You Can Have Donald Trump's Jitterbug Old People Phone When You Pry It From His Cold Dead Hands
In case anyone had any doubts, yes, Donald Trump is still using unsecured phones for his late night sob sessions with all his pals and for early morning tweetstorms at the entire world, according to a Politico story published yesterday. Why is the DOTUS so reluctant to to switch to a secured device, as many in the White House have advised? Simple: According to a "senior administration official," Trump says better security would be "too inconvenient," and nobody puts Big Baby in a corner when he needs Sean Hannity's expert advice on a sensitive topic like how much America loves Donald Trump, or when he wants to remind the world Hillary Clinton still isn't in prison for using a private email server.
Not that this is necessarily surprising news -- reports that Trump was still using his unsecured personal phone were quite the big deal in the first weeks of his presidency, as well as stories about his incredibly lax security across the board. Politico's story, while confirming that Trump is still using unsecured phones that may be susceptible to hacking or electronic eavesdropping, does at least point out that Trump has made a couple of tiny concessions to his staff's wish to be a little more secure:
The president uses at least two iPhones, according to one of the officials. The phones — one capable only of making calls, the other equipped only with the Twitter app and preloaded with a handful of news sites — are issued by White House Information Technology and the White House Communications Agency, an office staffed by military personnel that oversees White House telecommunications.
While aides have urged the president to swap out the Twitter phone on a monthly basis, Trump has resisted their entreaties, telling them it was “too inconvenient,” the same administration official said.
The president has gone as long as five months without having the phone checked by security experts. It is unclear how often Trump’s call-capable phones, which are essentially used as burner phones, are swapped out.
Yep, even switching out his Twitter phone for the occasional security check is too much trouble for the guy who promised he'd be far safer than that dangerously unstable lady just emailing everyone all the time. But don't worry! Another "senior West Wing official" explained there's nothing to worry about, because the voice-enabled phones are "seamlessly swapped out on a regular basis," and even better, insisted
Because of the security controls of the Twitter phone and the Twitter account, it does not necessitate regular change-out.
Are we supposed to be impressed? Do not congratulate.
The piece includes more than one comparison to Barack Obama, just in case anyone needed a reminder of who's who: Goofus hangs on to his Twitter phone as long as he wants because security is no big deal. Gallant swapped out phones every 30 days because you just can't be too careful when it comes to security. Goofus uses a phone with components that can be hacked. Gallant had a phone with those components not just disabled but not there in the first place:
Trump’s call-capable cellphone has a camera and microphone, unlike the White House-issued cellphones used by Obama. Keeping those components creates a risk that hackers could use them to access the phone and monitor the president’s movements. The GPS location tracker, however — which can be used to track the president’s whereabouts — is disabled on Trump’s devices.
The West Wing official refuted the idea that the presence of a camera and microphone on the president’s phone posed any risk, telling POLITICO, “Due to inherent capabilities and advancement in technologies, these devices are more secure than any Obama-era devices.”
Really, it's no big. And since technology has gotten so much better -- probably thanks to Dear Leader's trade policies -- there's little chance that foreign intelligence can possibly have found a way to intercept the new phones' signals. And yet Politico managed to find security experts who said Trump's absolute need to talk to whomever he wants late at night was a big juicy target for foreign intelligence services. But you can safely ignore those "experts," since they worked for Obama and are therefore unreliable, or, like Sam Sacks of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, should probably be disregarded because she doesn't sound very loyal to Donald Trump, now does she here?
It’s baffling that Trump isn’t taking baseline cybersecurity measures at a time when he is trying to negotiate his way out of a trade war with China, a country that is known for using cyber tactics to gain the upper hand in business negotiations
Well, that's just your opinion, person who is only the leader of the think tank's China Cyber Outlook program. What do you really know about China's cyberintelligence abilities, and why aren't you using your knowledge for something that really matters, like investigating Hillary Clinton's email server, which Trump explained in 2016 was probably hacked
by her financial backers in communist China — sure they have it — putting all of America and our citizens in danger, great danger.
Christ. It's as if nobody cared about what's really putting America at risk. All Trump ever talks to his friends about on his dubiously secure phone anyway is how Giuliani looks on TV, how comedians are mean to him, and maybe whatever names of intelligence sources he's been handed by Devin Nunes.
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There are sites where you can see his deleted tweets. So yeah.
Damn the iPhones are an upgrade from the ratty Samsung S3 he was holding during the campaign.