DOJ confirms FBI Director Kash Patel's personal email was hacked
134 points
2 hours ago
| 12 comments
| arstechnica.com
| HN
trelane
28 minutes ago
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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...

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unparagoned
2 hours ago
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It’s all fine since he didn’t use it for official business right, right…
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drfloyd51
13 minutes ago
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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?

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pnw
2 hours ago
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Based on the links in the articles, it's personal photographs and a resume from an old Gmail account. The resume dates from 2017.
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justonceokay
2 hours ago
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Or more likely unofficial business
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dlev_pika
1 hour ago
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I still can’t get over the fact that *Kash “Stay in my lane” Patel* is heading the FBI
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reddozen
42 seconds ago
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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

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sv123
1 hour ago
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Clowns, all the way down.
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mikkupikku
1 hour ago
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Unfair to clowns, a noble profession.
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xeonmc
1 hour ago
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Prefer the title “jesters”
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bryanrasmussen
1 hour ago
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the sensible middle of the road between clowns on the left and the jokers on the right.
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seemaze
43 minutes ago
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Its hard to keep this smile off my face
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jameson
1 hour ago
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I wonder how many others are hacked but remain undiscovered
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longislandguido
58 minutes ago
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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.

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detourdog
46 minutes ago
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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.
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longislandguido
1 hour ago
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Did you write the software that allowed him to get hacked in the first place?
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hmokiguess
1 hour ago
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Was he running openclaw on his unpenetrable system by any chance?
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k310
1 hour ago
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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.

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vrganj
16 minutes ago
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The Manchurian Candidate.
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afpx
12 minutes ago
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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
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RobRivera
1 hour ago
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When do the Raptor puppets go on sale?
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idiotsecant
1 hour ago
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Its both dumber and more dangerous than that. Competent people are not valuable to governments that value loyalty more than competence.
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leereeves
1 hour ago
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Were any of the people fired responsible for security on personal gmail accounts?
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throwawa1
1 hour ago
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24 year old Israeli girlfriend + Kash = True luv.
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OhMeadhbh
1 hour ago
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Certainly the FBI and GMail having gaps in their operational information security isn't news.
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buttersicle
6 minutes ago
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Do you think the FBI manages his personal email?

Kind of defeats the purpose of it being a personal email don't you think?

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bloppe
34 minutes ago
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I read the headline and first thought was seriously, that's it? Surely this is one of the least concerning things about the administration
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noosphr
2 hours ago
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Imagine a world where gpg encryption was the norm instead of something that only works reliably in Emacs.
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jonathanstrange
1 hour ago
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This wouldn't have happened if Kash Patel used Emacs, that's right.
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bryanrasmussen
1 hour ago
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I think it's a pretty cynical take that an Emacs user will never be made FBI director.
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razingeden
45 minutes ago
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are you saying someone can’t key information into an NCIC profile with EMacs? Ha! furious typing
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chao-
2 hours ago
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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".

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calvinmorrison
1 hour ago
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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

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tomjakubowski
56 minutes ago
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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.

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trhway
2 hours ago
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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.

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conductr
2 hours ago
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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.
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mattkevan
14 minutes ago
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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.

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thereisnospork
1 hour ago
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Future? I'm thinking a Borat style mockumentary in the present.
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scotty79
48 minutes ago
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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.
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root_axis
27 minutes ago
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Don't forget "the files are on my desk" and many other classics.
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pwarner
1 hour ago
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Only the best people
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ToucanLoucan
2 hours ago
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“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
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trhway
2 hours ago
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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.

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Fricken
49 minutes ago
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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.
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epistasis
1 hour ago
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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.

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ToucanLoucan
1 hour ago
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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.

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add-sub-mul-div
2 hours ago
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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.
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OhMeadhbh
57 minutes ago
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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.
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dogemaster2025
1 hour ago
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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.
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OhMeadhbh
38 minutes ago
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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.

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upheaval7276
1 hour ago
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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?
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claaams
27 minutes ago
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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?
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drfloyd51
6 minutes ago
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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.

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weaksauce
1 hour ago
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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.
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upheaval7276
1 hour ago
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we don't even know how it was compromised. was his password "password", or did the hackers exploit a gmail/google vulnerability?
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weaksauce
29 minutes ago
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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).
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drfloyd51
5 minutes ago
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Did the director have his email on a vulnerable server? Yes. Yes he did.

He should have known better.

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pkilgore
54 minutes ago
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are you suggesting the former is not a demonstration of a shocking lack of competency?
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upheaval7276
37 minutes ago
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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
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jeroenvlek
11 minutes ago
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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...
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margalabargala
1 hour ago
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It's not a big deal, for the reasons you mentioned. But it's interesting to a lot of people, and therefore newsworthy.
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upheaval7276
1 hour ago
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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.
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wmf
40 minutes ago
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People are concerned because every government official uses their personal email for work.
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nradov
33 minutes ago
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How is this a failing of Google? They can't be blamed for users who fail to secure their own accounts.
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m_ke
1 hour ago
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just think of what could someone do if they got into your personal email account?
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upheaval7276
1 hour ago
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yes, and...?
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ohyoutravel
1 hour ago
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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.
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upheaval7276
1 hour ago
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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.
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blooalien
6 minutes ago
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> "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?

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ohyoutravel
50 minutes ago
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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.
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