some of the most obvious errors and problems there is either fake or intrigue by the opposition, the country already set itself on a downward spiral. It will go on as long as it's to the benefit of those in power.
I pitty the non-supporters who are currently on this trap without any sight of getting out, but it is what it is.
And I say this as a non US citizen. I live in a country that has gone through that downward spiral. It has destroyed the entire country's economy, it has put the country as a place no foreign investors wants to deal with, it has provoked a massive runaway of scientists, researchers, technology overall, among other stuff t
Do you honestly believe that Hillary wouldn't pull same shit on him if they swapped places? Pot calling kettle black. Captcha:swingers
I'm 100% certain she wouldn't be playing much golf. And of course she wouldn't be charging the government a lot of money for services at her own enterprises, most certainly not for renting golf carts for the Secret Service agents who are supposed to take a bullet for her. Nor the tax breaks for the ultra rich including Wall Street. Want me to go on?
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
Do you honestly believe that Hillary wouldn't pull same shit on him if they swapped places? Pot calling kettle black. Captcha:swingers
I think that if the roles were reversed, Hillary, or any other presidential candidate you care to name, Democrat or Republican, would be concentrating on doing his job, solving the middle east mess, getting infrastructure reform done, finding some kind of compromise in the Obamacare feud that everybody can live with, doing something about mass shootings. Basically that candidate would be doing their job rather than spending all his time obsessing about what the person who lost the election was allegedly doing years ago and extorting foreign leaders into bailing out his son in law's real estate company and investing in his own resort projects in as a prerequisite to getting things done.
His predecessors were no better - and often worse - but they were given a free pass by the media. Obama used an ordinary Blackberry for years
Actually, no, Obama used a specially approved heavily restricted Blackberry. Not "an ordinary Blackberry". So, no, this is something Trump can criticized for just fine.
I'm not in the US, but from here it seems to me that Trump is pissing off all the right people. If the DC establishment and the media dislike him so much, he must be doing something right.
No, the simplest answer is most likely the correct one here; i.e. that he's just a dumb asshole.
Ezekiel 23:20
Yup. I'm a Finn so I have no direct stake in this, but following the Trump presidency from the outside has been like watching a trainwreck in slow-motion. This is the man who railed against corruption, the Washington elites, 'the swamp' and China. What has he done in his first year? Amp up nepotism by appointing his own friends and family into positions of power (never mind that they're not really fit to handle those positions), give massive tax-cuts to his own class to the tune of billions without any solid plan to fund them (and the republicans love this, even though it will cause a massive increase in the deficit), entangled your position in the middle-east even more than it already was by walking back on the Iran deal and with the Jerusalem embassy.move, and basically made himself the Swamlord.
The Chinese have the man figured out, and why wouldn't they, he's easy to read. All it took to bend the man to their will was a few hundred million to his project and suddenly the Chinese went from 'stealing so many jobs to nice people that need to be helped because 'too many jobs in China lost'. Beijing took one look at the tariffs he was planning, hit back with counter-tariffs that hurt the critical areas of the Trump-base in the midterm and the man folded instantly like a house of cards. The fact that he even thought he could win a 'trade war' is indicative of just how beyond clueless the man is of the structure of the global economy. And this man fancies himself a negotiator or a strongman of some kind? He's not playing 4d chess, he's not even playing chess, he's eating the pieces and calling himself a genius for doing so. But the base cheers for him, and that's all that he cares about.
Trump is weakening the US reputation and position globally on pretty much all fronts because he's so easy to manipulate, so impulsive, egocentric and frankly, so damn dumb. And that being the case, you can be sure that many of the major geopolitical players, likely China included, will do what they can behind the scenes to keep the man in power, because he might just be the best thing that's happened to your global competitors in a good while. Besides being relatively easy to control and influence from the outside with pocket change and praise, the amount of sheer incompetence and chaos he causes in the US domestic politics is a godsend to them. I mean, the fact that we're over a year into his presidency and the 'b-b-b-b-ut Hillary!" -card is still being thrown about as a counter whenever Trump does something that's just objectively moronic is proof of that.
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
Yup. I'm a Finn so I have no direct stake in this, but following the Trump presidency from the outside has been like watching a trainwreck in slow-motion. This is the man who railed against corruption, the Washington elites, 'the swamp' and China. What has he done in his first year? Amp up nepotism by appointing his own friends and family into positions of power (never mind that they're not really fit to handle those positions), give massive tax-cuts to his own class to the tune of billions without any solid plan to fund them (and the republicans love this, even though it will cause a massive increase in the deficit), entangled your position in the middle-east even more than it already was by walking back on the Iran deal and with the Jerusalem embassy.move, and basically made himself the Swamplord ... Trump is weakening the US reputation and position globally on pretty much all fronts because he's so easy to manipulate, so impulsive, egocentric and frankly, so damn dumb. ... I mean, the fact that we're over a year into his presidency and the 'b-b-b-b-ut Hillary!" -card is still being thrown about as a counter whenever Trump does something that's just objectively moronic is proof of that.
I'm not an American either and I don't have a stake Reps vs. Dems trench-warfare the US'ians have got going. I can also only sit in amazement and watch this farce unfold. Trump fancies himself as the greatest negotiator in history, the most clever political strategist of our time and in that capacity he has managed to destroy the USA's credibility by reneging on the Iran nuclear agreement with the predictable result that that now nobody believes that anything the US commits to will survive the next presidential transition or even the next morning POTUS wakes up in a bad mood and fires off a Twitter storm. I've been watching John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, Netanyahu and the rest of that ilk cheering this latest Iran move along and making the case that you can only fight war with war. Nobody except Israeli nationalists and the Fox and Friends audience is buying it. There are already four raging dumpster fires in the Middle East: Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and Yemen and nobody except Israel, Saudi Arabia and the US war hawk and a few small nations of no real consequence has the slightest appetite to light up a fifth one.
No but she did steal furniture twice on her way out of office.
Mostly false. https://www.snopes.com/fact-ch...
TL;DR version: The Clintons did keep gifts given to them while in office, some of which were furniture, and some of which turned out to be gifts given to "The White House". They had to return or pay for these gifts because while the gifts they received personally were theirs to keep, the gifts given to the White House were not. They settled the accounts by paying for some of the gifts and giving others to the National Park Service (who manages the White House).
Of course you probably believe the other, much bigger lies, about the Clintons, which Snopes has also debunked, so I'm sure you'll dismiss all their research as a coverup by a partisan web site.
I should mention that I don't like the Clintons. Not their politics or policies, not as people (from what I can see; I've never met them). And I never voted for either of them, nor would I. I just prefer facts to conspiracy theories.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
I think Trump is an absolute piece of shit, but it is incredibly ignorant to dismiss him as stupid or insane. He is obviously neither, and it's fools like you that helped get him elected.
Look at how much control we have over people on the right. Look at it! They don't make their own decisions, they do what we tell them to do (though we have to use reverse psychology). Witness the power of the political left!
Next election, I'm going to tell all my Trump-loving relatives that I, as a lefty, think he is awesome, and that they'd be totally doing the smart thing by voting for him. I'll tell them they'd have to be idiots to vote for the Democrat, but that they probably will because they're so dumb. That should do it, don't you think? I mean, I keep hearing that the left is responsible for his election, because we made those on the right feel so disrespected, they had to vote him in. Because they care so much what we think.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)