[HN Gopher] Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'
___________________________________________________________________
Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'
Author : mmsc
Score : 584 points
Date : 2025-02-08 09:34 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (krebsonsecurity.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (krebsonsecurity.com)
| ronbenton wrote:
| This seems really bad. Did they intentionally pick the worst
| possible people?
| laidoffamazon wrote:
| This is uh, a more than a little disturbing. Is JD Vance going to
| say that he deserves grace too?
|
| More context [0]
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/764_(organization)
| shitter wrote:
| For reference: JD Vance said that another DOGE staffer, who
| resigned after it was reported that he'd publicly come out in
| favor of racism, eugenics, and normalizing hate against Indian
| people on Twitter, should be rehired because it was just
| "stupid social media activity".
| jlawson wrote:
| No, you're lying by extracting context. Here's what he said.
|
| Here's my view:
|
| I obviously disagree with some of Elez's posts, but I don't
| think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid's life.
|
| We shouldn't reward journalists who try to destroy people.
| Ever.
|
| So I say bring him back.
|
| If he's a bad dude or a terrible member of the team, fire him
| for that.
|
| https://x.com/JDVance/status/1887900880143343633 --
|
| The part about the journalists is the operative part
| obviously.
| 9283409232 wrote:
| We shouldn't treat people as if their words have no
| consequences either.
| shitter wrote:
| It's not a lie. "I don't think stupid social media activity
| should ruin a kid's life" does two things: characterizes
| endorsements of racism and eugenics policies as "stupid
| social media activity", and asserts that exposure of such
| activity should not lead to someone losing their job. The
| part about not rewarding journalists who "destroy" people
| does not exist in a vacuum away from his downplaying of
| Elez's abhorrent racial views. If journalists had revealed
| Elez, for example, was a secret left-wing antifa supporter
| on Bluesky, I think we can reasonably doubt Vance's
| reaction would have been the same.
|
| Edit: Now that you've brought Vance's tweet into focus,
| it's also interesting that he does not think Elez is
| currently a "bad dude" when he's expressly stated a desire
| to normalize hatred against an entire ethnicity
| fkyoureadthedoc wrote:
| Also (mis)characterizes a grown ass man as a kid
| ks2048 wrote:
| I'd like to see a a press conference:
|
| "Question for JD Vance - can you look at your Indian wife
| and children and then say a guy posting 'Normalize Indian
| hate' is not a 'bad dude'"?
| sjsdaiuasgdia wrote:
| Follow-up: "How is Elez both a child who shouldn't be
| held responsible for his actions from as recently as 2
| months ago, but also the right person to be trusted with
| extensive access to government systems?"
| laidoffamazon wrote:
| No journalist is going to ask him this because they're
| afraid of retribution and a loss of access. If they do
| he's going to deflect - nobody will press him on a
| genuinely galling statement of values.
| sjsdaiuasgdia wrote:
| "I don't think stupid social media activity should ruin a
| kid's life" is incredibly dishonest and Vance should be
| held to account for this incredibly dishonest statement.
|
| The phrasing is intended to create the impression that the
| posts were made years ago, by some angry teenager, and it's
| not relevant to the person they are today. It's a way of
| downplaying the acts, creating distance between the person
| today and the acts at some unspecified point in the past.
|
| But we know these timeline details. Elez is not a "kid"
| now, he's 25. These posts were not made when he was 13,
| they were made last year when he was, I suppose, 24 going
| on 25.
|
| There are two conflicting perspectives being promoted by
| Musk, Vance, etc which IMO are in direct logical conflict:
|
| 1) This person's actions last year (going up to December
| 2024! Just 2 months ago!) are the actions of an
| irresponsible child and we shouldn't hold them accountable
| for those actions because they're not responsible enough to
| be held accountable for them.
|
| 2) This person is responsible enough right now to be
| operating at the highest levels of government.
|
| He can't be both. So which is he, really?
| llamaimperative wrote:
| wat?
|
| We shouldn't reward journalists for finding and exposing
| morally repugnant people getting near the levers of state
| power?
|
| That is 100% exactly on-the-money the absolute _ideal_
| usecase for journalism.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > but I don't think stupid social media activity should
| ruin a kid's life.
|
| He's 25 or 26, given his birth year. The comments were
| posted months ago.
|
| This isn't a "kid"! Calling him a kid is a propaganda
| tactic that got rolled out to try to confuse people about
| the true story.
|
| He's an adult. He made the comments as an adult.
|
| > We shouldn't reward journalists who try to destroy
| people. Ever.
|
| It's extraordinarily irrational to think that we should
| ignore important information simply to spite journalists.
|
| There is nothing logical in that argument. It's pure
| emotion and spite driven.
| hagbard_c wrote:
| I may not know the full of the thought crimes this individual
| was accused of but I did see one of the posts he wrote:
|
| _Competent black women must be in charge if you want things
| to work.
|
| Unfortunately, our entire national ideology is predicated on
| pushing the ideas of white men, and demoralizing competent
| black women._
|
| Assuming I got this correctly it does not seem to differ in
| any way or form from what is said and written daily by people
| in the media, in the benches of government, in educational
| institutions, in museums and in cultural events. What is so
| egregious about this that he needed to be pushed out where
| none of those others who said or wrote similar things have
| ever been called out, let alone pushed out for stating these
| thoughts?
|
| If you have followed the news you'll know the difference but
| if you have not I'll spell it out: where I wrote _black
| women_ he wrote _white men_ , where he wrote _coddling the
| feelings of women_ I wrote _pushing the ideas of white men_.
| That 's it. If the message he wrote is enough to push him out
| the message I wrote should be just as bad and those who have
| been stating various versions of this message should
| similarly be pushed out of their positions. This is not what
| I think should happen since I believe in the free exchange of
| ideas. He should not have been pushed out and the moral
| outrage over this message is hypocrisy.
|
| Realise that saying 'but what you wrote is _true_ while what
| he wrote is _false_ ' is not a valid reason for calling for
| his removal. Neither message is true, competency does not
| reside in skin colour and society is not predicated on
| coddling or pushing ideas based on sex or race. Those are
| ideological standpoints which are valid in political
| discourse but lack validity in the eyes of the law and it is
| the law which decides whether someone has crossed the line,
| not some personal or collective ideological conviction.
| talldayo wrote:
| > What is so egregious about this that he needed to be
| pushed out
|
| You are cherrypicking. There are dozens of other posts,
| ranging from benign to South Park edgy to outright
| indefensible. In any case, they were shameful and he should
| be taking great efforts to apologize and prove he's a
| changed person if he actually regrets posting them.
|
| Broken clocks are right twice a day and all that.
| ks2048 wrote:
| You picked one of his posts. The one that has gotten the
| most attention is "Normalize Indian hate".
| sekai wrote:
| > For reference: JD Vance said that another DOGE staffer, who
| resigned after it was reported that he'd publicly come out in
| favor of racism, eugenics, and normalizing hate against
| Indian people on Twitter, should be rehired because it was
| just "stupid social media activity".
|
| To add to this, JD Vance's wife is Indian.
| _1tan wrote:
| Just out of curiosity, has anyone here been able to find one of
| the sites where "the COM" convenes or am I too old to see?
| lolrofl33 wrote:
| Mostly happens on Telegram and forums like OGUsers these days.
| Everdred2dx wrote:
| As another commenter said, Telegram.
|
| 404 media has ran multiple stories on them. Here is one:
|
| https://www.404media.co/inside-the-com-world-war-robberies-b...
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Linked previously here (currently flagged and dead):
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42979187
|
| Good thorough article on another wild development in this story.
| Deserves to be seen and read.
| pityJuke wrote:
| Have emailed dang to see if he'll unflag it.
|
| Agreed, previously I was amenable to the "they're young and
| smart" (but I'd counter with "not wise") take, but no, some of
| these people are just actually evil.
| zfg wrote:
| There was another submission of it here as well:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42981120
|
| Also flagged dead.
| relaxing wrote:
| Good reporting here. Clarifies why the kid was fired for leaking
| documents - it was specifically for leaking internal corporate
| documents to a competitor.
|
| The details about cybercrime discords involved in SWATting and
| DDOS attacks are fascinating.
|
| The idea that anyone involved in this would be fast-tracked for a
| clearance is beyond the pale.
| ketlag wrote:
| He was in the com chat, which is a domestic tier one threat.
| There is no way any fast-tracking would solve this, unless
| monsieur big balls is an American spy, when in reality he's an
| overly caffeinated kid who has no idea how bad he's screwing up
| his, and while we're at it our country's, future.
| derbOac wrote:
| I personally think it says volumes about how those in the
| Trump-Musk group (Musk group?) see this. They see the task as
| infiltrating an adversary, requiring someone with the technical
| skills to do so but who is also disposable. This in their mind
| is not about improving anything in the government for citizens,
| or with regard to US interests, it's about gaining access to a
| hostile entity without regard to their interests or the long-
| term interests of the persons actually doing the activity. It
| doesn't matter if they compromise US security, because the US
| is a hostile adversary, and they don't want to deal with people
| who might hesitate because of families or a reputation to
| uphold. If this person gets in trouble for security breaches or
| racism or whatever, they just fire them and replace them with
| another 19 year old with nothing left to lose and/or plenty of
| time left to go another path later.
| relaxing wrote:
| That's generally true of political operatives.
|
| The problem here is having such activities in his past makes
| him an exploitable by criminal organizations or foreign
| adversaries who would seek the sensitive information he now
| has access to.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| [flagged]
| honkycat wrote:
| [flagged]
| ty6853 wrote:
| The money you paid for social security was lost pretty
| much the moment you paid it.
|
| There is little left to lose, it's a redistribution
| scheme rather than a savings scheme.
| catlifeonmars wrote:
| FWIW I think we need both? Agree that the latter is
| severely lacking in the US.
|
| And maybe in some distant future post-scarcity society we
| would not have a need for a savings scheme.
| cvalka wrote:
| Any pension scheme is a redistribution scheme.
| amazingamazing wrote:
| why?
| immibis wrote:
| Are HN accounts even worth anything?
| dang wrote:
| Edit: I took a second look at your other recent comments
| and they didn't seem quite as bad as this, so I've
| restored your account. If you want to keep posting to HN,
| please take more care to stay on the right side of
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. What
| you posted here was particularly bad, and has been a
| problem before
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29868531).
|
| -- original comment --
|
| We've banned this account for breaking the site
| guidelines. You can't post like this here, and you've
| done it many times before.
|
| If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email
| hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that
| you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| Isn't that part of mandatory spending (that DOGE can't
| touch)? Anyways, the social security administration (even
| under Biden) has made clear that they have to cut the
| payments in the future. We simply have too much spending
| overall to fund and sustain it. But by cutting elsewhere
| maybe it can be saved.
| dang wrote:
| Edit: I took a second look at your other recent comments
| and they didn't seem quite as bad as this, so I've restored
| your account. If you want to keep posting to HN, please
| take more care to stay on the right side of
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
|
| -- original comment --
|
| We've banned this account for breaking the site guidelines.
| You can't post like this here, and you've done it many
| times before.
|
| If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email
| hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that
| you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| Edited my comment. Thanks for the consideration.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| > They see the task as infiltrating an adversary, requiring
| someone with the technical skills to do so but who is also
| disposable.
|
| People who have had access to that kind of data, and who have
| those kinds of skills, you'd better be _careful_ about how
| you dispose of them. (Consider the term "blowback".)
| Applejinx wrote:
| Or indeed that they are a hostile adversary to the US who
| have achieved some successes adversarial to the US.
|
| I feel like from the perspective of the US, if we frame this
| conflict/battle for control of US services and computer
| systems, we needn't say 'the US is a hostile adversary'. It's
| fair to frame it as 'the US is the US, and the people seizing
| control of the systems against the interests of the US are
| hostile adversaries of the US'.
|
| The specifics of who they're working for, how, why etc. can
| still be up for speculation or further discovery, but we
| needn't frame it as 'perhaps the US is actually the enemy and
| Musk's people are actually the liberators'.
| Kinrany wrote:
| This assumes that leaking is a compulsive behavior. The federal
| government has stronger incentives to offer for not leaking
| information. Getting fired is nothing.
| wobblyasp wrote:
| Say what you will about the cuts, you can't have people with zero
| clearance being given access to all of this data.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| The president has absolute authority on who has access to
| classified data (with the exception of some nuclear secrets)
| a12k wrote:
| They probably meant "should," not can't.
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| That's presidential fiat, not clearance.
| esmevane wrote:
| No, that isn't correct.
|
| Clearance is a process and it hasn't been obeyed, and the
| ultimate purpose of it is to both audit potential recipients
| and train them in security protocols. The president can't
| elude it, though he can pardon them for federal crimes, which
| they're committing a lot of.
| FergusArgyll wrote:
| No _that_ isn 't correct.
|
| The authority of classification rests solely with the
| executive branch and the policies are established by EO.
|
| A President can absolutely classify and declassify whatever
| he wants. This has been done a million times.
|
| "It is true that the President has broad authority to
| classify and declassify, derived from the President's dual
| role "as head of the Executive Branch and as Commander in
| Chief" of the armed forces. The "authority to classify and
| control access to information bearing on national
| security... flows primarily from this constitutional
| investment of power in the President and exists quite apart
| from any explicit congressional grant" ...
|
| "Finally, as the district court recognized, the suggestion
| that courts can declassify information raises separation of
| powers concerns.... such determinations encroach upon the
| President's undisputedly broad authority in the realm of
| national security."
|
| - The New York Times v. Central Intelligence Agency, No.
| 18-2112 (2d Cir. 2020)
|
| The only reason the material was not considered
| declassified in that case was because the possible
| declassification was "inadvertent" etc etc.
|
| Even that ruling does not go far enough, and I'd be willing
| to give 10:1 odds SCOTUS would give Pres. full and complete
| powers over classification
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| Why would you need "clearance"? Only positions like with
| military sensitive things have clearance requirements.
| mind-blight wrote:
| That's not true. Many government positions and rules require
| different levels/types of clearance. E.g. the DoD and DHS
| have entirely different clearances managed by different
| organizations.
|
| The DoD funds so much scientific research. There are entire
| budgets that are classified to hide how much we spend on -
| say - split satellites. Having access to the books of all of
| these orgs likely would require tons of different background
| checks and clearances from different organizations under
| normal circumstances
| fsckboy wrote:
| at the same time, far, far too much stuff is classified not to
| protect national interest, but to protect the spooks and deep
| military industrial state neocons from scrutiny.
| a12k wrote:
| Like what?
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
| ihuman wrote:
| Its safer for the people in charge of determining
| classification to overclassify and be wrong than
| underclassify and be wrong
| jonhohle wrote:
| Why shouldn't all public transactions be public? IRS and
| personal taxes may be legitimate since it's, well, personal,
| but we are all "shareholders" with equal stake in all other
| payments. This is the perfect use case for public ledger. We
| should all have access to all of this data. All outflows should
| note which bill authorized that expenditure, every bureaucrat
| that's involved with spending it. If I'm getting $600 in income
| tracked as a free citizen, I want the even more accountability
| for anyone spending that amount on behalf of the government.
|
| There's almost certainly no clearance requirement for what
| they've looked at already. Maybe HIPAA. I'm not sure why one
| executive branch org has any more or less right to access this
| data than any other.
| viraptor wrote:
| They had access to both financial and personal data. This
| included for example social security numbers and bank
| accounts. Sure, more financial data being public would be
| nice, but the current dataset as it is can't be made public
| safely and definitely needs clearance.
| jonhohle wrote:
| Is that not how audits work?
| viraptor wrote:
| By assigning random people with no experience and
| criminal work history to an internal system with no data
| restriction on personal information scope? No, that's not
| how they work. What are you even asking?
| jonhohle wrote:
| You're confusing the point. The data accessed so far is
| not classified. Where does a clearance requirement come
| from?
| viraptor wrote:
| https://archive.md/y7LWE it's already been confirmed that
| they access classified information in usaid and social
| security / Medicare elsewhere.
| mr_toad wrote:
| Vetting might be a better word, and a more general term,
| than clearance.
|
| Nearly all the jobs I've had working with data have
| required vetting - including a criminal background check.
| This is not the same thing as obtaining a security
| clearance.
| esmevane wrote:
| This is philosophizing, and it isn't even on topic.
|
| The laws are broken, so regardless of what you think "should"
| be legal, it isn't. They are being selectively enforced,
| though, and that's both the problem and probably the thing
| more worth your philosophical energy. Is that okay, when a
| criminal operation is too wealthy and influential to be held
| accountable?
| jonhohle wrote:
| OP was philosophizing. Why would anyone need any kind of
| clearance to access non-classified data. If they've been
| given permission by the head of the executive branch, what
| more authority do they need?
| ben_w wrote:
| While I am in favour of radically open records for government
| and private sector alike, consider what hostile governments'
| intelligence agencies can do with a detailed budget when
| deciding where to draw the line.
|
| Everything about this should worry patriotic Americans*,
| because this does look like a fantastic opportunity for
| _everyone else on the planet to spy on your government at the
| top level_.
|
| * also anyone in a country that has a military or economic
| relationship with the USA: we're still impacted even though
| we don't have a say in it
| jonhohle wrote:
| Regarding military and security, you are right.
| Unfortunately that means all superfluous spending becomes
| military and security.
| TomK32 wrote:
| Go ahead, put some legislation in place. I'd love to see
| transparency as the Swedes have where you can see how much
| tax your neighbour has paid. Or at least how much subsidies
| which company received. I'm sure rich people will LOVE to
| know the competition got half what they got... Btw, did
| Trump's tax returns get published yet?
| mbrumlow wrote:
| All this data?
|
| We really don't know what data is being accessed. We have a lot
| of people saying lots of things about the access. Such as he
| will block payments or tarter people based on how they vote.
| You have not claimed those so I won't rebuttal then here. But
| "all this data" I will.
|
| The systems bending accessed are the ones which handle money
| approved by congress to be spent in a specific way.
|
| As a tax payer I am appalled that this data is not already
| public and broadcasted live. Even more so that the specific
| legislation that granted the money was already public.
|
| Now let's say there are social security numbers and maybe even
| social security numbers tied to addresses or even names. This
| is still not a reason to not allow an audit.
|
| You might say. Okay let's audit. But people need to be
| verified. And at this point your argument is watered down to "I
| don't like who is doing this", which is the same bullshit
| politics we deal with in any tech company and the same bs that
| only delays results.
|
| If people were actually worried they would not be trying to
| stop musk. What they would actually be doing is asking for
| somebody who they politically align with to also have access to
| the data and perform their own audit, on top of making much if
| not all of the data public so those with real trust issues can
| draw their own conclusions.
| talldayo wrote:
| > As a tax payer I am appalled that this data is not already
| public and broadcasted live.
|
| As a taxpayer, I'm offended that more of my money isn't spent
| protecting it. Clearly it wasn't enough to stop a rudimentary
| attack. I can give you three good reasons this is offensive
| to American liberty in an apolitical context:
|
| 1. The personal information of federal employees should
| remain private in respects to the Civil Rights act and the
| impartiality of hiring _all_ candidates. This is what
| protects both Democrats and Republicans from having punitive
| action held against them by political opposition.
|
| 2. America's actual itemized expenditure is a matter of
| national security. Publishing a precise budget lets an
| adversary (of which America has many) estimate our weaknesses
| and, if specific enough, predict our intent before we strike.
| The current system of budgeting rather than begging is safe
| and can still be audited by both parties.
|
| 3. Elon Musk has stated business interests in opposing Apple
| and Google, both of which have secret testimonies he could
| access for illegal leverage against them in negotiations.
| Allowing him unfettered access to government records and
| defunding regulators is an expressly unfair business
| advantage that should not be tolerated in any free market.
| mbrumlow wrote:
| > which have secret testimonies
|
| Tell me what this has to do with am having access to USAAID
| and the Treasury?
| sigzero wrote:
| > We really don't know what data is being accessed.
|
| Thank you. I think there is a lot of assumption by everyone
| about that very thing.
| talldayo wrote:
| "I want to know what the government is hiding" and "I'm
| okay with the government hiding what they know" is a very
| hard circle to square.
| caminante wrote:
| _> and "I'm okay with the government hiding what they
| know"_
|
| Which part of the above comment are you attributing this
| to?
|
| Seems like a strawman.
| ks2048 wrote:
| > We really don't know what data is being accessed.
|
| > As a tax payer I am appalled that this data is not already
| public and broadcasted live.
|
| How are you mad it's not public if you don't know what it is?
| Sure there is data in computers of the Treasury department
| that should not be public - individuals' social security
| numbers, personal financial information, etc.
| mbrumlow wrote:
| Stop being so pedantic, we have an idea what it is. When I
| say "we don't know what it is" is a nice way of saying the
| things you say it is you have no proof of it being.
|
| How about you give me an argument of why we should not have
| this sort of audit?
|
| I am also willing to bet there is no situation where it
| could be done "right" and have the stated outcome Trump and
| Musk have outlined be okay. Which makes most of your
| arguments bad faith ones. Given the things already exposed
| should have all Americans upset.
