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China, Russia Are Listening To Trump's Phone Calls, Says NYT Report (thehill.com)
Rick Zeman writes: According to The New York Times, the Chinese are regularly listening to Donald Trump's cellphone calls (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source). While he has two NSA-hardened iPhones, and a secure landline, he insists on using a consumer-grade iPhone -- even while knowing he's being eavesdropped upon -- because it has his contact list on it. "White House officials say they can only hope he refrains from discussing classified information when he is on them," reports the New York Times. But, officials were also confident that "he was not spilling secrets because he rarely digs into the details of the intelligence he is shown and is not well versed in the operational specifics of military or covert activities"; in other words, security through ignorance. The article mentions the rationale is to be able to listen to his calls to find out what and whom influences him, and that the Russians also listen in, albeit with less frequency because of his unique relationship with Vladimir Putin.
BUT HER EMAILS!!!
Trump calls Putin after finishing his KFC dinner to bitch about how everyone is mean to him?
Rather than attack the messenger, please point to the evidence contradicting the story's evidence. Not everybody automatically responds positively to, "it's fake news!"
Are you forgetting who it is we're discussing here? This is the guy that blathers all over Twitter constantly, in defiance of all logic and reason, contradicting official Policy, even contradicting himself, attacking friend and foe alike, and so on, and so on, and so on. How is it so far outside the realm of possibility that he's blathering about State Secrets and other classified subjects on an unsecured phone?
What makes you say that? Do you have specific evidence or is this one of those, "They don't say what I want to hear so they're not credible" things?
Does MAGA = My Attorney Got Arrested?
More FAKE news. Everybody knows he is not a moron, but a FUCKING moron.
"Trump - Whitehouse Apprentice" is now the top-rated reality comedy show in Russia.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Who made a claim that the FBI or NSA can't "crack your calls," and what exactly do you mean by that term? Do you think that it's not possible to eavesdrop on a cellular call to any arbitrary phone in the world anymore? If it's not possible, then why do there exist "hardened" devices?
Also, even if everyone in the White House is too dumb to use auto-sync, how hard would it be to have an intern type Donald's contact list into a secure phone?
Shouldn't be hard at all, so why isn't he using a hardened device?
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Did you actually read the article you posted? It kind of undermines your own argument. Some salient points, emphasis mine ** :
But critics would argue that’s not enough, pointing to his delays implementing congressional sanctions and frequent praise of Putin’s leadership, as well as the reluctance to act on Moscow’s cyber aggression. They’ve also cited U.S. intelligence conclusions that the Kremlin meddled in the U.S. election in favor of Trump.
In August 2017, Trump signed into law the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, or CAATSA, despite calling it “seriously flawed.” **He then bypassed a congressionally mandated deadline in January to act on the bill** and impose new sanctions on Russia for the election allegations.
Also in March, following the poisoning of former KGB agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter in the U.K., the Trump administration expelled 60 Russian diplomats from the U.S., **although reports indicated he was not happy with the move.**
In early July, Trump seemed to challenge the long-held U.S. policy of refusing to recognize Moscow’s Crimea annexation, saying only in response to questions on the issue: “We’ll see.” He also reportedly argued to officials at June’s G-7 summit that Crimea should belong to Russia because “everyone there speaks Russian.”
Washington's UN ambassador Nikki Haley promptly promised further sanctions against Russia for its refusal to condemn the chemical attack — only to be left hanging when Trump walked back his threat and no new sanctions were imposed.
He talks a big game sometimes but hasn't really done much, and in a few cases like the CAATSA act, signed it and then refused to implement it. Not so tough.
You don't remember that? I do. Anyway, maybe this is the reason the press didn't get all German over it, from the article you linked to:
"The president has a BlackBerry through a compromise that allows him to stay in touch with senior staff and a small group of personal friends," said Robert Gibbs, his spokesman, "in a way that use will be limited and that the security is enhanced to ensure his ability to communicate."
