One of the astounding things to come out of these hearings is the fact that the Secret Service and other law enforcement confirmed sightings of people with guns at the rally near the WH, and didn't immediately lock everything down.
I mean, that's NUTS. Normally even a single person spotted with a weapon anywhere near a presidential event would result in a VERY aggressive security response.
The Secret Service has a very heavy duty Counter Assault Team that exists precisely to respond to this sort of this thing. And yet it was treated as no big deal.
Anyway, it makes no sense. It's obvious the Secret Service was concerned about Trump's safety (they wouldn't let him go to the Capitol), so why did they have such a tepid response to the gunmen spotted at the rally?
They normally would have hustled him quickly (the hell) away from there while neutralizing the people with the weapons.
And Trump's claim that "they're not here to hurt ME" doesn't explain it. They didn't know that, and one of those people might well have been there to hurt him.
People yelling at me about this. Yell all you want, but there is simply no way the Secret Service could have known the intentions of unidentified gunmen without confronting them individually. Anyone could have slipped into that crowd, including someone who wanted to harm Trump.
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It's been a long day, so here's a needlessly high resolution photo of the US Capitol last year, looking majestic despite a few scars still visible from the riot.
One of the tiresome things about this web site is that if you observe that some newly discovered or disclosed thing is surprising, notable, shocking, or whatever, you get inundated with people telling you how stupid you are to be surprised. Or at least I do.
This may be simply because I'm stupid and/or clueless.
Also, I'm now told, my failure to not be surprised is because I'm racist.
Some of the basic details about the Secret Service text messages that got deleted are unclear or haven't been publicly confirmed, including what kind of text messages these were (SMS? Something else?) and who the service provider was. But we can make some educated guesses.
Federal law enforcement agencies sometimes use internal proprietary text message systems. But those would likely be archived on a central server, and not require, as was the case here, the messages be archived handset-by-handset by the end users. 2/
These seem to have been some kind of ordinary phone text messages, such as SMS, or possible iMessage or Signal. SMS messages are transmitted via the cellular carriers, and use the phone numbers for addressing. 3/
This has come up a few times in as many days, so it seems like a good time to repost my writeup on cell-phone Faraday bags: mattblaze.org/blog/faraday/
I wrote this less as product reviews and more to encourage people to think abut threat models and how to make measurements.
You end up learning a LOT about science and engineering by making measurements like this.
In other words, rather than sending me your Faraday bag to measure, measure it yourself! (This may involve making friends with someone who has the appropriate equipment, an added bonus.)
The shoehorning of later tech into an older and widely used standard here reminds me of the way POTS telephony evolved. New services & capabilities were introduced over the years (DTMF, call waiting, etc), but all had to be designed to work atop the same old 48V 2 wire loop.
Cinema is interesting because the requirements for both new tech and backwards compatibility exists at both ends. Movies today might be shot in analog or digital, and are distributed in both. All sorts of ugly but functional hacks ensure they can be converted in either direction.