| cycomanic wrote:
| > We really don't know what data is being accessed. We have a
| lot of people saying lots of things about the access. Such as
| he will block payments or tarter people based on how they
| vote. You have not claimed those so I won't rebuttal then
| here. But "all this data" I will.
|
| We do know that they got admin rights to several IT systems.
| Are you saying that giving admin rights to government IT
| systems to people with dubious backgrounds is fine, because
| the guys at the top have been voted in?
|
| > As a tax payer I am appalled that this data is not already
| public and broadcasted live. Even more so that the specific
| legislation that granted the money was already public.
|
| As appalled as by the fact that the people who are supposedly
| doing the auditing are completely intransparent, trying to
| obscure who is doing the auditing and threatening people who
| are trying to name people involved? Or is that ok for you?
| mbrumlow wrote:
| IT systems! Oh No! There should be no surprises in these
| systems, giving them the title "IT" does not change
| anything. And to act like there is any real difference
| between the "right" people and "these" people is silly. The
| fact of the matter is if anybody was going to do it they
| would just be selected and _YOU_ and _I_ would not have any
| say over who it was. But the process!!! whatever.
|
| On top of that yes, I do expect the person the American
| people voted in to do the things they said they would do.
| If the president had zero power to do things it would be
| pointless to even spend so much time on the election.
|
| > trying to obscure who is doing the auditing and
| threatening people who are trying to name people involved?
|
| I am sorry, did you miss that half the internet openly
| called to kill these people because of the very type of
| outrage thinking you have perpetuated here?
|
| Again, back to my argument. You and nobody else opposed to
| this has any argument other than "I don't like who is doing
| it", which simply is a childish gatekeeping argument. If
| you cared you would demand more transparency in these
| agencies and want others to also freely audit them. Nearly
| all arguments are tied in to ideological bs like "who is
| doing it".
|
| > We do know that they got admin rights to several IT
| systems.
|
| And a note of transparency, they have already said they had
| read only access, and have been actively publishing their
| findings. I can see where biases might lean the findings to
| highlight specific spending. And that is why _YOU_ should
| be arguing for adding your own auditors to the data so you
| can ensure spending that aligns to your biases are also
| highlighted. Lets get rid of all the spending that makes no
| sense, regardless where it falls on ideological map.
|
| The second half the arguments are "they might" well, when
| they do the thing you say "they might do" then they
| probably broke a law, and we have laws for it. Not allowing
| you to drive a car because "you might speed" or "you might
| run a red light" is silly.
| mr_toad wrote:
| > We really don't know what data is being accessed.
|
| And you don't think that's a problem?
|
| You think that requiring people to have proper vetting to
| access information that might include personally identifiable
| information is "political bullshit"?
| mbrumlow wrote:
| No. No I don't. Before all this nobody knew anything. Then
| Trump and Elon came along and now everybody on the internet
| is an expert, and has all sorts opinions based off fear.
|
| We have a system. If it is not legal it will be flushed
| out. The only people who seem to have an issue seem to be
| ones who simply don't like the who.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Another DOGE member created a tool that generates ballot images
| to be used by counting machines to satisfy any statistical
| outcome requirements:
| https://bsky.app/profile/denisedwheeler.bsky.social/post/3lh...
|
| He worked in contact with Musk and his sponsorship to create this
| tool
|
| Interesting cybercrime research credentials
|
| Yes there's not evidence available that this research was used
| for crime, just that the project is capable of what's described
| and that it was done under Musk's sponsorship and that he was
| hired after building this in contact with Musk
| campbel wrote:
| I'd encourage folks to go look at the source code for the
| referenced project
| https://github.com/DevrathIyer/ballotproof/tree/master.
|
| This does not strike me as nefarious in any way and there is a
| really valid reason for generating the ballot images --
| testing, which is exactly how it is used in the project.
| rcpt wrote:
| On it's own it's not. But in the context of the people
| involved it's suspicious.
| beedeebeedee wrote:
| How far of a step would it be to produce this type of
| manipulation? https://www.wcia.com/business/press-
| releases/ein-presswire/7...
| rcpt wrote:
| I don't know because I don't have access to the missing
| binder
|
| https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2023/12/politics/missing-
| rus...
| SamBam wrote:
| That thread seemed low on evidence. It seemed reasonable that
| that code could be part of a test suite.
| throwaway173738 wrote:
| Yeah-- when I needed to test an integration with a cash
| recycler of the kind found in atms I asked if there were any
| fake or test bills I could use. It's a reasonable thing to do
| in embedded systems, and frankly you'd be surprised at what
| tools are out there and how hard they would be to actually
| use the way you say. Physical controls are paramount in this
| case.
| blast wrote:
| Another legitimate use would be research to demonstrate
| vulnerabilities in support of a return to paper ballots. Ed
| Felten and many others have been arguing this for years.
|
| https://www.npr.org/2006/09/23/6129761/study-shows-
| vulnerabi...
| verdverm wrote:
| Yup, there are election conspiracy theorists on the left too.
| I ran into a few on Bluesky, and after a conversation, they
| were realizing the evidence they wanted to believe in was
| quite thin and that they should hold off on such strong
| beliefs
| SamBam wrote:
| Is it the same Edward Big Baller that tweeted that Elon stole the
| election and is setting up more computers within the government
| to be hacked?
|
| https://bsky.app/profile/cartwright776.bsky.social/post/3lhr...
| brcmthrowaway wrote:
| Why is there no one explaining this?
| 0xcde4c3db wrote:
| Probably because it's implausible, trivial to fake, and
| there's no way to conclusively prove it's real without the
| original tweet still being up.
| laidoffamazon wrote:
| That's not the same guy clearly
| rcpt wrote:
| https://x.com/natedog155/status/1886180417549545674?s=19
|
| I think it is the same guy.
| pityJuke wrote:
| No, this is clearly not the same guy.
|
| This is just someone who took Coristine's previous handle [0].
| That post was made 1 day after the WIRED article revealing his
| handle. Lots of conspiracies around election stealing going
| round (and sadly, quite prevalent in some corners of Bluesky),
| don't fall for it!
|
| [0]: https://www.wired.com/story/edward-coristine-tesla-sexy-
| path... - "He also *previously* used an account on X with the
| username @edwardbigballer"
| bloopernova wrote:
| And now musk is calling for the impeachment of Judge Paul
| Engelmayer who blocked his department from accessing government
| payment/financial systems.
|
| https://thehill.com/policy/technology/5134725-elon-musk-impe...
|
| This should be mandatory reading for everyone who argues this is
| just fine: https://www.amazon.com/They-Thought-Were-Free-
| Germans/dp/022...
| tootie wrote:
| They are ignoring the basic precepts of the constitution, have
| rendered Congress' authority to set budgets as moot, are
| threatening the judiciary and the press. I can't believe how
| sanguine this thread is. This is an absolute crisis.
| bloopernova wrote:
| We'll never know the true nature of the commenters on HN.
| However I do wonder how many are useful idiots,
| propagandists, disinformation spreaders, or trolls.
|
| It is a crisis. Discarding any political leanings, just the
| economic fallout from this is going to be felt for years. Do
| none of these supporters have a 401k or savings?
| dang wrote:
| All: if you're going to comment here, please make sure you're up
| on the guidelines at
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, and don't post
| low-information / high-indignation comments that could just as
| easily appear in any related thread. Such generic comments make
| discussion less interesting and more activating. That's not what
| we're trying for here.
|
| Rather, we want _curious_ conversation. I know that 's not so
| easy when a situation is intense, infuriating, frightening,
| distressing, and so on. But we need to protect this site for its
| specific mandate--which is rather fragile on the internet--so
| please make the effort.
|
| As some of you know, this article was posted a dozen times and
| immediately flagkilled by users. I turned the flags off on this
| one because there's interesting new information in the story. But
| now it's up to the commenters to prove that was a good decision
| by co-creating a discussion that is interesting, curious, and has
| to do with the specifics of the article.
|
| If we end up with yet-another interchangeable flamewar about
| $BigTopic, that will only confirm that the flaggers were right,
| so those of you who want fewer of these threads to be flagged
| have a particular interest in sticking to the intended spirit of
| the site and proving that a substantively different discusson is
| possible.
| ebcode wrote:
| Thank you, dang. I think you've done the right thing here, and
| I'm sure you're also under a lot of stress right now. Thanks
| for having faith in the community to discuss this amicably.
| nailer wrote:
| You should leave the flags, for the same reasons as last time:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42933391
| ty6853 wrote:
| A career fed guy in his 50s being forced to beg for his job in a
| 15 minute teleconference to an arrogant zoomer in shorts and an
| unbuttoned suit is peak representation of democracy.
| libertarian1 wrote:
| this '50 yo fed guy' is a parasite if he cannot justify his
| work for the nation. 'arrogant zoomer' lmao
| fn-mote wrote:
| This would be a lot more powerful with a citation. I did read
| the article but didn't find this story you are referring to.
| ty6853 wrote:
| "My colleagues are getting 15-minute one-on-one check-ins
| with 19, 20, 21-year-old college graduates asking to justify
| their existence," one speaker at a recent town hall in
| northern Virginia said without identifying himself or his
| agency due to fear of retaliation.
|
| https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/07/politics/musk-doge-
| staffers-f...
| likeabatterycar wrote:
| [deleted]
|
| Hard to hold a discussion when everyone is arguing in bad
| faith.
| kurikuri wrote:
| What? It was a first-hand complaint from someone at a
| town hall, and it seems to corroborate with the intention
| of Musk's campaign to 'cut waste' and other statements
| about how this is playing out from a federal employee's
| perspective.
|
| 'That report' is based on a reporter hearing this
| statement at the town-hall, not innuendos and rumors.
| Your very statement that it was based on innuendo and
| rumors is poisoning the well.
| NilMostChill wrote:
| What metric are you using for the comparison of x vs
| bluesky ?
| jan3024-2r wrote:
| I mean use any service like Semrush. Blue sky has real
| traffic, X has fake traffic. It's an objectively true
| statement.
| NilMostChill wrote:
| The person i was replying to was claiming that bluesky
| opinions were somehow worse than x, i was wondering what
| metric they were using.
|
| They've ve deleted it now, I'm assuming because they
| didn't have a position they felt they could defend.
| ModernMech wrote:
| > Unfortunately if there is no way to confirm what he
| said, that report is based on rumours and innuendo.
|
| I mean yeah, that's part of the problem -- there's no
| oversight here, by design.
| likeabatterycar wrote:
| > guy in his 50s being forced to beg for his job in a 15 minute
| teleconference to an arrogant zoomer
|
| So, like every private sector job nowadays?
|
| Everyone is acting like this is the first time in history
| someone's been called into a meeting with a ponytailed 25 year
| old to have the "What is it ya do here?" discussion.
|
| Memorialized in a movie so old now that most zoomers haven't
| even heard of it, let alone seen it. Only the Bobs have now
| been replaced with 'Skylar'.
| tdb7893 wrote:
| My experience with private sector is instead of zoomers it's
| more men in their 40s and they all have the same haircut
| rcpt wrote:
| There were no 25 year olds taking over in that movie.
| jisnsm wrote:
| As a southern European, I'm really envious.
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| > All: please don't post the sort of low-information / high-
| indignation comment that could just as easily appear in any semi-
| related thread. Such generic comments make the discussion less
| interesting and more activating. That's not what we're trying for
| here.
|
| We'd love to have the sort of useful discussion you're aiming
| for, but all new discussions that reference Musk are being
| systematically flagged by apparent supporters of Musk.
|
| We're being censored.
| Bancakes wrote:
| Not everyone is censoring you. Some of us want to learn about
| cool technology, not read politics irrelevant to daily life.
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| Fine, you're welcome to skip the political posts. I've felt
| the same frustration.
|
| But when any new post that has Musk in the title is flagged
| within a minute or two entering the 'new' queue, then we have
| a problem.
|
| We are indeed being censored by any meaningful definition of
| the term.
| slg wrote:
| At what point does a story become big enough to disable the
| flagging mechanic? Maybe this post isn't the one to do it, but
| there has been an onslaught of stories about the damage Musk
| and DOGE is doing to the US government including lots of tech
| specific stories. This is an important ongoing story that is
| relevant to the community here and every post about it shoots
| up the front page of HN only to disappear minutes later because
| of mass flagging.
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| One solution might be to limit how many new discussions a
| user can flag within a certain period.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| I suspect the curation mentioned above[0] is crowd-sourced
| to a relatively small handful of "power" users with an
| outsized amount of flags in general. Probably not much of a
| solution to limit that.
|
| 0: Slightly confused; I'm referring to dang's comment,
| which I thought was the GP comment.
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| I don't think it's very high, like 1500 upvotes or
| something, there is a large population of people who can
| flag.
|
| Another idea is to make flags fractional, so the more
| upvotes you have the more weight your flags have. So
| those newly empowered get say 0.1 of a flag while more
| highly rated users get progressively closer to 1 flag.
| dang wrote:
| > At what point does a story become big enough to disable the
| flagging mechanic?
|
| I'm not sure "big" is the right word because we're not
| optimizing HN for topic importance - that would make for a
| current affairs site, which HN is not [1, 2]. But maybe
| that's hair-splitting in this case.
|
| The short answer to your question is that when there's a
| Major Ongoing Topic (MOT), moderators turn off flags on
| stories that contain Significant New Information (SNI) that
| is interesting in HN's sense of the word (i.e. gratifying
| intellectual curiosity) and there is a fair chance of the
| article supporting a substantively different discussion than
| the ones which have already recently appeared on the same
| topic.
|
| If you want more information, I'd start with my other post in
| this subthread
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42993092) and go on to
| the other links there. That should give a pretty complete
| explanation. If, after that, there's still a question I
| haven't answered, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.
|
| [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&
| que...
|
| [2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&
| sor...
| slg wrote:
| >moderators turn off flags on stories
|
| I replied to your comment in that other chain, but just
| want to point something else out here specifically. There
| seems to be more than just flags that are dragging down
| this story. The top post on HN at the moment has 117 points
| and is 3 hours old. This post has 238 points and is 1 hour
| old and is currently number 8 on the front page. Number 7
| is currently a post with 28 points posted 2 hours ago.
| There is clearly something else at work here besides flags
| and maybe disabling flags isn't enough to give these type
| of posts staying power on the front page of HN.
| immibis wrote:
| Dang should have manually downranked it because anti-Musk
| politics are off-topic on HN.
| dang wrote:
| There's room for an interesting discussion here, as I
| tried to argue at
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42992992.
| erikerikson wrote:
| It is a technology related article that is detailed and
| specific about things which appear to violate practices
| that have been part of the social contact for some time.
| Relevant regardless of optics.
| dang wrote:
| This is in the FAQ: "Why is A ranked below B even though
| A has more points and is newer?"
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html).
|
| I turned off the flags and rolled back the clock on this
| submission so that it would be on the front page and have
| a chance at a thorough discussion. I didn't do that so
| much that it would go straight to #1, though, because
| that would not be in the interests of the site. These
| things need to be controlled burns.
| slg wrote:
| Yes, I understand that. But you are missing the point of
| my comment.
|
| From the FAQ:
|
| >The basic algorithm divides points by a power of the
| time since a story was submitted. Comments in threads are
| ranked the same way.
|
| > Other factors affecting rank include user flags, anti-
| abuse software, software which demotes overheated
| discussions, account or site weighting, and moderator
| action.
|
| You are effectively just turning off one aspect of this,
| the flags, and declaring mission accomplished when
| obviously there are other things contributing to these
| stories falling off the front page faster than many
| people think they should. People care about the outcome,
| not the specific button you are pushing on the backend to
| accomplish that outcome.
|
| This story now has more points than anything posted on
| the site in the last 24 hours and it is currently halfway
| down the front page. People clearly think this is an
| important topic worthy of the site and discussion in a
| way that isn't in line with the HN ranking algorithm. My
| original point was that if you agree that stories like
| this have a place on the front page of HN, turning off
| the flagging isn't always enough to counteract the other
| factors at play that drop these posts in the HN rankings.
| bloopernova wrote:
| I don't need a response to these questions, as they are HN
| internal/sensitive, but I wanted them to be at least
| thought about:
|
| Do you track people who frequently flag stories and/or
| comments?
|
| Do you collate those results against particular subjects?
| i.e. Any musk related story always gets flagged by $group
|
| Do those groups/people always flag within X minutes of each
| other?
|
| Do those groups/people match the general location of a
| random sampling of HN users, or do they differ in a
| statistically significant way?
| dang wrote:
| > We'd love to have the sort of useful discussion you're aiming
| for,
|
| Alas, that is not true for all values of "we". Let's see how we
| do in the current thread. (Edit: so far it does seem to be a
| little better.)
|
| > but all new discussions that reference Musk are being
| systematically flagged
|
| Yes, and at the same time we've turned off the flags on quite a
| few of them--enough that this continues to be by far the most-
| discussed topic on HN right now. I realize that's not enough
| for those who want more, but this is always the case whenever
| there is a MOT (Major Ongoing Topic - https://hn.algolia.com/?d
| ateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...)
|
| > by apparent supporters of Musk
|
| But also by users who just care about protecting HN for its
| intended purpose, which is vulnerable to getting consumed by
| political flames. The pattern we've observed over the years is
| that when a MOT keeps getting flagkilled, the flags are coming
| from a combination of these two groups (i.e. users who oppose
| it politically and users who are trying to protect HN), neither
| of which would have enough oomph to do this on their own.
|
| > We're being censored.
|
| That word has so many different meanings nowadays that nearly
| all sentences including it are both true and false. In one
| sense, sure, _any_ story getting removed from HN 's front page
| could be called censorship--but it's maybe not the most helpful
| description on a site where frontpage space is the scarcest
| resource and some kind of curation/selection is essential.
|
| In another sense, the fact that this MOT is the most discussed
| topic on HN of the past few weeks means that no, it is not
| being censored--there have been thousands of posts about it.
|
| Using the word 'censored' ultimately just means you'd like to
| see more of this topic on HN. I certainly respect that, but
| there are also a lot of other users who would like to see less
| of it. Our job is to serve the community as a whole, which is
| not easy when the community is so divided. Ultimately, whatever
| solution we come up ends up feeling unsatisfactory to nearly
| everyone. That is probably my least favorite square on the
| Cycle of Life of HN, but it comes up once or twice in every go-
| round.
|
| Here are links to some other comments I've posted in the last
| few days about this specific issue. If you (or anyone) are
| willing to read them, take in the explanations, and then have a
| question that I haven't answered, I'd be curious to know what
| it is* and happy to take a crack at it.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42978572
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42978389
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42977160
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42911011
|
| * (because as far as I know, all the important questions have
| already been answered, which is not to say everyone is happy!)
