House Select Committee Hearings on Jan. 6 (5 Viewers)

[MT15]

Let’s put our discussion in this thread we can use it for all the hearings.

 

[bird]

This good news/bad news

The good news is that more people than ever do seem to want to move on from Trump

The bad news is that they want to move on from Trump not because of anything he and those around him said or did leading up Jan 6th or that day

It's because he won't shut up about 2020 being stolen
=====================================


For Republican voters, the January 6 hearings haven’t so much broken through as seeped in, slowly changing opinions about whether former President Donald Trump should be the GOP nominee in 2024.

I conducted dozens of focus groups of Trump 2020 voters in the 17 months between the storming of the Capitol on January 6 and when the hearings began in June. One measure was consistent: At least half of the respondents in each group wanted Trump to run again in 2024. The prevailing belief was that the 2020 election was stolen—or at least unfair in some way—and Trump should get another shot.

But since June, I’ve observed a shift. I’ve conducted nine focus groups during this period, and found that only 14 percent of Trump 2020 voters wanted him to run in 2024, with a few others on the fence. In four of the groups, zero people wanted Trump to run again. Their reasoning is clear: They’re now uncertain that Trump can win again.

“He’s just too divisive and controversial,” a participant in Washington State said about Trump. “There are good candidates out there waiting to shine.”

A participant in Wyoming said, “I feel like there’s too many people against him right now. He’s never gonna make it … So I feel like somebody else needs to step in that has similar views, but not as big of an ego—who people like, I guess.”

“At first I thought I would” want him to run again, an Arizona participant said. “I think it’s time to move on.”..........

MSN

Similar views but not as big an ego? So the problem is not the guy’s bullschlitz just his optics?

Yeesh.

 

[Optimus Prime]

Text messages for former President Donald Trump’s acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf and acting deputy secretary Ken Cuccinelli are missing for a key period leading up to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, according to four people briefed on the matter and internal emails.


This discovery of missing records for the senior-most homeland security officials, which has not been previously reported, increases the volume of potential evidence that has vanished regarding the time around the Capitol attack.


It comes as both congressional and criminal investigators at the Department of Justice seek to piece together an effort by the president and his allies to overturn the results of the election, which culminated in a pro-Trump rally that became a violent riot in the halls of Congress.

The Department of Homeland Security notified the agency’s inspector general in late February that Wolf’'s and Cuccinelli’s texts were lost in a “reset” of their government phones when they left their jobs in January 2021 in preparation for the new Biden administration, according to an internal record obtained by the Project on Government Oversight and shared with The Washington Post…….

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/07/28/homeland-security-texts-jan6/

 

[Optimus Prime]

Cybersecurity experts and former government leaders are stunned by how poorly the Secret Service and the Department of Homeland Security handled the preservation of officials’ text messages and other data from around Jan. 6, 2021, saying the top agencies entrusted with fighting cybercrime should never have bungled the simple task of backing up agents’ phones.


Experts are divided over whether the disappearance of phone data from around the time of the insurrection is a sign of incompetence, an intentional coverup, or some murkier middle ground.

But the failure has raised suspicions about the disposition of records that could provide intimate details about what happened on that chaotic day, and whose preservation was mandated by federal law.


“This was the most singularly stressful day for the Secret Service since the attempted assassination of [Ronald] Reagan,” said Paul Rosenzweig, a senior policy official at the Department of Homeland Security during the George W. Bush administration who’s now a cybersecurity consultant in Washington.

“Why apparently was there no interest in preserving records for the purposes of doing an after-action review? It’s like we have a 9/11 attack and air traffic control wipes its records.”

Rosenzweig said he polled 11 of his friends with cybersecurity backgrounds, including information-security chiefs at federal agencies, on whether any of them had ever done a migration without a plan for backing up data and restoring it. None of them had. “There’s a relatively high degree of skepticism about [the Secret Service] in the group,” he said……

If the Secret Service had truly wanted to preserve agents’ messages, experts said, it should have been almost trivially easy to do so.

Backups and exports are a basic feature of nearly every messaging service, and federal law requires such records to be safeguarded and submitted to the National Archives.

Several experts were critical of the Secret Service’s explanation that it had asked agents to upload their own phone data to an agency drive before their phones were wiped.

Cybersecurity professionals said that policy was “highly unusual,” “ludicrous,” a “failure of management” and “not something any other organization would ever do.”…….

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/07/29/jan6-texts-data-security/

 

[CoolBrees]

Can you imagine if Barack Obama’s SS detail; hell Malia’s detail would have deleted messages?

It would have been concrete evidence to Undercover SFL or Techno SFL that the Deep State existed.

This? Well they just won’t ever say anything.

 

[bird]

Soooo…we can trust DHS to handle our national security?

Yeesh.

