For those unfamiliar with the story here is the background:
On Saturday Ukrainian President Zelensky had a Zoom call with the U.S. Congress seeking additional help for Ukraine. During the course of the call participants were asked not to report on the call using social media, while it was in progress. Nonetheless Senators Rubio and Daines tweeted about it. They claim they did so before the request was made, but they failed to delete their tweets. In addition they claim that their tweets were not a security concern. Rubio is the vice chair of the Senate intelligence committee and should have known better.
A bit more background in case anyone is not familiar:
War criminal Putin has got assassination teams in Ukraine seeking to do in Zelensky. Ukraine says that they have foiled several recent assassination attempts. So security for President Zelensky is critical.
As to why tweeting about the call while in progress was a security breach:
No doubt President Zelensky was using a VPN on the Zoom call. What that means is that the Internet traffic issuing from his location was encrypted as to content and ultimate destination. However there is something unique about being the speaker on a video call – the traffic pattern. Ordinary Internet browsing entails only a little bit of upload traffic and a lot of download traffic – webpage requests going up and webpages with images and videos coming down. Occasionally someone might send an email with a big file which would entail intense upload usage for a few minutes. On the other hand, the speaker in a video call will be uploading a moderate amount of video data continually for the duration of the speech. A unique traffic pattern. If someone was intercepting the web traffic from a suspected Zelensky hideout this traffic pattern would be apparent, and therefore revealing, if they knew that Zelensky was speaking on a Zoom call. Yet Rubio says,
There was no identifying information of any kind. Anybody pretending this tweet is a security concern is a partisan seeking clicks.
Stupid or disingenuous? Could be either. The latter is a possibility since Rubio has received 1.5 million in campaign contributions from Russian interests. Either way he should not be in the Senate. Support the Val Demings campaign here.