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| > But also by users who just care about protecting HN for its
| intended purpose, which is vulnerable to getting consumed by
| political flames.
|
| I think there has been an element of backlash here. I believe
| there are people posting Musk articles repeatedly in response
| to the flagging, feeding the cycle.
| dang wrote:
| Yes, that happens sometimes.
| throwaway4736 wrote:
| Why did you let the article that was posted about a16z and
| Daniel Penny get flag killed so many times?
|
| It's so lame and tiresome --- powerful tech people look like
| idiots, it gets killed on here.
| dang wrote:
| I haven't seen it yet; I was mostly offline yesterday. This
| happens sometimes.
|
| Btw, stories about "powerful tech people look like idiots"
| get discussed on HN all the time. The tenor of HN comments
| about that kind of thing leans strongly towards the
| cynical, enough that it's actually a problem for the long-
| term quality of the site. I may be misinterpreting you, but
| if you feel like HN needs more of that, I have to disagree.
|
| Edit: $Firm hires $PolarizingPerson is probably not a good
| topic for HN but I'm happy to take a look at specific
| articles.
| slg wrote:
| >this continues to be by far the most-discussed topic on HN
| right now
|
| I wonder if you are maybe too close to the problem to see it
| from a normal HN user's perspective. From my perspective, I
| don't get this impression because I don't see the full breath
| of conversations that happen on HN like you do. People
| clearly want to talk about this here and I have rarely seen
| these stories actually on the front page of HN because they
| are so quick to drop off the front page due to flagging,
| downvoting, the flame war detector, or whatever other behind
| the scenes mechanics exist that you are obviously more
| knowledgeable about than me. People continuing to have
| conversations on posts that no one sees unless they
| specifically search them out is the equivalent of
| shadowbanning those conversations. Yes, they are still
| happening, but the normal HN user isn't actually seeing them
| and that is why you are fielding so many complaints from
| normal users who want to see these posts.
| dang wrote:
| I think you're right, but it's not clear to me what we
| could do differently about that. Ultimately it derives from
| the fundamentals of the site. Most people don't see most of
| what gets posted here. I don't either.
| inciampati wrote:
| It's thanks to this kind of guidance that HN survives as a
| focused technical hivemind.
|
| At the same time, issues of this kind of revolutionary scope
| are important for users to process. We can learn a lot from
| each other.
|
| Irrespective of politics, it's necessary to hedge systemic
| risk that's appearing due to destabilization of the US. That
| affects so many of us that it's hard to ignore.
|
| Keeping some persistent outlet (front page post) for
| discussion of this major topic is important to give people a
| politically agnostic and technically proficient space to
| integrate what's happening.
|
| Thank you for filtering the noise and fear with the posts.
| miltonlost wrote:
| > Using the word 'censored' ultimately just means you'd like
| to see more of this topic on HN. I certainly respect that,
| but there are also a lot of other users who would like to see
| less of it.
|
| Woo love changing the meaning of words to fit what I imagine
| other people are using it for!!
| dang wrote:
| Sorry, I'm not getting you here--perhaps if you made your
| point without snark, it would be easier to understand and
| respond to.
| shinryuu wrote:
| I would also say, that to me dang and team is doing a good
| job in general. I disagree with any sentiment that this is
| being censored, and I applaud the openness for discussing
| this.
| archagon wrote:
| On the whole, I appreciate and respect your approach to
| moderation. However, it's hard to ignore the fact that
| leaders in the YC sphere seem to be largely aligned with
| Thiel and Yarvin on the topic of government and democracy. (
| _The "smart ones" should aggressively take over and
| restructure our republic in the image of a corporation._ ) If
| there is, in fact, an active conspiracy against the
| government headed by SV technocrats, how can we trust
| moderation on this site to be unbiased? (This is my fear, not
| an accusation.)
| Quarrelsome wrote:
| its not censorship. There's several comments on here that have
| no relevance to the source article and are hand wringing which
| is unproductive and often is eager to descend into flaming.
| Lets talk about the article and its content and the potential
| cybersecurity risks to government data please.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| > all new discussions that reference Musk are being
| systematically flagged by apparent supporters of Musk.
|
| I'm not a Musk supporter _at all_ , but I flag these
| discussions for several reasons.
|
| 1. To keep my sanity. These stories are pretty much everywhere
| and will be all over for the next 4 years at least. I don't
| want to engage in them and lose even more time and get even
| more anxious.
|
| 2. The comments aren't useful and don't bring new information.
| It's pretty clear what Elon and the oligarchs are trying to do.
| Those who don't see it won't change their mind at that point.
|
| HN is one of the rare forum to avoid flame war, let's keep it
| that way.
| fragmede wrote:
| But where this particular article is from Brian Krebs, a
| niche reporter on hacker news, and bringing SNI, significant
| new information to the table, why flag _this one_? The
| broader strokes of what 's going on is obvious, but this
| particular article is a specific detail of a detail, from a
| source that is relevant to tits community, and not a generic
| breathless CNN or Fox News "something happened today"
| RandomBacon wrote:
| There's name-calling going on in the comments, so that probably
| doesn't help.
| fabian2k wrote:
| Ignoring the horrifying political parts, I think one aspect here
| about data access that is inherently worrying is that it seems
| like all usual controls were bypassed and the DOGE people had
| very low level access to systems. So there are probably copies of
| sensitive data now in their possession, and nobody knows exactly
| what was copied and where it is stored.
|
| This kind of access would be dangerous even in the hands of
| principled and well-meaning people. Giving it to people with
| glaring red flags like here is just entirely irresponsible.
| the_snooze wrote:
| At the very least, it's a field day for foreign intelligence in
| DC. Offering these guys some money, women, status, or drink
| would pay massive dividends.
| jfengel wrote:
| Have they even done the training that says "watch out for
| women trying to get into your pants"? Or did they just show
| up?
| moshun wrote:
| I think we both know the answer. Most of these DOGE people
| wouldn't have been allowed in the building, much less the
| system root a couple of months ago because they'd never
| pass a clearance check.
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| technically, a clearance and background check have never
| been done on political appointees. the fbi openly says
| so. at least this is not new... the new thing is the low
| level of petty criminals being apointed.
| acdha wrote:
| Political appointees don't get root, and they still had
| to get clearance for sensitive materials (as it's legally
| required for the people securing a SCIF not to allow
| anyone who doesn't have clearance in the door). Part of
| why the new administration is trying to bull through the
| process is that his first term had many delays due to
| appointees failing those checks.
| jfengel wrote:
| How do you know who has a clearance? Is there a database
| they check? Or is it word of mouth from their boss?
| jacoblambda wrote:
| Background checks have always been done on political
| appointees. They aren't a requirement for getting the
| position but historically they've been done prior to
| appointment so that leadership knows if they are a
| security risk.
|
| And for appointees that require congressional
| confirmation the checks have been giving to congress
| prior to hearings for the same reason.
|
| They weren't required but they very much have been done
| for political appointees in every admin in recent history
| except this one.
| sangnoir wrote:
| They could just hack their devices remotely, or physically
| break into his residence. I suspect a serial leaker will lack
| neither the discipline to not copy data onto personal
| devices, nor the opsec to withstand a motivated nation-state,
| since a lot of the work seems rushed, and is off playbook.
| SequoiaHope wrote:
| Perhaps giving an inexperienced script kiddie full access
| was part of a broader plan to allow someone else to
| covertly "steal" the data without directly implicating
| those in charge.
| Aurornis wrote:
| This person was fired from a trivial teenage script kid job
| after two months because he couldn't resist sharing their
| internal information.
|
| Only a few years later, he was thrust into the core
| information systems of the United States right next to people
| with security clearance.
|
| Targets like this are a dream come true for foreign
| adversaries looking for someone to corrupt.
|
| Who knows how much compromising content his old peers already
| have on him. The chat logs revealed they're already thinking
| about how much access he has to valuable secrets.
| the_snooze wrote:
| SF-86 Section 13A Employment Activities
|
| >For this employment have any of the following happened to
| you in the last seven (7) years?
|
| >Fired, quit after being told you would be fired, left by
| mutual agreement following charges or allegations of
| misconduct, left by mutual agreement following notice of
| unsatisfactory performance.
|
| >Provide the reason for being fired.
|
| https://www.opm.gov/Forms/pdf_fill/sf86.pdf
| beart wrote:
| Agreed. The political motivations need not even be a factor.
| Data privacy and access policies were bypassed by unauthorized
| actors.
| threeseed wrote:
| Also apparently huge scores of data was just dumped into a
| Microsoft hosted LLM [1].
|
| So that data is (a) publicly available if you don't secure your
| VPC properly and (b) available to anyone without RBAC or
| request logging. This is an extraordinary degradation of the
| level of private and security controls.
|
| [1] https://www.firstpost.com/tech/elon-musks-team-at-doge-
| feedi...
| animal_spirits wrote:
| The primary source for this is from The Washington Post -
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2025/02/06/elon-
| musk-d...
| ineptech wrote:
| What's more worrying is whether the access can realistically be
| revoked. As a general rule, when a security even rises to the
| level of root access to internal systems, you don't even try to
| remove them - you just rebuild the affected VMs from scratch
| because it's the only way to be sure the attacker didn't leave
| anything behind. For the systems we're talking about, payment
| processing stuff at Treasury and Social Security and so forth,
| one wonders if they can even be rebuilt on a reasonable
| timeframe?
| nicce wrote:
| The bigger question is whether there is currently any
| personnel physically even allowed to do such thing.
| MisoRamen wrote:
| How does someone even clean up this mess? One of the DOGE
| kids may have just cloned every repo and then connect the
| machine to public internet because they need to fed it to an
| AI to figure out how things work. We can only assume the
| worst and that foreign adversaries may already be combing the
| code line by line.
|
| What will happen when PIIs of every individual with dealings
| with the Treasury gets leaked?
|
| Then there is going to be thousands of hours of meetings to
| review various processes...
| nicce wrote:
| > One of the DOGE kids may have just cloned every repo and
| then connect the machine to public internet because they
| need to fed it to an AI to figure out how things work.
|
| May...
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2025/02/06/elon-
| musk-d...
| bigiain wrote:
| > you just rebuild the affected VMs from scratch
|
| These people have administrative access, and at least in some
| cases network and physical access.
|
| Once you determine they are untrustworthy and potentially
| malicious, you can't just rebuild the VMs, since you can no
| longer trust the hypervisor or even the hardware.
|
| If they were Chinese or Mossad agents, you'd start from
| scratch in a different DC on supply chain audited new
| compute, storage, and networking hardware. And you'd compile
| everything from audited source. And I have NFI how you'd deal
| with potential malicious changes to your data and backups.
| analog31 wrote:
| This is going to be like coming home from a vacation and
| discovering that squatters have been living in your house for
| a month, going through your stuff. You'll probably end up
| bulldozing the place and starting over.
| A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote:
| I will admit I did not think of that aspect of it. I think
| the reason I didn't is because, supposedly - as it was
| presented to me at the time, those systems run on some
| ancient hardware/software. In other words, even if something
| was left behind, it shouldn't be that hard to locate.
|
| If anyone with real experience in that area could chime in.
| Until now I was under impression COBOL ran it all:P
| _kb wrote:
| You don't just rebuild the VMs. You burn the DC and start
| again from scratch. That's exactly what Cloudflare had to do:
| https://blog.cloudflare.com/thanksgiving-2023-security-
| incid...
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| The amount of commercially and politically valuable information
| there is in these systems is incredible.
|
| If these people are scooping up this information you can
| imagine they might be tempted to monetize or weaponize it at
| some point, or use the threat of such for their own gain.
|
| This is absolutely chilling when you think about it.
| hypothesis wrote:
| The best part is that even if courts force them to destroy
| all the pillaged data right now, it won't stop them from
| making stuff up and weaponizing it anyway.
| cduzz wrote:
| I wonder what this is going to do to the value of the dollar
| in the next couple years...
| A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote:
| On the other hand, we may all experience privacy at levels
| uncomfortable for a lot of people, which MIGHT trigger some
| desire to actually make things more privacy conscious.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| Reading this kid's story, it sounds like a smarter run of _my_
| teenage years. When you're 16 you're not thinking about
| sanctions or optics. Coristine wrote impressive, profitable
| tech. He should have a future as a productive member of
| society, perhaps even one of its titans.
|
| Instead, he's going to spend his years in some combination of
| hearings, court rooms and jails. His hireability, fundability
| and possibly even ability to freely travel the world have been
| sharply reduced, his light cone of opportunity constricted into
| a narrow path.
|
| We're wasting our youth on the fever dreams of old men. DOGE,
| at a smaller scale in every respect, reminds one of the
| arrogance of Europe's WWI leaders.
| fnimick wrote:
| > Coristine wrote impressive, profitable tech. He should have
| a future as a productive member of society, perhaps even one
| of its titans.
|
| When did "profitable" become the sole metric by which we
| judge someone's work? Does what is morally correct factor
| into it at all, or should the impressiveness someone's
| accomplishments make them a "titan" regardless of intent or
| outcome?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _When did "profitable" become the sole metric..._
|
| You're quoting a sentence with two adjectives.
|
| > _should the impressiveness someone 's accomplishments
| make them a "titan" regardless of intent or outcome?_
|
| For a teenager? Barring violence, yes. An impressive,
| misguided teenager is a net asset to a community and
| society in the developed world.
|
| I challenge anyone intelligent to honestly say they didn't
| have any really stupid opinions or worldviews before their
| prefrontal cortex had finished developing.
| fnimick wrote:
| I certainly didn't say anything akin to the recent racist
| tweets from another Doge staffer, no.
|
| There's also a very large unspoken piece left out of your
| sentence, which is that they are an asset if taught and
| guided well. Do you think Musk is likely to do that, or
| to instead encourage careless "technically impressive and
| profitable" behavior without regard to ethics or morals?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _certainly didn 't say anything akin to the recent
| racist tweets from another Doge staffer, no_
|
| Were you on Twitter?
|
| I don't remember anything that heinous. But I do remember
| telling off-colour jokes. If I'd done that in public and
| received validation from someone I respected and admired,
| is it implausible I'd have gone down the rabbit hole?
|
| > _unspoken piece left out of your sentence, which is
| that they are an asset if taught and guided well_
|
| That's my point. These kids show potential. It's being
| squandered for the short-term gains of old men.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| If you'd done something dumb and then lots of things even
| dumber then you would have done really dumb things and
| no, _not everyone did or would_.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _and then lots of things even dumber_
|
| The point is we have multiple layers of society working
| to turn small dumb things young men say and do into very
| dumb things.
| cmorgan31 wrote:
| Small dumb things stop being a valid excuse when they
| have material impacts on other individuals. Your right to
| fuck around stops when it impacts me.
| shevis wrote:
| Isn't this basically the point they were making?
|
| > We're wasting our youth on the fever dreams of old men.
| nicce wrote:
| > I challenge anyone intelligent to honestly say they
| didn't have any really stupid opinions before their
| prefrontal cortex had finished developing.
|
| Usually there are negative consequences for stupid
| actions.
|
| Teenager has been on positive feedback loop for possibly
| "not so good actions". How difficult it is to turn the
| tide?
| m2f2 wrote:
| Most of us had a spine, and stopped misbehaving before
| anything serious was done.
|
| The guy didn't, and no one stopped him from collecting
| the very same data he could be using or will use to
| blackmail or worse.
|
| Sorry to note that political allegiance beats common
| sense.
| alexashka wrote:
| > When did "profitable" become the sole metric by which we
| judge someone's work?
|
| When humans learned to domesticate other humans.
| ineptech wrote:
| What was the impressive and profitable part? The article
| makes him sound like a script kiddie who dicked around with
| some DDoS networks and formed a couple LLCs but didn't end up
| accomplishing much (either entrepreneurially or illegally).
| Not saying that makes him a terrible person, but in
| generation ago terms, he sounds less like a founding l0pht
| member and more like a Rusty n Edie's subscriber.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _article makes him sound like a script kiddie who dicked
| around with some DDoS networks and formed a couple LLCs but
| didn 't end up accomplishing much_
|
| I'd say that's impressive for a high schooler. Initiative,
| follow through and results.
| cjaybo wrote:
| That's a different thing than building "impressive tech"
| imo. And a far cry from what would qualify someone as one
| of society's "future titans".
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| He's got enough hustle to get funded by a16z to build yet
| another blockchain scam if he so chose. You better
| believe he's siphoning your government records to use for
| his own purposes later. Ask for forgiveness, not for
| permission, as they say; but with this government, you
| don't even need to ask for forgiveness.
| computerthings wrote:
| In context, I read that as describing the future he
| _could have had_ in brighter terms to increase the
| contrast with the following description of the future he
| probably _has_. Like, being generous because it doesn 't
| matter now anyway.
| intended wrote:
| Isn't this being 'overly positive'?
|
| Why are we discussing the initiative in the first place?
| Isn't this once again shifting deck chairs on the
| Titanic.
|
| We live in the era AFTER stuxnet for crying out loud.
| watwut wrote:
| I do not find it impressive. It is not difficult
| technically. The reason others do not do this is that
| they have ethical and moral limitations, they wont DDoS
| networks because they are aware of harm. Maybe we should
| stop treating people who cause intentional harm as
| superior.
|
| Not opening LLCs you do not know what to do with is also
| more of "good impulse control" sign.
| mondrian wrote:
| You really think so? How about the alternative being he's
| fully pardoned of anything that might be brought against him
| and coasts to billionaire status by launching companies and
| having his funding rounds and paths to exits secured now that
| he's an absolute NRx legend with the full backing of Thiel
| and Musk?
| vidarh wrote:
| Being fully pardoned assumes that he and/or Musk do not end
| up annoying Trump enough that he'd rather burn them. Franky
| even Musk should be concerned given how easy it is to get
| on the wrong side of Trump, but anyone involved in this
| relying on Musk being prepared to risk political capital
| shielding them if something goes wrong should be terrified
| and working on escape plans.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > Coristine wrote impressive, profitable tech.
|
| Can you clarify what you meant? From reading the article I
| gathered that his attempts to start a business didn't produce
| anything and his attempt to join someone else's company
| resulted quickly in him getting fired for leaking private
| info to a competitor.
|
| That last point is extremely alarming for someone who was
| just given access to core government data. Any adversaries
| looking for an insider to corrupt are definitely taking note.
| tootie wrote:
| The Bankman-Fried arc?
| aduffy wrote:
| > He should have a future as a productive member of society,
| perhaps even one of its titans
|
| ...did we read the same article? It sounds like he was a
| failed script kiddie that registered some vanity domains, had
| exactly one job that he was promptly fired form.
|
| Where are you setting the bar for "deserves to be a titan of
| society"?
| watwut wrote:
| > Instead, he's going to spend his years in some combination
| of hearings, court rooms and jails.
|
| It is super possible none of those are in his future. Trumps
| administration wont pursue him and whatever remains after
| them will likely ignore this kid. I mean, it would be fair
| and great if these all got some kind of punishment, but it is
| unlikely to ever happen.
|
| > DOGE, at a smaller scale in every respect, reminds one of
| the arrogance of Europe's WWI leaders.
|
| What exactly you mean there? This does not strikes me as
| similar to WWI.
| grandempire wrote:
| (EDIT: Moved to comment I intended to reply to)
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| [flagged]
| grandempire wrote:
| Yes. I don't know many accountants who are familiar with
| polynomials let alone what a DAG is, etc. I am sure there
| are graph concepts they use by other names.
|
| > Light SQL skills tend to be the upper end of technical
| accounting
|
| This would be the main point that would need correction if
| I am wrong.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't cross into personal attack, regardless of how
| wrong another commenter is or you feel they are.
|
| If you know more than someone else, two good options are
| (1) to share some of what you know, so we all can learn; or
| (2) not post. Snarky putdowns are not a good option.
|
| If you wouldn't mind reviewing
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking
| the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be
| grateful.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > So to me this argument sounds the same as "how can young
| kids think they can program like experienced engineers".
|
| This is about a specific person who has a history of bad
| behavior, not a generic discussion on the abilities of young
| people.
| grandempire wrote:
| Apologies. I responded to the wrong comment.
| chmorgan_ wrote:
| "it seems like all usual controls were bypassed". Apparently it
| isn't known. Let's answer this question and be impartial about
| it. A story about China having access to Treasury Department
| workstations landed a few months ago. There may be a LOT of bad
| practices in place. We should be pushing to improve them if so.
| alecco wrote:
| Did everybody already forget _only a month ago_ it was revealed
| Chinese hackers had access to US Treasury computers including
| US Treasury Secretary _Janet Yellen_ 's own?
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-01-16/chinese-h...
| (https://archive.ph/xeEaO) (January 16, 2025)
| blondie9x wrote:
| That's a bit different than complete access to the complete
| payments database isn't it?
| SoftTalker wrote:
| OPM has had major leaks. I think it's safe to assume most
| federal IT leaks like a sieve.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| I find it strange that neither activists nor politicians nor
| journalists cared about that enough to make it a continuous
| news cycle. There was also no outrage about various security
| breaches that exposed personal information for _100 million
| Americans_ , like the Change Healthcare breach. The reaction
| to _alleged_ violation of privacy here seems inconsistent and
| disproportionate, and I wonder why?
| A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote:
| The story did get memoryholed very fast. At the time, I was
| not sure what to ascribe it to ( well, still don't ), but I
| did find it interesting that it was pointed out how limited
| in scope it was.
| bad_username wrote:
| > all usual controls were bypassed and the DOGE people had very
| low level access to systems
|
| Before DOGE, somebody obviously had to have this access as
| well, and similarly could have copied and stored. Why be
| concerned with DOGE but not their predecessors? Honest
| question.
