The Head of the Pentagon Has Been Using His Personal Phone for Sports Betting and Sharing Military Secrets
... According to security experts, it's not surprising that Hegseth's personal number is on the web, since he was a private citizen before being sworn in. Instead, the former Fox News host's staggeringly stupid mistake was using the same phone number to do all his official top secret military stuff, like announcing the details of an airstrike in Yemen against Houthi forces in a group chat that also had his wife and brother (we should clarify: that was a separate incident from when he accidentally leaked stuff to a journalist).
As the NYT notes, even low-level government employees are forbidden from using personal devices for work-related tasks — and here's the guy in charge of the entire nation's defense efforts, leaving it all out in the open.
In August last year, according to the reporting, Hegseth used his phone number to join Sleeper.com, a fantasy football and sports betting site, using this clandestine username: "PeteHegseth." He also used his number with an email account that left a bunch of Google Maps reviews, praising a dentist office for its "amazing" staff and a plumber for "fast, honest, and quality work."
At least he's the type to leave a nice review. But Hegseth's flaunting of common-sense privacy practices makes him a sitting duck for hackers.
"If you use your phone for just ordinary daily activities, you are leaving a highly, highly visible digital pathway that even a moderately sophisticated person, let alone a nefarious actor, can follow," Glenn S. Gerstell, a former general counsel for the National Security Agency, told the NYT.
"Phone numbers are like the street address that tell you what house to break into," James A. Lewis, a cybersecurity expert, told the paper. "Once you get the street address, you get to the house, and there might be locks on the doors, and you ask yourself, 'Do I have the tools to bypass or break the locks?'"
The former staff are NOT "anonymous", there's no hoax and he's a whiny sleazeball for bringing his kids into discussion of his poor management.
It's really something when a cultist like Hegseth, well schooled in MAGA LAW (Lying And Whining), fails at it so spectacularly over and over. At Fox news, this kind of shit wouldn't matter. Ah, well. Here we are. I still think Wiles will be the first to quit.
If Wiles quits because of the Hegseth mess I think GoCubsGo and O Really should get credit for an assist.
) access to an unsecured line.
Someone is going to frag him to end this.
