Ex-intel officials say Trump's document hoarding could ruin years of work

[highplainsdem]

Link to tweet

[Beetwasher.]

1. I'm Hoping there was Some Mitigation of Damage

For a couple of reasons.

I often wonder what Obama and Biden might have operationalized and compartmentalized prior to their departure. They would have had intel briefings on the threat Trump presented. Hillary certainly was completely aware.

I also hope that there was some foresight and many documents are salted and traceable, basically part of a honeypot operation.

But still, it’s horrifying to think what unforeseen damage that lunatic is capable of, having had that kind of access, just horrifying.

[crickets]

2. Thanks for posting this, highplainsdem. The article that goes with it is devastating.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-maralago-documents-intelligence-sources-b2157004.html
no paywall: https://archive.ph/ZuOgZ

“Who’s going to want to work with us if there’s a fear that this will happen again?” he asked. “We may have to risk American lives trying to extract people from dangerous situations, we may be pulling people from ongoing investigations or things that we're working on prematurely, and never seeing them through,” said Mr Clarke, who is now a senior research fellow with the Soufan Centre. He added that there could be “some places” intelligence officials will now have to “abandon and jettison the sources” as a result of Mr Trump’s actions. [snip]

With signals intelligence, or SIGINT, knowledge of the very fact that certain information is known by the United States could lead a foreign actor to change their communication habits in a way that would lead to them “going dark”, or having their communications inaccessible by US authorities. It could also lead the foreign actor to feed disinformation to the US by continuing to use the communications method that is known to be under surveillance by American intelligence agencies. [snip]

(example involving a decades-long operation to tap Russian communications cables, compromised by disgruntled ex-NSA employee Ronald Pelton)

“If you ratchet it back 30,000 feet, it could also reveal to people that we don't want to know that they've been targeted, that they're targeted, and you could end up with very bad actors in the world who did not know that NSA was up in their email suddenly, being aware of that and changing the way they're doing business, changing their pattern of communication, their pattern of life,” he said.

He explained that a foreign spy who got wind of Mr Trump’s document cache — which the government has suggested contained information including raw signals intelligence — could have gleaned “exploits and backdoors into intelligence into communications platforms that are kind of the Holy of Holies in the COMMINT (communications intelligence) world”. [more]