Also relevant: The DOGE team set up a Starlink satellite at the White House [1].
DOGE staff installed the terminal on the Eisenhower Executive Office Building roof in February 2025 without notifying White House communications or cybersecurity teams, ignoring their prior warnings [2]. The resulting "Starlink Guest" Wi-Fi used only a password—no usernames or two-factor authentication—unlike standard networks requiring full VPN tunneling and device logging.
This allowed devices to evade monitoring, transmit untracked data outside secure channels, and potentially enable leaks or hacks, as noted by former officials and experts like ex-NSA hacker Jake Williams. A confrontation ensued with Secret Service when DOGE accessed the roof unannounced [3].
> This allowed devices to evade monitoring, transmit untracked data outside secure channels, and potentially enable leaks or hacks
Pretty sure that was the point
scroot 3 hours ago [-]
This comes on the heels of the AHA and other parties in the suit against the government posting the video depositions of some of the DOGE people to youtube [1], which are fascinating to watch.
Justin Fox not being able to say what DEI is really tells you everything you need to know about how grants were cancelled.
He says it just fine. It's about "females" and "elevating the voices of marginalised groups" that he thinks is clearly "discriminatory". Don't think for a second that these people are dumb, they knowingly support this, just refuse to incriminate themselves further in front of people who can hold them accountable. It's no accident that he tries to sound like Musk.
Linkd 1 hours ago [-]
Exactly. By repeatedly saying "the definition is exactly what the EO said," he’s essentially deflecting responsibility and shifting the accountability upstream.
helpfulclippy 1 hours ago [-]
What I hate about it is that I listen to that and hear not so much actual brazen idiocy, as yet another example of flaws in an obviously defective process being exploited to deflect accountability. The meta for depositions at this point is such that the ideal witness is a lot like someone who has just experienced severe head trauma. They can sound insane, idiotic, clueless, lazy, forgetful, obtuse, anything in the world except liable.
Henchman21 39 minutes ago [-]
Its almost like the worst people among us have discovered that in high-trust societies if you have no morals you can engage in any behavior you wish.
saltyoldman 30 seconds ago [-]
It sounds like you're describing Somali scammers in MN?
lostlogin 22 minutes ago [-]
And they are succeeding.
Challenge it and they escalate.
What’s the solution?
deiisrascst 11 minutes ago [-]
[flagged]
JumpCrisscross 4 minutes ago [-]
> I'll be down voted into oblivion, but no one will actually present a coherent a counter argument
Is there a term for this Jehovah’s Witness complex where being ignored is taken as a sign of one’s faith?
aestetix 3 hours ago [-]
> The Post is not naming the former DOGE member or company because it has not independently confirmed the accusations in the complaint.
Why not? Shouldn't the public be allowed to learn who all the DOGE employees were? Federal employees are public record, are they not?
NicuCalcea 3 hours ago [-]
They're not naming them because they haven't been able to confirm the wrongdoing, not because they can't publish the names of DOGE employees.
paul7986 1 hours ago [-]
DOGE was headhunting me late July through end of December.
Their recruiters are all anonymous when they reach out as they do not provide their names. I constantly questioned to myself and them directly if they were legit even if their email address showed as RecruitingUSDS@doge.eop.gov (their public email address seen on USDS). The first recruiter I demanded a video call with and asked him to bob and weave his head (lol). He never gave me his last name (all his emails came from that public address and they signed their emails with first name only) but I found him on Linkedin. He was late 20s to late 30s. From there I was asked to do/turned in a case study and after the govt shutdown I was invited to interview with a DOGE employee whom then her email showed her full name. I didnt make it past her as there was another step in their process which is an in person interview at USDS's office or within another govt agency DOGE working at.
Helloworldboy 3 hours ago [-]
[dead]
starkparker 12 minutes ago [-]
If the Post named you as someone who did something, and you didn't do that thing, and that thing harmed you in some way, you would sue them. That would cost the Post money, and they obviously don't want to spend money on anything that their staff does.
WarmWash 3 hours ago [-]
The public is...unintelligent, and generally incapable of differentiating between an accusation and a conviction.
jsbisviewtiful 2 hours ago [-]
Not like the current admin and AI companies are helping with that at all. Also, anyone in that department has brought great harm to the entire country and their employment should be public knowledge.
aestetix 3 hours ago [-]
There are two stories here. One is the alleged wrongdoing. The second is the fact that the Washington Post has a name of a former DOGE employee. I'm far more interested in the second story than the first.
WarmWash 3 hours ago [-]
Asking for a list of all DOGE employees is different than asking for the name of the single accused employee. It wouldn't make any sense for the media to publish a list of every DOGE employee in the context of this story.
2 hours ago [-]
ajross 2 hours ago [-]
Right, because indiscriminately hoovering data about people and their activities and affiliations for the benefit of someone else is clearly immoral.
Oh, wait.
1 hours ago [-]
tastyface 33 minutes ago [-]
Every DOGE member is complicit, and every single name should be published. They knew what they were getting into.
kbos87 2 hours ago [-]
It’s an allegation, and the names of alleged perpetrators of crimes are rarely protected like this. Certainly feels like special treatment.
estimator7292 1 hours ago [-]
Because in a civilized society, everyone is presumed innocent until proven guilty and the accused are given some level of privacy until that happens.
lazyasciiart 15 minutes ago [-]
But we are in the USA, where the majority of convicted criminals were never proven guilty because the system relies on coercing them into not going to trial.
sylos 24 minutes ago [-]
We no longer live in a civilized society
batch12 39 minutes ago [-]
Someone should tell that to the people who publish the gas station mugshot magazines.
withinboredom 1 hours ago [-]
Say who? Literally the entire news media loves airing trials before they're proven innocent or guilty.
ramon156 1 hours ago [-]
Depends who it benefits
charcircuit 2 hours ago [-]
Such information would purely be used for harassment.
Agency:
"Social Security initially denied Borges’s allegations and said the data referenced in his complaint is stored in a secure environment walled-off from the internet."
Ah walled of the internet, so no one can get there and copy the data to a flashdrive. Move on, move on!
You can't make that up.
hodgesrm 3 hours ago [-]
> You can't make that up.
Unfortunately it seems quite believable. This is the same outfit that fired a bunch of people responsible for overseeing the US Nuclear Arsenal. [0] The combination of arrogance and stupidity was breathtaking.
The only way someone could get that data is if they demanded physical access and fired anyone who stood in the way. An impossible task if you ask me!
hotsauceror 2 hours ago [-]
If I recall, that was exactly what happened early on in DOGE's tenure. Senior personnel were explicitly directed to grant admin access to DOGE personnel, and auditing/logging were disabled. This was widely reported at the time. I don't remember whether there were threats of termination, but it would not surprise me.
lelandbatey 2 hours ago [-]
Yes, that's the joke
hotsauceror 2 hours ago [-]
Sorry. I started switching off of coffee this week...
tantalor 2 hours ago [-]
> secure environment
> copied to a flashdrive
Both of these cannot be true. A secure environment does not allow trivial data exfiltration over USB.
HillRat 2 hours ago [-]
Contemporaneous reporting was that DOGE people demanded root-level access across multiple systems (disallowed by federal policy, so political appointees had to demand the access) and without background checks or onboarding, after which they extracted protected data and shoved it in some S3 buckets. Just blew a hole right through the entire federal data protection model; you can't plan for "the President orders everyone to ignore all privacy and security controls" as a threat model.
Uvix 2 hours ago [-]
True, but you can at least correctly label it and no longer refer to it as a "secure environment".
tantalor 1 hours ago [-]
Indeed. The story should be that DOGE compromised these environments (at the direction of President), which allowed data to be exfiltrated by randos.
tw04 2 hours ago [-]
It was absolutely a secure environment prior to DOGE laying waste to all the layers of security in place. Presumably those safeguards are now back in place post-DOGE razing.
input_sh 32 minutes ago [-]
After you know someone already had root access to everything?