 

[Dragon]

Soooo…we can trust DHS to handle our national security?

Yeesh.

Apparently not your IT security. I've worked 4 years as an IT security Advisor for one of the danish government agencies and something like that should NOT be happening if you have the propper procedures in place. If a unit containing government data is reinstalled, cleaned or discarded, the person responsible for doing this would have attest with a digital signature that each step of the process was done according to procedures and part of that are, aside from backing up the data, a verification that the backup is retrievable BEFORE the unit is cleaned or discarded

 

[J-DONK]

Can you imagine if Barack Obama’s SS detail; hell Malia’s detail would have deleted messages?

It would have been concrete evidence to Undercover SFL or Techno SFL that the Deep State existed.

This? Well they just won’t ever say anything.

You don't need a hypothetical. The HRC email deletion is an extremely close analogy. If anyone needs a reminder that was a situation were a managed services/hosting company didn't delete some emails like 3 months after it was requested. The hosting company deleted the emails after they receive a subpoena. Which is a big no-no, and I still believe was an obvious coverup to keep any damaging emails from coming public.

The Secret Service is even worse. They were told to preserve their data on multiple occasions. If you're wondering if the SS has the expertise to do this? They specialize in investigating cyber crimes. Also, the Director of the SS has already resigned.

This is a Federal agency not some pot smoking IT dudes in Denver. You can't claim ignorance, or incompetence.

I personally think the SS should just purged. You bring a new director, and quietly get rid of everyone even remotely connected to Jan 6. right down to whoever managed their phone migration.

 

[DaveXA]

Cybersecurity experts and former government leaders are stunned by how poorly the Secret Service and the Department of Homeland Security handled the preservation of officials’ text messages and other data from around Jan. 6, 2021, saying the top agencies entrusted with fighting cybercrime should never have bungled the simple task of backing up agents’ phones.


Experts are divided over whether the disappearance of phone data from around the time of the insurrection is a sign of incompetence, an intentional coverup, or some murkier middle ground.

But the failure has raised suspicions about the disposition of records that could provide intimate details about what happened on that chaotic day, and whose preservation was mandated by federal law.


“This was the most singularly stressful day for the Secret Service since the attempted assassination of [Ronald] Reagan,” said Paul Rosenzweig, a senior policy official at the Department of Homeland Security during the George W. Bush administration who’s now a cybersecurity consultant in Washington.

“Why apparently was there no interest in preserving records for the purposes of doing an after-action review? It’s like we have a 9/11 attack and air traffic control wipes its records.”

Rosenzweig said he polled 11 of his friends with cybersecurity backgrounds, including information-security chiefs at federal agencies, on whether any of them had ever done a migration without a plan for backing up data and restoring it. None of them had. “There’s a relatively high degree of skepticism about [the Secret Service] in the group,” he said……

If the Secret Service had truly wanted to preserve agents’ messages, experts said, it should have been almost trivially easy to do so.

Backups and exports are a basic feature of nearly every messaging service, and federal law requires such records to be safeguarded and submitted to the National Archives.

Several experts were critical of the Secret Service’s explanation that it had asked agents to upload their own phone data to an agency drive before their phones were wiped.

Cybersecurity professionals said that policy was “highly unusual,” “ludicrous,” a “failure of management” and “not something any other organization would ever do.”…….

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/07/29/jan6-texts-data-security/

I'll just say that while I think this absolutely should not have happened and there may be some intentional covering up that went on, I'll also say that while the rules for preserving data and records are clear, people in government lose sheet all the time when converting to new systems or upgrading devices. People in government are dumb and ignorant often when it comes to stuff like that. A lot of that is due to lack of training.

 

[Lapaz]

I'll just say that while I think this absolutely should not have happened and there may be some intentional covering up that went on, I'll also say that while the rules for preserving data and records are clear, people in government lose sheet all the time when converting to new systems or upgrading devices. People in government are dumb and ignorant often when it comes to stuff like that. A lot of that is due to lack of training.

Nowadays the purging is usually done by competent IT professionals. Some data can get lost from one device, but it is highly unlikely that multiple devices would lose the same information.

 

[DaveXA]

Nowadays the purging is usually done by competent IT professionals. Some data can get lost from one device, but it is highly unlikely that multiple devices would lose the same information.

You would think so, but I'm a federal employee who works for an agency who deals with sensitive intel. We had to switch to new laptops because of a transition and the agents were required to back up all of their data and it was not a seamless process. And IT basically had to walk them through the transition. Because we're all working from home, getting that done without losing a lot of data was a tall order. And I can tell you first hand, a lot was lost in the transition. Having competent IT professionals is only half of the picture. What's more, is IT support hasn't always been great either. Some know their stuff, and some, not so much. Depends on the agency and/or contractor you're dealing with.

