you mean best selling children's book author Kash Patel who is desperately trying to scrub the internet of his music video[0] revising the Jan 6 insurrection
Almost all phishing attempts at my domain are from google. Many Norton subscription bills for around $350. I report every single one to google. I can’t believe they aren’t using there AI to figure this out.
A great many experts in the military, medicine, disaster relief, and cybersecurity { the list goes on } were fired.
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)
"Competent" people are not valuable and over rated because they will flake out in such jobs when the group holds them responsible for all sorts of things they have no control over. They are the first people who recognize lumits. Their own, their teams and the systems. But people dont want to hear about Limits. They want saviors and messaihs. They want fantasy and magic. So the system runs not optimized for efficiency but illusion of control, for damping of anxieties and fears.
From the administration that brought us "We are currently clean on OPSEC", I can't claim surprise. Disappointment, but not surprise.
Nor, however, can I take the statements of malicious actors at face value. They hacked a personal email address, but that does not mean "the FBI’s security was nothing more than a joke".
Nothing anti-semitic about pointing out close ties between political allies. Like how Jared Kushner's family is so close with Netanyahu he slept in Jared's bed. If anything it's patriotic & pro-Israel.
Noem - habeas corpus definition she gave at the Congress hearing
Kennedy Jr - vaccines and the rest of his view on medicine
Now Patel's unhackable FBI.
I think the world has changed, and i really need to update my expectations of what is new normal. It is like in tech when paradigm shift happens, and you're either go with the new paradigm or get irrelevant.
We’re way beyond Idiocracy now, we left that timeline six years ago.
For all his flaws, Camacho was a good leader - he recognised there was a problem, knew he couldn’t fix it and actively rallied the world around the one person who could.
This bunch of dipshits expressly denigrated the experts, refused to take the slightest precaution to protect themselves and others from a deadly virus and caused hundreds of thousands of deaths.
And that’s not even thinking about the industrial levels of fuckery and bullshit they’ve perpetrated over the last year.
“Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.” ~Hannah Arendt
i'm from USSR, so pretty familiar with it. The issue here is whether it is a fluke, or the world is really going into new phase where totalitarianism and authoritarianism are going to become dominating state of affairs.
For example many attribute rise of totalitarianism back then in 20th century to the power of broadcasting radio and "formation of mass society". We have a similarly transformative factor now - social media. And with the new tech power - propaganda (sounds dated, today it is more like mind control) through social media and total surveillance plus AI "minority report" - we can get a hyper-totalitarianism orders of magnitude more totalitarian than those of the 20th century. And may be we're witnessing the birth of such a new world order.
Totalitarianism and authoritarianism has been the norm for the majority of human history. The last century of technological progress created a bubble where the power of sycophancy wasn't strong enough to counteract the power of actual technology. Now that the technology is widely distributed and easily available to sycophants, sycophancy again brings an advantage.
Authoritarianism is a spectrum and all states are on it. We all have brain slugs now, it was voluntary. We'll be going back to that old time religion, but with a new twist. With AI every man will, in a much more literal way, be able to have an ongoing private conversation with god. And you won't need money or the government anymore. God has a special plan for you and you follow it.
The people of the US were converted into functional Putin-subservient Russians for the last election, and the media environment is not getting better, and in fact seems to be getting much worse.
However there is revolt amongst a good chunk of the fractured coalition that barely brought Trump into office.
Trump's Epstein coverup and sheltering of Ghislaine Maxwell took off the shine with a large number of people. The ghastly behavior around the deaths of major figures takes off more. Exempting producers of the pesticide glyphosate has taken off most of the MAHA coalition. And then, of course the wars, when he promised not to launch any and accused his opponent of doing exactly what he's currently doing...
It remains to be seen just how permanent this is, and whether the post-Trump US can be reattached to reality instead of reality TV, but I use hope.
Unfortunately that leaves us with the Democrats who have shown time and again that they are unwilling or unable to confront this movement for what it is.