There's absolutely no way to guarantee that ever again.
0cf8612b2e1e 55 minutes ago [-]
Not unless they rebuild all of the infrastructure from scratch. Far too believable that something nefarious was left behind.
doctorpangloss 1 hours ago [-]
Was it though? Haha
You sound like the guys I know who work at banks, talking about all this policy, how secure they are.
vntok 2 hours ago [-]
Maybe it wasn't trivial?
4 hours ago [-]
wat10000 3 hours ago [-]
While it's hard to overestimate the clownishness of this administration, I'd want to see the original wording of this denial before concluding that they said something that stupid, versus the author of this article paraphrasing it in a stupid manner. I'm not sure if this is what they're referring to, but the only response from the SSA that I found with a brief search doesn't say anything so foolish: https://dailycaller.com/2025/09/02/social-security-administr...
tw-20260303-001 3 hours ago [-]
Nothing nerve wrecking like that but come on. They claim "the information could not have been stolen because the security practices" but "evidence has been published online, is now available to anyone and therefore it is dangerous" is a clown situation. It doesn't matter how it happened, it happened. Them trying to dispute the method is a clown camp.
wat10000 3 hours ago [-]
The agency's statement says that PII is secure but that the complaint included internal emails and documents with info about the agency's systems and employees. That's not contradictory.
I suspect the whistleblower is correct, but I don't think it's proven to the point where we can confidently state that "it happened." SSA isn't trying to dispute the method, they're trying to dispute the fundamental claim.
tw-20260303-001 3 hours ago [-]
It might be worth waiting for the outcome of the investigation before trying to dispute anything in public statements.
actionfromafar 2 hours ago [-]
Kristi Noem doesn't operate like that either. It's a pattern.
2 hours ago [-]
mrmanner 3 hours ago [-]
I mean technically a flash drive could be "a secure environment walled-off from the internet"
NegativeLatency 3 hours ago [-]
An intranet could be a secure environment walled off from the internet
mcmcmc 2 hours ago [-]
Hard disagree. How can it be “walled off” from the internet if it’s not connected? Despite the jokes, cutting access on its own is not the same as air gapping or a firewall. As soon as it’s plugged in there are zero controls.
croes 2 hours ago [-]
Technically they could claim it’s a backup
vntok 2 hours ago [-]
An unplanned, decentralized, public backup?
vibe_assassin 4 hours ago [-]
The US has laws to handle stuff like this. The real problem is that the pardon power is completely broken and it needs to be removed.
philipov 3 hours ago [-]
Who are you to quote laws to those carrying swords?
cyberax 3 minutes ago [-]
Usually the opposition party, once it gains power.
Imustaskforhelp 3 hours ago [-]
The pen is mightier than the sword if the sword is very short, and the pen is very sharp.
- Terry Pratchett
shimman 3 hours ago [-]
Don't know why this is getting downvoted, it's well known that DOGE had goons to forcibly remove people that stood in their way.
Schmerika 2 hours ago [-]
> Don't know why this is getting downvoted
Paul Graham and Garry Tan were both big cheerleaders of DOGE, so, keep that in mind.
A shocking number of the biggest stories about DOGE over the past year were flagged here, probably including the stories about goons physically removing people.
Posts questioning this suppression/censorship were flagged.
Some people like to argue that since any story about Musk becomes toxic - for some reason - it 'makes sense' to flag every story about anything to with him. You know, like Israel, or US torture, or Assange, or Snowden, or Epstein, etc.
For we are but naive children here in the tech industry, and must have a safe space to discuss PCB specs and the meaning of 42 without too much 'current affairs', lest the site 'lose its focus'.
It's not like almost the entire top of the industry is neck-deep in collaboration with all this or anything, right?
... Anyway, if people here don't know much about DOGE, the massive flagging that's gone on here is probably a big factor as to why.
Herring 51 minutes ago [-]
The rich have known they're in a class war since at least Occupy Wall Street.
0xbadcafebee 60 minutes ago [-]
Yeah, you can't rely on HN to get important information. It will be flagged to death. There could be a holocaust going on and it'd get flagged for being "controversial".
ModernMech 56 minutes ago [-]
“Shocking number” being “pretty much all of them” to the point I discovered https://news.ycombinator.com/active which shows topics where discussions are happening even if they’re flagged.
That’s the only way I browse HN now because this place is clearly brigaded to bury certain topics.
wil421 2 hours ago [-]
The Feds love to wait. I doubt the next president will be as lenient with pardoning. Maybe there’s a market I can bet on pardoning.
GJim 2 hours ago [-]
Many of us would like you to be right about that.
However, the people of the USA voted for Trump. Twice.
I fear things have changed and Trump'ism is here to stay.
Steuard 3 hours ago [-]
In principle, flagrant abuse of the pardon power is blocked by Congress's ability to impeach and remove a President who engages in such abuse.
In practice, that has always been an ineffective threat against Presidents who are within days of leaving office anyway. And more importantly, the framers of the Constitution seemed to have entirely failed to imagine a party like today's Republicans who value strict personal loyalty to the President over every other principle of government.
kjkjadksj 60 minutes ago [-]
I wonder how anomalous this presidency really is. Trump is not the first strong man bullheaded president who engaged in cronyism and systemic corruption. Most people don’t know the history of presidents though especially from centuries past. Maybe this broken state of the office we observe today has always been a viable option for people who payed attention enough to see it and are also evil enough to use it. Maybe this power has been specifically maintained intentionally for some time. Like a big open secret for those tasked with approving laws.
atmavatar 10 minutes ago [-]
Please enlighten us: which former presidents have been similar strong man caricatures engaging in anywhere near the level of cronyism and systemic corruption as the current administration? What precisely did they do which demonstrates such behavior?
We've certainly had some colorful presidents in the past, but the current president is engaged in a lot of blatantly impeachable behavior, and as far as I know, we've never had such a passive and complicit Congress before.
pwillia7 3 hours ago [-]
I mean enforcing the laws on the books would be a good start. Corruption quickly breeds more and more corruption if it isn't rooted out and punished. Everyone who isn't corrupt starts losing and the benefits of not being corrupt evaporate
5upplied_demand 4 hours ago [-]
Can any of the administration's defenders explain to me how this is actually a good thing and not the exact thing people were warning about a year ago?
pwillia7 3 hours ago [-]
> “Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre
MathMonkeyMan 2 hours ago [-]
Anyone know where I can buy/borrow an ebook version of "Anti-Semite and Jew: An Exploration of the Etiology of Hate"? Can't find it anywhere.
tokai 1 hours ago [-]
Your local library can get it through ILL.
GuinansEyebrows 1 hours ago [-]
amazon sells a kindle version for ~$6. looks like deadtree copies retail under $10 online (or ~$17 from PRH). IA has it but it's covered under their stupid pseudo-library false scarcity bargain so you might have to get in line. if you're okay with physical, i bet your local library has it.
otherwise... can't check from work, but perhaps anna's archive/slsk has you covered?
everdrive 3 hours ago [-]
No they cannot. They don't offer real arguments, they make pre-textual arguments and they bullshit. (bullshit in the formal Harry G. Frankfurt sense of the word.) If an argument they make suits them, they will stand by that argument. If an argument ends up not suiting them, they will readily discard and fabricate a different justification.
So many years of dealing with this administration, and people are still attempting to point our hypocrisy and hold people to standards with regard to principle, past statements, character, etc. None of it will work here.
5upplied_demand 3 hours ago [-]
I agree. I'm not trying to point out the hypocrisy, it is obvious to anyone watching. I am more interested in testing the limits of how people will justify actions to themselves and others. It is fascinating to see the twisting happen in real time.
