How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[billbindc]

8 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

For sure (see previous post).  I'm just saying there are different levels of clearance and for stuff like this that should mean the highest standards have already been applied.  And don't even get me started on how poorly people with clearances are monitored.  I bet more than one of this character's coworkers will, under questioning, admit they thought the guy was "off" and yet didn't report on him and his supervisor didn't do any checking up.

It's really not that difficult to spot those who view the entire world through a political skewed perspective, be it right or left.  With a tiny bit of experience and training it should be pretty easy to get onto the trail of someone.  Especially if the person looking has access to tools an information. 

Steve

Another thing that was apparently happening is that the rules on phones being in SCIF's were only being somewhat observed while spot checking for folks taking documents has become quite...spotty...at least in some places. One suspects there is a global rewrite of rules and enhanced enforcement effort happening as we speak. Betting the Pentagon was the worst offender.

[riptides]

59 minutes ago, chrisl said:

For TS and higher, they are.  When people are getting their clearances renewed the investigators make appointments and then come around and interview both the person given as a reference on the SF-86 and anybody else that person refers to as familiar with person under investigation.  If they come looking for someone who they didn't have an appointment with they'll even ask random people in the area "hey, do you interact much with X?  I'm here reviewing their clearance, do you have a few minutes?"

Getting clearances vs. reviewing.

 

[chrisl]

18 minutes ago, riptides said:

Getting clearances vs. reviewing.

 

They do the same on new clearances.  I’ve been interviewed for people in both situations.

[billbindc]

1 hour ago, chrisl said:

For TS and higher, they are.  When people are getting their clearances renewed the investigators make appointments and then come around and interview both the person given as a reference on the SF-86 and anybody else that person refers to as familiar with person under investigation.  If they come looking for someone who they didn't have an appointment with they'll even ask random people in the area "hey, do you interact much with X?  I'm here reviewing their clearance, do you have a few minutes?"

This definitely happens. But we shouldn’t underestimate how difficult it is to find someone willing to pass negative information to a vetting officer. People have to live, more or less, with the person they are suggesting should be denied and that’s not something someone is going to take lightly unless there is something very obviously serious going on. And often, not even then.

[chrisl]

6 minutes ago, billbindc said:

This definitely happens. But we shouldn’t underestimate how difficult it is to find someone willing to pass negative information to a vetting officer. People have to live, more or less, with the person they are suggesting should be denied and that’s not something someone is going to take lightly unless there is something very obviously serious going on. And often, not even then.

I wouldn’t think twice about it, and I would expect the same from anybody I work with. We’re the same about safety and reliability. The difference around here is that we only do a relatively small amount of classified work, so not having a clearance isn’t career ending.  Having one can a be worse, because you disappear into a black hole until you decide to go back to unclassified stuff.  

[billbindc]

4 minutes ago, chrisl said:

I wouldn’t think twice about it, and I would expect the same from anybody I work with. We’re the same about safety and reliability. The difference around here is that we only do a relatively small amount of classified work, so not having a clearance isn’t career ending.  Having one can a be worse, because you disappear into a black hole until you decide to go back to unclassified stuff.  

Folks hiding things tend to do it best from the people that understand the stakes while they will hide those things the least from people that don’t. Even so, there’s not a lot of vetting going on at the local bar stool.

[billbindc]

Clown meets national security state: 

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/13/world/documents-leak-leaker-identity.html

[kraze]

And now for something completely different

"Our shop now has the ability to offer you truly unique and actual products.

2022-2023 years pass under the flag of Special military operation, which aims to battle Nazism in Ukraine.

Thanks to our warriors you can order a gift so exotic and unique that it would surprise even the most spoiled collector - things or furniture elements, decorated with bones of killed Ukrainian fascists.

One such item can be an ashtray, made from a skull of a combatant of AFU."

[kimbosbread]

If I were China, I would set up WallStreetBets, but for classified info. Instead of losing money/betting big porn, it's leak the most classified/ridiculous info porn and improve the size of your e-penis.

[Yskonyn]

3 minutes ago, kraze said:

And now for something completely different

"Our shop now has the ability to offer you truly unique and actual products.

2022-2023 years pass under the flag of Special military operation, which aims to battle Nazism in Ukraine.