I'm frankly far more concerned that the Republicans lose next election, and we get Democrats in power who then prioritize "getting back to normal" and once again utterly failing to hold accountable the utter BUFFET of mediocre wannabe dictators who brought us to the brink already.
I also hope. But I'd be lying if I said I thought it was rational.
The real fear is that they don't solve any of the problems that caused this in the first place... it's not about some vindictive punishment, it's about solving the problem.
I don't think people appreciate enough how much it mattered that Trump was a celebrity buffoon/reality show personality for decades before "politics". Stupid people eat that up. Other Trumpy candidates have not been able to reproduce his success. Let's not assume this is the new normal.
I heard some of the best advice I ever heard at a Subgenius devival in Dallas in the 80s: "Act like a dumb-shit and they'll treat you like an equal." Every year that quip seems more and more relevant.
I don’t think people appreciate enough how much it mattered that Trump was the only candidate explicitly saying they were working to Make America Great Again, as opposed to foreign interests or illegals.
I recently read one of the best descriptions of why middle of the road, non wealthy voters went for Trump in the book "The King in Orange," a book about the "magickal" aspects of the 2016 campaign by John Michael Greer, the former (?) head of the Ancient Order of Druids in America.
I expect cogent commentary about ritual magick by a Druid, but was a little surprised to find well laid out political commentary. I guess that was a failure of my imagination. Worth a read, even if you consider the topic bollocks. Greer sticks mostly to psychology and musings about using metaphor to engineer the mass imagination. Much less woo-woo than you might expect.
I mention it in support of the previous poster's commentary about the Dems messaging being irrelevant to most Americans. Seemed to me middle America doesn't love Trump as much as they weren't able to hear Harris address any issues they were concerned about.
I can recommend The King in Orange, What's the Matter with Kansas and Metaphors We Live By for more musings about such things.
I'm no fan of this administration, at all, but this seems like a big fat nothingburger. They hacked a personal gmail account, not a government account, not government infra. Why is this not a failing of Google instead of the government? And surely the hackers would have eagerly released anything damning, but nothing damning seems to exist. What am i missing here?
Remember when this admin used a Signal group chat to coordinate an operation against Houthi forces in Yemen and left in some journalists. Do you think he cares care whether he sent an email with his gov email on a gov device or if he sent it with his personal email?
you don't think that it's relevant and concerning that the director of the FBI didn't take operational security seriously enough that his account got compromised? even if they didn't get anything incriminating (which maybe they did and are going to blackmail him later) that show a shocking lack of competency for someone in that kind of position.
i think the facts of the matter are that a gmail vulnerability is on the very low likelihood kind of event. they wouldn't burn their insanely valuable vulnerability on showing how much of a fratboy kash is. the most likely possibility is that he either clicked on something dumb and gave access through phishing(really bad) or had a really weak password without 2fa(also really bad).
True, but don't you think the FBI director should be held to higher standards of security hygiene than average people? Because I'm interpreting your tone as "it could happen to anyone". At some point the doubt is gone and there's no more benefit to give...
it's definitely newsworthy, no doubt there. but i see so many people in this thread pointing to this as somehow a failing of the fbi, which it's not. i'm all for calling out this administration for its many many failings, but this is not one of them, and calling this a failure of the administration just hurts the credibility of everyone pointing out real issues with this administration.
True yeah. but uh anyway what about HILLARYS EMAILS we need to hear about those for the next 4 decades (no convictions despite "Lock Her Up" slogans for 5 years)
Major public figure who is currently in a position of power in the USA. That’s bad news because it reveals sensitive details which may lead to their further compromise. Imagine you’re compromised by a corrupt administration with pics of CSAM or something already, now imagine a foreign actor also having compromised you. It’s a sticky situation.
Yes, that's all true, all potential issues in theory. I'm still not seeing why this points to or supports the (valid) claim of incompetence in the FBI. That seems to be the angle most posters in this thread are taking, and it seems...misguided to me. Tilting at windmills. Let's call out the admin for their real failings, not nonsense like this. Getting your gmail account hacked does not reflect on you as a professional.
