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Credit to Author: Brian Barrett| Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2019 20:47:51 +0000<\/strong><\/p>\n House Republicans barged into a secure facility uninvited Wednesday, creating a host of problems in the process.<\/p>\n It should go without saying: Don\u2019t round up a bunch of your buddies and jostle your way into a highly secured government facility uninvited. But that's exactly what a group of Republican congressmen proudly did Wednesday morning.<\/p>\n \u201cBREAKING,\u201d representative Matt Gaetz (R\u2013Florida) tweeted at 11:32 am, \u201cI led over 30 of my colleagues into the SCIF where Adam Schiff is holding secret impeachment depositions.\u201d Schiff is the head of the House Intelligence Committee, who has led the recent inquiry into President Trump\u2019s Ukraine imbroglio<\/a>. (Deputy assistant secretary of defense Laura Cooper was scheduled to give a deposition this morning.) But while Gaetz and his cohorts may have fancied themselves Parisians storming the Bastille of cloak-and-dagger bureaucracy, all they\u2019ve really accomplished is the violation of some extremely basic tenets of national security.<\/p>\n Meet the gaggle of Republicans who violated security protocols Wednesday.<\/p>\n Let\u2019s start with the SCIF (pronounced skiff<\/em>), since it\u2019s an unfamiliar acronym for many. It stands for Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility. These are rooms that are outfitted to be effectively spyproof by conforming to a stringent list of security standards. There\u2019s a SCIF at Mar-a-Lago<\/a>, for instance, kitted out to accommodate briefings for Trump during his frequent<\/a> southerly sojourns. Barack Obama traveled with a SCIF tent during his presidency that could be set up on short notice inside, say, a hotel room<\/a>.<\/p>\n The requirements of a SCIF will also vary depending on its specific use case; whether sensitive materials will be stored there or simply discussed, for instance, makes a difference. But some standards apply universally, as you can see in these hefty guidelines<\/a> produced by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. They need radio frequency shielding, to prevent those signals going in or out. Their walls should be stuffed with sound-attenuation material and topped off with acoustic sealant. And any electronics inside a SCIF need to conform to the NSA\u2019s TEMPEST specification, which details how to keep them safe from surveillance. This is just a sampling! But you get it by now. It\u2019s a lot.<\/p>\n The reason to lock down a SCIF is intuitive. They\u2019re the rooms where the most sensitive conversations related to US national security take place\u2014or, at least, they\u2019re supposed to be<\/a>. That includes the current impeachment inquiry, which relates directly to high-level interactions between the US and foreign countries, at least some of which is presumably classified, and all of which a hacking-happy country like, say, Russia would love an inside read on.<\/p>\n So when Gaetz and House minority whip Steve Scalise and their merry band of lawmakers literally barge into a SCIF\u2014they finally left after a five-hour standoff\u2014they\u2019re not just causing a fuss. They\u2019re making a mockery of national security and to a lesser extent putting it at risk. Especially the congressmen who, as numerous outlets have reported<\/a>, brought their smartphones into the room.<\/p>\n \u201cA SCIF is designed and regulated to be a secure space\u2014and that means keeping out electronic devices that malicious actors can exploit to conduct surveillance,\u201d says Joshua Geltzer, a former senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council. \u201cBringing those into such a space can cause real national security vulnerabilities. Doing so for a political stunt potentially sacrifices security for partisan points.\u201d<\/p>\n You don\u2019t need a vibrant imagination to see how. The SCIF guidelines from ODNI list three categories of \u201chigh-risk\u201d devices: multifunction cellular telephones, electronic devices with RF transmitting (e.g., Bluetooth), and photographic, video, and audio recording devices. Smartphones are all three. They can have malware<\/a>, and malware can take over microphones and cameras. Making matters worse, the very people storming the SCIF are the among the most at risk of compromise from a sophisticated adversary. Who wouldn\u2019t want to hack a congressperson?<\/p>\n \u201cThey\u2019re definitely appealing targets,\u201d says Mieke Eoyang, who worked as a staffer on the House Intelligence Committee and currently heads up the national security program at Third Way, a nonprofit think tank. \u201cForeign adversaries have been trying to collect on some of these people from the moment they announced. These are high-value intelligence targets, and well-known.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s hard to overstate the extent to which the GOP members involved in the ruckus either didn\u2019t know or didn't care about the kinds of risks they were inviting. Several of them not only brought their phones into the SCIF, they proudly tweeted that they had done so. Representative Alex Mooney (R-West Virginia) appears to have tried to livestream<\/a> the affair, but settled for an audio dispatch<\/a>.<\/p>\n https:\/\/twitter.com\/RepMattGaetz\/status\/1187028992295161858<\/a><\/p>\n https:\/\/twitter.com\/RepMarkWalker\/status\/1187033883411398656<\/a><\/p>\n Several of the representatives later appended \u201csent by staff\u201d or some variation to their missives, in an attempt to indicate that they themselves had not tweeted from inside the SCIF. Apparently not everyone felt the same retroactive rationality; according to a House Intelligence Committee official, some GOP members refused to give up their devices even at the request of the Sergeant at Arms and security personnel.<\/p>\n \u201cThey engage in this circus-like behavior because they can\u2019t defend the president\u2019s egregious misconduct,\u201d the official added, noting that the House Parliamentarian found the SCIF-stormers in violation of House deposition rules. It\u2019s unclear what kind of repercussions, if any, await.<\/p>\n