0xy 45 minutes ago [-]
It's a pretty easy argument. You have Biden's admin presiding over the largest cybersecurity failure in U.S. history resulting in China stealing data on millions of Americans including both campaigns [1] versus an isolated lone actor stealing much less data.
Allowing China god mode access to U.S. telecommunications infrastructure versus one guy with a USB stick.
Biden's senior FBI officials and National Security Advisers admitted they didn't even have the logs to determine when or how they were breached, and the hack was via law enforcement portals.
Breathtaking incompetence. The 2024 election was completely compromised due to this security lapse, as both campaigns were wiretapped.
"Musk says he'll fix the corrupt Democrat-run government and reduce two trillion in spending and given his track record I have no reason not to believe him."
Real quote from a friend when this whole thing was going down.
glaslong 2 hours ago [-]
Given his track record of raising ever more money on idealistic claims only to deliver less and less... I think he delivered exactly as expected
mnmnmn 3 hours ago [-]
Your friend is a prick
raverbashing 2 hours ago [-]
> A young programmer asked if he should go work for DOGE, or whether it would end in disaster. I told him that it would at least be interesting, and that if he was worried it would end in disaster, that was all the more reason to take the job. Maybe he could help prevent that.
Given his track record, spending should be at four trillion now, right?
jimt1234 2 hours ago [-]
Musk's goal was never to reduce government spending or waste. It was to get unrestrained access to government spending data to serve his own goals.
It's a conspiracy theory - I don't have any real evidence to support it, but I tend to believe it.
1 hours ago [-]
miltonlost 2 hours ago [-]
I'd switch friends.
SV_BubbleTime 2 hours ago [-]
I’m not sure the unsanctioned actions of an individual are the best attack that someone could make on the Trump administration.
I don’t believe anyone here if they say that is honestly a standard that they held through previous administrations.
I think there are plenty of ways to criticize Trump without abandoning my own principles.
caconym_ 1 hours ago [-]
The Trump administration is 100% responsible for setting up the conditions where this kind of breach is effectively inevitable. They created "DOGE", staffed it with (among other specimens) teenage hackers with established records of malfeasance and names like "Big Balls"---presumably without any serious attempt at checking backgrounds and/or responding appropriately to any findings---and (by many accounts I've seen) granted them the authority to demand root level access to government systems without auditable logging or any other record of their actions. There appears to have been effectively zero oversight within "DOGE" itself, and the organization evidently failed to accomplish its stated goals by an enormous margin. AFAIK The Trump administration never publicly acknowledged any of this or took any visible steps to investigate the allegations.
If I was aware of any remotely comparable precedent in any recent administration, I would certainly criticize them for it. But the "DOGE" episode was so far beyond the pale that I can't think of anything else like it.
red_hare 2 hours ago [-]
That person's actions were only possible because the administration explicitly decided to put that much unchecked power into poorly vetted individuals.
SV_BubbleTime 22 minutes ago [-]
> poorly vetted individuals.
Interesting choice of words and application when discussing gripes against entire administrations.
hsuduebc2 25 minutes ago [-]
If you enable reckless behavior, you are even hyping it I believe you are responsible for this behavior too.
SV_BubbleTime 22 minutes ago [-]
> If you enable reckless behavior, you are even hyping it I believe you are responsible for this behavior too.
Are the people mad at ICE complaining that immigration was perhaps a little too lax under Biden’s admin, and possibly creating a situation where so many people felt inclined to vote for the Mass Deporations Guy?
Is there retroactive anger for Biden Admin? Note that I’m talking about a conservative voter’s right or wrong stance on the popular-at-the-time migrant caravans and not the actions of a specific person in a mid level position.
Not that I’ve seen, ymmv.
miltonlost 2 hours ago [-]
SO you're not defending the administration, you're just attacking everyone who does attack it. Nice.
Helloworldboy 3 hours ago [-]
[dead]
hsuduebc2 4 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
charcircuit 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
dovesky 1 hours ago [-]
I fail to understand how a random "special government employee" dumping sensitive government data into a flashdrive and trying to share it with private corporate is not a big deal?
charcircuit 1 hours ago [-]
It is not a big deal as it doesn't affect the average American like what may be implied. Our data already has been leaked and stolen before this. So this is smaller issue of a government employee breaking the rules.
dovesky 1 hours ago [-]
You are focusing on "what" was leaked, and not "how" and "why"
miltonlost 1 hours ago [-]
Sounds like you suffer from the opposite of Elon Derangement Syndrome, where he can do no wrong even when the evedience points otherwise.
charcircuit 1 hours ago [-]
I assume good intent instead of assuming he is a cartoon villain.
goatlover 1 hours ago [-]
No need to assume, Elon is a very public figure. We have plenty of receipts on what he's said and done. DOGE was a disaster, it was unconstitutional, it did not find significant fraud, waste and abuse, it did put our information at serious risk and we still don't know who all gained acces.
antonymoose 4 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
5upplied_demand 3 hours ago [-]
I didn't treat it as anything. It really doesn't even need to be proven as fact. The actual thing people were warning about was untrained and unqualified people having access to this data in the first place. I can't find a statement denying that this employee had that level of access.
If those people weren't granted unprecedented access to our data, there would be no whistle to blow. You can wait for the "investigation" to play out, the rest can see that obvious risks were ignored to benefit someone.
jdross 3 hours ago [-]
The steelman is that this issue is politically loaded, and there is not yet proven public evidence for the most explosive version of the claim. That makes it an easy target for partisan amplification, especially because it maps perfectly onto an existing fear people were already primed for. It is emotionally potent by design.
5upplied_demand 3 hours ago [-]
> there is not yet proven public evidence for the most explosive version of the claim.
Again, there doesn't need to be evidence. The point is that a claim like this is clearly plausible and worth investigating because of political decisions this administration made. They took a non-political issue (access to social security data) and explicitly made it political. You don't get to later use those same politics as a protective shield for criticism.
> it maps perfectly onto an existing fear people were already primed for.
People were primed because of the repeated warning that experts were giving about the security of this data and carelessness in allowing access. You are helping to prove my point that the administration encouraged this by their own actions.
yifanl 3 hours ago [-]
To clarify, "steelman" is just another term for making up a fictional scenario that doesn't bore out in reality, like "strawman"?
eszed 2 hours ago [-]
I'll treat this as a genuine question. No, to "steelman" is to engage with the strongest possible version of your interlocuter'so argument, rather than the weakest. An especially effective steelman case will (genuinely!) strengthen or clarify the opposite point of view before laying out the case against it. It's a way of granting respect to those with whom you disagree, and (I find) a discipline that helps me avoid empty rhetoric.
But, yeah: if you find that the steelman version of the opposing argument won't be borne out in reality that's a promising line of attack. You'll argument will be more likely to be effective, however, than if you attack the strongest rather than the weakest ("strawman") version of the case.
yifanl 17 minutes ago [-]
I don't understand, declaring on your own terms what you think the argument actually is isn't respectful, it's deeply disrespectful. Take the claim at face value, details can and will be clarified through conversation.
2 hours ago [-]
hobs 3 hours ago [-]
Anyone whose looking at this administration as anything but corrupt thieves that need to be immediately jailed is a patsy, a fool, or a thief themselves.
mervz 3 hours ago [-]
This coming from the same group of morons crying election fraud without an ounce of proof is amazing.
nilamo 3 hours ago [-]
I suppose the data just ended up in their hands at no fault of their own, through complete random happenstance, unrelated to their previous employment with DOGE?
superxpro12 4 hours ago [-]
You're right. This administration has done nothing but sit on it's laurels the past 2 years.
I think given the performance of DOGE, the wars, the executive orders, the epstein files, we can make a SMALL logical stretch here and assume, FOR THE MOMENT, that this happened.
antonymoose 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
BrokenCogs 3 hours ago [-]
Can you give examples of a few allegation stories that have been later retracted, in relation to the current administration?
sieep 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
5upplied_demand 3 hours ago [-]
Neither of these involved legal allegations later proving to be false, they were simple news story retractions (just like Fox News did Sunday with Trump's dignified transfer performance [0]).