> "Getting your gmail account hacked does not reflect on you as a professional."
Doesn't it though? Especially when your profession involves the security of a nation and you can't even secure your own personal email account successfully?
> Getting your gmail account hacked does not reflect on you as a professional.
Why not? Most professionals at larger organizations have to do security training. These kinds of attacks are far less likely to succeed on anyone who follows the basic precautions taught in such training. E.g., if he had MFA enabled on his account - as he certainly should have had - they would not have been able to compromise it externally, i.e. it would have had to be much more than his email that was hacked.
I don’t get the propensity some people seem to have for defending this shameful collection of incompetent criminals, bullies, and clowns.
Leaking one’s credentials to sensitive personal repositories of information is a “real failing” lol, how could one think any differently? I would be mortified and immediately rectify the situation.
> Getting your gmail account hacked does not reflect on you as a professional
If you work in security: it *absolutely does*, because 99+% of the time you are the primary contributing factor, whether from password reuse or downloading malware or clicking bad links or opening random emails or being susceptible to social engineering, etc.
If you are the head of a security organization: obviously you should not expect to retain that job, as your poor reputation is now an albatross around the company's neck.
If you are the head of the FBI: lol. lmao. what the actual fuck. my money is on someone spearfished him with an email subject about a book deal and he'll just click fucking anything.
The Reuters article they link to and that they mostly summarize has much more info.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/iran-linked-hackers-claim-b...
It’s all fine since he didn’t use it for official business right, right…
The FBI just made a bounty to find who hacked family photos.
I am sure the FBI will do that for my family too right?
Or we’re more than family photos hacked?
Maybe the family un-friendly kind?
Based on the links in the articles, it's personal photographs and a resume from an old Gmail account. The resume dates from 2017.
Or more likely unofficial business
I still can’t get over the fact that *Kash “Stay in my lane” Patel* is heading the FBI
you mean best selling children's book author Kash Patel who is desperately trying to scrub the internet of his music video[0] revising the Jan 6 insurrection
[0] https://youtu.be/TPF_e2E5F74
Was he running openclaw on his unpenetrable system by any chance?
Clowns, all the way down.
Unfair to clowns, a noble profession.
Prefer the title “jesters”
the sensible middle of the road between clowns on the left and the jokers on the right.
Its hard to keep this smile off my face
When the clown moves into the palace it doesn’t make him the king, the palace becomes a circus
I wonder how many others are hacked but remain undiscovered
Considering 95% of spam that hits my inbox originates from compromised Gmail accounts, I'd say it's a few.
Because Google is too big to fail, all Gmail traffic is essentially whitelisted and they can't be bothered to do anything about it.
Almost all phishing attempts at my domain are from google. Many Norton subscription bills for around $350. I report every single one to google. I can’t believe they aren’t using there AI to figure this out.
> I can’t believe they aren’t using there AI to figure this out.
Why would they burn compute on it when they have zero incentive to fix the problem?
Google was banned from Usenet once, so there's hope.
Did you write the software that allowed him to get hacked in the first place?
Earlier pre-confirmation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47543167
BRING IT ON
Certainly the FBI and GMail having gaps in their operational information security isn't news.
Do you think the FBI manages his personal email?
Kind of defeats the purpose of it being a personal email don't you think?
The FBI does because he is included in "the FBI"
I read the headline and first thought was seriously, that's it? Surely this is one of the least concerning things about the administration
A great many experts in the military, medicine, disaster relief, and cybersecurity { the list goes on } were fired.
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.
The Manchurian Candidate.
When do the Raptor puppets go on sale?
For real, I wouldn't be shocked if Trump drafted everyone between 18 and 42, sent them all to Iran and then let Israel nuke Iran
Its both dumber and more dangerous than that. Competent people are not valuable to governments that value loyalty more than competence.