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| Because before the people that had access to this data got
| that access after passing background checks, had years in the
| treasury, supervision from higher-ups, and other processes in
| place. Now it's being accessed by cyber-criminal Nazis in
| their 20s who describe themselves as wanting to "Normalize
| Indian hate", " want a eugenic immigration policy", and who
| "were racist before it was cool"
| https://www.npr.org/2025/02/06/nx-s1-5289337/elon-musk-
| doge-....
| juujian wrote:
| Process for security clearance might have caught this kids
| background, and then decision makers would have at least had
| a conversation about it. This kid is more a symptom of a
| wider lack of controls though, who knows whether any of
| Musk's script kiddies has a criminal background. Important to
| note that previous Trump administration has already followed
| out/bypassed security clearance process, so this is really
| just the next evolution of the disregard for criminal
| elements or foreign interests.
| bad_username wrote:
| You say there's security clearance which was a prerequisite
| for the predecessors but was bypassed by the DOGE team.
| Understood.
| amazingamazing wrote:
| The biggest irony to me is that Musk wanted to reneg on the
| Twitter sale. It's interesting to consider the timeline where he
| was allowed to not buy it. Truly a "canon" event, that one.
|
| I'm also not convinced this is a "security breach." They're being
| allowed to do it. It's more like an unforced error, if anything.
| Not that it changes anything material about the situation.
|
| That said - a small majority of congress is currently complicit
| in this, but I expect that to reverse as many Republican states
| will have congresspeople whose constituents are affected. I'd
| expect by May of this year some of this will have been reversed.
|
| Sadly that's too long and some damage will be done perhaps
| permanently...
| wnevets wrote:
| > The biggest irony to me is that Musk wanted to reneg on the
| Twitter sale
|
| With everything he has lied about why assume he wasn't also
| lying about that? He has been caught lying about being good at
| videos games.
| amazingamazing wrote:
| He went through great lengths to try to get out of it. I
| suppose it's possible _that_ was a charade, as well, though.
| verdverm wrote:
| I think he was likely after a lower price than the
| impulsive one he offered
| mattnewton wrote:
| I always assumed it was because he believed the price he
| was paying was now too high anfter the tech downturn, and
| he wanted to try lower it a few billion. It's roughly worth
| a few million in lawyer fees to take a 10% chance to lower
| the purchase price by just over a billion.
| fragmede wrote:
| would you mind looking like a fool for a chance to save a
| couple billion dollars?
|
| there's no fair market value for Twitter because there's
| only one Twitter. If you're rich, money is just a means to
| an end. you see something, you take it. If you think you
| can save a couple (billion) bucks on your way out, why not
| give it a shot? it's already yours
| shit_game wrote:
| I've become convinced that everything he publicly does is an
| advanced form of social gish gallop meant to overwhelm and
| distract everyone from what he is actually doing, which is
| robbing the United States of its wealth, information, and
| federal autonomy. For example, _everyone_ knew that the
| hyperloop was a work of fiction and that the Vegas loop was
| an ineffective death trap, but during the same period that he
| was evangelizing about it, China had built 40,000 Km of high
| speed rail - the US built 0. It seems aufully convenient that
| someone whos wealth stems from car manufacturing might work
| to ensure that the most car-dependent nation in the world
| remains so. This of course doesn 't even begin to touch on
| his forays into media, public infrastructure, digital
| technologies, communications, space travel, and I can only
| assume soon energy.
|
| Most people are not very "in the loop", nor do they put much
| thought into long term consequences or even the concept of
| ulterior motives; performative (yet socially consequential)
| things like distracting everyone by paying a team of people
| to play PoE for him so he can lie about it and generate
| widespread and inconsequential outrage is an insignificant
| cost to him. He is poised to be a trillionaire within the
| term of this administration, and I fully believe he is going
| to become one by continuing this pattern of pointing at
| distractions while rifling through our pockets.
| rcpt wrote:
| That's a very odd definition of "security breach"
| tbatchelli wrote:
| > I'm also not convinced this is a "security breach." They're
| being allowed to do it. It's more like an unforced error, if
| anything. Not that it changes anything material about the
| situation.
|
| From the perspective of the owners of this data, the US
| citizens and others that live in the country, this is very much
| a security breach; the data that was supposed to be secure is
| no longer secure.
| amazingamazing wrote:
| That's what I'm saying though - DOGE claims it is secure and
| all of the data is still in the hands of those (in)directly
| appointed by Trump.
|
| I do not disagree with your sentiment though, but a little
| pedantry is needed here. It's not necessary for this to be a
| security breach to be bad. Given how poorly this data is
| being handled even among those who are "supposed" to have it,
| it's likely there will be a legitimate security breach soon
| enough.
| tbatchelli wrote:
| Agreed, but part of the reason I think people are not aware
| of what's going on is that we're not calling things for
| what they are, in a weird and self-imposed Orwellian way.
| Like calling a rocket that blows up "unexpected rapid
| disassembly" or some other BS. The rocket blew up, the cars
| blow up, it's a coup, they're nazi sympathizers, etc...
| lawn wrote:
| That's why they dumped it all into an LLM online?
| Applejinx wrote:
| If DOGE is acting in an adversarial capacity to the US,
| there's no reason to put any stock in any claims they make
| regarding 'it is secure' or 'it is still in the hands of
| DOGE alone and definitely not being conveyed anywhere else,
| it has just been wrested from the grasp of the US
| Government'.
|
| If they are adversarial enough to justify such wresting
| from the grasp of the US government, is that not already a
| problem, compounded by the fact that if they are already in
| an adversarial position there's no reason to assume they
| are acting alone in that position? Why believe any claim by
| them if they are already taking pains to take a position as
| an adversary?
|
| It's taking their say-so that they are a domestic adversary
| rather than a foreign adversary, as if that made all the
| difference. I can't agree that it makes as much difference
| as they claim it makes.
| alexashka wrote:
| > From the perspective of the owners of this data, the US
| citizens and others that live in the country
|
| Did you say the cattle owns the ranch? Or you mean the cattle
| owns the feed?
|
| No, the cattle owns _nothing_ , _you_ own nothing.
|
| As for data being secure or not secure - how do you know any
| of this is true? Because journalists are good faith arbiters
| of truth without any conflicts of interest or personal bias?
| ganoushoreilly wrote:
| I would argue that the same could be said that "from the
| perspective of the owners of this data, the US citizens and
| others that live in the country" it's evident that the
| government has been recklessly spending money. The reality is
| Americans voted this in, they wanted it. Both sides have made
| historical voting points for claiming to clean up corruption
| and cut the fat, none of them really did. This time it's
| being cut for everyone to see. They don't like it. People
| will fight it. Some good programs will be impacted. Once the
| dust settles we'll fix it, but for now I have yet to see any
| good arguments for some of the excess spending programs. I've
| seen little or no justification for billions going to foreign
| countries while Americans are in need of help.
| guelo wrote:
| He was trying to renege on Twitter so he could renegotiate the
| $52 price after the stock market came off its highs. To me the
| suspicious thing about the Twitter sale is why banks lent him
| the $13 billion to pull it off. The banks were then unable to
| move those loans off the books as Elon trashed Twitter's value.
| fakedang wrote:
| At the time, Tesla's shares were so resilient that banks
| must've equated it to gold. And you can borrow any amount of
| money if you can provide the equivalent amount of gold as
| collateral.
| nemo44x wrote:
| He never planned on reneging. It's a negotiation tactic. It
| didn't work but it was worth trying. Turns out it was a bargain
| all along.
| wnevets wrote:
| I wouldn't trust these criminals with access to a staging
| database let alone access to data on every single America.
|
| > Musk's DOGE teen was fired by cybersecurity firm for leaking
| company secrets
|
| https://fortune.com/2025/02/07/musks-doge-teen-edward-corist...
| VagabundoP wrote:
| Is anyone really surprised here?
|
| This is Elon who is neck deep in the cesspool parts of the
| internet and attracts the same kinds of people.
|
| They will continue to break every rule they can and ignore the
| legal push back as much as possible. They know that there is
| little they could do here that will result in any criminal
| prosecution.
|
| Batten down the hatches and expect worse to come, the safeties
| are off.
| retskrad wrote:
| When Elon stripped the Twitter organisation down to its
| fundamental parts, saved tons of money and the service is still
| ran like usual, people said the he's a moron and the service
| couldn't possibly run without a bloated and inefficient
| workforce.
|
| They were wrong. Now that Elon is applying the same philosophy to
| all of his companies and now the federal government, people are
| once again saying he doesn't know what he's doing.
|
| At a certain point, you have to ask yourself if these people who
| complain like headless chickens are actually serious people ...
| amazingamazing wrote:
| Is it really impressive to reduce expenses drastically if you
| also reduce revenue drastically?
|
| Secondly it's doubly unimpressive because I believe Musk could
| have actually maintained very similar revenue levels, but the
| haphazard and immediate way of laying everyone off was
| incredibly counterproductive.
| jlawson wrote:
| Revenue went down a lot less than expenses. So yes, profits
| went up a ton and are now positioned to go up even more as
| revenue recovers and the tech keeps functioning.
|
| The revenue reduction was also more related to political
| positioning/image than technical capacity of the platform.
| amazingamazing wrote:
| You base this off what? X isn't a public company.
| jlawson wrote:
| Let's look it up together. Musk has approximately doubled
| X's profits from 0.68B to 1.25B.
|
| [0] article quote:
|
| "During the last full year prior to Musk's takeover,
| Twitter reported adjusted EBITDA (earnings before
| interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization) of about
| $682 million and about $5 billion in revenue.
|
| In 2024, X had an EBITDA of about $1.25 billion and
| annual revenue of $2.7 billion.
|
| While X's revenue is about half of what it used to be,
| the company's costs are just about a quarter of what they
| were before.
|
| As per the WSJ, investors noted that these were better
| figures than they had anticipated."
|
| Even this [1] hilariously biased article is forced to
| admit in the middle that yes, X's profits have gone up
| since Musk took over.
|
| "Now X also, of course, has reduced its overheads
| significantly, by culling around 80% of staff, so X's
| profit margins are now much better as a result."
|
| [0] https://www.teslarati.com/elon-musk-x-doubled-ebitda-
| since-2...
|
| [1] https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/x-is-still-far-
| from-pr...
| senordevnyc wrote:
| The word "adjusted" before EBITDA for 2021 is an
| important one: it references a one-time legal settlement
| that Twitter paid that year. If you don't take that into
| account, the EBITDA was $1.47 billion.
| ketlag wrote:
| Xai or whatever it's called was pumped with $6 billion,
| by, wait for it, fidelity. And, they still value X at
| 1/3rd of its original price. So, yes, the numbers will
| look good to people like you doing basic ebitda and
| revenue back of the envelope math. There's also no
| denying that the product sucks and users are leaving,
| which in turn will make your cute ebitda numbers look
| even bigger a few years down the line when there's only
| naz1s left!
| UltraSane wrote:
| I strongly doubt the current Twitter programmers could recreate
| Twitter from scratch. They are living of of the work a much
| larger number of programmers and building up a lot of technical
| debt.
| Trasmatta wrote:
| Twitter as it stands post Musk is a disaster, though. Revenue
| has dropped off significantly. How is that a success?
|
| Not to mention the absurdity of comparing something like
| Twitter to the federal government. It shows the staggering
| arrogance and ignorance of people in tech who think that.
| nemo44x wrote:
| The companies EBITDA is nearly double from when he purchased
| it so although revenue is down the company is making more
| money than before due to efficiencies. It's probably worth
| about what he paid for it today. If advertisers come back,
| which I can see occurring with the huge cultural shift, it
| will certainly be worth well more than what he paid.
| unsnap_biceps wrote:
| So why did the bankers that finance the loan write it down
| by nearly 80%? They have access to all the financial data
| and yet decided to take a major loss on their loan due to?
|
| From what it appears, Late 2024, Fidelity wrote down their
| loans by 79% [1] and then sold it early 2025 for 97 cents
| on the dollar (of the reduced value) [2].
|
| I really struggle to believe that the banks are just taking
| this massive loss by mistake and that the value is actually
| still there.
|
| [1] - https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/29/fidelity-has-cut-
| xs-value-... [2] -
| https://nypost.com/2025/02/05/business/banks-
| sell-5-5b-of-x-...
| pbiggar wrote:
| Twitter is down 80% in valuation since Elon took over:
| https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/29/fidelity-has-cut-xs-value-...
| threeseed wrote:
| > service is still ran like usual
|
| a) Trust and Safety teams were disbanded which led to the EU
| now investigating the company for breaching DSA Risk Management
| provisions. If X is banned from EU this decision will be a
| major part.
|
| b) Content Moderators were fired which has led to an increase
| in the amount of bots, spam etc which has directly attributed
| to a major loss in revenue as advertisers require a trusted
| platform.
|
| c) Fidelity, an X investor, has valued the company at 20% of
| when it purchased. That is indicative of widespread wealth
| destruction.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| Just want to point out that Twitter is not running anything
| like it used to. It's handling orders of magnitude less load
| because they have broken all publicly embedded tweets, blocked
| public searching of tweets, blocked public browsing of tweets,
| and cut off all API access except for a very few who are
| paying.
|
| Brand safety is also essentially turned off. This was a staff-
| intensive feature because brands can't delete other users'
| tweets the way they can hide or delete or turn off comments in
| Meta platforms and Youtube. They had to have help from Twitter
| staff, and now they don't.
|
| Finally, Twitter's ad targeting is horribly broken and there is
| little recourse. Again, that customer service was staff-
| intensive and therefore a target of cuts.
|
| Elon dramatically shrank Twitter into a much smaller service
| and company. And that's a fine approach for a private company,
| because customers can just go elsewhere (Threads, Mastodon,
| Bluesky, Truth Social, etc) if they don't like it.
|
| It will not work as a way to improve the federal government. If
| you take away highway funding and healthcare and national
| defense, there is not an alternative federal government that
| American citizens can switch to.
|
| It's a dramatic demonstration of how poorly many business
| leaders understand what government does. Tech leaders can move
| fast and break things _because_ they operate inside the
| protected, optimized space created by what government does.
| Break the government and you also break all the assumptions
| that give license to innovation.
| Everdred2dx wrote:
| This was a very insightful comment. Cheers!
| arp242 wrote:
| Also after Musk took over my DMs were full of bots (never had
| a bot DM me before that). And the platform is drenched in
| outright naked racism and antisemitism in a way it wasn't
| before because they just decided you don't really need to do
| anything with that (except if someone says "cisgender", of
| course).
| ModernMech wrote:
| For Elon and all the neo Nazis who were banned from Twitter,
| Elon's takeover of the platform worked out great. For others,
| like trans people who were just living their online lives in a
| community they formed over years, Elon unleashed a barrage of
| hate and toxicity that forced them off the platform entirely.
|
| The same will be true in our country. What Elon's doing now
| will work out great for him and neo Nazis, not so great for
| people that Elon and neo Nazis hates.
| nemo44x wrote:
| If I read this post 2 years ago it'd sound really relevant
| and current. But today it sounds fossilized. Like it came
| from a world that hasn't existed for a long time. It's
| amazing how much has changed in the last year. Like the
| Berlin Wall fell.
| sekai wrote:
| > When Elon stripped the Twitter organisation down to its
| fundamental parts, saved tons of money and the service is still
| ran like usual, people said the he's a moron and the service
| couldn't possibly run without a bloated and inefficient
| workforce.
|
| - The bot problem is much worse than before the acquisition
|
| - Search is completely broken, borderline unusable
|
| - Financial data is hidden, so no way to compare
| 9283409232 wrote:
| Why are high level figures in these departments just letting them
| walk in and have access? Tell them to kick rocks until they have
| proper clearances.
| tristan957 wrote:
| USAID employees did and were fired for it.
| 9283409232 wrote:
| Refuse to leave then. It is the entire point of civil
| disobedience. Make a spectacle of being dragged out.
| tristan957 wrote:
| I don't mean this negatively toward you in any way, but it
| is easy to say when you aren't in that situation.
| 9283409232 wrote:
| You're right but I also didn't swear an oath to
| protecting the country.
| threeseed wrote:
| Because Elon has the authority of the President who can
| override clearances.
|
| US government was simply never designed for scenarios like
| this.
| jdross wrote:
| Arguably it was designed explicitly for the chief executive
| having control of the executive branch we just haven't had
| executives with this level of interest in making major
| changes in 40+ years. Was somewhat common to shake up the
| scope of the federal gov't when the bureaucracy was much
| smaller in the 1800's and early 1900's
| threeseed wrote:
| You're right that previous governments did not just
| recklessly disband entire agencies based on the wishes of
| an unelected billionaire and a bunch of teenagers.
|
| I wonder why.
| nemo44x wrote:
| Correct. It's hard for people to imagine but the country
| functioned very differently before FDR and before him
| Lincoln. We've lived in FDRs government for 75 years and
| it's served well for a good deal of that time. But nothing
| lasts for ever and even wine doesn't continue to get better
| forever.
|
| You could argue there have been 4 Republics - articles of
| confederation, Washington, Lincoln, FDR marking the turning
| point. The world has changed a lot. It feels like the time
| is right to rethink the federal governments scope and
| function and how it relates to her people and the world.
| 9283409232 wrote:
| I'd rather a bunch of corrupt oligarchs not be the ones
| behind the change turning the US into a different
| "network-states"
| threeseed wrote:
| You are talking about a time before social programs like
| Medicare and Medicaid.
|
| People have higher expectations of what their government
| should be able to do.
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| So.... The US government was designed to -deny- the executive
| branch oversight and answers from the departments and
| agencies that the exutive branch runs?
|
| Or it was designed such that the exutive branch may not
| appoint or use independent organisations or consultants to
| perform audits?
|
| I dont think that is accurate.
| threeseed wrote:
| Not sure what you are talking about. Audits happen _all the
| time_ in government.
|
| What is extraordinary is doing so with (a) no thought to
| privacy or security, (b) using teenagers with no security
| clearances, (c) by a billionaire who seems to just be going
| after his enemies e.g. USAID was investigating SpaceX.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| > with no security clearances
|
| Everyone has the necessary clearance. People need to stop
| treating clearances like a magic totem, the executive can
| grant access like candy if they wish, and often does when
| expedient.
|
| DC is organized around minimizing the need for a formal
| clearance/access process because it is slow. Between the
| executive carte blanche and various title authorities
| with their well-understood loopholes, you can often just
| do things.
| dudinax wrote:
| It was designed for this. The safeguard is supposed to be
| Congress protecting their own powers out of self interest.
| They aren't. That's the where the "framers" screwed up.
| fzeroracer wrote:
| I think the problem goes deeper than that, for two reasons.
|
| The first is the obvious one. Congress is captured by a
| bunch of ineffectual assholes that either don't care enough
| to stop this or actively support ceding power to the
| executive.
|
| But the second is that Congress has no actual enforcement
| mechanism. There are a few Congress members that are trying
| to stop this, but the executive can just play games with
| the court and lock out Congress members from any sort of
| oversight. If the executive refuses to abide by the laws of
| the country, who has control to stop it?
| zfg wrote:
| > _If the executive refuses to abide by the laws of the
| country, who has control to stop it?_
|
| Three years ago J.D. Vance and others were already
| thinking about this and anticipating court cases:
|
| https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/04/inside-the-new-
| right...
|
| To quote the article: _"I think Trump is going to run
| again in 2024," [Vance] said. "I think that what Trump
| should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire
| every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in
| the administrative state, replace them with our people."
| "And when the courts stop you," he went on, "stand before
| the country, and say--" he quoted Andrew Jackson, giving
| a challenge to the entire constitutional order--"the
| chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce
| it."_
|
| They've been preparing themselves to ignore judicial
| rulings and they may well do that.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Why are high level figures in these departments just letting
| them walk in_
|
| The better question is what are all the Congressmen doing
| cozily on Capitol Hill. Like, not _one_ has walked over to
| these departments to try and physically stop these kids from
| gaining the keys to the kingdom?
|
| (EDIT: Whoops, they have.)
| mlyle wrote:
| https://www.newsweek.com/democrats-blocked-education-
| departm...
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| Thank you--missed this. I'd still say there is an
| escalation step missing in trying to stop the DOGE bros
| from entering the premises, up to and including getting
| arrested.
|
| Look at Seoul. The balls on those lawmakers saved their
| democracy. I'm not seeing that strength or resolve in the
| Congress _anywhere_.
| mlyle wrote:
| Resistance in democracy needs to be well-timed. Too
| early, and you don't have a critical mass of force to
| oppose the ruling regime and appear unreasonable. Too
| late, and it's too late to do anything.
|
| The right moment is only obvious in retrospect.
| Applejinx wrote:
| This, plus you must consider the risks of taking bold
| action that can be framed as insurrectionary. I don't see
| a lot of haste to immediately and unequivocally declare
| the elected President, a usurper. Some would say the
| trouble is, the man got large numbers of legitimate votes
| under false pretenses, in a system where such an act is
| expected to lead to buyers' remorse and midterm losses
| through the political system.
|
| Instead, we have whatever this is. Doesn't look like it's
| complying with the normal process of the political
| system, which is designed to punish an electoral bait-
| and-switch. Looks more like Russian elections and
| populace-management.
| 9283409232 wrote:
| Hungary's PM Viktor Orban gave speeches to Republicans to
| teach them how to destroy democracy so it is more like
| Hungary than Russia
| j_w wrote:
| The democratic leadership has allegedly advised the
| members on congress to not get arrested, as they are
| already in the minority. Given too many arrests, the
| republican majority will be able to easily pass nearly
| anything through congress.
|
| Now it's my understanding that members of congress can't
| be truly arrested during session; so the above argument
| doesn't entirely stick for me.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| I don't know, keeping people in prison definitely sounds
| like an official act for which POTUS is now immune.
| sigzero wrote:
| They did and they were not allowed into the building.
| hgsfCa wrote:
| Regarding USAID: That is under Rubio now, who was confirmed
| unanimously. So I suspect it will be resurrected in some form
| and continue at least regime change operations.
|
| MAGA outlet Tucker Carlson had Mike Benz on this week. Mike
| Benz had been vocally opposed to all CIA or foreign
| interference programs during the election campaigns. This
| week he recanted, talked without his usual eloquence and said
| that USAID is not all that bad! So MAGA is being
| reprogrammed.
|
| If nothing really changes, the Democrats (who were avid
| neocons in the past four years) won't mind. Which could
| explain the meek protests of Schumer etc.
|
| The treasury story is way more difficult, we have to wait for
| more information.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Regarding USAID: That is under Rubio now_
|
| Almost certainly not. The President can't reorganise _e.g._
| the CIA and Federal Reserve under HHS, for example.
|
| Where I agree with you is in USAID not being politically
| worth the fight. And after the last 8 years (and Biden's
| twilight) it's hard for Democrats to argue for the rule of
| law _per se_.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| _Almost certainly not. The President can't reorganise
| e.g. the CIA and Federal Reserve under HHS, for example._
|
| Any sentence that begins with "The President can't" can
| safely be disregarded. The executive branch has all the
| lawyers, all the guns, virtually all the media, and (now)
| all the money.
|
| Everything we were taught was an ironclad law of American
| constitutional governance has turned out to be a
| "guideline," a "custom," a "tradition," a "gentlemens'
| agreement," or "nothing that my pet judges can't fix."
| filoeleven wrote:
| > Any sentence that begins with "The President can't" can
| safely be disregarded. The executive branch has all the
| lawyers, all the guns, virtually all the media, and (now)
| all the money.
|
| Not to mention the blanket ruling from the supreme court
| that says "if the president does it, it's legal."
| sekai wrote:
| > The executive branch has all the lawyers,
|
| Judges do exist, and they matter more than any lawyer.
|
| > virtually all the media
|
| How does the executive branch control the media?