First, only a select circle of people will have his address, creating a true hierarchy for who makes the cut and who does not.
Second, anyone placed on the A-list to receive his e-mail address must first receive a briefing from the White House counsel’s office.
Third, messages from the president will be designed so they cannot be forwarded.
There's also this:
Mr. Obama received his BlackBerry on Tuesday, but officials declined to specify what kind.
Imagine that, he was using a device that they gave him, not a consumer-grade device.
While lawyers and the Secret Service balked at Mr. Obama's initial requests to allow him to keep his BlackBerry, they acquiesced as long as the president - and those corresponding with him - agreed to strict rules. And he had to agree to use a specially made device, which must be approved by national security officials.
Let me know if you're still confused about the difference between that and Trump. You could also just actually read the articles that you link to. Or, if you just needed to get your what-about-ism out, hopefully you feel better now.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
I don't remember all the sturm und drang from the NY Times when President Obama kept his Blackberry.
I'm not sure what your point is. I conjecture you're arguing this: "critique of Obama for using his blackberry came from Fox but not NYT; therefore Fox and not NYT should be the ones critiquing Trump for using his iPhone"? (in which case, are you berating Fox or NYT or both?)
Or are you saying that the NYT and Fox comments about Obama's blackberry touched only on hypothetical attack vectors conjectured by security experts, but this article is about reports of actual and present and successful attacks on Trump, and you're wondering why the difference?
How this got modded insightful I can't even guess. Of *course* it will let you in. So will *any* consumer grade phone. It's called "phone tapping". Whether it's on the phone itself, a hijack on the carrier's network, or using a picocell to perform a MITM attack, it's actually very easy for anyone who cares enough to do so.
Law enforcement do it all the time, for pete's sake.
I think the larger issue is that it was the unanimous opinion of the 16 agencies in the intelligence community that Russia was actively attacking US democratic processes, and Trump, in public, while standing right next to Putin, after a private meeting that no one else was allowed to attend, said "President Putin says it's not Russia. I don't see any reason why it would be." So Trump chose to not believe his own intelligence agencies, all 16 of them, and instead side with the Russian dictator.
You might want to bring up the prepared statement that he later read when he said that he actually meant the exact opposite of what he said, but if you believe that prepared statement that he read on camera instead of the live answer he gave to the reporter who asked the question, then I think you're giving a pathological liar the benefit of the doubt. That's probably not the wisest thing to do.
Someone is actually keeping track of how many times Trump lies or makes misleading statements while he's been in office, and the total is over 5,000 so far. He has a documented history going back decades of not telling the truth. So, hopefully your counter-argument doesn't require people to believe him when he said, reading from a prepared statement, that he actually meant the exact opposite of what he previously said. Because, either way, whether it was the original answer or the follow-up statement, he said something that wasn't true. So hopefully you're not asking us to just take his word for it.
Also, in case you're getting the urge to bring up something that Obama did, this has nothing to do with Obama. Obama's actions do not excuse Trump's actions.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
FYI, this discussion made me curious to see if there are anything like 'rankings' for news sources, and I came upon this very interesting site:
https://www.adfontesmedia.com/
They do very detailed content-based analysis and are responsible for what is apparently a now very well cited graph. (https://www.adfontesmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Media-Bias-Chart_4.0_8_28_2018-min.jpg)
It's interesting cause they go into depth regarding their methodology and it seems pretty solid.
Incidentally, NYT is categorized as "slightly left leaning" and "factual".
Does Trump look like the kind of guy that goes into specifics ovethe phone?
So far as he knows them, sure. Practically the first thing he did was expose a bunch of Israeli intelligence assets to the Russian ambassador in an Oval Office meeting.
In fact what would be far more Trump-like is him knowing the Chinese were listening, and leading them on in some ways... you have to wonder what he's said about tariffs with others knowing the Chinese were listening in.
