Pants Down Around Our Ankles

America's cyber posture in 2025

There’s a lot of incompetence in the Trump administration. Most presidents want a long string of experts handy, but Trump can’t stand anyone who doesn’t foster the notion he’s the smartest guy in the room. The Republican party has been anti-intellectual, which is one of the numerous reasons we parted ways twenty some years ago. The combination of these two attitudes, combined with Secretary Kegsbreath in charge of our military, is a recipe for disaster.

The Trump Organization’s DNS was penetrated in 2013. This Mother Jones article on the intrusion was when we caught the problem in 2017. This was the first time I went back to making national news after the 2010/2012 election cycles. I have some hard cyber capabilities, but my forte is what the Russians call “operations psychological”. That I got this is a common sort of accident for me, not publicly replicated until MIOS: Iran’s PressTV, in the summer of 2024, but it used to happen. I was accessible and I know what to do with reporters, so things naturally found their way to me.

That being said, this is terrifying. There are situations where U.S. infrastructure is at risk, things where I had advanced warning, and there’s literally nobody home. Not reporters, not NGOs, not any of my spook associates. The U.S. Federal Courts got hammered two months ago. I don’t know who did it, but I bet I can show efforts to interdict the attack vector around this time in 2023. Not one fuck was given.

We didn’t have effective leadership before the Trump administration, and what we have now? All this sniveling I hear about open borders makes me want to slap people - the packets are coming from inside the house.

Conclusion:

We’re gonna get our asses kicked. We’ll probably be able to strike back. We have an outdated, Cold War notion of deterrence. I think there is much to be learned by observing the war in Ukraine. Static defense situations, tiny devices creeping back and forth across the line? This network threat is instantly recognizable to me as a physical manifestation of what has always been part of my career.

And to be clear, Ukraine has the same sort of cyber problems, and their response from on high is no different. There are so few who understand the nature of the threats, and unless the organization is handling large volumes of money, the C suite won’t care.

So here we sit, knowing it’s coming, like the people warning the White House of terror plots in the fall of 2001. We’ll get the same result, once conditions go far enough. I suspect that will involve Chinese amphibious forces crossing the strait of Taiwan.

There is little to do but prepare for the worst.