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| If you weren't paying attention when people like Patrick
| Soon-Shiong and Jeff Bezos were elbowing each other out
| of the way to pay tribute to Trump (1) -- or when CBS
| 'settled' a lawsuit that was widely seen as a certain win
| for _them_ (2) in exchange for a $15M donation to the
| Trump Presidential Library, matching an earlier
| contribution in the form of an unnecessary 'settlement'
| from ABC, you probably aren't going to pay any attention
| to this comment, either. But for the record:
|
| 1:
| https://www.npr.org/2025/01/04/nx-s1-5248299/cartoonist-
| quit...
|
| 2: https://www.npr.org/2025/02/06/nx-s1-5288181/why-cbs-
| stands-...
|
| Also, bear in mind the history of America's most popular
| cable news network. Fox News is _the_ propaganda arm of
| the Republican Party, and that was always the idea. After
| Watergate took down Nixon, the GOP swore the same oath
| that the Holocaust victims did: _Never again_. Never
| again would something like Watergate be allowed to play
| out in an unbiased, uncontrolled media environment. Ailes
| and Murdoch answered the call
| (https://theweek.com/articles/880107/why-fox-news-
| created) and the rest is history.
| treis wrote:
| From Wikipedia:
|
| >Statute law also places USAID under "the direct
| authority and policy guidance of the Secretary of
| State".[4]
| 93po wrote:
| Why do we care so much about classified information? Why is
| there a reverence for our government hiding information from
| its people? Why shouldn't the government operate out in the
| open in all ways?
|
| Something something terrorism, but i don't buy it. terrorism is
| the scapegoat for which we have massively eroded privacy and
| rights, in the same way that CSAM is the scapegoat for trying
| to ban encryption every 5 years.
| 9283409232 wrote:
| They don't just have classified information. There is a lot
| of sensitive personal information on you and me in these
| databases. Information that can be used for blackmail and
| other nefarious purposes.
| hypothesis wrote:
| They didn't publish it all for everyone to use, did they? Not
| much transparency here, since all they did was steal it and
| use selectively for their purposes.
| kzrdude wrote:
| They remove the people who resist, like this:
| https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/31/us/politics/david-lebryk-...
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| Because the DOGE people have the proper clearances and
| authority. There seems to be a lot of confusion on this point.
| The executive branch can immediately grant clearance and access
| to random people at their discretion, and they routinely do in
| every administration. You don't even need to apply for a
| security clearance, never mind hold one. If the DNI wants to
| read in a Starbucks barista on the secret space alien bunker
| program, they can do that.
|
| Voting for the President is in part voting for this. They don't
| need to ask permission from the bureaucracy nor can they be
| impeded by process because it is a Constitutional authority.
|
| Americans really do seem to know nothing about how the Federal
| government works. This kind of drama happens every four years,
| they've just never paid attention before. Every administration
| change brings in a coterie of poorly vetted people like this
| and gives them the keys to the kingdom. Dialing up the outrage
| media this particularly time is manipulative. I've been close
| enough to this action across several administration changes to
| be pretty blase about what has occurred so far.
| 9283409232 wrote:
| The question no one asking is why Elon is sending a team of
| teenage programmers and not a team of financial auditors if he
| really wanted to cut government spending?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _why Elon is sending a team of teenage programmers and not a
| team of financial auditors if he really wanted to cut
| government spending?_
|
| History has one answer for the deployment of reams of young
| fiery-loyalist men to the front lines: cannon fodder.
| varjag wrote:
| IMO it's more reminiscent of Red Guards from Cultural
| Revolution era China.
| thephyber wrote:
| And university students during the Iranian Revolution.
| watwut wrote:
| Nazi took power in a quite similar way. One difference was
| that the German governmental workers was already primed to
| obey them (cause it was primary composed of ex soldiers),
| but similarities are there.
|
| But like, any authoritarian needs to do the same - get rid
| of opposition, install loyalists and make everyone afraid.
| fujinghg wrote:
| Old enough to do the job, too young to ask the right
| questions.
| amazingamazing wrote:
| Reporting on this is terrible. There are also senior (in age
| and experience) people, but much of the focus is on the
| youngins for obvious reasons.
|
| Musk also believes (either arrogance, or true belief) that much
| of this stuff can be figured out from first principals without
| much need of traditional experts.
| fumar wrote:
| What do mean by stuff?
| amazingamazing wrote:
| > not a team of financial auditors if he really wanted to
| cut government spending?
| default-kramer wrote:
| I hope this is true. Can you name any senior people and/or
| financial auditors who are overseeing "the youngins"?
| jdross wrote:
| I know a number of them but they're rightfully not looking
| to be especially public about it now on the internet --
| life is hard enough just doing the job they're trying to
| do. Which is frankly a lot of banal accounting and auditing
| type work. They're in their 30's and 40's with prolific
| backgrounds in PE, as entrepreneurs managing nine figure
| budgets and thousands of employees, etc.
|
| Politics vs policy, or something like that?
| apical_dendrite wrote:
| I'm having trouble reconciling the backgrounds of the
| people that you're describing with the effects of the
| work they're doing. When they suddenly closed USAID,
| vulnerable people around the world instantly lost access
| to food and medicine with no recourse. There were people
| enrolled in clinical trials who had devices implanted in
| their bodies and then suddenly all support was cut off.
| Even if you believe that America shouldn't fund these
| things, how can you possibly justify shutting it down in
| such a way that food for hungry people rots in warehouses
| and clinicians have to decide if they're going to defy
| orders to vaccinate a pregnant mother? I can understand
| how a 23-year-old can get so enamored by all this sudden
| access to power that he completely loses sight of the
| effects of what he's doing. I don't understand how
| someone with decades of experience in positions of
| responsibility doesn't ask the most basic questions about
| the consequences of taking drastic action.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| The policy people like Stephen Miller who are the brains
| here question the humanity of others.
|
| The expression of power by inflicting suffering is seen
| as a flex. USAID and its mission are in opposition to
| their aims -- you are to be cowed by power, not be look
| kindly upon the kindness and mercy of the US.
| n2d4 wrote:
| A larger list of DOGE employees is on Wikipedia. While
| there are a variety of members, most of them don't have the
| experience you'd expect someone to have in the respective
| roles. The average age is definitely higher than 25 though.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Department_of_Government_Effi
| c...
| 9283409232 wrote:
| Wow, this is a list of tremendous pieces of shit.
|
| > Brad Smith: Allegedly pushed during the COVID-19
| pandemic to adjust a government model in order to produce
| fake estimates showing lower death rates; friend of Jared
| Kushner
|
| > Christopher Stanley: Assisted with the pardons of
| January 6 rioters
|
| > Gavin Kliger: Reposted Nick Fuentes mocking interracial
| families
|
| > Edward Coristine: Fired from internship at Path in 2022
| for leaking internal information
|
| > Marko Elez: Fired from DOGE for past racist posts;
| later re-hired
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| I would love to know what Trump supporters think of all
| of this, but the usual places where Trump supporters hang
| out online (e.g., r/Conservative) don't seem to talk
| about anything of the current administration's
| controversies _at all_. I guess I was hoping they would
| at least talk about why they think they're good or not
| that bad, but the mere mention of them seems to be
| suppressed. :sigh:
| 9283409232 wrote:
| I'm sure they don't care. Means to an end.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| I don't even mean this as an insult, but these people are
| quite literally in a cult. MAGA has all the hallmarks of
| a cult, and accordingly, you will not find the contrition
| or self-doubt you're looking for penetrating deeply into
| the movement whatsoever.
|
| They chose long ago to block out negative thoughts and
| information, today is no different.
| matwood wrote:
| No one talks about the price of eggs anymore. Remember
| 'back the blue'? That was before pardoning people who
| beat up police officers.
| ganoushoreilly wrote:
| Similar to how we are shutting down the whole topic of
| what these programs were actually funding? The excessive
| spending? It's easy to project one side as bad but the
| same exact behaviors and attitude have been prevalent on
| the left.
|
| Do you feel all of these programs should have been
| funded, or make sense when we are blowing through money
| and crushing people with inflation? Do you find the
| concept of auditing these organizations as bad, or is it
| bad because it's someone else doing it? If so can you
| explain why these actions weren't taken with the prior
| administration?
|
| The point being, step out of a partisan hat, or an
| emotional state of X person is Y. Look at the federal
| governments spend, fraud, waste, and abuse is prevalent.
| Someone has to do the hard part and clearly leaving
| everyone to manage themselves doesn't work. More so when
| they can't pass their own audits.
| 9283409232 wrote:
| > Do you feel all of these programs should have been
| funded, or make sense when we are blowing through money
| and crushing people with inflation? Do you find the
| concept of auditing these organizations as bad, or is it
| bad because it's someone else doing it? If so can you
| explain why these actions weren't taken with the prior
| administration?
|
| I don't take issue with auditing. I take issue with the
| possible illegal firing of officials that are meant to
| provide oversight, skipping over security clearances to
| provide sensitive data access to unvetted indivduals, and
| attempting to illegally cut spending when only Congress
| has that authority.
|
| > The point being, step out of a partisan hat, or an
| emotional state of X person is Y. Look at the federal
| governments spend, fraud, waste, and abuse is prevalent.
| Someone has to do the hard part and clearly leaving
| everyone to manage themselves doesn't work. More so when
| they can't pass their own audits.
|
| Let's be clear here because I see a lot of MAGA repeating
| this incorrectly. You are referring to a few agencies
| like the Pentagon when you say they can't pass their own
| audits. Most federal agencies have no problem passing
| their audits and all of those audits are available
| through GAO. https://www.gao.gov/federal-financial-
| accountability. The majority of agencies pass GAO audits.
| In fact if Elon was only targeting agencies that failed
| GAO audits I would have much less of a problem.
|
| I think you are the one that needs to take off the
| partisan hat.
| ganoushoreilly wrote:
| Can you prove that the appropriate clearance hasn't been
| granted? It actually appears to be the opposite.
|
| Passing an audit of " you spent x at y" isn't the same as
| "why are we spending X at y". He's doing the later,
| surely you can agree with that.
|
| As for you partisan hat dig, i'm in fact not. I don't
| lean or vote how you're implying. In this particular
| instance, I've seen the excess of fraud, waste, and abuse
| through multiple agencies and organizations first hand.
| I've seen the pallets of USAID cash that were handed out
| without regard. I've also seen the increased prices, the
| national debt rising, and the general glut of how our
| government operates. So yes, while I may disagree with
| the process, the fact is no one else has taken a
| legitimate attempt at solving this problem. So in that
| manner I support the cleanse.
| matwood wrote:
| No one should have to prove a negative. In fact, Musk
| should be the one being completely transparent about
| clearances, etc... Instead he's fighting transparency
| every step of the way. If Musk was really looking to save
| tax payers money, USAID would have been at the bottom of
| the list. The cynic in me says he went after them because
| they were investigating him and he didn't want any
| conclusions to get out.
|
| Finally, if you want to talk about the 'why' money is
| being spent, that's congress's domain. If we throw the
| laws out now then what use are laws. If you want to talk
| about rising debts, then look at the tax cuts Trump wants
| to renew that we can't pay for.
| ganoushoreilly wrote:
| The left lost. If they didn't want this to happen they
| would have put forth a better candidate and addressed the
| American peoples concerns. This is what we get. It's
| crude and abrupt, but its what we get. I think we needed
| to purge a lot of the glut, so in this instance i'm
| indifferent to whom is doing it.
| 9283409232 wrote:
| You completely sidestepped their comments on the legality
| of this all as just "eh, as long as it gets done." The
| legality and unconstitutionality of it all should be
| concerning no matter what side you are on.
| ganoushoreilly wrote:
| You clearly have your perspective and the rest of the
| population has theirs. If he / they broke the law, I
| encourage you to engage your representatives and push for
| the appropriate actions. Take charge. Until then, it is
| what it is.
| matwood wrote:
| So whoever wins no longer has to follow the law?
| 9283409232 wrote:
| Can you prove the opposite has happened because every
| journalist says otherwise? The very article you are
| commenting on suggest the FBI did not do background
| checks because if so this particular person wouldn't have
| been approved. I'm all for having a committee that
| scrutinizes line items but the ends don't justify the
| means. Especially because there is no oversight here.
| ganoushoreilly wrote:
| What evidence do the journalists have? Elon is cleared,
| many of his employees are by nature of the work they do.
| Many of the listed personnel for each of the DOGE teams
| in the orgs are comprised of Cleared lawyers and
| invdividuals from within the orgs as well. The burden
| isn't on proving they aren't, it's on the journalist to
| prove the sensationalist claims. There is clearly
| evidence of oversight, the president is authorizing
| actions. He was elected, we don't have to like it but
| it's how things are structured. Want change, back the
| candidates that will fix the issues you want, convince
| everyone else to agree.
|
| One good example of sensationalism from journalists is
| the claim this is a "Data breach". That's neither true,
| nor helpful.
| 9283409232 wrote:
| That is not how oversight works. Oversight is an
| unrelated non-partisan committee and transparency.
| Unfortunately Elon is jumping through hoops to avoid
| transparency like moving off any communication that would
| be subject to FOIA. What you describing is a crony doing
| his masters bidding not oversight and transparency.
| ganoushoreilly wrote:
| You clearly have your perspective and the rest of the
| population has theirs. If he / they broke the law, I
| encourage you to engage your representatives and push for
| the appropriate actions. Take charge. Until then, it is
| what it is.
| 9283409232 wrote:
| Trust me my representatives are complicit in this coup.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| > skipping over security clearances
|
| This is not accurate. Most jobs in the federal
| government, including at the treasury, do not require
| security clearances. You're confusing background checks,
| which are very basic, with the different types of
| security clearances, which aren't required for something
| like a financial audit.
| wsatb wrote:
| You don't find it at all concerning how quickly this is
| happening? How have they learned so much in such a little
| amount of time? It's incredibly naive to just trust that
| they're this efficient.
|
| I mean at least make it look like this is what you're
| accomplishing. They're not even trying to convince
| anyone, we're just supposed to trust.
| ganoushoreilly wrote:
| I understand a perspective from someone on the outside
| that hasn't worked within these organazations. The
| reality is we're ripping a bandaid off and it will sting
| and we may need more treatment, but we have to see where
| the real wound is at.
|
| It's also not a situation of where we are spending money,
| but why. I have yet to see any reporting that can defend
| the vast majority of spend in USAID let alone the other
| organizations. Further when you look at the disclosures
| of how much money is actually making it to the
| organizations vs overhead it's even worse.
|
| This is painful and it will impact people, but as a
| country we have to fix the books. If it goes to far, come
| election time we elect the people we need to fix it.
| Ultimately this was something he campaigned on and it's
| something he's doing. Like it or not, it's been a pretty
| transparent process.
| matwood wrote:
| > Like it or not, it's been a pretty transparent process.
|
| Not at all. Musk has cherry picked a few things to share.
| Other than that, we know nothing. And most of what he's
| cherry picked have been shown to be incorrectly
| understood. Transparency would be third party auditors
| who setup a process, executed the process, and documented
| as they went. We literally have no idea what's going on.
| ganoushoreilly wrote:
| They've been at it for a couple weeks, Let's see what
| happens. If they don't provide it, we'll start to see the
| results of their failures. Then we can push back. There
| will be legit programs impacted, we can pivot and get
| them back. If America didn't want this, they shouldn't
| have voted the way they did, but that's where we're at.
| He was open in doing this, it was always the case.
| 9283409232 wrote:
| I highly doubt the people who voted all voted for this
| and the ones that did didn't vote for seizing agencies
| and illegally barring personnel and senators from the
| building.
| ganoushoreilly wrote:
| We can speculate all we want. He said what he would do,
| he's doing it. Here we are. I encourage you to reach out
| and get involved with your local and representative
| politicians if you want to be a voice for change.
| dashundchen wrote:
| If the debt and spending are so important, why focus on
| cutting random programs and throwing tens of thousands of
| people in chaos?
|
| You really haven't seen reporting defending PEPFAR, for
| example, as a program of USAID? The same org that also
| track and help prevent Ebola outbreaks? That funded
| hospitals for innocent civilians in Gaza?
|
| Why is the first priority of the GOP Congress to renew
| and expand the Trump tax cuts, which the government is
| estimating to cost at least $4 trillion dollars and will
| mostly accumulate to the top 0.1%? It's also estimated
| that it will explode the federal debt.
|
| This is a government by and for oligarchs like Musk. He's
| attempting distraction while the plan is to grossly
| enrich themselves.
| ganoushoreilly wrote:
| Well if you want change, convince the other side to vote
| for your candidates. This is what won. The people made
| their bed.
| rcpt wrote:
| Fraud?
| brookst wrote:
| I find the concept of ad hoc audits of the executive
| branch, by the executive branch, terrifying. Especially
| when used to terminate congressionally-mandated programs.
|
| I agree that we should lean into audits and
| responsibility. The good faith way to do that would be
| laws passed by congress and executed by the executive.
|
| There is no possible spin that legitimizes current
| events. I would say we have a constitutional crisis, but
| it seems like the blitzkreig was successful and the
| constitution became irrelevant.
| ganoushoreilly wrote:
| I don't follow this logic, I would in fact expect the
| executive branch to be auditing the executive branch.
| What congressionally mandated program was terminated?
|
| No spin is required, the people voted for this.
| Unfortunately one side wasn't able to convince the people
| that they didn't need this. That's where we are.
| Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. You make
| adjustments and move on.
| 9283409232 wrote:
| > I don't follow this logic, I would in fact expect the
| executive branch to be auditing the executive branch.
|
| This is nonsense. It's like the police investigating
| themselves and finding no wrongdoing. You have a separate
| oversight organization do the audit because of conflict
| of interest and corruption.
| ganoushoreilly wrote:
| It's nonsense in that is what was going on within the
| agencies. Our legal system is being leveraged. Don't like
| it, put forth a good claim and bring it to court. As it
| stands, it's all legal. That's on the voters if you don't
| like it.