So you're theory is that Trump is a genius 11-dimensional chess player.
I'm not one of those people who think Trump is stupid. Penn Jilett, who actually knows the man, has an interesting take on Trump: Trump isn't stupid. He's stupid for a president. Take even George W. Bush, whose intelligence is often mocked, and put him in a room with a couple of dozen other random guys, and he's probably the smartest guy in the room.
Jilette, by the way, says he likes Donald Trump personally, because he likes people who don't have a filter. This fits my impression of the man, and what other expansive egotists I've known are like. They're domineering and crafty, yes, but they're also impulsive and needy. They tend to improvise, because making an impression on the person they're talking to right now takes precedence over the long term.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Really? You're going for the "but Obama ...!" defense? If you had read the article, you would know that they addressed that very subject and stated that Obama did not make calls on his cell phone when he was President:
So basically Obama had a email-reading device, not a cell phone.
Enigma
If China AND Russia are listening to ALL calls that Trump makes on a private cell phone, that means that we are freely giving all domestic and international call streams to China AND Russia, we KNOW about it and we DON'T DO ANYTHING about it.
This doesn't pass the sniff test.
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TFA is based on the assumption that any consumer grade cell phone can be monitored at will by the Chinese and Russians.
This strawman argument is completely made up. This assumption never appears in the article. Instead the article says, "American spy agencies, the officials said, had learned that China and Russia were eavesdropping on the president’s cellphone calls from human sources inside foreign governments and intercepting communications between foreign officials." Of course, each reader is free to discount the competence of American intelligence agencies, like our President does.
The Chinese strategy is not to learn nuggets of classified information. Instead, "the officials said they have also determined that China is seeking to use what it is learning from the calls — how Mr. Trump thinks, what arguments tend to sway him and to whom he is inclined to listen — to keep a trade war with the United States from escalating further. In what amounts to a marriage of lobbying and espionage, the Chinese have pieced together a list of the people with whom Mr. Trump regularly speaks in hopes of using them to influence the president, the officials said."
Perhaps the most interesting idea from the article is "Russia is not believed to be running as sophisticated an influence effort as China because of Mr. Trump’s apparent affinity for President Vladimir V. Putin, a former official said." That is, Mr. Xi can only dream of being like Putin. So, instead Xi needs spy tactics to learn which Americans to taint, but Putin can talk to his American friend directly.
The FBI and the NSA. They have repeatedly said they can't monitor phones, and need backdoors.
I believe you’re conflating two different things. The FBI has said they need back doors to get at the encrypted contents on the phones. But I’ve never heard any claim that cell phone calls are particularly secure, unless the person is using an encrypted technology (e.g. FaceTime).
Now as to why the President insists on using his personal phone instead of the two different hardened phones he’s been provided - God only knows.
#DeleteChrome
Sure! I'm glad you asked.
If you had bothered to read the article, you would have noticed that the allegation is that the communications are intercepted en route, not at the device itself. But since you were so eager to defend someone who is actually a chump, I guess we should expect some bias and dishonesty from you.
If it's being intercepted en route, then I doubt the NSA-hardened cell phones are going to do any better... After all, I doubt they're actually encrypting the calls--that doesn't seem likely to be technically feasible if these phones use the standard cell network.
However, there is no sane reason for not having gotten his contact list moved over onto one of them. Transferring contact lists between cell phones is a trivial thing to do. Even if you're scared of doing it by transferring the data for some absurd reason, or it can't be done because it's part of how vendor lock-in is managed, there is always the option of doing it by hand...which is still trivial, just tedious. (So, it's a job for the interns.)
Therefore: Why did the people responsible for ensuring that the POTUS has a secure cell phone decide to not move it over? Is there some (presumably utterly stupid) reason it's not standard operating procedure, given it's a reasonable and anticipatable desire?
Does anyone else feel sorry for the poor Chinese and Russian spies who have to listen to Trumpâ(TM)s phone calls all day?