Thanks to our warriors you can order a gift so exotic and unique that it would surprise even the most spoiled collector - things or furniture elements, decorated with bones of killed Ukrainian fascists.

One such item can be an ashtray, made from a skull of a combatant of AFU."

While it is an offensive item, I don’t believe its a real skull on the picture.

Unless it has been treated with some kind of wax or epoxy or some other plastic compound. 

Whats the background/origin of the website offering it? 

[RandomCommenter]

Quote

 

The leader of a small online gaming chat group where a trove of classified U.S. intelligence documents leaked over the last few months is a 21-year-old member of the intelligence wing of the Massachusetts Air National Guard, according to interviews and documents reviewed by The New York Times.

The national guardsman, whose name is Jack Teixeira, oversaw a private online group named Thug Shaker Central, where about 20 to 30 people, mostly young men and teenagers, came together over a shared love of guns, racist online memes and video games.

 

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/04/13/us/documents-leak-pentagon

 

[Lethaface]

11 hours ago, chrisl said:

One of the problems with the clearance process is that the younger you are and less history you have, the easier it is to get a clearance.  And at that age it's easier to hide wacko properties because there are just fewer people who would have seen them.  

A lot of the investigation is about whether you have questionable connections, or things you're hiding from people that make you blackmailable, etc, and so if you're 22 and fresh out of school there's just a lot less there.  I'm also not convinced that the government has done any really scientific study of what works and what doesn't as evaluation criteria - quite a few of the criteria look like they came right out of the 50s and there are things that make you "questionable" that might have been an issue in 1956 but not only are common today, so common that you may not be able to find people without those characteristics. 

But to your point - they should be able to find people who aren't wackos who are competent, even for pretty obscure things.  You may not always be able to get all the skills/capabilities you want in a single cleared person, but should be able to do it by making a small group of complementary people.  And that's probably more secure in some ways, since they should start noticing if their teammates are wacko.

Over here the formally required procedures are usually mainly (automated) 'desk' research into known antecedents, the higher the clearance/responsibility the more case research per case into family/friend connections etc. But positions relevant to national security will usually also include psychological screening/profiling. For example, I don't suppose 'they' give any junior sysadmin working for or with military intelligence access to top secret stuff without oversight. 
Nutjobs should be filtered out, but that's no 100% guarantee. Someone can stable and smart enough to pass such tests while, perhaps due to personal circumstances, at a later moment stupid enough to share sensitive stuff with their 'trusted' discord/friend group where people have known each other for years.
 

Edit: the reported information in this case however sounds like it was a nutjob.

Edited April 13, 2023 by Lethaface

[Butschi]

10 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

And yet they are still used

As are horoscopes, homeopathy, brain storming meetings and tinfoil hats, just to name a few. Not because they are working but because some people believe they do. Or want to believe they do.

Then again, that might be a good reason to use polygraphs: the interviewee may believe the machine works which could give the interviewer an advantage.

Edited April 13, 2023 by Butschi

[The_MonkeyKing]

[Jiggathebauce]

Amazing that a world power is being humiliated by a kid in the air national guard who liked to share documents with teenage kids, the kind of teenage kids who think it's funny to say the N word with a hard -ER and other slurs. 

A key reason why I despise certain gamers, particularly the Eugen Wargame community and prefer the folks at Battlefront who are at least, folks who act like adults

 

[kimbosbread]

Unrelated to the mole hunt, I was wondering about the application of drones to engineering tasks, namely mine clearing. I know there has been a ton of work planting trees with drones (Airseed, Flash Forest, etc.), so I wonder if you could carry enough mine-setting-off-things on a big hexcopter (payload of 10+kg) and have it drop these at regular intervals on the suspected mine field you plot out on GPS.

[Lethaface]

10 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

With a better designed vetting process this could be fairly easily worked around.  For example, being told to hand over access to all social media accounts during application process and being subjected to random inspections while holding classification.  Couple things like this with a lie detector test and I think we're well on the way to scoping out who we're hiring:

Interviewer (I) = do you have any social media accounts you haven't told us about?

Prospect (P) = no.

I = well, this needle here shows you're lying.  What account are you not telling us about and what is your user name?

P = well, I go by JewKiller666 on whitepower.com.  But I hardly use it so I thought I didn't need to mention it.

I = yeah, well, don't let the door hit you in the arse on the way out.  NEXT!