The topic at hand was a whistleblower report, which would have serious ramifications if proven false. It isn't apples-to-apples.
Trump suing a news outlet (bbc) for how they edited a piece doesn't seem like "a report of allegations that ended up not being true".
orochimaaru 3 hours ago [-]
DOGE was a shit show. It didn’t need to happen and achieved nothing. It was distraction so that musk could gut regulatory organizations probing his self-drive claims.
I was for the admin based on claims of lawful immigration enforcement and keeping out of foreign wars. however, after inept efforts with immigration, doge and the Iran war I will not be for republicans again.
collingreen 3 hours ago [-]
Do you find those more impactful on your future voting than the lies, the massive amount of money funneled to the trump family, threatening to invade our allies, and the epstein involvement plus its subsequent cover up?
I'm not trying to be snarky but I am trying to take the opportunity to gauge how some folks are prioritizing these things when they vote.
orochimaaru 2 hours ago [-]
Frank answer - the total release of Epstein files was a promise during election time. As was not getting into foreign wars. Immigration enforcement is a problem - all they had to really do was turn the tap off at the border and use legal means to deport as opposed to the mess they created.
During the previous time they were in power - these were mostly adhered to. Tariffs - again inept. They need to be targeted to keep allies close and wean off of Chinese dependence.
So all in all - most of the corruption didn’t exist during trumps first term.
daveguy 2 hours ago [-]
I think it has a lot to with where people get their information. If you stick your head in the Fox News / NewsMax sand you aren't even going to see the all of the corruption that was clear before the election.
And the twitter sewer is full of unsubstantiated rage bait and thinly veiled toxic innuendo. Musk knew exactly what he was doing when he used his direct control of a multi billion dollar communication network to influence the election.
I'm just glad some people are finally saying "hey, wait a minute..."
speefers 3 hours ago [-]
[dead]
victorbjorklund 3 hours ago [-]
You can of course discuss whether a thing is good or bad, even before it has been proven a fact. As an example, you could discuss whether it would be good or bad if it turned out that Trump fucked a minor in the presence of Epstein. Doesn't have to be proved first. You can still discuss whether it's good or bad. You could even discuss things that are totally hypothetical: if we colonize the moon, should we make murder legal or illegal on the moon? We can answer that question even if it hasn't happened yet.
hsuduebc2 3 hours ago [-]
He is talking about explanation of potential situation. He never said it is proven fact.
LiquidSky 3 hours ago [-]
Well, there was the previous whistleblower complaint that members of DOGE accessed and shared sensitive Social Security data without the awareness of agency officials, which the government denied...until this January when they were forced to admit in a court filing that it was true. [https://archive.is/efY6S]
That is to say, there is no reason to extend this administration or anything DOGE-related the benefit of the doubt.
jasonlotito 3 hours ago [-]
What's good for the goose is good for the gander. I think it's fine for citizens to hold administrations up to their own standards.
Now, your turn to answer the question.
ndsipa_pomu 3 hours ago [-]
Maybe because the constant lying of the U.S. administration means that any kind of whistle-blowing should be treated as fact, especially when there's likely to be significant risks to the whistleblower. It seems very likely to be true.
zetanor 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
eszed 2 hours ago [-]
The public do forget (even egregious) things. I usually find that unfortunate, rather than the reverse, and tend to distrust those who count on public amnesia to obfuscate what they do. That's not a partisan, or even political - lots of corporations operate in the same manner - point, but I think it's a pretty good heuristic for sussing out who's being dodgy and who isn't.
> This is a nation built on egg-breaking.
Is too capacious. The USA is a nation based on "these truths [that] are self-evident", and (as the federal oath puts it) protecting and defending the Constitution.
That's not to say that egg-breaking can't be great, but it a) isn't usually to be commended for its own sake, but rather when it's to some specific and important purpose, and b) the "eggs" broken are not those in the preceding paragraph.
5upplied_demand 3 hours ago [-]
> In due time, this one will fall out of your mental stack, too.
I bet you said the same thing a year ago when people were warning about exactly this scenario.
vntok 2 hours ago [-]
If so then they were right, everybody promptly forgot from then on until just now.
enraged_camel 2 hours ago [-]
>> In due time, this one will fall out of your mental stack, too.
Unless you get stack overflow first!
scarecrowbob 2 hours ago [-]
Damn, hoss, I wish this shit would just fall out of my stack.
Instead, I have a steady and ever-growing list of real and vicious shit that the US has done, going back to its formation.
You can pretend that everyone is just outraged because of some flavor of the month. You can pretend you're okay with breaking eggs because you don't think they are your eggs.
But at the end of the day some of us really don't like this stuff because we pay attention and have a memory- if you don't, then that's something you should work on.
TheGRS 2 hours ago [-]
Gotta break a few eggs to, uh, make things worse with no definable purpose.
looking at https://doge.gov seems to be defunct for around 7 months now? Also a little bit of review made me learn that doge.gov/spend is wrong lol.
rglover 36 minutes ago [-]
Makes sense. IMO it was always a wank operating as a smoke screen while access was given to private parties that couldn't get it through legal/traditional means. This story increases the probability quite a bit.
mrweasel 4 hours ago [-]
What kind of job would you realistically take this data to? What company would even so much as look at data procured in this manor. I can think of one that's evil enough and probably have the protection of the US government, but it's not like they could acquire the data directly, if it was necessary.
afavour 3 hours ago [-]
If I had to make a wild guess, xAI. The article states they took a job at a government contractor.
It’s interesting (horrifying) to think of the implications actually. People wouldn’t buy this data directly, it’s too obviously illegally procured. But laundered through an LLM to provide “insights” without citation? That’s plausible deniability.
hsuduebc2 3 hours ago [-]
Also meta or any other data broker.
dmschulman 3 hours ago [-]
In addition to all the other answers here, foreign governments would fall over themselves to get this kind of data.
afinlayson 3 hours ago [-]
My understanding is stats canada gets offered a lot of money for this data after being anonymized. A lot of employers might not ask questions if someone had really good data they could use to help market their product. Especially politically aligned think tanks
mrweasel 3 hours ago [-]
Maybe not under the current administration, but that's the kind of risk that could kill your company, if you got caught. It might be why I'm not rich, but that seems like a massively irresponsible risk to take.
enoint 1 hours ago [-]
You can’t just donate these tables to the Republican Party; they’re evidence. You need to repack them for deniability. These will be used to cross-check if voters can be ruled vaguely ineligible.
jeffwask 4 hours ago [-]
Ad Tech, I would bet its ad tech.
bpodgursky 3 hours ago [-]
Nobody in Ad Tech is going to risk jailtime for a slightly higher CPM.
MeetingsBrowser 3 hours ago [-]
I think you are more correct than you realize
NickC25 3 hours ago [-]
I disagree - it's 100% a factor of how much money you have to pay in legal fees.
Zuck would be happy to take that data, and because he's worth a cool $350 billion, he'll do whatever the fuck he wants with that data, and we'll thank him by cutting his taxes.
You think Donald Trump would put him in jail?
bpodgursky 1 hours ago [-]
You have no idea what you are talking about.
Nobody wants to fuck with PII, platforms will blackball you in a second if they think you have sensitive data. If you haven't worked in adtech, be quiet and do even the most trivial research before spouting nonsense.
GuinansEyebrows 1 hours ago [-]
> If you haven't worked in adtech, be quiet and do even the most trivial research before spouting nonsense.
if you have, i won't take ethically-compromised advice from you.
bpodgursky 1 hours ago [-]
Lol. It takes some work to contort being retarded into epistemic sanitization, but I'm impressed, you got there.
