https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/11/impeachment-hearing-reveals-major-white-house-phone-security-fail/
By Sean Gallagher
Ars Technica
11/14/2019
In testimony yesterday before the House Intelligence Committee, diplomat
William Taylor said that he had recently learned of a phone call between George
Sondland—the US ambassador to the European Union—and President Donald Trump.
Taylor, the senior diplomat for the US in Ukraine, said that his staff
overheard Trump during a call with Sondland while at dinner with the ambassador
at a restaurant in Kiev.
The contents of that discussion—that Trump asked Sondland about "the
investigations" Trump wanted Ukraine to conduct as an alleged condition of
releasing military aid—may or may not be damaging to the president's case that
he was not seeking foreign assistance for his 2020 presidential campaign. But
as anyone in national or diplomatic security will attest to, an open phone call
between the president and an ambassador regarding topics of diplomatic interest
in a public place like a restaurant—a place where any foreign intelligence
organization could be monitoring for collection purposes—would be a major
breach of operational (and national) security.
This is not the first time that the administration has let issues of national
security play out before a public audience. In February of 2017, President
Trump consulted with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe regarding a North
Korean ballistic missile test and made phone calls from the restaurant of his
Mar-A-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, in plain view and within earshot of
other diners—some of whom essentially live-streamed the situation from their
cell phones. A few months later, Trump shared intelligence data with Russia's
foreign minister and ambassador in an Oval Office meeting concerning an Islamic
State plot to bring down passenger planes with laptops turned into bombs.
Most recently, Trump impulsively declassified and tweeted a sensitive
surveillance image from a US spy satellite of the launch site of a failed
Iranian satellite launch. As president, Trump can choose to declassify any
information he sees fit. But the lack of security concern with regard to
diplomatic and national security planning has raised concerns from many in the
security community. Typically, these sorts of conversations between a president
and his envoys occur either in person or over a secured phone line—from a
secure compartmented information facility (SCIF) at an embassy or some other
secured space.
[...]
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