"Competent" people are not valuable and over rated because they will flake out in such jobs when the group holds them responsible for all sorts of things they have no control over. They are the first people who recognize lumits. Their own, their teams and the systems. But people dont want to hear about Limits. They want saviors and messaihs. They want fantasy and magic. So the system runs not optimized for efficiency but illusion of control, for damping of anxieties and fears.
Were any of the people fired responsible for security on personal gmail accounts?
"Iran, if you're listening..."
From the administration that brought us "We are currently clean on OPSEC", I can't claim surprise. Disappointment, but not surprise.
Nor, however, can I take the statements of malicious actors at face value. They hacked a personal email address, but that does not mean "the FBI’s security was nothing more than a joke".
These government officials are idiots. Jeffery Epstein, idiot. Why do even rich and powerful use easily hackable stuff?
Lest us not forget bObama@yahoo.com or the IT guy who worked for the Clinton foundation who posted about bleachbit on recdit
Obama's old personal email was at defunct ISP ameritech.net, not Yahoo. I only remember because that's the ISP I grew up with.
Trump using yourefired as his Twitter password well into his 2016 campaign was amazing, too.
I'm surprised he put the 'e' on 'you're'.
Idiots
Because they are experts in acquiring riches and power, not experts in computer security.
24 year old Israeli girlfriend + Kash = True luv.
It’s considered anti-semitic to point out the ways that Israelis influence The US government.
Nothing anti-semitic about pointing out close ties between political allies. Like how Jared Kushner's family is so close with Netanyahu he slept in Jared's bed. If anything it's patriotic & pro-Israel.
Imagine a world where gpg encryption was the norm instead of something that only works reliably in Emacs.
This wouldn't have happened if Kash Patel used Emacs, that's right.
I think it's a pretty cynical take that an Emacs user will never be made FBI director.
are you saying someone can’t key information into an NCIC profile with EMacs? Ha! furious typing
How would GPG help? GPG is as safe as your private key is. If someone gets "hacks you" and gets access to your private key, it's over
https://dangerousthings.com/product/apex-flex/
Hegseth - Signal app
Noem - habeas corpus definition she gave at the Congress hearing
Kennedy Jr - vaccines and the rest of his view on medicine
Now Patel's unhackable FBI.
I think the world has changed, and i really need to update my expectations of what is new normal. It is like in tech when paradigm shift happens, and you're either go with the new paradigm or get irrelevant.
If Idiocracy was made today, I wonder how far in the future they’d place it. In 2006, they thought 500 years which seems optimistic now.
It would literally just be a compilation of TikToks
We’re way beyond Idiocracy now, we left that timeline six years ago.
For all his flaws, Camacho was a good leader - he recognised there was a problem, knew he couldn’t fix it and actively rallied the world around the one person who could.
This bunch of dipshits expressly denigrated the experts, refused to take the slightest precaution to protect themselves and others from a deadly virus and caused hundreds of thousands of deaths.
And that’s not even thinking about the industrial levels of fuckery and bullshit they’ve perpetrated over the last year.
> caused hundreds of thousands of deaths.
Excess mortality in the US during the pandemic was around 1.2 million.
Future? I'm thinking a Borat style mockumentary in the present.
I think it's the future of entertainment. Ruthlessly mocking idiots in power (and others). To be honest it's the present of some entertainment.
Don't forget "the files are on my desk" and many other classics.
The real paradigm shift is coming in 2028.
Only the best people
“Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.” ~Hannah Arendt
i'm from USSR, so pretty familiar with it. The issue here is whether it is a fluke, or the world is really going into new phase where totalitarianism and authoritarianism are going to become dominating state of affairs.
For example many attribute rise of totalitarianism back then in 20th century to the power of broadcasting radio and "formation of mass society". We have a similarly transformative factor now - social media. And with the new tech power - propaganda (sounds dated, today it is more like mind control) through social media and total surveillance plus AI "minority report" - we can get a hyper-totalitarianism orders of magnitude more totalitarian than those of the 20th century. And may be we're witnessing the birth of such a new world order.