GuinansEyebrows 55 minutes ago [-]
charitably, i think the choices one makes to enter into that profession belie a lack of consideration for the broader good of humanity in order to profit a select few - choices that necessarily include misdirection and manipulation of actual people. choices that that lead me to take behavioral advice from such folks as essentially worthless.
slur me if you like.
Imustaskforhelp 3 hours ago [-]
If this goes within the Ad Tech industry and knowing how Ad tech industry is, I don't feel quite surprised if we might see foreign adversarial nation buying the Social Security data from Ad tech/ (this Doge person in general either directly or through multiple layers) even in secretive manner at this point.
Either way this data is definitely going to spread behind closed doors.
esseph 2 hours ago [-]
"What kind of job would you realistically take this data to?"
Banks
Sales/Marketing
Healthcare
Palantir
xAI
Any social security scammers
Etc.
4 hours ago [-]
lenerdenator 4 hours ago [-]
Cool. Investigate it. If they really did take data off a government system without permission, charge them with the most serious thing you can find in a district where they're likely to be convicted. Then send them to prison to delete years or decades off their lives.
See if Musk was in any way involved, or acted with such reckless disregard for known security standards that he could be civilly or criminally liable. Do the same as above for him.
The only way this stops is if consequences are introduced.
pjc50 4 hours ago [-]
Federal charging will be countermanded from the top, or pardoned. Got to wait at least four years.
collingreen 3 hours ago [-]
That doesn't mean don't file them. Don't allow evil deeds to be done merely by threat - force immoral people to take the immoral action in public if they want to behave that way.
fallinghawks 3 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately, consequences have been largely absent for anyone in this administration since the last time they were in power. That's part of why this round they've been flaunting it so egregiously.
Natfan 4 hours ago [-]
explain to me the incentives for the trump administration to do a complete 180 of crimes? why would they stop now?
axus 4 hours ago [-]
Distract from crimes of those currently in favor?
lenerdenator 2 hours ago [-]
Removal of their personal freedom for months, years, or decades.
Did this joker take things from a computer that they weren't supposed to while in a state that has laws against that sort of thing? If so, have a local prosecutor build up a case, and arrest and charge them.
The Supremacy Clause should be tested in this way.
voidUpdate 4 hours ago [-]
It would be lovely if they did that. I very much doubt it will happen in this administration, if at all
I feel like when I was a twenty- something I would have been at risk of exfiltrating data like this not for any specific nefarious purpose or money-making scheme but just out of data hoarding.
Anymore I have zero desire to keep any copy of work code or other data on any personal device. Nope, never gonna need it, don't want it, just a potential legal headache with no upside.
But when I was younger? I could totally imagine getting a big juicy dataset like that and wanting a copy for myself. It'd make me feel special, having information no one else had.
sigmar 4 hours ago [-]
It may not have been your intent, but this comment seems to downplay the crime here. It's a crime to take the data even if he wasn't shopping it around as alleged. and the fact that he was 'young and stupid' makes the circumstances of how this happened much more important for an investigation by the IG (ie why was an immature person given so much power?)
rz2k 3 hours ago [-]
I think it’s a great reaction to news stories to imagine how you could have made the same bad decisions. Furthermore this public confession of being able to imagine making bad decisions might encourage a similarly minded to 20-something to wonder why an older version of themself is so afraid of even having such a dataset. It might even prompt someone to destroy some long forgotten cache of data they exfiltrated a long time ago.
I don’t think there’s a risk that it will influence a rare person in power to enforce the rules to go lighter. I just think it encourages people to be less reckless with hoarding data who might otherwise put themselves in danger.
swasheck 3 hours ago [-]
yeah. ignorantia juris non excusat applies to both the speed limit and passive data theft
Antibabelic 4 hours ago [-]
So like Harold T. Martin who took 50 terabytes of data from the NSA because he was a data hoarder and was sentenced to nine years in prison?
> "Martin reportedly stole the information simply by walking out of his various secure workplaces with it in his possession"
"secure" eh?
sumeno 2 hours ago [-]
"Secure" workplaces means that you have to have the appropriate clearances and background checks to be allowed in and out. I'm sure there are more secure workplaces, but the security of your average SCIF largely depends on the people allowed inside of it not being bad actors.
Outside of strip searches upon arrival and leaving I'm not sure how you could eliminate that risk.
dspillett 4 hours ago [-]
> zero desire to keep any copy of work code or other data on any personal device
Same. I won't even have Teams or Authenticator on my phone unlike most others here (though wrt Teams, that is at least as much about not wanting work to bother me as it is about the danger of data seepage). I need the authenticator to do the job, but I have an old factory-reset phone that has that (and, just in case, Teams) on it.
> But when I was younger? I could totally imagine getting a big juicy dataset like that and wanting a copy for myself.
I'm pretty sure I never would have done. I've always resisted knowing credentials and personal information that aren't mine (so if anything untoward happens with/using that information there is no way it can be my fault/doing, as well as the less selfish reasons) despite people falling over themselves to do things like tell me their passwords & such when they were wanting some for of tech support.
But I think there is a different attitude to data risk in that age group today. They've grown up in a world where very little is really private, and every app and its dog has wanted their contact details and other information (and all too often information about their friends & family), do the idea that data is a free-for-all is dangerously normalised in their heads.
I find older people are similarly very lax with their own data, in fact often being rather too trusting of others generally, but not so much with other peoples. There are a lot more people who are appropriately careful (or even paranoid) in their 30s/40s/50s (I'm late 40s myself) - I think we are lucky to be in the middle, being exposed to information dangers enough to not have that “naivety or age” and not desensitised by having lax information security pushed at us from an early age.
enoint 2 hours ago [-]
Check out FreeOTP if you want an alternative to Google Autheticator.
GJim 2 hours ago [-]
> But I think there is a different attitude to data risk in that age group today. They've grown up in a world where very little is really private, and every app and its dog has wanted their contact details and other information
Counterpoint from a UK/EU perspective.....
Anybody new being onboarded is given (company compulsory) GDPR training if their role involves any handling or processing of personal data whatsoever. Data security and privacy is being treated quite seriously here; though unfortunately not seriously enough IMO.
simonw 4 hours ago [-]
Even in your twenties would you have then taken that data and attempted to share it with a future employee?
saalweachter 4 hours ago [-]
I don't think I would have offered to sell it or accepted an offer to buy it, but I think I could have easily been talked into sharing it, in a "I think my boss is a cool guy and I want him to like me and/or impress him" situation.
I'm not doing anything wrong! It's not like I'm selling it! I'm just showing off the cool data no one else has! I'm saving the day, probably, by letting us solve a problem with my cool data that would be impossible otherwise.
estearum 4 hours ago [-]
This is why we normally have hiring standards for USG.
I had access to insane amounts of highly sensitive data as an early 20-y/o and never once felt inclined to share it or brag about it with anyone.
Hiring processes around these roles should distinguish between past-me and past-you.
saalweachter 3 hours ago [-]
Eh, over time I've come to believe having systems that manage insider risk is more important than expecting to be perfect in hiring.
Like, any system will fail if too many of its members don't care about maintaining it, but you're going to hire the wrong person from time to time.
It's important to design your systems to minimize access, both in terms of not allowing everyone access to everything and to only allow people as much access as then need to do their jobs, to require multiple people to sign off on temporary access grants, to create audit trails and to actually audit them and have consequences for violating the rules.
(Which, in this case, DOGE purposefully dismantled.)
It doesn't just protect the data from nefarious villains, it also protects young idiots from themselves, who don't realize you can cause harm just by being curious.
estearum 3 hours ago [-]
Sure, I'm not proposing that we shouldn't have systems to mitigate insider risk.
I'm proposing that we both have systems to mitigate insider risk and we try to avoid hiring ideologically motivated and ethically compromised goobers to highly sensitive government jobs.
And I'm proposing that we don't write this off as, "welp he's a kid!"
marcosdumay 2 hours ago [-]
Hum... The buck still has to end at some point. Somebody will have the power to override process or access things directly.