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| I've seen MAGA supporters hyperventilating about "money
| laundering" and "fraud," but they almost never give any
| examples of said laundering and fraud. When they do give
| supposed examples, they're usually fake (e.g., birth
| control for Gaza, not that that would even be fraudulent
| in any way, if it had been true).
|
| If you look at the federal budget, the vast majority of
| it is spent on a few big-ticket items (Social Security,
| Medicare, Medicaid and the military). The programs Musk
| is attacking are a tiny part of the federal budget, and
| are already transparent, for the most part. You can go
| look up who is getting what grant from which agency. But
| it's all peanuts to start with.
| matwood wrote:
| > I've seen MAGA supporters hyperventilating about "money
| laundering" and "fraud," but they almost never give any
| examples of said laundering and fraud. When they do give
| supposed examples, they're usually fake (e.g., birth
| control for Gaza, not that that would even be fraudulent
| in any way, if it had been true).
|
| This is the end stage of cable news like Fox and social
| media.
| ganoushoreilly wrote:
| Wouldn't the otherside argue the same could be said for
| about the extreme viewpoints the left has held for the
| last decade+? Regardless of what anyone on this forum
| thinks, his approval ratings are only going up. If the
| people made a great mistake, that was their mistake to
| make.
| ganoushoreilly wrote:
| Why did he start with USAID. Also he's in all of those
| other organizations as well. Peanuts add up.
| 9283409232 wrote:
| I'm sure he started with USAID because USAID helped end
| apartheid in South Africa, something he was a big fan of.
| Starting with USAID also helps reduce US's power overseas
| which certain countries would be very grateful for.
| rubyn00bie wrote:
| You're totally missing the point about this, the agencies
| being gutted, combined, are less than 8% of federal
| spending:
|
| https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-
| guide/feder...
|
| Even if entire agencies were bullshit, and that's
| incredibly unlikely and unrealistic, it'd do absolutely
| nothing meaningful to our spending compared to our
| biggest expenses. This is a problem for a lot of people
| without backgrounds in economics or who are used to very,
| very, large numbers. A few billion dollars sounds like a
| lot, but it's literally not even a tenth of a percent of
| our budget.
|
| If they cared about reducing the budget, and finding
| inefficiencies they would nationalize the healthcare
| system since we as a nation pay nearly double that of any
| other country and have worse outcomes. It's empirical
| they do not care about efficiency, based on their
| targets, they care about power. USAID was investigating
| NeuralLink that's why it was targeted. Thats it.
| ganoushoreilly wrote:
| He's going after every single agency. Surely you're aware
| he's tarting health card and the Military already right?
| Do you know why the started with USAID?
|
| Let's see where we are in 6 - 12 months, then if he
| hasn't touched anyone else I'll accept your point of him
| not targeting anything of value.
| dijksterhuis wrote:
| > Luke Farritor of DOGE was given access to computer
| systems of the National Nuclear Security Administration
| (NNSA), the department responsible for the security and
| protection of American nuclear technologies and nuclear
| weapons, by United States Department of Energy (DOE)
| Secretary Chris Wright, against guidance of the DOE's
| general counsel and chief information offices.
|
| on the face of it, this sounded absolutely terrifying
| reading it on wikipedia. But, on closer inspection of the
| CNN article used as a source
|
| > Farritor was granted access to basic IT including email
| and Microsoft 365, one of the people said. The chief
| information office only does a small amount of IT and
| cybersecurity work for the National Nuclear Security
| Administration, they said, including providing
| connectivity and running basic internet services for
| NNSA's headquarters. It does not run IT systems for the
| nuclear agency's labs controlling the nation's nuclear
| stockpile.
|
| Genuinely had me scared for a moment there.
| rapind wrote:
| This is how media has been hacked. When everyone is
| exaggerating that the sky is falling, we all tune it out,
| and then it's really hard to convey when the sky truly is
| falling... resulting in authorities that can get away
| with pretty much anything.
| margalabargala wrote:
| > The average age is definitely higher than 25 though.
|
| The mean age is definitely higher than 25, due to a
| handful of very old (relatively speaking, compared to 25)
| people including Musk himself.
|
| The median age does appear to be below 25.
| tootie wrote:
| I think that's generous. He is chopping entire departments
| after scooping up all their data. He doesn't seem to be doing
| any analysis at all. And a lot of his public statements have
| been patently false.
| baxtr wrote:
| As a side note: that is very similar to how a consulting team
| would operate. Very young (inexperienced) team on the ground
| + senior people flying in from time to time.
| rcpt wrote:
| "flying in from time to time"?
|
| I'm sorry but what are these guys working on that's taking
| precedence over this?
| baxtr wrote:
| It's usually several projects they're overseeing, so
| splitting time at different locations.
|
| PS: I'm just guessing here. I have no clue how DOGE
| operates.
| dcl wrote:
| Running/managing the firm, doing pitches, sales,
| schmoozing, etc.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > I'm sorry but what are these guys working on that's
| taking precedence over this?
|
| Their day-jobs at other various Musk enterprises.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Well he has done pretty well with that belief so far. Tesla,
| SpaceX, Starlink...
| tzs wrote:
| All of those were full of traditional experts.
| kjrfghslkdjfl wrote:
| Answer is obvious. Because teenagers tend to be impressionable
| and unscrupulous.
| PenguinCoder wrote:
| And typically cheaper to employ.
| grandempire wrote:
| When we think about what tasks bright young people can become
| good at, I think auditing flows of money is one of them. It's a
| technical task with objective results, and a tight feedback
| cycle. The places where you need age and experience are like
| resolving interpersonal conflict, balancing interests from many
| stakeholders, setting up objectives for others to follow, etc.
|
| So to me this argument sounds the same as "how can young kids
| think they can program like experienced engineers".
|
| Another answer is that financial auditors don't have ALL the
| technical skill for this scope of project. Light SQL skills
| tend to be the upper end of technical accounting (many workers
| on a project is good for corporate billing). Reports indicate
| Doge is employing graph analysis, LLMs, etc. Getting the data
| looks like a SW problem perfect for young people. I have no
| evidence that this how the organization functions, but I can
| imagine them as technical analysts, who simply pass information
| to higher ups who do have organizational experience.
| UncleEntity wrote:
| > So to me this argument sounds the same as "how can young
| kids think they can program like experienced engineers".
|
| Which leads me to my favorite quote from TFA: "must have
| killed all those test pigs with some bugs"
| rich_sasha wrote:
| Moving fast and breaking things.
|
| Though I note at SpaceX he seems to hire actual rocket
| scientists.
| renewiltord wrote:
| The answer to that question is that Elon Musk does not seem to
| believe that the government departments can answer data
| questions. Rather than wait for them to inevitably say it will
| take weeks to gather the data, he has his war boys extract it
| from the system.
|
| One might as well ask "if you want to stop HIV/AIDS in Africa
| why pay a bunch of young kids with international relations
| degrees instead of AIDS researchers". Grunt work takes grunt
| effort.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Auditors take time and are boring. Auditors measure performance
| against rules and goals -- this is about discarding the rules
| and goals. The point of this is chaos and power.
|
| Elon has contempt for rules and laws. Blame the fuckups on the
| deep state or whatever. He will run wild until the president
| cuts off his head.
| timewizard wrote:
| The question no one is asking is why does the federal
| government have so much "sensitive data" on it's citizens in
| the first place?
|
| When you build a machine like this you should ask, "would I be
| comfortable if my political opposites had control of this?" If
| the answer is no, then you DON'T BUILD IT.
|
| Meanwhile someone goes in there to try to break up this 30 year
| pile of technical debt and it's all lawsuits and handwaving
| theatrics to try to stop it.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| How could the US government do things like collect tax or
| regulate the medical industry without sensitive data?
| timewizard wrote:
| Tax data is not particularly sensitive and several nations
| just publish it. Even in the US many forms of non-
| individual tax filings are public by default. The results
| of audits /are/ highly sensitive but there's no reason to
| hold those on computer systems for longer than 5 years
| after the audit.
|
| I think the medical industry can easily be regulated
| without the government having access to my actual medical
| file. They regulate cars without having any idea how I
| drive mine. They regulate planes without sitting on the
| flight deck themselves.
|
| It's like we know how to build good businesses, good
| databases, have solid user control practices, but then we
| give the government a pass because it's imagined to be
| "really hard." It's laughable.
| matwood wrote:
| > Tax data is not particularly sensitive and several
| nations just publish it.
|
| Aren't we still waiting for Trump's tax returns?
| c-cube wrote:
| Can you point to a country that publicly releases
| everybody's tax returns, as a policy? I know some
| countries that release elected officials' returns, but
| not those of common people.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| Sensitive data includes things like home addresses,
| personal income, personal debt, personal wealth, dates of
| birth, medical status, etc. I don't know if it's true
| that some nations publish that (I don't personally know
| of any) but whether that's the case or not doesn't make
| any difference to whether it's sensitive.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| I'd be happy if they dropped both taxes and regulations
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Taxes could be consumption based with no need for anyone's
| personal data at all.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| Consumption taxes are highly regressive. Pure consumption
| taxes would plunge USA into an even higher degree of
| inequality. The most progressive way to tax a populous is
| taxing incomes and wealth progressively.
| vharuck wrote:
| The NIH and CDC have incredibly detailed medical event data
| for infectious diseases, cancer diagnoses, and death
| certificates (which have a ton of data beyond "John Doe of
| New York City died of such and such on such and such date."
| It's how we have incredibly effective epidemiologists.
| Hospitals and non-profits use the data published by the
| government to make large decisions about equipment purchases,
| types of staff to hire, and community health programs to run.
|
| All the government professionals I've met who work with that
| data are _very_ careful with it. The guiding star is "Never
| let anyone use our data to find out something about any
| individual. Then, if you still can, publish someone useful."
|
| >Meanwhile someone goes in there to try to break up this 30
| year pile of technical debt and it's all lawsuits and
| handwaving theatrics to try to stop it.
|
| They only had to get security clearances and follow the
| Constitution. Clearances are routine, so shouldn't be a
| problem (unless the person being cleared is a problem). The
| Republicans control all branches of government, and cost-
| cutting is very popular among all voters, so writing a better
| budget is possible. Things won't collapse if they work on it
| until before the midterm elections. It just seems like Trump
| is testing how far he can walk along the path to tyranny.
| braza wrote:
| > team of teenage
|
| Maybe it's a question of wording, but I would agree if the word
| were "inexperienced" instead of teenage (in reality, they are
| young adults).
|
| I have no horse in this DOGE race and all the discussions, but
| I find this "reverse ageism" (for lack of a better term) quite
| sad, 'cause it does not sound condescending but infantilizes
| youth and hides one of the biggest elephants in the room in the
| modern world, which is the real lack of representation of youth
| in politics (and maybe in the public service?) [1][2].
|
| I was a 19-year-old holding an assault weapon in my daily work
| in the military with the power to terminate the lives of almost
| 99.99% civilians, friends with 23 starting piloting USD 5
| million machines, and it's just sad to see that we as a society
| do not see young adults as capable as their older counterparts.
|
| I speculate that at least in Europe, due to this credibility
| bias in favor of older politicians, we are facing one of the
| biggest violations of the intergenerational pact, which is the
| fact that this same youth will end up without retirement [3].
|
| [1] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/congress-
| age-de...
|
| [2] - https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/both-republicans-
| and-de...
|
| [3] - https://www.dw.com/en/pension-fund-crisis-looms-in-
| germany-a...
| DiscourseFan wrote:
| You were not a 19 year old with access to the personal
| financial data of hundreds of millions of civilians.
| borski wrote:
| You're not wrong, but there is also wisdom in age. I'm 37
| now, and got in plenty of similar trouble when I was 16-22,
| simply because my brain literally was not fully developed
| yet. My impulse control was worse, my consideration of
| consequences was much less existent, and so on.
|
| I think the reaction is more about wanting _some_ older
| adults in the room as well, not about having _no_ younger
| adults in the room.
|
| Younger people always want to knock down Chesterton's fences
| whenever they see them; I know, because I was recently young.
|
| But asking the elders why those fences exist is _always_ a
| good idea; then, knock them down if the issue is resolved.
| Humility _and_ curiosity are required for that.
| fzeroracer wrote:
| > I was a 19-year-old holding an assault weapon in my daily
| work in the military with the power to terminate the lives of
| almost 99.99% civilians, friends with 23 starting piloting
| USD 5 million machines, and it's just sad to see that we as a
| society do not see young adults as capable as their older
| counterparts.
|
| Who would you trust more, a teenager with active military
| training and awareness on how to handle a gun or a teenager
| picking up a gun off the floor for the first time?
|
| If these teens all had followed proper protocol, went through
| a full security clearance process and training on how to
| handle sensitive data there would be no issue. They did not.
| And they are definitely not old enough to have had experience
| dealing with highly sensitive systems. So you've got people
| that are not qualified to handle data, working on systems
| they are not experienced enough to work in, kicking over
| load-bearing pillars that they can't see.
| watwut wrote:
| I would trust 19 years old soldier with an assault weapon
| more then trusting him with what DOGE is supposed to do.
| Soldiers passed training literally designed to make them obey
| orders and not randomly shoot that gun. And there is whole
| hierarchy designed to keep their use of assault guns in
| check.
|
| I would not trust a random 19 years old with assault gun, I
| would not trust that guy if we were alone in the room where
| his superiors do not see. But, I would be afraid of him
| raping me more then him using that gun without order.
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| you're probably being dowvoted because there are thousand of
| regulations and a multi year program exclusively made to
| educate young soldiers, besides giving them guns.
|
| your argument starts well, but then compares the top well
| behaved military machine with a war lord arming children and
| throwing them on the front.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| Everyone is asking that. It's the main thing people are asking.
| billfor wrote:
| Why can't he send a team of teenage programmers to audit? He
| cofounded paypal which is payment system. Presumably he knows
| about things like payment systems, fraud, etc... Seems to me
| Paypal had their fair share of youngsters and it worked out
| fine. He's found missing payment codes for most of the treasury
| transactions, no notes about transactions, payments to entities
| or persons on blacklists, etc... AFAIK he's actually finding
| stuff that nobody was able to find for recorded history, so
| .... why not give it a try. Treasury has already been hacked
| numerous times and I think we can assume that this data that
| people are so concerned about is already out there in the wild.
| If I want somebodies social security number for example, it's
| pretty easy to get it.
| jsiepkes wrote:
| > He cofounded paypal which is payment system. Presumably he
| knows about things like payment systems, fraud, etc...
|
| No, he didn't. He founded x.com as a payment system which was
| substantially less popular then paypal. Due to a bunch of
| mergers of parent companies, x.com and paypal had to merge.
| Musk became CEO and the whole thing was later sold to ebay,
| he left and cashed out big. That whole timeline unfolded in
| just a couple of years.
|
| So his actual experience is not that long. And besides that
| all unfolded in 1999. I have no idea what your age is but
| that was a different time and payment system knowledge from
| that time isn't worth that much nowadays.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| Isn't there a tell-all book or three about the founding of
| PayPal? I think many people here have read those books, and
| some readers here were involved? Please, enough breathless
| conjecture, the content is serious enough..
| watwut wrote:
| Cause these can get access to things Elon wants access to and
| will do what Elon wants. Musk does not want audit, he wants
| someone who will find exactly what Musk wants him to find and
| wont worry about legality or rules.
|
| Musk is not concerned with producing false accusation for
| example. Obviously he could find corrupt auditors and probably
| did, but those are slower. They take more time to produce what
| was asked from them.
| adolph wrote:
| > not a team of financial auditors
|
| There is a claim that many federal payments do not have
| information necessary for traditional financial audits. Maybe a
| team of forensic auditors would be more apt?
| barkingcat wrote:
| this just exposes the double standard and agism in tech
| industries. in tech, a lot of companies won't hire you in
| technical roles or as programmer because you're over 40.
|
| a lot of doge/elon's team is from the various tech companies he
| owns, so of course, they're going to be teenagers and senior
| people are pretty much laid off.
|
| think about the next tech layoff you hear in the news
| (facebook/meta, etc) and think about what portion of the layoff
| is younger than 20 and what portion are older than 40.
| nailer wrote:
| Data scientists are generally better than financial auditors at
| handling large quantities of data.
| engineer_22 wrote:
| The stakes are high for these kids. They're obviously very
| talented individuals, but they're in deep. The reality probably
| isn't lost on them.
|
| I hope they stay safe, they're doing important work.
| totallymike wrote:
| Wait, what important work are they doing?
| trickyager wrote:
| Are they, though? I'm not trying to be flippant. Rather, it's
| entirely unclear to me any positive outcome for these
| individuals or American citizen in general as a result of this
| effort. Can you provide vetted sources that accurately
| communciate actual benefits as a result of this effory for
| anyone other than Elon Musk and Donald Trump as individuals?
| try_the_bass wrote:
| > Can you provide vetted sources that accurately communciate
| actual benefits as a result of this effory for anyone other
| than Elon Musk and Donald Trump as individuals?
|
| Can you provide such sources that communicate the benefits of
| this effort for _only_ Elon Musk and Donald Trump? I have
| seen a lot of speculation on the matter, with much of it
| plausible, but nothing concrete and nothing that really
| stands up to intense scrutiny.
|
| At this point we're all working on a near-total information
| vacuum. To claim you know anything with certainty is
| presumptive, at best. To claim, with anything short of first-
| hand knowledge, that you both know exactly what is happening
| and exactly _why_ it is happening is unbelievable.
|
| Or at least it should be, but as discussion around this topic
| indicates, it's actually quite believable. Which is really a
| shame.
| belorn wrote:
| It has been a fairly common story, and part rumor, that
| intelligence agencies like to recruit young people active in the
| cyber criminal scene, and that the IT security industry also
| adapted this approach. They basically becomes part informer and
| part subject expert, especially since IT security expertise seems
| to be a difficult subject matter to teach in universities. When I
| studied IT security in university, about 10 years ago, I heard
| multiple version of this several times, with one student from my
| university getting employed because they managed to demonstrate a
| hack on a bank.
|
| I always hope that such recruits had a bit tighter surveillance
| from their employee, but no one in the industry describes such
| recruits as "highly susceptible to extortion and coercion from
| current members of the same gang", and absolutely no one
| described them as members of violent street gang. It might have
| been a fair label but at most, such teens were describe as smart
| but mischievous. Might not be the best people to be responsible
| for national security, or peoples bank accounts, but it seemed to
| be the culture of that industry.
|
| Has other people in the IT security industry had the similar
| experience of this culture?
| Quarrelsome wrote:
| while I agree there's typically a big event where the state has
| incredible leverage over the subject that is part of the flip.
| As far as we can see in this story; there is no leverage. So
| for all we know this guy is doing what he did in his last job
| and selling secrets gained working here to competitors.
|
| Imagine if DOGE feeds all the data they get their hands on into
| an LLM and he sells a copy of that to a foreign nation,
| allowing any other government a text-based interface to ask any
| questions of any of the internal workings of the US
| administration, government, citizens or even some of its
| secrets.
| notahacker wrote:
| Even without the leverage, I think that former teenage
| hackers turned pentesters or three-letter-agency adjuncts are
| hired for specific skills on the understanding they're being
| watched and they're probably not getting access to much more
| than a sandbox or _adversary_ data and the money and freedom
| 's all in scrupulously obeying the rules
|
| That feels a little different to hiring people with cracking
| credentials for auditing jobs, giving them full access to
| extensive government records (and possibly the right to
| backdoor them) in a move fast break things environment on the
| understanding that they're probably above the law and they're
| less likely to be punished than anyone barring their way.
|
| I doubt the success rate of converting teenage tearaways to
| scrupulous white hats in boring businesses is 100% either....
| donmcronald wrote:
| > They basically becomes part informer and part subject expert,
| especially since IT security expertise seems to be a difficult
| subject matter to teach in universities.
|
| I don't think the argument they can act as an informer for
| things going on inside government agencies works. They've never
| been on the inside.
|
| And I don't see what it has to do with IT security. What are
| they doing that's security related? Isn't what they're claiming
| to be doing pretty much data analysis?
|
| The only overlapping skill I can see is a willingness to
| exfiltrate data, if they're doing that, without giving
| consideration to the rules or consequences.
| nisten wrote:
| Doesn't all this make the kid a lot more practically skilled at
| the job than most regular overpaid security engineers at most
| regular corps?
| Volundr wrote:
| For security work _maybe_ but ostensibly this is accounting
| work. We are still claiming this is all an audit right?
|
| I'm not aware of anyone questioning his skillset beyond basic
| questions of experience. Rather what's being questioned is this
| person's access to highly sensitive data given his shady recent
| history.
|
| Like sure, maybe I'll hire an ex bank robber to help improve my
| security, but do I give him the code to the vault and write
| access to the inventory a year after he broke in?
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| I don't like Musk and have not for many years, but the left has
| been venerating some very flawed people for a very long time.
| It's hard to be outraged now when we've been selectively told to
| ignore the past of others.
|
| Let's not forget that Trump is the pied piper candidate promoted
| by the left to make it easier to win elections. I remember when
| Ron Desantis was successfully undermined by the news media
| casting him as weird if he was even covered at all. The left
| celebrated at the time because they assumed Trump would be easier
| to beat. When our leaders are picked by their enemies it's
| understandable that they're extremely flawed.
|
| I see it as an emergent behavior where it's easier to damage than
| it is to build, it's easier to undermine an opposition than it is
| to build up your own side.
|
| I would suggest that political parties stop trying the pied piper
| strategy but if we are to learn one thing from history it should
| be that no-one learns anything from history.
|
| > https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/1120
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| I don't blame HRC's team for trying the pied-piper strategy in
| 2016. It would have seemed rational enough at the time. It
| didn't come into play in 2020 at all, though -- do you have any
| insight to the contrary?
