I come from a fairly bureaucratic workplace and I must say these are some damn fine questions.
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[whispers] The prophecy!
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Usurpation of the OK hand gesture happened, what?, in 2016 or -17? Possibly earlier? This is not a new thing.
[Pretty sure you got more than you expected re: the 2001 transition of power.]
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Since it looks like a majority of GOPers are going to stand with Lord Dampnut no matter what, I wonder just how they are going to be dealt with…
Needless to say, those directly involved in the Coup need to be removed from office, arrested, and prosecuted. This still leaves his Enablers in the Congress, much less all the sympathizers buried throughout the bureaucracy, law enforcement, etc.
Worse, still, will be the inevitable calls in the incoming administration to ‘look forward, not back’ or some such tommyrot.
All that does is kick the can down the road & encourage the next Worse Trump that comes along.
What needs to be recognized is that these actions aren’t Cancer; they are gangrene, & need to be treated as such.
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That implies that they really believed there was guilt to find: they knew there wasn’t
The real purpose for the endless Benghazi hearings was to destroy Hillary Clinton.
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Yeah, that’s sort of the problem. Sometimes people say the pardon power is absolute, but it’s clearly not absolute. I get it doesn’t say “except in cases of sedition” or anything like that. But another part of the constitution says that whoever gets a majority of electors becomes president, and it doesn’t say “except if the president sends a seditious mob to disrupt the poceedings”. Normally the power to pardon people doesn’t conflict with the fact that you count electors to determine who is president, but a week ago it did. All parts of the constitution limit one another, they shouldn’t have to most of the time, but they do.
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Congress does seem like it’s all gums right now.
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i posted the link to the government’s report on that the last time this came up. basically, gop alleged costly damage was done to the white house, including missing w keys, and broken computers. the report said nothing much beyond wear and tear was found. there were some broken computers, probably from age - and after 8 years, needed replacing anyway… and also that the primary person responsible for tracking this stuff seemed to remember indeed a lot of missing w’s
basically… not a complete fiction, though the gop inflated an anecdote into a political attack. ( so business as usual really )
as with all things this early on, i think it’s worthwhile to wait and see. there’s little reason to doubt ayanna pressley’s chief of staff , but as to why… it could still be many different things
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I think the bigger scandal is using/trusting whatever peripherals the previous ‘tenant’ left behind. Something tells me that won’t happen this year.
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yeah, i’ve been curious how many bugs were planted in congressional offices during the coup. though i guess, it’s not necessary when republican members are already so willing to cozy up with domestic terrorists.
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The most dangerous scenario is where there are sympathizers/loyalists to the cause of insurgents/your enemy in your own security/troop ranks.
The problem is, detecting such can wreak havoc on general morale and drive neutrals to the other side with loyalty tests, extra oaths, interviews etc.
Keep in mind Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her own bodyguards. Ask gays and people of color how it feels to be assaulted or harassed while the police just stand back and stand by,
Whether politician or peasant, ultimately you can never know if the police or guards will be on your side or not or perhaps not even available when you need them most.
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I thought that same thing at first, but they didn’t. Several articles have mentioned how “the Squad” have been targeted even more than other reps, and how this particular office specifically checked the panic buttons and knew they were there and worked prior to this.
I don’t want to jump to conclusions, and would like to think there might be some less scary explanation, but so far the facts seem to point to intentionally removing a congressperson’s tools for calling for help in a dire situation.
Given the direness of this particular situation, I’m not even sure what could’ve been done if the panic buttons were there, but it adds to the evil that they weren’t there.
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For SOC2 certification you have to come up with a threat model and the most challenging threat model by far is the one where you have a rogue employee on the inside. 
So, so difficult to protect against – requires massive discipline and lots of onerous “these two people turn the key at the exact same time” security restrictions.
The one good thing that it does encourage, which is sensible and all companies should be doing, is the “circles of trust” concept where you try to keep a minimum number of people in the higher trust circles so it’s easier to audit and there’s less risk.
An example of totally screwed up trust circles is the bitcoin scam hack Twitter endured, which still blows my mind:
We detected what we believe to be a coordinated social engineering attack by people who successfully targeted some of our employees with access to internal systems and tools." In addition to taking further steps to lock down the verified accounts affected, Twitter said they have also begun an internal investigation and have limited employee access to their system administrative tools as they evaluate the situation, as well as if any additional data was compromised by the malicious users
On top of that, Twitter employees were not using two factor auth, which for a company of Twitter’s scale, age, and sophistication… is just inexcusable.
I’ve been super encouraged that in 2020 political campaigns seem to “get” two factor auth for email! 
And anyone reading this, who hasn’t already: please, PLEASE, PLEASE enable two factor auth on your email account right now! You don’t have to use a 2FA hardware key, though that is indeed best, the smartphone authentication app of your choice is fine… there’s one from Microsoft, one from Google, Authy, etc.
(And wow I can’t believe that blog entry about 2FA is almost 10 years old now. But we have progress! Real tangible progress! 
)
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“It was easy to see I was going to be falsely accused, this was my only defense against an unfair socialist antifa conspiracy, etc.”
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(oh and because I always neglect to mention this, DON’T FORGET TO PRINT OUT THE BACKUP CODES when you enable two factor auth.)
All the cool kids are using hardware two factor auth and it’s fairly inexpensive… you want to be cool, don’t you? dontcha? 
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There are times when I wish Discourse had a feature like Medium’s “claps”, where I can just lean on the button and run the counter up.
This is one of those times.
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This time for sure‽
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and of course the spy will be the most enthusiastic oath-taker, so it will prove nothing
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I’m not a security specialist - I work in a field that’s often alongside them.
There’s no legit scenario where safety equipment that is known to be working and in service is removed without telling the regular occupants of an office.
I’d also like to think there’s some less scary explanation. But they’re pretty farfetched ideas, and certainly not safe to consider likely. The Squad and other high-profile house members have to assume sabotage.
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