[Leica] Did the world dodge a bullet?

[Howard L Ritter Jr]

ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!!! I hereby DECLARE WAR ON N.KOREA!! Nuke Bombs & Rockets start falling in 30 min. ENJOY HELL LIDDLE ROCKET MAN! 


Suppose the “rogue employee” exiting Twitter had decided to post something like that on @realDonaldTrump instead of just inactivating the account. Kim might not have been panicked into a military response, but the tension would have gone through the roof, and Trump’s credibility through the floor. 

Just think about this for a minute: ONE low-level flunky at ONE private company, able to impersonate the leader of the most powerful nation on Earth with what sounds like one of the real thing’s intemperate, bellicose eructations. The mind reels.

When America has been saddled with a thin-skinned, easily provoked, arrogant, intemperate juvenile delinquent with all the emotional stability and self-control of a pimply 13-year-old feeling his first rush of testosterone for its President and he connects both ends of his id’s digestive tract raw and unfiltered to his Twitter feed that’s as accessible internally as mine is, America’s misfortune could become the world’s. 

Do you think that no one outside the WH knows, or could discover, the password associated with this account and how to spoof two-factor authentication? All it might take is being able to do it one time. How much would you be willing to bet on the absolute security of @realDonaldTrump? The future of the world? I’d bet my dog (not really, Maizey!) that Kim’s or Vlad’s or the ayatollahs’ hackers could do it if they wished, which of course they fervently do. For God’s sake, think about what they’re already known to have gotten into!

This is just intolerable. I want to start a change.org <http://change.org/> petition calling on all social media to close the accounts of all heads of state under any name that identifies them as such or becomes recognizable as theirs. I think this mundane episode is a real sleeper that could turn into something really really major, and even though few might have thought about it before this, the social media should have. I think it’s unconscionable that the muckety-mucks at Twitter didn’t take every possible step to make Trump’s account accessible only at the highest levels, and even then requiring two launch officers to turn their keys simultaneously. 

Trump should fly into one of his patented rages and demand that #failingTwitter put nuclear-level security on his account and should refuse to use it until the NSA’s top spooks have reviewed every aspect of that security. Of course, recognizing no interests whatever outside his own, he didn’t and won’t.

Mark my words.