 

[Dragon]

You would think so, but I'm a federal employee who works for an agency who deals with sensitive intel. We had to switch to new laptops because of a transition and the agents were required to back up all of their data and it was not a seamless process. And IT basically had to walk them through the transition. Because we're all working from home, getting that done without losing a lot of data was a tall order. And I can tell you first hand, a lot was lost in the transition. Having competent IT professionals is only half of the picture. What's more, is IT support hasn't always been great either. Some know their stuff, and some, not so much. Depends on the agency and/or contractor you're dealing with.

Shocked to be honest!! WHY in the world would they be so negligent when it comes to data security

 

[MT15]

You would think so, but I'm a federal employee who works for an agency who deals with sensitive intel. We had to switch to new laptops because of a transition and the agents were required to back up all of their data and it was not a seamless process. And IT basically had to walk them through the transition. Because we're all working from home, getting that done without losing a lot of data was a tall order. And I can tell you first hand, a lot was lost in the transition. Having competent IT professionals is only half of the picture. What's more, is IT support hasn't always been great either. Some know their stuff, and some, not so much. Depends on the agency and/or contractor you're dealing with.

Chris Krebs was on a tv show and he touched on this. He said that it could be true that the data was lost during a switch because they’ve had a lot of trouble with that in the past. As I recall both the DHS Trump employees say their devices were intact when turned in, and anything deleted was done after they turned them in. I don’t know either, and it should be investigated, but Krebs has been truthful before.

 

[Dragon]

In early February, after learning that the Secret Service’s text messages had been erased as part of a migration to new devices, staff at Inspector General Joseph V. Cuffari’s office planned to contact all DHS agencies offering to have data specialists help retrieve messages from their phones, according to two government whistleblowers who provided reports to Congress.

But later that month, Cuffari’s office decided it would not collect or review any agency phones, according to three people briefed on the decision.


The latest revelation comes as Democratic lawmakers have accused Cuffari’s office of failing to aggressively investigate the agency’s actions in response to the violent attack on the Capitol by supporters of then-President Donald Trump on Jan. 6, 2021.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/07/29/homeland-inspector-general-texts/

A senior forensics analyst in the inspector general’s office took steps to collect the Federal Protective Service phones, the people said. But late on the night of Friday, Feb. 18, one of several deputies who report to Cuffari’s management team wrote an email to investigators instructing them not to take the phones and not to seek any data from them, according to a copy of an internal record that was shared with The Post.

If it was a mistake, wouldn't they do all they could to fix it? Instead of ordering those people who was trying to do so, to stop??

 

[MT15]

Yes, I do think the IG’s office wasn’t on the up and up. The more I hear about that office the worse they look.

 

[SFIDC3]

You would think so, but I'm a federal employee who works for an agency who deals with sensitive intel. We had to switch to new laptops because of a transition and the agents were required to back up all of their data and it was not a seamless process. And IT basically had to walk them through the transition. Because we're all working from home, getting that done without losing a lot of data was a tall order. And I can tell you first hand, a lot was lost in the transition. Having competent IT professionals is only half of the picture. What's more, is IT support hasn't always been great either. Some know their stuff, and some, not so much. Depends on the agency and/or contractor you're dealing with.

All agencies are different in that regard (though they shouldn’t be with regards to data integrity and preservation)….at the agency I worked for (25 years) I would say at least 10 years ago you could no longer save data to a local hard drive, the only options were network drives that were replicated and backed up nightly….I don’t have any experience with phone records as they weren’t part of our scope but I would hope that for national security purposes those records should be preserved in multiple fashions, making it nearly impossible to delete records once they are created but apparently they are not, which is troubling…..

 

[Dragon]

We have one goverment agency which has the sole responsibility to ensure and verify that all Government offices is in compliance with privacy and security laws. They do an unannounced audit of every agency and every goverment sub-contractor every year and you better make sure that they don't find anything. They will look at your procedures and examine random data in order to verify that everything you do matches up with the regulations.

 

[DaveXA]

Shocked to be honest!! WHY in the world would they be so negligent when it comes to data security

I agree. It absolutely it shocking. It's a systemic issue, and I'm not sure how it can be fixed.

 

[DaveXA]

Chris Krebs was on a tv show and he touched on this. He said that it could be true that the data was lost during a switch because they’ve had a lot of trouble with that in the past. As I recall both the DHS Trump employees say their devices were intact when turned in, and anything deleted was done after they turned them in. I don’t know either, and it should be investigated, but Krebs has been truthful before.

It definitely should be investigated. But it could be multiple issues. Whether it happened with the agents, or with the IT folks or something else, it's hard to say. But being that there's already issues with preserving data on government devices, it becomes very difficult to track what happens with lost data. There are SOPs to prevent data loss, but agents don't always know or follow those protocols.