Chinese Spies Hacking Trump's Phone, Asking Him If His Refrigerator's Running
We're beginning to think he wasn't sincere about phone security in 2016.
Imagine the kind of gag-inducing content you could find on Donald Trump’s phone. Searches for skin bronzer. Up-skirt shots of every attractive woman who has ever walked within three feet of him. Pee tape. Pee tapes, plural. Charo’s phone number.
The mind reels.
Nonetheless, if The New York Times is correct, Chinese hackers have been hacking into the telecommunications systems of Verizon and other networks in an effort to steal whatever they can get from Apricot Amin. Which seems like a lot of work to go through to pilfer data when they could probably just ask him for it.
The hackers have also reportedly targeted JD Vance’s phone, which probably just contains several gigs of pictures of him sitting on various sofas.
The type of information on phones used by a presidential candidate and his running mate could be a gold mine for an intelligence agency: Who they called and texted, how often they communicated with certain people, and how long they talked to those people could be highly valuable to an adversary like China.
Hey, he should call this guy!
Sure, there could be blackmail material. It could also just be that Xi Jinping is possessive and jealous, like a spouse who thinks her husband is cheating on her. (“Donald? Why is Vladimir texting you photos of himself shirtless? You said it was over with that hussy!”)
Our opinion is that if you have been targeted by assassins from a foreign adversary, as Iran is allegedly targeting Trump, you do not want its spies to be able to get to your location data and track your movements 24 hours a day. But we’re not our very stable genius of a former president.
The hackers reportedly also targeted the phones of various other prominent politicians, and possibly some staff members from Kamala Harris’s campaign. Both of which sound like much better potential sources of information. With Trump all you need to do to get your hands on classified info is ask to use the shitter at Mar-a-Lago.
Given their famous obsession with the security of communications devices used by high-level officials, Trump and his people are taking the security breach very, very seriously. Ha ha ha, just kidding, spokesdick Steven Cheung “criticized the White House and Vice President Kamala Harris and sought to blame them for allowing a foreign adversary to target the campaign.”
This is not the first time that Trump’s phone use has raised security concerns. Early in his presidency, it was reported that he was still using his old Android phone and mostly ignoring the locked-down cell phone the Secret Service had given him.
The following year, Wired reported that he had switched it up, sort of:
Trump currently has three iPhones—an NSA-secured iPhone for calls, another secure iPhone that can't make calls but does have Twitter and other apps, and a personal, off-the-shelf iPhone, apparently with no added security, that he keeps handy because he can store his contacts on it.
Could his NSA-secured iPhone not handle contact lists? Was it a first generation iPhone with like 10 kilobytes of storage space? Anyway, Trump supposedly refused to swap the phones out every 30 days as is apparently normal security practice, at least for a president.
Of course thanks to some sharp-eyed Redditors, this week everyone learned that Trump’s phone-lock screen is just a picture of himself pointing at the camera. Which means when he looks at it, he is seeing himself pointing sternly back at himself. We are not going to trouble our beautiful brains any more by thinking about the psychology going on here.
Four out of five doctors recommend supporting Wonkette. The fifth is kind of an asshole.
In the battle between Superman and Lex Luthor, The Daily Planet has decided not to take a side.
OT: We got ourselves a mutiny, folks.
*The Washington Post’s Trump-era slogan, “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” was the title of a simple and effective cartoon in that same paper Friday afternoon, hours after its billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos, refused to allow its editorial board to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris. The cartoon, by Pulitzer Prize-winning illustrator Ann Telnaes, shows streaks of dark paint that have been brushed to form no discernible shape. The absence of what would be considered a typical editorial cartoon follows the absence of the Post’s presidential endorsement--the first such instance in the past 36 years. “Democracy Dies in Darkness” first appeared on the storied paper‘s website about a month into Donald Trump’s presidency. Former Post executive editor Marty Baron alluded to it when he panned Bezos' decision as “cowardice, a moment of darkness that will leave democracy as a casualty.” The lack of an endorsement, Baron also said, was an invitation for Trump to “further intimidate” the media.*