Posted by rbanffy 4/15/2025
> Meanwhile, according to the disclosure and records of internal communications, members of the DOGE team asked that their activities not be logged on the system and then appeared to try to cover their tracks behind them, turning off monitoring tools and manually deleting records of their access — evasive behavior that several cybersecurity experts interviewed by NPR compared to what criminal or state-sponsored hackers might do.
The subsequent message about Russian activity could be a coincidence–Internet background noise-but given how these are not very technically skilled and are moving very fast in systems they don’t understand, I’d be completely unsurprised to learn that they unintentionally left something exposed or that one of them has been compromised.
There were already people auditing departments, but they got fired early on:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inspector_general#United_State...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_dismissals_of_inspectors_...
There's even an entire agency devoted to auditing:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Accountability_Offi...
Trying to find efficiency by bringing in the private sector is not a new thing:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Commission
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownlow_Committee
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_Commission
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Partnership_for_Reinv...
No. But getting rid of cronyism/nepotism did happen at one point:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_service_reform_in_the_Un...
These weren't random login attempts. It says the Russian login attempts had the correct login credentials of newly created accounts.
If the article is correct, the accounts were created and then shortly afterward the correct credentials were used to attempt a login from a Russian source.
That's a huge issue if true. Could be that someone's laptop is compromised.
Or perhaps someone got invited to the wrong group chat again.
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/07/16/trump-putin-russia...
ftfy
In fact I would imagine they would do exactly the opposite because they would look at the mere ability to hide what they did as an audit finding.
"We already have an audit from last year, we just need the funding to improv--"
"Oh, and they want to turn off all the security cameras next weekend. You'll know it's them because they'll be wearing masks."
"Sir, we have a responsibility to our customers, we can't ju--"
"Do it or you're fired."
manager: "the auditors found all of our money missing"
::silence::
manager: "they are clearly doing an amazing job, and you are all fired for allowing such fraud waste and abuse"
Well, maybe one shouldn't be using Google DNS server when violating ToU to download Google's video.
I should point out, though, that authoritarianism doesn’t necessarily mean that QOL drops for the average person (if you’re not part of a targeted group). Many people live quite happily in Hungary, Turkey, Russia. Local government will chug along as before, stonks might still go up. But you have to internalize a certain resignation over things you can no longer change or talk about, unless you wish to become a dissident and put yourself in danger. I’m not brave enough for that, so I’m opting out of the whole thing.
Perhaps the defining feature of the modern nation state is a monopoly on violence and power. Been that way my whole life.
I'm making plans and moving money already.
I'm waiting it out for now. I'm "close" enough to communte to Los Angeles, but otherwise on the outskirts of the county as a whole. It's a weird place for any federal service to go out of their way to exploit.
As an aside, I also consider a civil war as "not making it". Having to wage war on the people you lead is fundamentally a failure of all systems.
But even if Trump is out of the picture, that just means we'll get president Vance, which is likely to be even worse.
Nobody else in the party has this kind of power. Not JD, not Desantis, not the Koch brothers, nobody. When he's gone, it's over.
Right now this is impossible because Trump sucks all the air out of the room. But with him gone, I don't see any reason why all those people who voted for him will suddenly not vote for the closest similar candidate, and that voting block is really where his power comes from.
And looking at history, cults of personality often survive replacement of the figure around which they are built - examples are numerous in various dictatorships, just look at North Korea for one that is still ongoing.
Trump is simultaneously a blunt force tool to destroy our institutions while also being a political wizard that always know exactly how to spin things and is completely impervious to pressure and stress.
I think those background forces know after trump there will not be anyone like him. Which is exactly why everything is being destroyed at such a rapid pace. Their opportunity is short and they are maximizing it. Things will look very different post trump
Along with the other points you made, rarely showing stress, always having a comeback with no care for the truth make him unique.
Vance is not even close.
When Trump goes all the smaller factions will compete for the top. That's the typical state.
The Senate has sole power over impeachment trials. The trial and conviction vote have no quorum requirement. Republicans will have to show up and vote to acquit, explicitly, to protect Trump.
The law is clear, upon conviction the president is removed from power. The only power any person has is the power people voluntarily give to him. He can also throw poop if so inclined, he's plenty full of it.
But if not one thing is yielded to him, if without any violence he is simply not obeyed, he becomes naked and undone and nothing, just as when the root receives no nourishment, the branch withers and dies. - Étienne de La Boétie, Discourse on Voluntary Servitude: Why People Enslave Themselves to Authority
Yes.
With a confidence level of some 99.9%+ of votes being legitimate, yes. with 155 million voters in 2024 nationals, that leaves a margin of about 155k illegitimate votes. Elections can be super close (see 2000), but any fraud that went undetected would not sway most American elections. At least not with this electoral college system.
>Do you honestly believe there will not be at least _some_ kind of election in 2028?
Yeah probably. I'm not even sure if Trump will get that far, though. we'll have to see how damning this SAVE act is on women first and if the courts strike this down in the next 18 months or so.
>Even if it's staged, form must be respected.
When has Trump ever done that? most other leaders I disagree with still did this. But not him.
Why aren't we to believe that this is Elon Musk going after anyone filing a complaint to the NLRB (from X, Twitter or SpaceX) or, worse yet (from Elon's POV), anyone potentially organizing any unionization effort?
There's absolutely no reason DOGE should have access to this information. There's absolutely no reason their activity, such as what information they accessed, should be hidden.
