He’d blab all the secrets if only he knew anything about them
When President Trump calls old friends on one of his iPhones to gossip, gripe or solicit their latest take on how he is doing, American intelligence reports indicate that Chinese spies are often listening — and putting to use invaluable insights into how to best work the president and affect administration policy, current and former American officials said.
Mr. Trump’s aides have repeatedly warned him that his cellphone calls are not secure, and they have told him that Russian spies are routinely eavesdropping on the calls, as well. But aides say the voluble president, who has been pressured into using his secure White House landline more often these days, has still refused to give up his iPhones. White House officials say they can only hope he refrains from discussing classified information when he is on them.
But her emails! But her emails! But her emails! But her emails!
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.
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.
Lock her up! Lock her up! Lock her up! Lock her up!
China’s effort is a 21st-century version of what officials there have been doing for many decades, which is trying to influence American leaders by cultivating an informal network of prominent businesspeople and academics who can be sold on ideas and policy prescriptions and then carry them to the White House. The difference now is that China, through its eavesdropping on Mr. Trump’s calls, has a far clearer idea of who carries the most influence with the president, and what arguments tend to work.
Benghazi!
Mr. Trump typically relies on his cellphones when he does not want a call going through the White House switchboard and logged for senior aides to see, his aides said. Many of those Mr. Trump speaks with most often on one of his cellphones, such as hosts at Fox News, share the president’s political views, or simply enable his sense of grievance about any number of subjects.
Yeah that’s cool. It’s all about what he wants and not at all about the bigger picture.
Administration officials said Mr. Trump’s longtime paranoia about surveillance — well before coming to the White House he believed that his phone conversations were often being recorded — gave them some comfort that he was not disclosing classified information on the calls. They said they had further confidence 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.
Snerk. In other words they have a lot of confidence he’s not spilling secrets because he’s too stupid and ignorant to spill any. Whew!
That has to rate as the gloomiest ‘good news / bad news’ joke ever.
As the text says, it’s not only secret information that’s damaging. We all routinely give away far more information than is good for us. We tend to assume that the minutia of our lives are uninteresting and cannot harm us (if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear).
We do crazy things like tell Amazon who our friends and family are, when their birthdays are and the sort of stuff they like. In fact, it’s worse than that, because we tell them the sort of stuff we think they like. Of course, if they are Amazon customers too, they can compare what we think they like with what they think they like, which is one hell of a powerful way to target ads. Amazon constructs complex social networks based on the information we freely and unguardedly give them. It uses them to manipulate us into buying things in complex and subtle ways. It encourages us to flesh out the weak or hypothesised links in those social networks by, for example, sending us ads for things we think a person it guesses is connected to us would like, round about the time it thinks their birthday might be, in the hope that it will remind us of that person and trigger us to buy them something. They don’t really care about making money from whatever we’ve bought, they want us to flesh out the bones of the social network they’re building. It’s a long game and Amazon isn’t selling what you think they’re selling.
This is a really cheap thing for Amazon to do. It doesn’t lose anything with these fishing expeditions. In fact, it learns something from every time we don’t take the bait, too.
And this is just us. We’re nobody. We don’t have any big important secrets. Amazon doesn’t care about big important secrets because it knows it can manipulate us using the stuff we actually want to tell it. And all it wants is to make money. And Amazon is not targeting us specifically to achieve specific goals. It doesn’t care whether it adds a link to an aunt or to a friend. It doesn’t care what you buy for them. It cares about what you bought for them after it sent you some fishing ads.
So imagine the sort of thing that can be gleaned by monitoring Trump’s calls and data traffic. He’s a highly specific target and there are presumably vast resources aimed at him, with fairly specific goals. This makes him a much easier target than any of us, if the goal is to find ways to manipulate him. Imagine foreign governments building up the same sort of social network around him and his contacts as Amazon does about us, with the added benefit of highly trained and creative analysts, all focused on this one person…
[…] a comment by latsot on He’d blab all the secrets if only he knew anything about […]