The following is an op-ed by Jeff and Tina, former employees of the Cyber Awareness Challenge at the Department of Defense.
Six years ago, the Department of Defense decided that it no longer needed our helpful hints on cyber awareness and operational security offered in a quiz game format. But now, as we assess the Secretary of Defense’s maddening group chat of embarrassing national security leaks and look back on the years we spent toiling without complaint while dealing annually with the same blisteringly elemental aspects of cyber security — social networking, home computer security, insider threats, phishing, and removable media — we’re asking ourselves, “what in the fuck?”
In 2019, the people entrusted with security in the United States apparently no longer needed reminders not to prop the SCIF door open for people who forgot their badges. MyTunes file sharing was a thing of the past. And no one, it was believed, would ever click links on emails from people they didn’t know, much less write their password on a yellow sticky posted for everyone to see.
Today, it’s evident that dozens of members of the National Security Council’s Principals Committee, including Vice President J.D. Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, National Security Advisor Michael Waltz, and Director of the Central Intelligence Agency John Ratcliffe would be smart enough to not invite Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic magazine, into a group text established to discuss the details of a highly sensitive military operation on an unofficial communications network much less share classified “information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing” within it.
