The reality, which people are not acknowledging here, is that what they did may not have been according to official policy but it has been normal and pervasive for decades. It isn’t partisan, everyone does it. This is how DC works and the American public just got an education.

As a consequence, any enforcement now would be viewed as extremely selective.

I have been exposed to a lot of classified information in meetings in DC that were supposed to be unclassified. This isn’t an isolated incident, it has been a systemic issue across every administration for as long as I’ve worked in DC.

People should focus less on the incident and more on why this has been normal for decades.

The underlying tension is that doing things the official way is extremely slow and speed matters. There is a longstanding bias toward taking more risks in terms of information exposure because being slow carries its own significant risks. Speed of decision making is critical and that has proven to be impossible if every interaction has to happen inside a SCIF. It is a tension the intelligence community is still grappling with.

I don't believe this is normal.

Have you operated in DC as a part of this world? Your belief isn’t important, I am reporting my first-hand experience.

Sharing details about upcoming airstrikes over Signal on your personal phone is normal? You're sitting on top of the story of the century here

You're embarrassing yourself, brother. Nobody is asserting that this is OK. It was naive to assume the government was secure in the first place. Privacy advocates and whistleblowers have whistleblowers have been saying this for decades! You just weren't paying attention. WikiLeaks and Snowden leaks wasn't a "fun" news cycle, it was revealing everything you need to know about how the government operates truly. With no concern for security

Of course they haven't. Every think-tank moron knows political opsec is a joke (this is why sigint works in the first place) let alone people actually working in politics

I'm not doing anything of the sort. The kind of problem I'm flagging in is experienced every day by governments all over the world. Would anyone disagree? People on here who want to put their heads in the sand about it are just being political when there is a legitimate technical topic to discuss. The point is these aren't "rank and file" actors. They are at the top of political leadership. Those rules don't apply at this level of power politics so why get bogged down in such thinking?

Because laws should matter. Laws should apply to members of government too. Unless you're suggesting it's totally fine for Trump and his administration to be above the law. In which case the whole discussion is moot, because then it's not a democracy with a functioning rule of law anymore.

Law is a tool, and some tools are appropriate for some contexts and others are not. Do you think there is such a thing as "International Law"? If so, I would ask you what you think that actually is and where its legitimacy comes from and who enforces it? Politics and Law are two separate spheres of human conflict. You actually degrade the law by trying to weaponize it for political purposes. I would hope the past 10 years have shown that to everyone.