Perhaps no one in the world has made such a flow of catastrophic technology this year as US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.
Saga began when Atlantic editor -in -chief Jeffrey Goldberg reported that he was incorrectly added to a conversation of the unauthorized signal group by US National Security Adviser Michael Waltz, where many high -level government officials will take place, discussed the detailed attack on Houthis attacks on Yemen, including the times.
To be right, we have all made some shameful mistakes of technology. But for most people, it means to accidentally like an Instagram post of an former from five years ago-not sharing high government secret military plans into an unauthorized merchant app.
This maltreatment of massive information was already quite troublesome, but this week, the New York Times reported that Hegseth shared information on the attacks on Yemen in another signal conversation, which included his lawyer, his wife and his brother, who had no reason to obtain such sensitive information; Hegseth’s wife doesn’t even work for Pentagon.
These safety failures are particularly wild – how do you accidentally curve in a journalist in your military plans? But this is far from the first time that contemporary technology has landed global governments in complicated situations – and we are not just talking watergate.
Set in the Army? Do not use strava
The fitness tracking/social media app can be a nightmare of intimacy, even for your average athlete. The app allows people to share their exercise registries – often runs, walks or bike travel – in a public account with their friends, who may like and comment on their morning runs in the park.
But Strava’s accounts are public as default, it means that if you are not frugal enough to control your intimacy settings, you will inadvertently transmit to the world where you work. Strava defines to hide the first and last 200 meters of a run as a tool to darken where someone lives, as people are likely to start and run out run near their home.
For anyone on the Internet, it is still dangerous to transmit a 200 -mile radius of where you live, but it is even more dangerous if you are a member of the army on a secret base, for example.
In 2018, Strava discovered a global heat map, showing where public users have recorded activities. It doesn’t really matter if you are looking at a map of the New York City, but in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, few people use strava besides strangers, so it can be assumed that hot points of activity can occur in or around military bases.
To make things worse, users can watch some Running routes in Strava to see the public profiles of users who recorded activities there. So it would be possible for a bad actor to find a list of American soldiers located on a particular base in Iraq, for example.
Joe Biden is not so secret Venmo
Venmo is an application for payments from colleagues, however for some reason, it is predestined to publicly share your transactions. So, simply by opening my Venmo app – who synchronized my friends on Facebook on my account at one point, probably over 10 years ago – I can see that two girls I went to high school with the dinner taken together last night. Good for them.
The information we share in Venmo may be pretty boring and benign, but dedicated fans of reality performances like “Love is blind” will require the account of the contestants to predict which of the show is still meeting (if the couple sends one -to -rent, then they probably live together).
So if you can find stars of reality in Venmo, why not ask the president?
In 2021, some Buzzfeed news reporters decided to seek Joe Biden’s Venmo. Within 10 minutes, they found his account.
From Biden’s account, reporters could easily find other members of the Biden family and its administration and draft their broader social circles. Even if a user makes his own private Venmo account, the list of their friends will remain public. When Buzzfeed News contacted the White House, Biden’s profile was clean, but the White House did not comment.
So yes, reporters really located Venmo’s accounts of Pete Hegseth, Mike Waltz and other government officials, too. Some things never change.
Coded messages cannot protect you from cameras
You can take all the precautions you want to protect your messages, but nothing can save you from the wrong possibility of human error.
Carles Puigdemont, the former President of Catalonia, led a move in 2017 to achieve independence from Spain and become its country. But the Spanish government blocked the effort and overthrew Puigdemont from the leadership. When the Spanish government issued an order for the arrest of Puigdemont and its allies, they fled to Belgium.
A few months later, Spanish media attended an event in Belgium, where Puigdemont was expected to speak – he sent in a video of a speech, but while the clip was playing, a Spanish broadcaster noticed that a former Catalan health minister, Toni ComÃn, was writing with his entirely visible screen.
The camera operator was magnified on ComÃn’s phone, exposing texts from Puigdemont, where he had resigned himself to defeat in his efforts to bring Catalan independence.
Puigdemont later tweet tweet that he was expressed in a moment of doubt, but that he did not intend to withdraw.
Regardless of what steps you take to encrypted your private messages, you may want to look on your shoulders before reading sensitive information in publicly when you are writing articles with a self-president.
