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Jared & Ivanka: Couple 'Continues To Use' Private Messaging For White House Business, Top Democrat Says (thedailybeast.com)
Freshly Exhumed writes: Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD), the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, has revealed that senior White House advisor Jared Kushner's lawyer admitted in December that his client "continues to use" WhatsApp to conduct official White House business. The chairman also said that a lawyer for Ivanka Trump and Mr. Kushner told the committee late last year that they additionally used private email accounts for official White House business in a way that may have violated federal records laws. Mr Kushner's lawyer, Abbe Lowell could not say whether his client used WhatsApp to share classified information. Regardless, Cummings says the communications raise questions about whether Kushner and other officials violated the Presidential Records Act, which requires the president and his staff "take all practical steps to file personal records separately from Presidential records." As for Ivanka's use of a personal email account to conduct official business, her lawyer says she sent the emails before she was briefed on the rules.
If you're not familiar with WhatsApp, here's what you should know about it: "As of January 2019, more than 1.5 billion users in over 180 countries use WhatsApp, created in 2009 as an alternative to text messaging," reports USA Today. "Facebook acquired WhatsApp in 2014 to make a bigger play in the rapidly-growing messaging market, along with its own Messenger platform, which also boasts 1.5 billion users." The service features end-to-end encryption, meaning the sender and recipient are the only ones who can view the messages.
If you're not familiar with WhatsApp, here's what you should know about it: "As of January 2019, more than 1.5 billion users in over 180 countries use WhatsApp, created in 2009 as an alternative to text messaging," reports USA Today. "Facebook acquired WhatsApp in 2014 to make a bigger play in the rapidly-growing messaging market, along with its own Messenger platform, which also boasts 1.5 billion users." The service features end-to-end encryption, meaning the sender and recipient are the only ones who can view the messages.
The problem is the system that given two choices picks the one least able to effectively lead the country and make things better for people, mostly because of innuendo and bullshit.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
If you look beyond the obvious partisan memes that continue to be spouted here, there are a couple of much more significant, underlying concerns.
/. readers have a technical background and are familiar with the concept of designing systems with redundancy, reliability and independent controls [to ensure effectiveness]. None of these concepts are beyond us - certainly not beyond an institution with the budget of the federal government.
1. Why have officially mandated guidelines for all those serving in government - including post-holders, employees and advisors - not been tightened? If the concerns raised by the "Clinton Email Server" were as serious as the talking heads would have us believe, then when the Republicans came to power in 2016, why was the first new legislation on the slate not a comprehensive review of "conduct in public office", with permissible and impermissible activities more clearly defined?
3. Why is it acceptable for "dark money" to be given to aid political campaigns, with voters having no visibility of sources and therefore no way of knowing if decisions and votes being cast by elected representatives are given based on representing their electorate or based on the requirements of those special interests?
One way to look at this is as a customer - you a buying a service from the federal government by virtue of the taxes you pay.
In order to be able to look at this objectively, we need to cast aside the specifics of Hilary's email server or Kushner's use of Whatsapp, or Jrvanka's access to Top Secret information through clearances that raised strenuous objections from every agency involved... Instead we have to look at this from th eperspective of imagining a worst-case scenario: that the republic is under direct attack from hostile foreign actors, corrupt insiders and mendacious corporations and make sure that the framework in which government operates is designed from the get-go to safeguard *us* from abuses of that system.
Many
In shore, there are no excuses for the public to accept these failures of their government.
It's highly problematic, but it's how the system works, Clinton was entirely normal in that regard.
That is the point. Our government runs on sleaze, and HRC is a "normal" example of that sleaze.
So the choice was between a slimy politician and a slimy businessman. I don't know what the solution is, but our system is clearly broken if the only options were HRC and DJT.
One solution is instant-runoff voting, which was done in Maine and seems to work well. There were predictions that the voters would be too stupid to understand it, but that didn't happen in Maine.
Another (or additional) solution is open primaries. California has gone to open primaries for state, but not federal, elections. It seems to be working to elect more moderates, and weaken the power of political parties.