By all accounts, Signal’s encryption is robust, so they’d need spyware on the device to monitor the contents of the chat, or even to see who else was in the chat. Since these people were using their own personal devices and not government devices, there’s a higher chance that Russia or China or some other power could have put spyware on their device. So that is a major lapse in security, and there’s a chance it could have been spied on. But the person being physically in Russia shouldn’t make it any easier for the Russian government to spy on the chat itself.

On the positive side, I knew a Canadian couple where she was an evangelical Christian home-schooling their kids and he was a massive conspiracy theorist. They were both suspicious of vaccines and “mainstream medicine”, and he strongly disbelieved in the moon landings. 15 years ago there was no way to persuade them out of any of this. But over time, with the rise of the far right, QAnon, the antivax movement and MAGA, both of them realized they want nothing to do with those people or their insanity. She correctly identified the church as a bad influence and left it, she stopped preaching at people, they sent their kids to regular schools, they all got their vaccines, and he abandoned his conspiracy theories and now accepts that he was an idiot about the moon landings and laughs at his former self. Now you can have a perfectly normal conversation with them. So it is possible to travel in the other direction.

Buddhists would say that if you look closely, you find no distinction between yourself and everyone else. We are made of each other. Empathy and compassion are our nature because nothing happens to just me or just you. It’s one shared life, and we suffer when we fail to recognize this.

Classing anyone as inhuman is dangerous. A widespread inability to see the most barbaric Nazis as regular human beings like ourselves is one of the reasons Nazism has been able to sneak back up on us. It’s important to recognize that the potential for empathy, and the potential for empathy to wither away, are both human potentials. As humans we have the capacity for great compassion or great cruelty. It won’t help us if we say, “Oh, that cruelty is not us. We’re humans; they’re not.”

Xitler.

Four in five Canadians strongly oppose the idea of joining their neighbours to the south, and a majority, 78 per cent, are concerned with the rhetoric Trump keeps pushing.

So 20% of Canadians are traitors and/or idiots. Probably the FUCK TRUDEAU flags and bumper stickers crowd who complain about their first amendment rights.

If they were using Signal on personal phones, an unofficial channel on unofficial devices, they already weren’t, even before they accidentally included a journalist in the chat.

The redacted messages here have now been published:

https://archive.is/T4RTF

It just looks like a combination of digital zoom, bad sharpening and low-quality JPEG.

So they’ll try to kidnap her illegally anyway. Hope she can find a way to stay safe.

USA’s not sending their best.

It’s not all foreigners. It’s right-wing Americans. And if they didn’t keep hating it, they’d have to admit that Canada is better governed than the USA in many respects. It’s a challenge to their belief that they and their far-right dysfunction are the pinnacle of human existence.

I suspect he’d say Jean Poutine.

Trying to make it sound like a technical failure, not a massive show of incompetence and a huge security lapse by people who are unqualified for their jobs and shouldn’t have been communicating through those channels in the first place.

And “It’s the first time we’ve really fucked up inexcusably in a whole two months” doesn’t really work as a defense. Nor is it true.

How much exactly do you think Joe Rogan knows about the government of Canada? Pretty sure it’s around fuck all. He’s just a propagandist for the fascist regime at this point.

Not everyone has got the memo yet that the USA is now a fascist autocracy intent on teaming up with Russia to invade and destroy democratic countries.

In Canada a municipality is something else - a town or township, or a small region, governed by a municipal government (council). A riding is an electoral district in a federal or provincial election.

I think we’re already seeing that they’re quite capable of doing severe damage to the USA and other countries. You don’t have to be smart or skillful to be a wrecking ball. And, as another commenter says, the pandemics, wars and climate disasters they will bring have yet to really kick in.

This is the same team of geniuses that kept classified files, some of which were mysteriously emptied of their contents, in the unlocked bedroom and bathroom of a members-only club in Florida, near the swimming pool whose water mysteriously destroyed all the surveillance video just when the FBI were about to look at it.

Shared military plans with a journalist on a private app.