At DOGE, those somebodies were a bunch of red-piled barely adults that worshiped Musk.
speefers 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
mnmnmn 3 hours ago [-]
Wow you’re dumb as hell
saalweachter 3 hours ago [-]
Personally, I like to think I just was dumb as hell, and now am only kind of stupid.
4 hours ago [-]
elicash 4 hours ago [-]
I don't think you deserve downvotes; I think it's totally plausible that some people would steal this data just to feel special.
But:
1) That's why we have traditionally had the safeguards that we have had, to protect against this sort of crime, and
2) The allegation in this case is that he later approached coworkers to do something with this data, even if they ultimately didn't help him do it. So it doesn't appear to be hoarding just for the sake of it here.
JKCalhoun 4 hours ago [-]
And further, I would absolutely leverage it to get myself a job.
Oh, wait. No I would never have done that. That's just insane.
tw-20260303-001 4 hours ago [-]
> having information no one else had
A broken logic. Of course the people who you would have stolen the data from, had it. A question pops up, though... what's in your possession you should not be in the possession of.
kreco 4 hours ago [-]
I'm pretty sure you can adjust the logic from "no one else" to "very very very few" and the logic just works the same...
tw-20260303-001 4 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I'm pretty sure.
freejazz 4 hours ago [-]
How would you get it in the first place?
saalweachter 4 hours ago [-]
I mean, insider risk is insider risk.
In the DOGE case, they specifically broke all the controls that existed to manage insider risk and keep people from making copies like this, but (especially 20-30 years ago) I've been on plenty of networks that just had no concept of insider risk and everything was just open for anyone to access (or protected by shared passwords everyone knew).
tantalor 2 hours ago [-]
> they specifically broke all the controls
Is there a reference or citation for this? I didn't see in the article.
saalweachter 2 hours ago [-]
I don't know about this person specifically, but the news from when DOGE was active was full of "employee of department fired for trying to prevent DOGE employees from directly accessing system no one is allowed to directly access".
freejazz 1 hours ago [-]
So you're saying that if you worked there you would also steal the social security data? What am I supposed to be taking away from this besides the fact that you would make poor choices and lack ethics? Didn't seem like it was a problem for people who worked in gov't prior to DOGE existing, so I'm not really getting any other takeaway here.
speefers 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
shadowgovt 4 hours ago [-]
This is probably a good time to mention that they court-martialed Chelsea Manning for exfiltrating Army documents.
I have a sinking suspicion this engineer won't see the inside of a jail cell.
jmyeet 4 hours ago [-]
I've always wondered what the endgame of that farce was. Cost-cutting was clearly always a pretense and a bad one at that. There's made up claims about 300 year olds getting Social Security but I think this only proves that the SSA database was an explicit goal and that was cover.
But why? The only conclusion I can come to is "stealing elections". I'll include this partial list I made of Republican voter suppression efforts going back decades [1].
I believe out there someone is collecting all this data into an AI model to predict how people will vote, something that Cambridge Analytica was a toy version of. But it goes beyond how people will vote but whether they will vote. Likewise, data will be constructed to strike off people from voter rolls if the system believes they won't vote how you want. We've seen efforts like this where similar-sounding names of felons in other states are used to strike off people from voter rolls. And that's a real problem because people might not know they're no longer registered to vote and in some states you have to register 30 or more days before the election.
There is essentially infinite money available to fund Republicans stealing elections because it results in public funding cuts to give even more tax breaks to billionaires.
You can't directly use the SSA databsae obviously so any effort must be small enough to not draw attention, involve part or all of the computing done overseas to avoid legal scrutiny and/or "washing" that data through data provider services. I would bet if you started exhaustively looking at various companies in or adjacent to these spaces, you'd find some pretty dodgy stuff.
I think it's simpler than that. I believe (as some others do) that DOGE was a useful piece of theater to distract the media while the Administration got down to business implementing a huge number of executive orders to roll back social protections and establish control over the civil service. This would have been a lot more controversial without Musk acting as a lightning rod for press coverage.
estearum 4 hours ago [-]
I think a lot of these people are literally dumb. Or so naive or Twitter-brained that they're effectively dumb.
Society can only support so many sociopaths (~ 1 in 5) before it starts to collapse. We may have reached the tipping point.
thiago_fm 4 hours ago [-]
Americans are about to find out why data protection laws exist in the EU, and why even the government has to follow it.
Nobody should have permission to query 70M Americans, it's a huge security flaw for the average citizen. But Pentagon has been doing this for a while a la Snowden, and the average american doesn't seem to be worried. With Snowden becoming a menace rather than a hero.
Once private government data from Americans starts being heavily used to mess up elections, or even worse, persecute people with a different opinion than the ruling party...
Americans will finally wake up that GDPR doesn't stiffle innovation, but rather protect its citizens from an evil actors.
But it may be too late, like when NSDAP started chasing jews and migrants. There was nothing they could do other than to flee to survive.
betaby 4 hours ago [-]
Unlikely. Also it doesn't work well where it needed in the EU.
mnmnmn 3 hours ago [-]
Heil Elon lol
ajross 3 hours ago [-]
I knew it. I was saying from the instant they started we'd have a scandal like this. Bunch of tech bros walking into the government with personal MBPs and administrative authority to demand data from anyone and everyone was a privacy crisis happening in real time.
Yet here on HN, what have we been arguing about? Big tech. Google and Meta have been allowed to become boogeymen in this community out of all proportion to the actual threat they posed[1].
While the actual boogeyman stealing our data to exploit in the market? It was us.
[1] I mean, lets be honest, while everyone has abstract complaints the truth is that they've actually been remarkably benign stewards of our data over the past 20 years. Much, much, MUCH more responsible than the glibertarian dude in the cubicle next to you, as it turns out.
troyvit 3 hours ago [-]
Yep, and we're only hearing about this because in this case there was a whistleblower. Call me cynical but I'm sure that there is plenty of data DOGE workers exfiltrated from SSA and other places that we'll never directly know about.
GuinansEyebrows 1 hours ago [-]
i dunno. NSA letters are a real thing and i have no reason to believe there's not at least some exfiltration of personal data from "big tech" to other actors.
ajross 47 minutes ago [-]
> have no reason to believe there's not at least some exfiltration
Is it genuinely your opinion that that activity (just look at all the equivocation!) constitutes a risk at the same level as alleged by the linked article?
This is exactly what I'm talking about. HN has a tunnel vision disease on this subject. "Yes yes, DOGE bros stole the SSA database, but let's please talk about how awful Google is." It's clinical at this point.
baggachipz 4 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
samrus 4 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
paxys 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
cbradford 4 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
mothballed 4 hours ago [-]
It's probably safe to assume any non-classified information you provide to the government is for sale on the dark web.
JKCalhoun 4 hours ago [-]
Like the stolen-art market, I wonder if anyone with a large zip file of fake data could sell it as the "DOGE files" and make mucho crypto.
pixl97 4 hours ago [-]
I mean, recently it's pretty safe to assume any classified information the government has is stored in a fucking bathroom and is for sale.
bitroughj 1 hours ago [-]
Anyone who favors h1b coolies over American Workers should not be allowed to do any government work. Period.
DOGE staff installed the terminal on the Eisenhower Executive Office Building roof in February 2025 without notifying White House communications or cybersecurity teams, ignoring their prior warnings [2]. The resulting "Starlink Guest" Wi-Fi used only a password—no usernames or two-factor authentication—unlike standard networks requiring full VPN tunneling and device logging.
This allowed devices to evade monitoring, transmit untracked data outside secure channels, and potentially enable leaks or hacks, as noted by former officials and experts like ex-NSA hacker Jake Williams. A confrontation ensued with Secret Service when DOGE accessed the roof unannounced [3].
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/17/us/politics/elon-musk-sta...