Totalitarianism and authoritarianism has been the norm for the majority of human history. The last century of technological progress created a bubble where the power of sycophancy wasn't strong enough to counteract the power of actual technology. Now that the technology is widely distributed and easily available to sycophants, sycophancy again brings an advantage.
Authoritarianism is a spectrum and all states are on it. We all have brain slugs now, it was voluntary. We'll be going back to that old time religion, but with a new twist. With AI every man will, in a much more literal way, be able to have an ongoing private conversation with god. And you won't need money or the government anymore. God has a special plan for you and you follow it.
The people of the US were converted into functional Putin-subservient Russians for the last election, and the media environment is not getting better, and in fact seems to be getting much worse.
However there is revolt amongst a good chunk of the fractured coalition that barely brought Trump into office.
Trump's Epstein coverup and sheltering of Ghislaine Maxwell took off the shine with a large number of people. The ghastly behavior around the deaths of major figures takes off more. Exempting producers of the pesticide glyphosate has taken off most of the MAHA coalition. And then, of course the wars, when he promised not to launch any and accused his opponent of doing exactly what he's currently doing...
It remains to be seen just how permanent this is, and whether the post-Trump US can be reattached to reality instead of reality TV, but I use hope.
Unfortunately that leaves us with the Democrats who have shown time and again that they are unwilling or unable to confront this movement for what it is.
I'm frankly far more concerned that the Republicans lose next election, and we get Democrats in power who then prioritize "getting back to normal" and once again utterly failing to hold accountable the utter BUFFET of mediocre wannabe dictators who brought us to the brink already.
I also hope. But I'd be lying if I said I thought it was rational.
The real fear is that they don't solve any of the problems that caused this in the first place... it's not about some vindictive punishment, it's about solving the problem.
I don't think people appreciate enough how much it mattered that Trump was a celebrity buffoon/reality show personality for decades before "politics". Stupid people eat that up. Other Trumpy candidates have not been able to reproduce his success. Let's not assume this is the new normal.
I heard some of the best advice I ever heard at a Subgenius devival in Dallas in the 80s: "Act like a dumb-shit and they'll treat you like an equal." Every year that quip seems more and more relevant.
I don’t think people appreciate enough how much it mattered that Trump was the only candidate explicitly saying they were working to Make America Great Again, as opposed to foreign interests or illegals.
I recently read one of the best descriptions of why middle of the road, non wealthy voters went for Trump in the book "The King in Orange," a book about the "magickal" aspects of the 2016 campaign by John Michael Greer, the former (?) head of the Ancient Order of Druids in America.
I expect cogent commentary about ritual magick by a Druid, but was a little surprised to find well laid out political commentary. I guess that was a failure of my imagination. Worth a read, even if you consider the topic bollocks. Greer sticks mostly to psychology and musings about using metaphor to engineer the mass imagination. Much less woo-woo than you might expect.
I mention it in support of the previous poster's commentary about the Dems messaging being irrelevant to most Americans. Seemed to me middle America doesn't love Trump as much as they weren't able to hear Harris address any issues they were concerned about.
I can recommend The King in Orange, What's the Matter with Kansas and Metaphors We Live By for more musings about such things.
I'm no fan of this administration, at all, but this seems like a big fat nothingburger. They hacked a personal gmail account, not a government account, not government infra. Why is this not a failing of Google instead of the government? And surely the hackers would have eagerly released anything damning, but nothing damning seems to exist. What am i missing here?
