Wow. They leveled an entire apartment complex and killed at least 53 people in order to extrajudicially execute one person.
What a scandal this checks notes bungled invite to Signal is.
this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2025
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Yeah, ethics (and probably legality) have been out of the equation for a while now. The US are not officially at war. Very peaceful, much friendly. Too many precedents now...
Still I suppose trying to keep the leaders accountable for some of their actions is somewhat positive.
This stuff has already been happening for a while.
Back in Obama times when extrajudicial executions by drone started to be a thing, the civilian casualties numbers were so bad that they even changed the definition of "enemy combatant" when counting casualties to be "any male of military age".
The tools and mindset when it comes to murder abroad that the current batch of assholes are using have been in place and used for more than a decade.
Back in Obama times when extrajudicial executions by drone started to be a thing
Obama gets a lot of shit for this, and plenty of it is deserved. But I think people fixate on "execution by drone" while forgetting Bush Jr and prior administrations tended to use hellfire missiles launched from manned black-hawk helicopters to the same effect.
the civilian casualties numbers were so bad that they even changed the definition of “enemy combatant” when counting casualties to be “any male of military age”.
I believe this was the standard during the original Bush Jr Iraq invasion. Also... go back to the US invasions and interventions in Nicaragua, Vietnam, Korea, and the Balkins... hell, straight back to the WWs, and you're going to see people playing very fast and loose with the definition of "combatant". Military officers have never been picky about collateral damage before. What's largely changed has been the post-Vietnam media coverage, as a rebuttal to the photography and video journalism that emerged from that era.
We have to say we're only killing "enemy combatants" now, because we want to preemptively rebut the claim that we did another Mai Ly Massacre or Hadditha.
The tools and mindset when it comes to murder abroad
And now we're seeing the mindset come home, perhaps in a way we haven't experienced since Blair Mountain.
However, in the pre-strike review, Obama "embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties" that effectively counted "all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent."
Obama knew very well what he was doing.
Both Republicans and Democrats were happy with using the very same tools in the very same way these assholes now are using them, and even the supposed greatest Democrat president of the last 3 decades, Barack Obama, very specifically relied on changing the meaning of words (just like the Fascists do) by specifically redefining the meaning of "enemy combatant" to hide in the final tally the most immoral and unethical effects of his choices.
Sociopathic sleaze has been the way of the office of POTUS and cronies for a long time and in many things such as this, it's not different Ethics and Morals that really distinguishes Democrats from Republicans (even the current lot of Republicans), it's that this lot are more brazen and less competent.
Both Republicans and Democrats were happy with using the very same tools in the very same way these assholes now are using them, and even the supposed greatest Democrat president of the last 3 decades, Barack Obama, very specifically relied on changing the meaning of words (just like the Fascists do) by specifically redefining the meaning of “enemy combatant” to hide in the final tally the most immoral and unethical effects of his choices.
“There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party … and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt — until recently … and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties.”
― Gore Vidal
Sociopathic sleaze has been the way of the office of POTUS and cronies for a long time and in many things such as this, it’s not different Ethics and Morals that really distinguishes Democrats from Republicans
The western mass media venerates the holocaust of foreigners, particularly browner-skinned foreigners, on the grounds that they are savage and our bombs and bullets bring modernity. As Trump brings imperialism home to the industrial core, we're going to see these same promises of modernity used to justify the demolition and decimation of the American interior.
They also struck a cancer hospital twice.
WHAT??? Do you support cancer? 😤 we need to eliminate all cancer hospitals - this is where you get cancer! The clue is in the name
Signal is a publicly available app that provides encrypted communications, but it can be hacked.
As far as I've seen, the only attacks are phishing attacks to get a device linked
This is far from being hack-able in my books.
Did I miss something?
I'm not defending those dipshits, but I want to make sure, that my preferred communication platform isn't actually compromised
What’s being reported… is that the national security folks believe that most all top level officials already have enemy nation states ease dropping on their personal phones. Especially if, say… you’re in their country (like one of the members of the signal chat was, in Russia specifically, during the signal chat episode).
Signal may be safe for us normies, but if your device is already compromised because you’re a high value target, especially if you’re in their lair, then there isn’t much good that’ll do for you.
Yeah, if you device is compromised, the apps on it are obviously as well.
But that still doesn't affect Signal as a network directly.
Which is imho a important distinction, as else all my communications could be compromised as well
Media won’t report that, it’s be bad for the shareholders of iOS or Android was known to be exploited. They’ll just say “Signal bad! Signal insecure!” While these dipshits probably have given GIF Keyboard access within it and shit like that.
Phishing and also your commercial phone is definitely vulnerable. Look what groups like Salt Typhoon and their cohorts have been doing for years.
Not saying that this isn't a threat vector, but it's not like my communications are automatically compromised, like with a bug or hacked signal server infrastructure
For sure, but the primary reason governments around the world keep their classified data off commercial networks is to mitigate risk vectors. The US is just being led by a bunch of fucking morons, so they don't consider things like that. The encryption within Signal is perfectly sound, but top secret data has no business being on their servers or on unclassified, commercial phones.
Hacking a signal server should yield zero useful results. Messages are encrypted on the phone before being sent. Signal servers only ever receive and retransmit encrypted blobs, never the plaintext. They, by design, do not have the keys to decrypt those messages. There might be metadata about who messages who and when, but I’m not 100% familiar with that part of it.
Now, if you pwn the phone, on the other hand, you can record the display and log the keystrokes.
Yeah, exactly
But when they talk, that signal is hackable, there is pretty much a difference to a phishing attack or an actual hack of the infrastructure
And as you said, with E2E encryption that shouldn't be really possible
Did I miss something?
Yeah the NSA (and your other favorite cyber/sigint agencies) will just use the easiest attack vector of your phone, which is usually iOS, Android and its many other apps, root it and read all your app messages anyway.
I mean that assumes you are a target of high value worth throwing stuff like the Pegasus spyware at, but at that point you really should just be using a dedicated handheld computer with a sim adapter for network connectivity, and not practically almost every smartphone on the planet, even if you somehow coaxed it to use postmarket OS lol.
did I miss something?
Yeah, your devices keyboard needs an internet connection.
As far as I know, I've blocked my keyboards network requests
But maybe GrapheneOS gives me more abilities here