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/06/07/starlin...
[3] https://www.wired.com/story/white-house-starlink-wifi/
Pretty sure that was the point
Justin Fox not being able to say what DEI is really tells you everything you need to know about how grants were cancelled.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/@historiansorg
Challenge it and they escalate.
What’s the solution?
Is there a term for this Jehovah’s Witness complex where being ignored is taken as a sign of one’s faith?
Why not? Shouldn't the public be allowed to learn who all the DOGE employees were? Federal employees are public record, are they not?
Their recruiters are all anonymous when they reach out as they do not provide their names. I constantly questioned to myself and them directly if they were legit even if their email address showed as RecruitingUSDS@doge.eop.gov (their public email address seen on USDS). The first recruiter I demanded a video call with and asked him to bob and weave his head (lol). He never gave me his last name (all his emails came from that public address and they signed their emails with first name only) but I found him on Linkedin. He was late 20s to late 30s. From there I was asked to do/turned in a case study and after the govt shutdown I was invited to interview with a DOGE employee whom then her email showed her full name. I didnt make it past her as there was another step in their process which is an in person interview at USDS's office or within another govt agency DOGE working at.
Oh, wait.
That said there is a list by propublica: https://projects.propublica.org/elon-musk-doge-tracker/
Agency: "Social Security initially denied Borges’s allegations and said the data referenced in his complaint is stored in a secure environment walled-off from the internet."
Ah walled of the internet, so no one can get there and copy the data to a flashdrive. Move on, move on!
You can't make that up.
Unfortunately it seems quite believable. This is the same outfit that fired a bunch of people responsible for overseeing the US Nuclear Arsenal. [0] The combination of arrogance and stupidity was breathtaking.
[0] https://thebulletin.org/2025/04/doges-staff-firing-fiasco-at...
> copied to a flashdrive
Both of these cannot be true. A secure environment does not allow trivial data exfiltration over USB.
There's absolutely no way to guarantee that ever again.
You sound like the guys I know who work at banks, talking about all this policy, how secure they are.
I suspect the whistleblower is correct, but I don't think it's proven to the point where we can confidently state that "it happened." SSA isn't trying to dispute the method, they're trying to dispute the fundamental claim.
- Terry Pratchett
Paul Graham and Garry Tan were both big cheerleaders of DOGE, so, keep that in mind.
A shocking number of the biggest stories about DOGE over the past year were flagged here, probably including the stories about goons physically removing people.
Posts questioning this suppression/censorship were flagged.
Some people like to argue that since any story about Musk becomes toxic - for some reason - it 'makes sense' to flag every story about anything to with him. You know, like Israel, or US torture, or Assange, or Snowden, or Epstein, etc.
For we are but naive children here in the tech industry, and must have a safe space to discuss PCB specs and the meaning of 42 without too much 'current affairs', lest the site 'lose its focus'.
It's not like almost the entire top of the industry is neck-deep in collaboration with all this or anything, right?
... Anyway, if people here don't know much about DOGE, the massive flagging that's gone on here is probably a big factor as to why.
That’s the only way I browse HN now because this place is clearly brigaded to bury certain topics.
However, the people of the USA voted for Trump. Twice.
I fear things have changed and Trump'ism is here to stay.
In practice, that has always been an ineffective threat against Presidents who are within days of leaving office anyway. And more importantly, the framers of the Constitution seemed to have entirely failed to imagine a party like today's Republicans who value strict personal loyalty to the President over every other principle of government.
We've certainly had some colorful presidents in the past, but the current president is engaged in a lot of blatantly impeachable behavior, and as far as I know, we've never had such a passive and complicit Congress before.
otherwise... can't check from work, but perhaps anna's archive/slsk has you covered?
So many years of dealing with this administration, and people are still attempting to point our hypocrisy and hold people to standards with regard to principle, past statements, character, etc. None of it will work here.
Allowing China god mode access to U.S. telecommunications infrastructure versus one guy with a USB stick.
Biden's senior FBI officials and National Security Advisers admitted they didn't even have the logs to determine when or how they were breached, and the hack was via law enforcement portals.
Breathtaking incompetence. The 2024 election was completely compromised due to this security lapse, as both campaigns were wiretapped.
[1] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/chinese-hackers-have-infil...
Real quote from a friend when this whole thing was going down.
https://xcancel.com/paulg/status/1888555241055948981
I guess this aged like Windows Me
It's a conspiracy theory - I don't have any real evidence to support it, but I tend to believe it.
I don’t believe anyone here if they say that is honestly a standard that they held through previous administrations.
I think there are plenty of ways to criticize Trump without abandoning my own principles.
If I was aware of any remotely comparable precedent in any recent administration, I would certainly criticize them for it. But the "DOGE" episode was so far beyond the pale that I can't think of anything else like it.
Interesting choice of words and application when discussing gripes against entire administrations.
Are the people mad at ICE complaining that immigration was perhaps a little too lax under Biden’s admin, and possibly creating a situation where so many people felt inclined to vote for the Mass Deporations Guy?
Is there retroactive anger for Biden Admin? Note that I’m talking about a conservative voter’s right or wrong stance on the popular-at-the-time migrant caravans and not the actions of a specific person in a mid level position.
Not that I’ve seen, ymmv.
If those people weren't granted unprecedented access to our data, there would be no whistle to blow. You can wait for the "investigation" to play out, the rest can see that obvious risks were ignored to benefit someone.
Again, there doesn't need to be evidence. The point is that a claim like this is clearly plausible and worth investigating because of political decisions this administration made. They took a non-political issue (access to social security data) and explicitly made it political. You don't get to later use those same politics as a protective shield for criticism.
> it maps perfectly onto an existing fear people were already primed for.
People were primed because of the repeated warning that experts were giving about the security of this data and carelessness in allowing access. You are helping to prove my point that the administration encouraged this by their own actions.
But, yeah: if you find that the steelman version of the opposing argument won't be borne out in reality that's a promising line of attack. You'll argument will be more likely to be effective, however, than if you attack the strongest rather than the weakest ("strawman") version of the case.
I think given the performance of DOGE, the wars, the executive orders, the epstein files, we can make a SMALL logical stretch here and assume, FOR THE MOMENT, that this happened.
The topic at hand was a whistleblower report, which would have serious ramifications if proven false. It isn't apples-to-apples.
[0] https://thehill.com/homenews/media/fox-news-donald-trump-dig...
I was for the admin based on claims of lawful immigration enforcement and keeping out of foreign wars. however, after inept efforts with immigration, doge and the Iran war I will not be for republicans again.
I'm not trying to be snarky but I am trying to take the opportunity to gauge how some folks are prioritizing these things when they vote.
During the previous time they were in power - these were mostly adhered to. Tariffs - again inept. They need to be targeted to keep allies close and wean off of Chinese dependence.
So all in all - most of the corruption didn’t exist during trumps first term.
And the twitter sewer is full of unsubstantiated rage bait and thinly veiled toxic innuendo. Musk knew exactly what he was doing when he used his direct control of a multi billion dollar communication network to influence the election.
I'm just glad some people are finally saying "hey, wait a minute..."
That is to say, there is no reason to extend this administration or anything DOGE-related the benefit of the doubt.
Now, your turn to answer the question.
> This is a nation built on egg-breaking.
Is too capacious. The USA is a nation based on "these truths [that] are self-evident", and (as the federal oath puts it) protecting and defending the Constitution.
That's not to say that egg-breaking can't be great, but it a) isn't usually to be commended for its own sake, but rather when it's to some specific and important purpose, and b) the "eggs" broken are not those in the preceding paragraph.
I bet you said the same thing a year ago when people were warning about exactly this scenario.
Unless you get stack overflow first!
Instead, I have a steady and ever-growing list of real and vicious shit that the US has done, going back to its formation.
