Donald Trump’s presidential campaign was informed this week that Chinese hackers may have gained access to phones used by the former president and his running mate JD Vance.
According to The New York Times, Chinese hackers are believed to have gained access to data from phones used by the Republican candidates. However, investigators are still trying to determine what data was stolen or examined by the hackers following the telecom system breach.
Our entire government has played like it cared about infosec for years, but has always made weird exceptions for high-up officials. They have spent way more time and effort concealing merely “embarrassing” things which show they don’t actually promote the values they preach worldwide, (a thing they would prefer their citizens to not know) than they ever have for stuff that really matters for national security.
Like Bush ignoring intelligence warnings about 9/11, or the response to 9/11, the TSA, being all Security Theater, as called out by Bruce Schneier at the time. Destabilizing the middle east in the Iraq War was a small price to pay for Halliburton to get no-bid contracts to rebuild Iraq, and the oil that was claimed would pay for the war would go to private companies, in their eyes. Security has always been secondary.
So I mean, this is the natural end-game of such a system that always makes security exceptions for “special” people, because those people are too fucking lazy to take security seriously.
This isn’t the government, though. Like, this is Trump being hit on campaign, not as a sitting president, and Vance has never been a sitting VP, just a candidate.
Trump and Vance, as of today, are just private citizens.
When Trump was President, or when Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State or something like that, okay, yeah, I get you. I’m not saying that we always do the right things for government officials – like, I’m not saying that your broader concern isn’t valid.
But for this particular Trump/Vance compromise, I don’t think that that’s what’s driving the situation – I think that it’s the vulnerability of political candidates, people who are not yet officials.
JD Vance is a sitting US senator.
God when you say it out loud it makes me realize how far gone this country is.