 

Of course I am being a bit flip here, but my guess is that the vetting process is not geared towards the full spectrum of whackos out there.  It needs to be on the lookout for people who are, basically, antisocial generally.  You know, because antisocial people tend to do antisocial things.

I wouldn't be half surprised if they still have a type written question like "have you ever been a member of the Communist Party USA?"  OK, I'm being flip again... so I'll just stop there.

Steve

Coming from a country where polygraphs aren't a thing (imo for good reason), I hope that these are used only as an extra not as a replacement for other types of vetting/screening.  

[FancyCat]

 

 

[AlsatianFelix]

One. Still not entirely discounting a Mincemeat scenario. (the Hope is strong with this one).

Two. Every member of that Dischord group is going to jail for abetting and conspiring during an ongoing months-long espionage crime, right? I mean, the second one of you jabbonies leaks a secret document I'm ratting you out.

[Lethaface]

4 hours ago, Beleg85 said:

It would half-as-bad if some idealistic spy was there. Unfortunatelly (and entirely predicatably given crazy environment we leave in) one of largest leaks of XXI cent. seem to be done by lone nerd who wanted to show himself against his gaming pals.

The funniest part in article is that this "OG" needed to constantly force attention of other guys, who chiefly wanted to play Tactical Shooters and watch Gun channels instead of analyzing complicated top-secret leaked documents. How boring.

 Good stuff for a novel, rather fitting for our times I guess. Some radicalized person of a marginalized minority/identity tries to leak secret documents in discord but the other users just keep posting memes and ****posts not even noticing what's in front of their eyes. Apart from the one user not engaging in much posting but downloading the stuff to sell it to on ebay to pay for their medical/energy bills.

[Lethaface]

53 minutes ago, Butschi said:

As are horoscopes, homeopathy, brain storming meetings and tinfoil hats, just to name a few. Not becausev they are working but because some people believe they do. Or want to believe they do.

Then again, that might be a good reason to use polygraphs: the interviewee may believe the machine works which could give the interviewer an advantage.

You have never brainstormed properly

[MSBoxer]

1 hour ago, Yskonyn said:

While it is an offensive item, I don’t believe its a real skull on the picture.

Unless it has been treated with some kind of wax or epoxy or some other plastic compound. 

Whats the background/origin of the website offering it? 

[Eddy]

Report from the Atlantic Council on what are and are not game changers from this war in the authors opinion:

Game-Changers-or-Little-Change-Lessons-for-Land-War-in-Ukraine-.pdf (atlanticcouncil.org)

By and large a lot of what has been mentioned on here but with a bit more detail. There's a more detail on the Integrated Command and Control that I found particularly interesting. Also mentions Mass Precise Fires as a game changer which I know has been brought up here a lot.

Anyway food for thought, perhaps. 

[Beleg85]

https://news.sky.com/story/jack-teixeira-leader-of-online-group-behind-us-military-document-leaks-is-national-guardsman-12856543

21 year old guy? Ok if he was "older, fatherly figure for them" I don't even want to know age of other members. Nor their avatars and why -most probably- there are anime girls on them.

34 minutes ago, Lethaface said:

 Good stuff for a novel, rather fitting for our times I guess. Some radicalized person of a marginalized minority/identity tries to leak secret documents in discord but the other users just keep posting memes and ****posts not even noticing what's in front of their eyes. Apart from the one user not engaging in much posting but downloading the stuff to sell it to on ebay to pay for their medical/energy bills.

It's so absurd, Hollywood must one day make a gag comedy on this case.

But seriously, I hope it will not postpone Ukrainian offensive because of this leak.

A propos completelly nothing:

 

Edited April 13, 2023 by Beleg85

[kraze]

1 hour ago, Yskonyn said:

While it is an offensive item, I don’t believe its a real skull on the picture.

Unless it has been treated with some kind of wax or epoxy or some other plastic compound. 

Whats the background/origin of the website offering it? 

Of course I doubt russians would post a real skull on a photo (and they didn't). In fact image itself is not important. What's important is that it's an absolutely legit russian shop.

However the fallout is massive enough that the shop went into full damage control and locked down their website. "We got hacked", "somebody wants to create a negative image of Russia" (like anyone really needs to do it at this point) you know the drill.

https://gifts-luxury.ru/maintenance/

Edited April 13, 2023 by kraze