You can pretend that everyone is just outraged because of some flavor of the month. You can pretend you're okay with breaking eggs because you don't think they are your eggs.
But at the end of the day some of us really don't like this stuff because we pay attention and have a memory- if you don't, then that's something you should work on.
And: https://archive.is/Mw5bh
It’s interesting (horrifying) to think of the implications actually. People wouldn’t buy this data directly, it’s too obviously illegally procured. But laundered through an LLM to provide “insights” without citation? That’s plausible deniability.
Zuck would be happy to take that data, and because he's worth a cool $350 billion, he'll do whatever the fuck he wants with that data, and we'll thank him by cutting his taxes.
You think Donald Trump would put him in jail?
Nobody wants to fuck with PII, platforms will blackball you in a second if they think you have sensitive data. If you haven't worked in adtech, be quiet and do even the most trivial research before spouting nonsense.
if you have, i won't take ethically-compromised advice from you.
slur me if you like.
Either way this data is definitely going to spread behind closed doors.
Banks
Sales/Marketing
Healthcare
Palantir
xAI
Any social security scammers
Etc.
See if Musk was in any way involved, or acted with such reckless disregard for known security standards that he could be civilly or criminally liable. Do the same as above for him.
The only way this stops is if consequences are introduced.
Did this joker take things from a computer that they weren't supposed to while in a state that has laws against that sort of thing? If so, have a local prosecutor build up a case, and arrest and charge them.
The Supremacy Clause should be tested in this way.
Anymore I have zero desire to keep any copy of work code or other data on any personal device. Nope, never gonna need it, don't want it, just a potential legal headache with no upside.
But when I was younger? I could totally imagine getting a big juicy dataset like that and wanting a copy for myself. It'd make me feel special, having information no one else had.
I don’t think there’s a risk that it will influence a rare person in power to enforce the rules to go lighter. I just think it encourages people to be less reckless with hoarding data who might otherwise put themselves in danger.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_T._Martin
"secure" eh?
Outside of strip searches upon arrival and leaving I'm not sure how you could eliminate that risk.
Same. I won't even have Teams or Authenticator on my phone unlike most others here (though wrt Teams, that is at least as much about not wanting work to bother me as it is about the danger of data seepage). I need the authenticator to do the job, but I have an old factory-reset phone that has that (and, just in case, Teams) on it.
> But when I was younger? I could totally imagine getting a big juicy dataset like that and wanting a copy for myself.
I'm pretty sure I never would have done. I've always resisted knowing credentials and personal information that aren't mine (so if anything untoward happens with/using that information there is no way it can be my fault/doing, as well as the less selfish reasons) despite people falling over themselves to do things like tell me their passwords & such when they were wanting some for of tech support.
But I think there is a different attitude to data risk in that age group today. They've grown up in a world where very little is really private, and every app and its dog has wanted their contact details and other information (and all too often information about their friends & family), do the idea that data is a free-for-all is dangerously normalised in their heads.
I find older people are similarly very lax with their own data, in fact often being rather too trusting of others generally, but not so much with other peoples. There are a lot more people who are appropriately careful (or even paranoid) in their 30s/40s/50s (I'm late 40s myself) - I think we are lucky to be in the middle, being exposed to information dangers enough to not have that “naivety or age” and not desensitised by having lax information security pushed at us from an early age.
Counterpoint from a UK/EU perspective.....
Anybody new being onboarded is given (company compulsory) GDPR training if their role involves any handling or processing of personal data whatsoever. Data security and privacy is being treated quite seriously here; though unfortunately not seriously enough IMO.
I'm not doing anything wrong! It's not like I'm selling it! I'm just showing off the cool data no one else has! I'm saving the day, probably, by letting us solve a problem with my cool data that would be impossible otherwise.
I had access to insane amounts of highly sensitive data as an early 20-y/o and never once felt inclined to share it or brag about it with anyone.
Hiring processes around these roles should distinguish between past-me and past-you.
Like, any system will fail if too many of its members don't care about maintaining it, but you're going to hire the wrong person from time to time.
It's important to design your systems to minimize access, both in terms of not allowing everyone access to everything and to only allow people as much access as then need to do their jobs, to require multiple people to sign off on temporary access grants, to create audit trails and to actually audit them and have consequences for violating the rules.
(Which, in this case, DOGE purposefully dismantled.)
It doesn't just protect the data from nefarious villains, it also protects young idiots from themselves, who don't realize you can cause harm just by being curious.
I'm proposing that we both have systems to mitigate insider risk and we try to avoid hiring ideologically motivated and ethically compromised goobers to highly sensitive government jobs.
And I'm proposing that we don't write this off as, "welp he's a kid!"
At DOGE, those somebodies were a bunch of red-piled barely adults that worshiped Musk.
But:
1) That's why we have traditionally had the safeguards that we have had, to protect against this sort of crime, and
2) The allegation in this case is that he later approached coworkers to do something with this data, even if they ultimately didn't help him do it. So it doesn't appear to be hoarding just for the sake of it here.
Oh, wait. No I would never have done that. That's just insane.
A broken logic. Of course the people who you would have stolen the data from, had it. A question pops up, though... what's in your possession you should not be in the possession of.
In the DOGE case, they specifically broke all the controls that existed to manage insider risk and keep people from making copies like this, but (especially 20-30 years ago) I've been on plenty of networks that just had no concept of insider risk and everything was just open for anyone to access (or protected by shared passwords everyone knew).
Is there a reference or citation for this? I didn't see in the article.
I have a sinking suspicion this engineer won't see the inside of a jail cell.
But why? The only conclusion I can come to is "stealing elections". I'll include this partial list I made of Republican voter suppression efforts going back decades [1].
I believe out there someone is collecting all this data into an AI model to predict how people will vote, something that Cambridge Analytica was a toy version of. But it goes beyond how people will vote but whether they will vote. Likewise, data will be constructed to strike off people from voter rolls if the system believes they won't vote how you want. We've seen efforts like this where similar-sounding names of felons in other states are used to strike off people from voter rolls. And that's a real problem because people might not know they're no longer registered to vote and in some states you have to register 30 or more days before the election.
There is essentially infinite money available to fund Republicans stealing elections because it results in public funding cuts to give even more tax breaks to billionaires.
You can't directly use the SSA databsae obviously so any effort must be small enough to not draw attention, involve part or all of the computing done overseas to avoid legal scrutiny and/or "washing" that data through data provider services. I would bet if you started exhaustively looking at various companies in or adjacent to these spaces, you'd find some pretty dodgy stuff.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47053453
https://www.onthewing.org/user/Bonhoeffer%20-%20Theory%20of%...
Nobody should have permission to query 70M Americans, it's a huge security flaw for the average citizen. But Pentagon has been doing this for a while a la Snowden, and the average american doesn't seem to be worried. With Snowden becoming a menace rather than a hero.
Once private government data from Americans starts being heavily used to mess up elections, or even worse, persecute people with a different opinion than the ruling party...
Americans will finally wake up that GDPR doesn't stiffle innovation, but rather protect its citizens from an evil actors.
But it may be too late, like when NSDAP started chasing jews and migrants. There was nothing they could do other than to flee to survive.
Yet here on HN, what have we been arguing about? Big tech. Google and Meta have been allowed to become boogeymen in this community out of all proportion to the actual threat they posed[1].
While the actual boogeyman stealing our data to exploit in the market? It was us.
[1] I mean, lets be honest, while everyone has abstract complaints the truth is that they've actually been remarkably benign stewards of our data over the past 20 years. Much, much, MUCH more responsible than the glibertarian dude in the cubicle next to you, as it turns out.
Is it genuinely your opinion that that activity (just look at all the equivocation!) constitutes a risk at the same level as alleged by the linked article?
This is exactly what I'm talking about. HN has a tunnel vision disease on this subject. "Yes yes, DOGE bros stole the SSA database, but let's please talk about how awful Google is." It's clinical at this point.