Remember when this admin used a Signal group chat to coordinate an operation against Houthi forces in Yemen and left in some journalists. Do you think he cares care whether he sent an email with his gov email on a gov device or if he sent it with his personal email?
you don't think that it's relevant and concerning that the director of the FBI didn't take operational security seriously enough that his account got compromised? even if they didn't get anything incriminating (which maybe they did and are going to blackmail him later) that show a shocking lack of competency for someone in that kind of position.
we don't even know how it was compromised. was his password "password", or did the hackers exploit a gmail/google vulnerability?
i think the facts of the matter are that a gmail vulnerability is on the very low likelihood kind of event. they wouldn't burn their insanely valuable vulnerability on showing how much of a fratboy kash is. the most likely possibility is that he either clicked on something dumb and gave access through phishing(really bad) or had a really weak password without 2fa(also really bad).
are you suggesting the former is not a demonstration of a shocking lack of competency?
I'm suggesting we don't know how the account was hacked, which is true. could be due to incompetence or not. i don't know, nor do you
True, but don't you think the FBI director should be held to higher standards of security hygiene than average people? Because I'm interpreting your tone as "it could happen to anyone". At some point the doubt is gone and there's no more benefit to give...
Comments in this thread mostly reflect people’s own biases, that is a shallow projection based on the headline.
Did the director have his email on a vulnerable server? Yes. Yes he did.
He should have known better.
It's not a big deal, for the reasons you mentioned. But it's interesting to a lot of people, and therefore newsworthy.
it's definitely newsworthy, no doubt there. but i see so many people in this thread pointing to this as somehow a failing of the fbi, which it's not. i'm all for calling out this administration for its many many failings, but this is not one of them, and calling this a failure of the administration just hurts the credibility of everyone pointing out real issues with this administration.
True yeah. but uh anyway what about HILLARYS EMAILS we need to hear about those for the next 4 decades (no convictions despite "Lock Her Up" slogans for 5 years)
People are concerned because every government official uses their personal email for work.
The director of the FBI should not be hacked in anyway ever for any reason.
If Gmail isn’t secure, he should be using something else.
How is this a failing of Google? They can't be blamed for users who fail to secure their own accounts.
just think of what could someone do if they got into your personal email account?
yes, and...?
Major public figure who is currently in a position of power in the USA. That’s bad news because it reveals sensitive details which may lead to their further compromise. Imagine you’re compromised by a corrupt administration with pics of CSAM or something already, now imagine a foreign actor also having compromised you. It’s a sticky situation.
Yes, that's all true, all potential issues in theory. I'm still not seeing why this points to or supports the (valid) claim of incompetence in the FBI. That seems to be the angle most posters in this thread are taking, and it seems...misguided to me. Tilting at windmills. Let's call out the admin for their real failings, not nonsense like this. Getting your gmail account hacked does not reflect on you as a professional.
> "Getting your gmail account hacked does not reflect on you as a professional."
Doesn't it though? Especially when your profession involves the security of a nation and you can't even secure your own personal email account successfully?
Shouldn't the FBI be protecting its own members -- especially its executives -- personal digital footprint, given the risk?
> Getting your gmail account hacked does not reflect on you as a professional.
Why not? Most professionals at larger organizations have to do security training. These kinds of attacks are far less likely to succeed on anyone who follows the basic precautions taught in such training. E.g., if he had MFA enabled on his account - as he certainly should have had - they would not have been able to compromise it externally, i.e. it would have had to be much more than his email that was hacked.
I don’t get the propensity some people seem to have for defending this shameful collection of incompetent criminals, bullies, and clowns.
Leaking one’s credentials to sensitive personal repositories of information is a “real failing” lol, how could one think any differently? I would be mortified and immediately rectify the situation.
> Getting your gmail account hacked does not reflect on you as a professional
If you work in security: it *absolutely does*, because 99+% of the time you are the primary contributing factor, whether from password reuse or downloading malware or clicking bad links or opening random emails or being susceptible to social engineering, etc.
If you are the head of a security organization: obviously you should not expect to retain that job, as your poor reputation is now an albatross around the company's neck.
If you are the head of the FBI: lol. lmao. what the actual fuck. my money is on someone spearfished him with an email subject about a book deal and he'll just click fucking anything.