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| It is an emergent behavior and the negative consequences,
| that HRC was insentiviesed to use the strategy is why it's an
| emergent behavior. I don't expect parties to learn from this
| mistake and not use the strategy - but for the sake of the
| country I really wish they didn't.
|
| 2020 was an incumbency, I doubt the democrats felt they could
| realistically replace Trump with someone less likely to win.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| _HRC was insentiviesed to use the strategy is why it's an
| emergent behavior._
|
| That's not what emergent behavior is... Emergent behavior
| is _unexpected_ behavior that occurs as result of the
| addition of new rules or variables into a system arising
| from unexpected local maxima created by the confluence of
| those new rules /variables.
|
| Parties trying to get a disliked opponent to win the
| opposing primaries has been a strategy since the very
| beginning of the U.S. party system in the late 1700s. They
| do it because it can be very effective. Case in point: the
| GOP and Fox News urged Biden to run for re-election in 2024
| because he was so unpopular his campaign virtually
| guaranteed that whoever the GOP candidate was would win.
| Similarly, the GOP has spent extensive resources supporting
| Jill Steinman and Bernie Sanders in the last 3 presidential
| elections, and in 2 of those elections the margin of votes
| those candidates got in battleground states was enough to
| give them the win.(Contrapositive: Obama was the pied piper
| candidate in 2008; Fox News promoted him with the
| expectation that the GOP candidate would have an easy time
| winning and if McCain hadn't completely bungled his
| campaign that likely would have been true. )
| pjc50 wrote:
| > When our leaders are picked by their enemies
|
| This bears no relationship to reality; he won the primaries in
| the normal fashion. He's the candidate of the right, who love
| him, go to his rallies, and buy his crypto.
| 93po wrote:
| The parent comment's claim is that he won the primaries
| because corporate news deliberately and tirelessly covered
| his campaign to give him tremendous visibility, which led to
| his winning campaign. I disagree and think they covered his
| campaign because it generated clicks and therefore money,
| which is most of what they care about, and accidentally got
| him elected in the process. I think they guessed incorrectly
| at how successful he would be, probably because they're
| massively out of touch due to both being in a echo chamber
| while also extremely privileged.
| fkyoureadthedoc wrote:
| > I don't like Musk and have not for many years, but the left
| has been venerating some very flawed people for a very long
| time. It's hard to be outraged now when we've been selectively
| told to ignore the past of others.
|
| Such as? I'll be seriously impressed if you can come up with
| anywhere near the volume and severity of flaws of the people in
| Trump's orbit.
| martinsnow wrote:
| I don't understand what your comment means in context of doge?
| I'm not american so something may be lost on me.
| fragmede wrote:
| It's American for "I voted for Trump but you can't blame me
| for whats happening because I didn't want to vote for the
| other team".
| Aurornis wrote:
| > It's hard to be outraged now when we've been selectively told
| to ignore the past of others.
|
| A key tactic of the current administration is to pretend that
| all politicians are massively corrupt. This cynicism is easy to
| digest, but it normalizes bad behavior. Then when this team
| does it, they can pretend they're behaving normally.
|
| Anyone paying attention can recognize the difference, but to
| casual observers who like cynical takes it's easy to take the
| "both sides bad" bait and become numb to it.
|
| Regardless, the logic doesn't even make sense. It's literally
| the "two wrongs don't make a right" fallacy to try to defend
| this by saying that you didn't like something the other side
| did in the past. In the process, you admit this is actually bad
| too.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| _the left has been venerating some very flawed people for a
| very long time. It's hard to be outraged now when we've been
| selectively told to ignore the past of others._
|
| Name one.
|
| _Let's not forget that Trump is the pied piper candidate
| promoted by the left to make it easier to win elections....The
| left celebrated at the time because they assumed Trump would be
| easier to beat._
|
| This was not true in 2016 or in 2024. Dems preferred Cruz as an
| opponent in 2016 because he was the one candidate even more
| disliked than Hilary. In 2024, DeSantis was undermined by Fox
| News and News Nation...at Trump's urging). Trump was already
| ahead of Biden in the polls dating back to summer 2023;
| Democratic leadership would have preferred DeSantis as an
| opponent because he was extremely disliked even by Republicans
| outside of Florida (one can't claim the mantle of "family
| friendly" and "business friendly" when they go to war with
| Disney, the largest employer in their state) and they would
| have at least had a shot to retain the presidency.
| Sloowms wrote:
| It would be better to be more precise about who the left is
| according to you. If you think Hillary Clinton is the left, the
| media that is owned by billionaires or the democratic party
| leadership is left I feel like there is a wide range of
| political theory for you to learn about.
|
| One way you might learn what the left is is by looking at some
| history.
| Dowwie wrote:
| A kleptocracy is quickly coming into view and yet DOGE is only
| just getting started with its work.
| maximilianburke wrote:
| DOGE is the kleptocracy.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| The DOGE makes the poison I guess.
| ein0p wrote:
| I'd much rather Krebs actually looked into the theft of taxpayer
| funds by USAID, with all its "shrimp treadmills", "Iraqi Sesame
| Street", "transgender mice" and regime changes. I want to get to
| the leaves of that tree and see who really got my money.
| Everything else is immaterial and should be ignored as targeted
| attacks on their mission.
| wrs wrote:
| Replacing the entire security clearance and access control
| system of the government with the say-so of one guy is
| immaterial?
| ein0p wrote:
| You don't have evidence for what you just alleged, aside from
| vague, unsubstantiated allegations by Krebs.
| wrs wrote:
| I know how long it takes to get a security clearance.
| ks2048 wrote:
| I'd rather my tax dollars go to Iraqi Seasame Streeet than to
| Musk's private companies.
| stevenbedrick wrote:
| For what it's worth, and in case anybody's interested, the
| "shrimp treadmill" was funded by NSF, not USAID, and was
| exactly the kind of basic science research that the NSF is
| supposed to fund. Here's an article from 2011 that gives a lot
| of useful backstory about that story:
| https://www.npr.org/2011/08/23/139852035/shrimp-on-a-treadmi...
| whatshisface wrote:
| Why isn't all government budgetary information public to begin
| with?
| stonogo wrote:
| The majority of it is. The parts that aren't tend to be
| personal information, which is where most of the concern comes
| from about this crew bypassing data controls.
|
| This work could have been done without this slash-and-burn
| approach. It could have been done, in fact, without involving
| the government at all. The people involved did not actually
| care before, or they would have known this.
| frankharv wrote:
| I totally agree. Sunshine is the best disinfectant.
|
| It seems our Continuing Resolution method of funding the
| government is a failure.
|
| Sorta like cost plus last year.
| c-cube wrote:
| Where do you see sunshine? Are the "audits" public at all?
| It's indistinguishable from just having Musk kill every
| agency he dislikes with no further proof, while siphoning
| data to some unspecified server. The timeline also hints at
| no serious audit taking place.
| Aurornis wrote:
| Much of it is! Journalists are already using it to debunk some
| of Elon's claims like the one they only 10% of USAID reached
| intended targets (which appears to be based on his complete
| misreading of a breakdown)
|
| The real question now is where is DOGE's evidence of all of
| this corruption? There are massive claims of rampant
| corruption, such as calling the USAID corrupt to their core,
| but literally zero evidenced has been revealed to anyone. The
| interviews I've caught have been Elon giving definitive
| statements and refusing to elaborate on anything, as if we're
| supposed to trust his private judgment and ask no questions.
| ketlag wrote:
| Yup, ask no questions. That's it. That's their entire game
| plan. That no one will dare question their intellect. What's
| the point after seeing what happened with the USAID spending
| and news subscriptions? As the kids say, "we're cooked."
| default-kramer wrote:
| > where is DOGE's evidence of all of this corruption?
|
| Presumably this was published by DOGE:
| https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/02/at-usaid-
| wast...
|
| I encourage everyone to follow the links and determine the
| accuracy of the claims being made.
| rawgabbit wrote:
| The linked Breitbart article had this:
|
| " _Between 2005 and 2008, the U.S. Agency for International
| Development (USAID) devoted at least $330 million in
| funding to failed ADP projects intended to deter farmers
| and traffickers from cultivating and trafficking opium._ "
|
| The article actually said the money was intended to STOP
| opium production. But the Whitehouse Fact sheet (last
| bullet point) twisted the facts to say the complete
| opposite.
| jhp123 wrote:
| > $6 million to fund tourism in Egypt [link explains it is
| to fund economic development in North Sinai]
|
| This sounds like an absolutely expected program for USAID,
| given that it is a soft power aid agency. Egypt is a
| regional partner to the US and this province has been a
| source of Islamist violence. It also borders the Gaza
| Strip.
| discreteevent wrote:
| This is beyond belief. It's a Whitehouse website with a
| list of claims of wasted money on the part of USAID. But
| instead of evidence unearthed by DOGE the first three
| claims link to a Daily Mail page. The Daily Mail is a junk
| newspaper in the UK!
| picafrost wrote:
| I recall an aphorism that government is self-governed 90% by
| norms and 10% by law. I don't know if American law is being
| violated but certainly it is alarming to observe from the outside
| when the norms are totally disregarded.
|
| The US looks unstable and untrustworthy.
| 93po wrote:
| My issue with this content on HN isn't that the conversation is
| sometimes garbage, which it is, but that it's overwhelmingly
| people repeating the same falsehoods that might, at best, have a
| kernel of truth, but have been blown out of proportion to the
| point of just being not-true. There is very little interest in
| actually taking a step backwards, challenging beliefs and the
| propaganda fed to us by corporate news channels owned by
| billionaires, and trying to objectively evaluate information
| without "so and so is literally worse than hitler" knee-jerk
| reactions. If people could actually steel-man (I hate that
| phrase) actions and have nuanced views, that would be
| interesting, but it's basically only anti-whatever people butting
| heads with any opinion that challenges their narrative at all.
| dang wrote:
| (I detached this comment from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42992992, to save space at
| the top of the thread)
|
| I agree in principle, but these are the dynamics of every
| intense polarized issue and I don't think there's much we can
| do about it other than nibble around the margins. For example,
| we try to downweight comments that are primarily name-calling
| or flaming, in the hope of giving more oxygen to posts that are
| reflective, find something new to say, and so on.
|
| At bottom, it seems like this is just how mass psychology works
| --it's what you get when the inputs are (1) human nature, and
| (2) modern media. It stresses me out too, but I have to remind
| myself not to fight battles we can't win. That's a recipe for
| burnout and worse.
| Applejinx wrote:
| Also, when the nature of an intense polarized issue about
| things of great importance overlaps into the things Hacker
| News is about, that's when to try very hard to study what's
| happening. What's happening with modern media is Hacker News-
| adjacent. What's happening in how modern world wars are
| fought is Hacker News-adjacent.
|
| When the mechanics of how these things are put into play,
| begin to affect not only Facebook, Twitter etc but also
| Hacker News itself, that's very much Hacker News-adjacent.
| It's a meta sense where control of the discourse becomes not
| only the ground but also the figure.
|
| Hackers are eager to think they, like the internet, will
| route around any censorship. If their ways and belief systems
| are studied to the point that flagging and argument becomes
| able to unilaterally censor discourse against the wishes of
| the hackers, that's when your action of picking a thread and
| taking pains to unflag it and attempt discussion anyhow,
| becomes the right thing to do :)
| phony-account wrote:
| > "so and so is literally worse than hitler"
|
| Can you give citations for where you've seen these sorts of
| statements?
|
| However bad Musk is, I've yet to see anyone saying he is
| "literally worse than Hitler"
| 93po wrote:
| it's an example of the type of knee-jerk reactions, not a
| claim that people are literally saying that in every comment
| thread, however you're welcome to see for yourself how musk
| and hitler are discussed in the same comment constantly. it
| happens basically every day:
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.
| ..
| standardUser wrote:
| There are genuine similarities between the current
| administrations actions and the actions taken by Hitler in
| 1933 in Germany that essentially ended their reign of
| democracy, and of course people are going to write about
| that and talk about that. Toss in Musk's loud and frequent
| support for far-right parties (including in Germany), and
| top it all off with a nazi salute on national television
| and you're bound to get a few comparisons.
| cm2187 wrote:
| As all the intelligence agencies see DOGE coming their way to
| look into how they spend money, I think we will see many of those
| stories in the coming weeks.
| jdross wrote:
| I realized I'm treading in extremely hostile waters here, but the
| stories I hear from folks working in DOGE are closer to "I spend
| 8am to 2am with the leaders of department X going through all
| contracts and outflows and identifying what is important versus
| wasteful given a target of saving $X million per day, and there
| are some great people in this department who really know what's
| been going on and it's been great to make a difference"
|
| Versus whatever the media is reporting
| demosthanos wrote:
| Where are you getting these stories from? Are you claiming to
| know people and to have received firsthand accounts, or is this
| stuff written down somewhere where the rest of us can see it
| and read it?
| Aurornis wrote:
| > Versus whatever the media is reporting
|
| _Where?_ The lack of transparency from DOGE has been a pain
| point even for advocates. I haven't seen anything more than
| generic "we're doing good work, trust us" PR
|
| The media is reporting the history of some of these people and
| their actual actions. Of course these people aren't going to
| discuss their past membership in script kiddie DDoS groups or
| their highly racist Twitter rants.
| dlivingston wrote:
| I assume you're hearing this online. Can you link to some
| accounts or articles?
| ttpphd wrote:
| Gullibility is a thing, which is why we demand people go
| through channels of accountability, including security
| clearances.
| tayo42 wrote:
| What the media is reporting isn't relevant. We have Elons own
| word where he is saying he shut downtown various departments,
| intends to or canceling payments, having people arrested.
| Others are trying to cause a scene on social media by sharing
| cut out spreadsheets.
| bearjaws wrote:
| If you are mad at your AWS bill, do you slide to your 10th line
| item? That is effectively what going after USAID is.
|
| To give you an idea of how poorly this has been handled, my
| wife's friend is an attorney working in non-profit immigration.
|
| She got told on Monday that her company is going to lay off 50%
| of their staff because they have no more money from USAID. Her
| boss found her a job at another firm a week later thankfully.
| Then Friday she got called by the CEO to come back since it
| turns out they were not going to get cut. Obviously, she
| declined.
|
| They are messing with real peoples lives and destroying
| businesses that help people.
|
| Is the goal to save money? Balance the budget? If so, fixing
| tax loop holes and going after waste in the military will yield
| more than 10x what cutting USAID does.
|
| FWIW I'm all for fixing government spending, but treating it
| like a CI/CD pipeline where you will just "rollback" is
| idiotic.
| vimy wrote:
| Marco Rubio said that USAID wasn't listening to orders. They
| were a rogue agency. From other things I've read it has been
| an issue for multiple administrations.
|
| Watch here:
| https://x.com/defiantls/status/1888533363117449619?s=46
| bearjaws wrote:
| You need to understand when he says "irrespective of
| whether its in national interests" he means helping
| immigrants and asylum seekers, who are here legally even.
|
| They listen to orders from many parts of the government,
| some of those are even conflicting orders. It's not like
| they are just doing whatever they want 90% of the time.
| Their money comes from who again?
| caspper69 wrote:
| > Marco Rubio said that USAID wasn't listening to orders.
| They were a rogue agency. From other things I've read it
| has been an issue for multiple administrations.
|
| Where the fsck are you from? The weren't "listening to
| _orders_ "? They were a _rogue_ agency?
|
| Who even talks like that?
|
| The fact that you quoted Rubio and linked to X tells me all
| I need to know about the "other things you've read".
|
| I've been reading conservative media for decades and I
| can't recall the last time I saw A SINGLE ARTICLE about
| USAid. Like ever.
|
| Yeah, must've been a real big issue for multiple
| administrations.
| matwood wrote:
| For all the talk of legacy media, I assume anything posted
| on X is misinformation. And Rubio only cares about possibly
| being POTUS one day. Please post an article of any other
| administration that has ever complained about USAID being
| 'rogue'?
| dashundchen wrote:
| Orders can be given that are unconstitutional or unlawful.
| Congress appropriates and designates funds, it is illegal
| for the executive to impound funds Congress appropriate.
| Unfortunately the GOP is happy to hand over their power in
| Congress and walk right into a dictatorship.
| kolanos wrote:
| > non-profit immigration
|
| Very vague. Wonder what they were really doing?
|
| I worked for a USAID funded company once. On the surface they
| were doing satellite imagery analysis for agriculture. Want
| to know what they were really doing? Identifying prime
| agricultural land in Kenya to help the Kenyan government
| seize it from poor farmers.
| archagon wrote:
| Regardless of what the media is reporting, the head of DOGE is
| gleefully gloating about all the departments he's "deleting" on
| Twitter. No hint of collaboration, just attack after attack.
| And he keeps framing federal workers as the enemy.
| giarc wrote:
| If that were the case, why lock out democratic law makers from
| the building(s)?
| crazygringo wrote:
| This would be great if true.
|
| Unfortunately, from what we know of the people they've hired,
| they have little to no experience in doing that. They're not
| being transparent, we have no idea what metrics they're using,
| etc.
|
| If the team was meant to actually do what you claim, it would
| look very different in terms of its hiring, and there's no
| reason it would have to be operating so secretively.
| apical_dendrite wrote:
| This doesn't even line up with what Elon is saying publicly.
| Mike Flynn searches a public database for grants to
| organizations with the word "Lutheran" in them and then Elon
| tweets that they're all illegal and will be canceled. How is
| that a thoughtful process for identifying wasteful spending?
|
| Or Elon saying he's "deleting" the IRS free file group. How is
| that wasteful? It's providing a service that actually solves a
| real problem for people - people have complained for years
| about having to pay TurboTax to file their taxes. What metric
| is being used to decide if it's wasteful? It seems entirely
| like government by whim.
|
| And if they really think there are great people in these
| departments, why are they terrorizing them? Right now federal
| workers are facing daily emails telling them to quit, their
| bosses calling them unproductive, chaos and upheaval at work,
| and many of them are going to have to make these huge life
| changes to suddenly return to the office (long commutes,
| disruption to childcare and other schedules, maybe having to
| move on short notice). To my knowledge, all of the companies
| that did RTO gave much more notice.
| brandonagr2 wrote:
| Disbanding 18F (a government IT / consulting type group), who
| happened to help build the IRS free file product, is not at
| all the same thing as deleting the "IRS free file group",
| free file is is still right here https://directfile.irs.gov/
| demosthanos wrote:
| > in 25 states
|
| Will the program advance into other states after the
| dissolution of the organization that created it? Will it be
| kept up to date? Or will it quietly disappear in the name
| of efficiency?
| apical_dendrite wrote:
| Any confusion here is on Elon.
|
| He was responding to a tweet that featured a screenshot
| from the IRS website about Direct File. The tweet said
| "18F, the far left government wide computer office that was
| recently taken over by allies of @elonmusk, is also the
| same agency that built Elizabeth Warren's "Direct File" tax
| program. Direct File puts the government in charge of
| preparing people's tax returns for them". To which Musk
| responded "That group has been deleted".
|
| If you google "Elon musk free file" you'll see dozens of
| articles with headlines like "Elon Musk creates confusion
| about IRS' Direct File".
|
| It's unclear to me what the impact of "deleting" the group
| that built that product is. It's unclear whether Elon wants
| to delete that product and not just the team that built it,
| and given that they are suddenly shutting down whole
| agencies without regard for the fallout, it's unclear
| whether he will get rid of it.
|
| It's a hell of a way to run a government.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| So why is their boss tweeting out outrageous lies about what
| they've found?
|
| Don't they feel any moral compunction to say publicly, actually
| that is a complete misrepresentation of what we've found?
| Fauntleroy wrote:
| Maybe you could point some of the media to these primary
| sources you're citing.
| j_timberlake wrote:
| The more advanced AI gets and the more power that is at stake,
| the more these tech CEOs are going to drop their nice-guy acts
| and reveal their true intentions. The drama is going to get much
| worse over the coming years.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| Worth noting that some of the most well-known cybersecurity
| experts today are former cyber criminals. It may be worth
| investigating his past, but a person's past is often used to
| attack their character when there is no other argument to make.
| If we were all judged solely on our past, we'd all be perpetually
| guilty.
| tonymet wrote:
| That's true. And in most other posts, the HN community is
| predominantly supportive of cyber criminals redeeming
| themselves as security experts. It's informative that this case
| receives the opposite reception.
| lolc wrote:
| A security expert does not need access. They serve in
| advisory roles.
| pityJuke wrote:
| My mental comparison is someone like Marcus Hutchins [0]. He
| committed some relatively low-level cybercrime, redeemed
| himself, and served a punishment for it.
|
| That's someone I'm absolutely OK with rejoining the real
| world.
|
| But the critical thing is the community Coristine was a part
| of. It is legitimately classified as a child exploitation
| ring, and as a terror ring. That requires a lot more eyebrows
| before one even begins consider him rehabilitated.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Hutchins
| miltonlost wrote:
| Worth noting that this kid did this black hat shit like 3 years
| ago, not 30. This isn't the kid's past; this is his very big
| present.
|
| We should be judging someone's recent behavior and possible
| skeletons when it comes to a security clearance. Otherwise,
| that's how someone is able to be compromised.
| fujinghg wrote:
| I used to hang around with the late 90s's versions of these guys.
| I grew up, had a family, have had a successful career. They went
| to prison. I expect the same will happen to this lot.
| tonymet wrote:
| Almost all the top tier infosec professionals had a grey-hat
| history. The successful ones are not likely cringe posting on
| LinkedIn so you wouldn't have any idea of the successes, only
| the failures.
|
| Of course we all want to say : see, obedience and hard work
| pays off. I'm glad I didn't do anything reckless. The truth is
| that the real successful people keep it to themselves.
| apical_dendrite wrote:
| I hung around with some guys like this too. I wouldn't trust
| them with even a trivial amount of money. They threw some fun
| parties though.
| n1b0m wrote:
| Except in this case they'll probably get sweeping presidential
| pardons
| AlexCoventry wrote:
| How do I access this "Com"? I'm curious.
| Quarrelsome wrote:
| I might suggest that if you have to ask then you shouldn't be
| going there.
| layer8 wrote:
| Probably by doing something that gets you an invite.
| mmastrac wrote:
| The reason security clearances are so important, and why people
| are so upset about randos going through so much sensitive
| government information, is that things like this can be used by
| adversaries to lean on these employees in the future.
|
| One of these kids might have worse skeletons in their closet.
| Given how well-known their names are, adversaries of the USA are
| likely combing through their own intelligence archives, etc and
| might decide to extract their own pound of flesh from the
| government.
|
| Or, even more horrible, they might have family that adversaries
| can lean on.
|
| Subverting the process to meme faster and blitz the other side
| puts the entire American system in pretty serious danger. If it's
| more important to destroy the system than make serious change, I
| suppose that's how you'd do it.
| watwut wrote:
| I am genuinely more concerned by Elon Musk himself having
| access then one of these with skeletons in the closet. USA
| adversaries are no more dangerous then USA is to itself.
| adolph wrote:
| > Or, even more horrible, they might have family that
| adversaries can lean on.
|
| Isn't that the case for any government employee?
| mmastrac wrote:
| Security clearance will include family members, and it's
| entirely possible someone will be denied clearance because of
| something they've done that makes them susceptible to
| coercion. The candidate would need to disclose things like
| this.
|
| Reddit is full of examples where someone's family impacted
| their clearance (either denying it or requiring disclosure):
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEngineers/comments/4d4xd8/possib.
| ..
