Biden Could Receive Classified Intelligence Just by Hanging Out in Mar-a-Lago Dining Room

[Rhiannon12866]

PALM BEACH, Florida (The Borowitz Report)—President-elect Joe Biden could obtain all the classified intelligence he needs simply by hanging out in the public dining room at Mar-a-Lago, members of the international espionage community recommend.

“Biden shouldn’t worry about getting official intelligence briefings,” a foreign spy, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said. “He should just reserve a table at Mar-a-Lago, and he’ll hear everything he needs.”

The spy offered his own methods for obtaining classified intelligence as a possible roadmap for the President-elect. “Get a table near Trump, order an omelette, and turn on your recorder,” he said.

Calling the last four years “the golden age of spying on the U.S.,” the intelligence agent was philosophical about the impending Biden Presidency. “Nothing lasts forever,” he said.


Short article, no more at link: https://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/biden-could-receive-classified-intelligence-just-by-hanging-out-in-mar-a-lago-dining-room



Photograph by Nicholas Kamm / AFP / Getty

[UTUSN]

1. HAH - got it again!

[Rhiannon12866]

2. LOL!

I figured this one wouldn't get by DUers...

[chriscan64]

3. Spy speaks on condition of anonymity! Love it.

Reason 642 to be happy Joe won the election: lines between satire and reality unblurred.

[dchill]

4. All the best humor is TRUE!

[yellowcanine]

5. Joe would not sully himself.

[Lars39]

6. lol Perfect!

[BannonsLiver]

7. That, and a side of Covid-19.

I wouldn’t get within 100 yards of that place.

[nuxvomica]

8. "the golden age of spying on the U.S."

Sadly, not even close to being satire.

[Tanuki]

9. Pretty close to reality

https://www.propublica.org/article/any-half-decent-hacker-could-break-into-mar-a-lago/amp

..."We parked a 17-foot motor boat in a lagoon about 800 feet from the back lawn of The Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach and pointed a 2-foot wireless antenna that resembled a potato gun toward the club. Within a minute, we spotted three weakly encrypted Wi-Fi networks. We could have hacked them in less than five minutes, but we refrained.

A few days later, we drove through the grounds of the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey, with the same antenna and aimed it at the clubhouse. We identified two open Wi-Fi networks that anyone could join without a password. We resisted the temptation.

We have also visited two of President Donald Trump’s other family-run retreats, the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., and a golf club in Sterling, Virginia. Our inspections found weak and open Wi-Fi networks, wireless printers without passwords, servers with outdated and vulnerable software, and unencrypted login pages to back-end databases containing sensitive information.

The risks posed by the lax security, experts say, go well beyond simple digital snooping. Sophisticated attackers could take advantage of vulnerabilities in the Wi-Fi networks to take over devices like computers or smart phones and use them to record conversations involving anyone on the premises.

“Those networks all have to be crawling with foreign intruders, not just ProPublica,” said Dave Aitel, chief executive officer of Immunity, Inc., a digital security company, when we told him what we found.
......
U.S. leaders can ill afford such vulnerabilities. As both the U.S. and French presidential campaigns showed, hackers increasingly exploit weaknesses in internet security systems in an effort to influence elections and policy. Last week, cyberattacks using software stolen from the National Security Agency paralyzed operations in at least a dozen countries, from Britain’s National Health Service to Russia’s Interior Ministry.

Since the election, Trump has hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and British politician Nigel Farage at his properties. The cybersecurity issues we discovered could have allowed those diplomatic discussions — and other sensitive conversations at the properties — to be monitored by hackers..”....(more)