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/LawSchool/comments/11pkjew/will_a_f.
| ..
|
| etc
| risyachka wrote:
| Also a lot of consequences of musks actions will appear only
| decades later and they will claim they have nothing to do with
| it.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| To be clear, the security clearances you're talking about, that
| look at "skeletons in their closet" or family members or
| whatever is not applied to MOST federal positions. This is only
| for a subset that are more sensitive. The type of activity
| people involved in DOGE are taking on does not require security
| clearances, just a background check. Also keep in mind, the
| people involved in DOGE are working alongside senior people,
| alongside people from agencies, and not just off on their own
| the way the media has been painting. Treasury secretary Bessent
| discussed this recently in public.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Of all the ways for China, Russia, Iran, Israel, etc. to get
| access to sensitive data like this, these events feel like
| they're by a wide margin the most likely way for them to do so.
|
| These people are going to cut corners and be sloppy and stuff is
| just going to end up on USB keys and whatnot.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| _If we end up with yet-another interchangeable flamewar about
| $BigTopic, that will only confirm that the flaggers were right_ '
|
| No it won't. That would only be true if the flaggers were
| disinterested judges who never comment. You're projecting your
| desire for a good civil discussion onto them without considering
| the possibility that any of them could be flagging or commenting
| in bad faith, ie with a view to shaping the outcome of the
| discussion rather than optimizing the quality thereof.
| dang wrote:
| Edit: oh wait, I think I understand you now. When I said "that
| will only confirm that the flaggers were right", I did _not_
| mean "that will only confirm that the flaggers all had the
| right motive". (Obviously not all of them do, as I've explained
| below.) Rather, I meant "that will only confirm that this
| submission wasn't a good one for HN, and therefore it was good
| that it got flagged (even though not every flag was rightly
| motivated)".
|
| -- original comment --
|
| I've detached this comment from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42992992 in order to save
| space at the top of the thread. (Btw normally I just turn off
| replies on pinned-to-the-top comments, but in this case I
| wanted to give people a chance to post their responses.)
|
| > That would only be true if the flaggers were disinterested
| judges who never comment.
|
| I don't follow this argument. Can you rephrase it?
|
| Flagging flamewars is an appropriate use of flagging on HN. If
| this thread turns into the kind of flamewar we normally want to
| see flagged, that's evidence in favor of the users who made
| that call in the first place.
|
| > the possibility that any of them could be flagging or
| commenting in bad faith
|
| Of course. I've made this point many times about flags,
| including in this thread
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42993092): there's
| usually two kinds of flaggers: users who want to suppress a
| story because they don't like it (e.g. politically), and users
| who feel like the story isn't in keeping with the site
| guidelines and are worried about protecting HN. I assume by
| "bad faith" you mean the first kind.
| malkia wrote:
| Mao's Red Army in the digital world...
| purplethinking wrote:
| You're equating cutting waste spending to murdering professors.
| Like you've been screaming "nazi", "fascist" and "bigot" at
| anything you dislike for the past 15 years. Your hyperbole
| holds no power anymore.
| malkia wrote:
| How would you know what I've been screaming for the last 15
| years? I said in the "digital world" - equating what a
| dumbass does with his goons thinking he knows everything.
|
| Most of us here are software engineers, we all know that
| sudden change causes issues, even if it's for the good. He
| does this without any transparency, and just spits out like a
| cowboy programmer - "Here I saved it! I'm the hero! I've
| changed the whole `codebase` on Friday afternoon - so enjoy!"
|
| No it doesn't work like this... Sorry
| lenerdenator wrote:
| All I can think of when I hear about DOGE is Robert McNamara's
| Department of Defense, where the "Whiz Kids" from industry and
| academia were supposed to magically fix all sorts of problems
| with the military's bureaucracy. After all, they went to the
| right schools, and really, how hard could war-making be?
|
| We lost in Vietnam and there are people being born there with
| birth defects from Operation Ranch Hand to this day partially due
| to their work, but at least they got to pad out their resumes and
| were set for life as consultants.
| Kinrany wrote:
| > After all, they went to the right school
|
| The selection process here appears to have been the opposite of
| traditional credentialism
| jenny91 wrote:
| It's a new spin on an old idea. Software whiz kids are what a
| part of society now see as the cream of the crop.
| chmorgan_ wrote:
| Why the security concerns now and not with the thousands of
| employees with potentially similar access? NOW it's a concern
| because the idea occurred to people that who might have access to
| data is important? Imo the faux outrage is so far beyond rational
| that it turns people away. Let's have a reasonable discussion
| about data access and controls, and whether they are being
| followed, rather than some reflexive response based on political
| points of view.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Because controls ensures that people stay honest. I worked on a
| treasury system for a significant (not federal) organization.
| By design, I couldn't even see aspects of the system directly.
|
| When you give people unfettered access to sensitive
| information, your risk is exponentially greater. Those people
| can be compromised, tricked, engage in fraud, be victims or
| frauds, etc.
|
| Worse, because access is unfettered and controls bypassed, you
| may never know.
| conception wrote:
| Uhh the other employees did go through the proper reviews?
| That's why they are employees. That's why there isn't outrage
| at people who were hired and vetted for their jobs.
| RIMR wrote:
| > Why the security concerns now and not with the thousands of
| employees with potentially similar access?
|
| Because there aren't "thousands of employees" with this kind of
| access, and few people who have had it were thoroughly vetted.
|
| > Let's have a reasonable discussion about data access and
| controls, and whether they are being followed, rather than some
| reflexive response based on political points of view.
|
| We are well beyond partisan "points of view" here. This isn't
| really about policy, this is about the law and whether or not
| anyone has any interest in enforcing it.
| themgt wrote:
| _Because there aren 't "thousands of employees" with this
| kind of access, and few people who have had it were
| thoroughly vetted._
|
| I mean, we've had multiple classified info leaks by low-level
| employees, most recently a 20 year old Massachusetts Air
| National Guard member who leaked hundreds of top secret
| Pentagon docs on the Ukraine War to his bros on the "Thug
| Shaker Central" Discord channel. Some hundreds of thousands
| of people had access to this stuff. If there are specific
| subsets of documents with very limited need-to-know access,
| you need to be clear about which documents and how many
| people have access.
|
| _We are well beyond partisan "points of view" here. This
| isn't really about policy, this is about the law and whether
| or not anyone has any interest in enforcing it._
|
| Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution: "The executive
| Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of
| America." The law is the president has ultimate authority
| over the executive branch and e.g. all classified information
| and can disclose it to anyone he wants. Obviously there are
| certain asterisks and exceptions to this authority, so if you
| want to be specific about which laws being violated please go
| ahead, but painting with a broad brush that individuals who
| have been delegated authority by the president are breaking
| the law by accessing executive branch information is
| unserious.
|
| The claim that no one in America is enforcing the law anymore
| is extremely grave and should not be made lightly by a civic
| minded person.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Teixeira#Publication_of_l.
| ..
| woah wrote:
| Data access controls couldn't have been followed in this case,
| given the short timelines, right?
| spdgg wrote:
| The security concerns are addressed in the article. The answer
| to your question is in there, and your comment is easily
| interpreted as the same reflexive outrage you think others are
| guilty of.
| xyst wrote:
| Why this unvetted person(s) has been allowed to even touch or
| access critical systems speaks volumes about the state of US
| government.
|
| We are at the neoliberal endgame. Billionaires and multibillion
| dollar corporations received massive tax cuts during the first
| term, and this will likely continue under the second term. He's
| going all out for this billionaire donors, buddies, and of course
| himself. We have a kleptocracy at the federal level with the
| intent to dismantle it as much as possible.
|
| End game here is federal/people control end, and "network states"
| (balaji) model with corporations acting as governance over land,
| regions, and law.
|
| Thiel and the rest of the billionaire class are the parasites
| that need to be purged. Whether we will recover after 4 years
| remains to be seen.
| austinwade wrote:
| Wait until you find out about the grift that the billionaires
| you don't hear so much about have been pulling. I agree with
| your concerns around turbulence, but the audits of these shady
| government agencies needs to be done.
| milesrout wrote:
| I don't see how this kind of story is on-topic for HN. Yes, we
| all appreciate that HN is more than just a website for discussing
| garbage collection algorithms, graph algorithms, javascript
| frameworks, etc (i.e. computer science and programming) but isn't
| it meant to be about things that hackers would find interesting
| _by virtue of being hackers_?
|
| My understanding of that broader topicality was that it was
| intended to capture things like science news ("Feynman's lectures
| have been published online for free" or "The Higgs Boson has been
| confirmed"), interesting posts and articles of other kinds (e.g.
| that series of posts of horror stories about dangerous chemical
| compounds - "why I will never work with supernitroglycerin" etc)
| and occasionally general news stories of such significance that
| ANYONE would want to discuss them (eg. Russian troops have
| invaded Ukraine).
|
| That isn't what I am seeing here. There is now almost always
| general American political "news" on the front page. It isn't
| particularly newsworthy. It feels like the only reason it is here
| is that people here don't have anywhere else to discuss it
| because HN is one of the few decent forums left on the Web. But
| that doesn't make it on-topic, surely?
|
| I often see you remove flags from posts. What's the point of
| having the flagging mechanism if you just remove them when people
| complain? You say there's interesting new information, but is
| everything that is interesting on-topic? Or is the test narrower:
| it should be interesting to hackers _by virtue of their being
| hackers_. I am sure this is interesting to many hackers that are
| also US political junkies (which I mean in a neutral way) but not
| because they are hackers.
|
| Do you see what I mean?
| throwup238 wrote:
| I don't know how many flags it takes to flag kill a whole
| article, but the threshold for comments is two or three flags.
| It doesn't take a lot of people to kill an entire topic of
| discussion by flagging related articles, especially for users
| who only peruse the front page. Brigading on this site is
| almost trivial.
|
| Dang's anti-flagging mechanism is the human factor that
| balances that very blunt automated system. People don't seem to
| vouch for articles as much as for comments.
| ctrlp wrote:
| That's all well and good for the submissions themselves, but
| you can't have the kind of balanced discussions dang is
| calling for when comments in conflict with the HN moral
| "majority" are flagged and downvoted. There should be an
| anti-downvoting/flagging facility employed to protect sincere
| commenters expressing heretical opinions.
| epakai wrote:
| It is the same feature. Maybe you haven't seen it because
| it is less visible.
|
| Dead submissions have a vouch link on the new page. Dead
| comments require clicking on the comment timestamp before
| the vouch link becomes visible.
|
| In either case you need showdead enabled on your profile,
| and to have met the karma threshold for vouch links to
| appear.
| throwup238 wrote:
| _> There should be an anti-downvoting /flagging facility_
|
| Like _up_ voting and vouching?
|
| To be honest, I don't think that comments are the problem.
| The community _mostly_ does a good job of policing itself,
| especially once a thread gets enough visibility*. The
| problem is all the threads that get killed before they
| reach the front page (this post is a case in point).
|
| * Although I will admit there are glaring blindspots you
| could drive a Panamax tanker through (especially political
| ones on the boundary between ideologies).
| atoav wrote:
| I don't see how this _isn 't_ hacker news: "What is the
| technical education of the teenager with security clearance to
| the network of the org that is responsible for nukes"
|
| That sounds *literallyf like the plot for any 80s hacker movie
| out there. You know, when hacking was political and hackers
| were people interested in undermining structures of authority
| and bending the rules.
|
| That is the origin of hacking, and as such it is totally in
| order to discuss such topics here, IMO.
|
| I'd rather read stuff like this than another CEOs musings that
| are entirely marketing and make believe (cue Sam Altman). Just
| because it affirms billionairs viewpoints of the status quo
| doesn't make it apolitical. If it feels apolitical to you that
| probably says something about your political biases.
| milesrout wrote:
| I mean hacker in the proper sense not in the colloquial/black
| hat sense.
|
| I agree that content marketing posts are not the best but
| they can be interesting despite the underlying motivation for
| the posts being marketing instead of curiosity. Sometimes the
| result is interesting regardless. Removing content marketing
| means having to try to guess the motivations of authors which
| is fraught. Yeah sometimes it is obvious but not always.
| computerthings wrote:
| Oh, so the CCC aren't "proper" hackers now? Where can I see
| that memo?
|
| https://media.ccc.de/
|
| Lots of political stuff, in context most importantly
| https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-correctiv-recherche-
| geheimplan-g...
|
| Whereas any old thing that "might be interesting" is fine
| when it comes from a rich person? Make a poll at the CCC,
| or Defcon, about the value of such posts, I'd be very
| curious.
| talldayo wrote:
| > It isn't particularly newsworthy.
|
| I disagree. Krebsonsecurity has regularly delivered HN salient
| and interesting frontpage material, and this is currently the
| most flagged submission they've ever had on HN. We've discussed
| security assessments very similar to this in the past, even
| political ones, with technical curiosity and good faith
| discussion. The constraining factor is now people who
| unconditionally idolize Elon Musk. It's easy to see who's in
| the wrong with flagging relevant, well-written and objective
| reports like this one.
|
| My personal view is that HN shouldn't promote political content
| at all. It should just be moderated out or flagged with no
| opportunity for recourse, whether it's Syrian independence or
| the invasion of Ukraine. But I abide by the exceptions made in
| HN's guidelines and consider this a technically imperative
| article that most can tune out if they dislike. It's very easy
| to see the title and decide for yourself whether you're
| comfortable reading and discussing the article.
| c22 wrote:
| I think the fact that we keep hearing about DOGE grey-area
| accessing of computer systems run by the US government and not
| about whatever else the Trump administration is currently doing
| is pretty good evidence that HN maintains a bias towards
| stories of interest to hackers. Like it or not, I think most of
| the hackers here are also US citizens.
| jacobjjacob wrote:
| This site is called hacker news... the article is news about
| hackers
| fragmede wrote:
| Ignoring the US politics angle, would this post have been
| flagged? It's Brian Krebs, back after being DDoSed yet again,
| reporting on hackers hacking. doxing and swatting people.
| hacking. That's not of interest on _hacker_ news? If, then, the
| subject without the political angle, would have been of
| interest here, then why does adding, yes, a highly contentious
| topic on top of that, make it of _less_ interest to the
| community?
| dang wrote:
| (I've detached this comment from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42992992 in order to save
| space at the top of the thread).
|
| This is a (very) well-explored issue on HN and the solution we
| arrived at has been stable for many years: most stories about
| politics are off topic, as the guidelines say
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), but some
| stories with political overlap are on topic (https://hn.algolia
| .com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...).
|
| Here are a couple recent posts to look at if you (or anyone)
| want to understand the principles by which we decide which ones
| get to count as "on topic":
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42978389
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42911011
|
| If you read those and follow the links there, and still have a
| question I haven't answered, I'd be happy to take a crack at
| it.
|
| > What's the point of having the flagging mechanism if you just
| remove them when people complain?
|
| I made precisely the same point a few minutes ago!
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42993906
|
| The answer is that we don't "just remove them when people
| complain". We only remove them sometimes, when doing so seems
| in keeping with the principles by which we moderate HN.
| varsketiz wrote:
| An angle I didn't notice discussed here on HN is that while this
| confusion about DOGE among the general US public continues, it's
| a great time for China to advance it's agenda and to weaken the
| US.
| fsckboy wrote:
| a ton of replies to dang's adminsitraviata comment are
| highjacking his "sticky" to coattail all their comments to the
| top, and the comments are generally right on the edge of being
| what dang's comment is trying to warn against.
|
| I'd flag them all but fear that would appear heavy handed
| milesrout wrote:
| I am responding to the content of Daniel's comment, not
| hijacking his comment to coattail my views of the article
| itself. I think the replies to his comment are the most
| appropriate place to respond to it.
|
| The effect you describe is an unfortunate side effect of any
| threaded forum where the ordering of sibling posts is
| determined by some measure of quality: all responses to the
| first top-level comment, no matter the quality, precede the
| second top-level comment, which is probably of higher quality
| (on average). This is one of many reasons that threaded
| comments are flawed. Flat comments (phpBB style) of course have
| their own flaws and chronological threaded comments (LWN for
| example) have their own too.
| dang wrote:
| (I've detached this comment from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42992992 in order to save
| space at the top of the thread.)
|
| Normally we turn off replies on pinned comments to avoid this
| problem, but today I decided to leave it open, to give people a
| chance to air their objections/counterarguments/feelings and
| hopefully get responded to.
|
| However, to avoid the thread ballooning at the top of the page,
| I'm also detaching these subthreads as I reply to them.
| davesque wrote:
| Seems safe to assume that the DOGE kids probably scored copies of
| the data they had access to even if that access was or will be
| revoked, especially considering that some of them have a history
| of data theft as mentioned in the article.
| swat535 wrote:
| I am wondering what will happen at the end of all of this? I see
| a few possibilities here:
|
| 1. Either this project will be a tremendous success for the
| American people, saving millions and uncovering massive fraud and
| waste in the government thanks to the audits
|
| 2. It will ab a complete failure, nothing of value will get
| discovered, published and time and money will be wasted for
| everyone involved (giving the DNC a huge attack vector for the
| next election)
|
| 3. Alternatively, some efforts may yield some positive net
| results but others will fail to bring anything of value in
| fruition, this to me, seems to most realistic outcome, but who
| knows?
|
| This is going to be an interesting experiment for the rest of the
| world to watch.
| daveguy wrote:
| You left out this possibility:
|
| A critical subversion of cybersecurity in the United States
| that leads to decades of compromised computer systems
| throughout our society -- from infrastructure to military to
| banking. I heard someone refer to this as a speedrun of the
| fall of the roman empire, and given the lack of ethics at the
| top levels of this administration I wouldn't be surprised.
|
| "giving the DNC a huge attack vector..." -- I think you're
| mistaking an attack vector for a realization that this regime
| is incompetent and against the safety and security of the
| United States population.
| matwood wrote:
| I'm thinking 2/3, but the part you're missing is that the
| process will destroy US influence around the world. Which may
| be the real point of all this. It's hard to know where Musk's
| allegiances really lie.
|
| With that said, the US has been in the dominant world position
| for so long, it's like they forget what it takes to be there.
| Soft power, by giving people food and support - like USAID
| does, is part of what helps keep the US in that dominant
| position.
| aranw wrote:
| I don't really understand how this is an audit? Shutting down
| departments, getting root access to systems, read/write access
| to codebases these are hardly the actions of auditors doing a
| audit. Does a audit really require this level of access?
| keyme wrote:
| This is an audit that is actually meant to get results
| mijamo wrote:
| There are way more possibilities. And the main one is that any
| negative effect would only be visible in a long time (let's say
| 10 years) and by that time it may take 10-20 years again to
| change course.
|
| For instance say you lower standards for building bridges, how
| do you assess the success? First you may notice nothing,
| because all bridges under construction stay with their design,
| so consequence 0. After a few years, construction costs may go
| down because the new standard allow to cut some corners. Great!
| Success! Now 30 years in the future maybe suddenly the bridge
| has a failure that costs 20x the savings at the time of
| construction. Well suddenly not great. But changing the
| standard at that point would not fix all the bridges built over
| those 30 years.
|
| Evaluating public policies is often very hard and it's
| sometimes only possible a long time after. I would also say
| that weather or not a policy is good or has positive impact has
| little impact on winning or losing elections. Lots of terrible
| policies can win you voters. Just like building the best
| product is not the easiest way to make money. For both goods
| and elections, playing on emotions works a lot better.
| palata wrote:
| You seem pretty optimistic. A plausible alternative is that it
| really ends up hurting the US.
|
| In some way, it has started hurting the US. Ask anyone in the
| world who is not a US citizen if they think the US is stable. I
| think the answer has changed a lot in, say, the last 10 years.
| cytocync wrote:
| Elon Musk's DOGE team is raising eyebrows with their seemingly
| reckless behavior.
|
| Their actions are causing concern for several reasons:
|
| * A 19-year-old with a questionable past has been given access to
| sensitive US government systems. * The team is reportedly using
| this access to dig through student loan data. * This could
| potentially put millions of Americans at risk of identity theft
| or other forms of financial exploitation.
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