It looks to be both
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/twilight-of-the-edgelords
At least I can share it. And wait. And hope.
By which I mean, stoicism is really becoming a survival stance for me. And I recommend it for others.
Some people will retreat from the news, but that’s not me.
What is happening is going to cause a great deal of lasting mental hardships, as well as the practical damage.
Second tack: remember we are still in history. History has always been crazy, with only short periods of less crazy.
A third tack is considering how to support other people, instead of needing support.
Best to find a way to reliably maintain internal peace and health right now. Things are unlikely to stabilize soon, without a miracle. Or eventually bounce back. But that could take a long time. And this could just be the preamble for much worse disasters. Gulp.
At least, this is how I am prepping myself! Scary times.
This is woefully ignorant of the fact that some people will be thrown into an El Salvadorian prison, killed, disappeared, threatened, lose civil liberties, lose human rights, ect.
Must be nice to just put on some headphones and wait for it to all blow over. Unfortunately for many immigrants, LGBTQ members, activists, union members, government workers don't have that luxury. The news you're ignoring are their lives being shattered.
I made no implication that very bad things are not happening. Or that anyone is immune. Quite the opposite.
But I don't want to be afraid, regardless of what happens. Not the, "I can't sleep at night" afraid. Nor the, "I can't speak up and take action" afraid. That is quite literally what the main actors want.
People's ability to maintain their mental health is going to matter. There are so many ways to spiral, internally and externally, during traumatic times, and we all need to be at our best. For ourselves, for each other.
Now might be a good time to be generally supportive of each other. A systemic lack of tolerance for differences of thought is a prime contributor to the fiasco we are in.
Right now, at this moment, society has a small window of opportunity.
People cannot get rid of autocracy by themselves, they have become controlled resources. It took millions of free people to get rid of the Nazi's.
Act now.Have conversations with your friends, the grocery store owner.
Join grassroots organizations, or start a local one. Keep people accountable. Your local politician bends over because he is afraid of consequences. Now give people no way out but do the right thing. When people are transported to concentration camps, than such is not an act of God, but people doing unconstitutional things while not being held accountable.
Fascism is not Hitler. It is collective, sociological behavior. Trump is a nuisance. The problem is a society engineered to give consent to the .1%, the Dark Mirror tech bro's, the christian cultists.
I disagree. It seemed blindingly obviously sarcastic to me -- and the rest of the comments it generated indicate the same.
EDIT: PS the peer comment by blindsight has a much more cogent critique
If government agencies are compromised - via software backdoors or any other mechanism - any data and systems they can access should be considered compromised too.
You are a Human Resource to be commercialized. Ad tech => Private Intelligence.
One is not a person. One has no rights. Unless one can free themself and their loved ones of neoliberal brainwashing.
And the same half of the population do not trust anything what npr.org says.
Understanding the above dynamic is key to grasping the current state of discourse in the U.S.
[1] https://edworkforce.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?Docum...
Usually there's a shakedown, did Trump ever make NPR an offer they "couldn't" refuse?
Really feels like the fox is already in the coop.
Has some of the protected disclosure document from the whistleblower.
https://bsky.app/profile/mattjay.com/post/3ln2dgoksce2e
Looks like Elon's staff went in and made a copy of everything - which in this case NLRB, so sensitive stuff, but any state department going to have a ton of sensitive stuff - and sent it who knows where; this after disabling all logging and a ton of security, presumably to try to cover their tracks.
This is bad. These guys are looking like bad actors, with State-level authorization for access to everything.
Also looks like they're kids and don't have the hang of security, and the professional Russian State run APTs have hacked them.
https://oversightdemocrats.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/demo...
The owner could, of course, just make it public again, or put it back up, and end all the speculation.
I'm trying to think through this:
1. if the screenshot is not doctored, then the implied ordering of last updated would have had it last updated before January 20, 2021; which would mean it has nothing to do with what is alleged in the article.
2. But in the archive.ph snapshot from 2/28/25 doesn't have it at all anywhere.
3. Archive.org's 3/21/25 snapshot shows the same thing as archive.ph
4. The article states that after this tweet (https://x.com/SollenbergerRC/status/1895609294810464390) dated 2/28/25 (the date of the archive.ph 2/28/25 snapshot), Berulis noticed NxGenBdoorExtract in the repo: "After journalist Roger Sollenberger started posting on X about the account, Berulis noticed something Wick was working on: a project, or repository, titled "NxGenBdoorExtract." Wick made it private before Berulis could investigate further, he told NPR.
Of course, if it really only was public for a very brief moment then it might not be in the snapshot, and the article isn't clear exactly how long after that tweet that Berulis supposedly discovered this.
All I can say is this: I can't figure out for the life of me what all this adds up to.
And they absolutely should be resisted with this deadline in mind...
And this Chief Executive was elected by the majority of the country, specifically to take these actions that he'd clearly stated he would take.
The resistance is actually the violation of federal law. It's no different from contempt of court; within the President's domain, he has a huge amount of power. The President can also modify existing policy (regulations) at any time and literally make new laws (Executive Orders have the force of law) as long as they don't conflict with current law, as well as overturning previous President's Executive Orders.
Of course, then the shoe will be on the other food someday, too, just as it was when Biden took over from Trump and then they switched places again.
As President Obama said, "I've got a pen, and I've got a phone."
https://www.npr.org/2014/01/20/263766043/wielding-a-pen-and-...
If he ordered you to break the law or professional standards, would you obey? This is not hypothetical for many people: if you’re a lawyer, professional engineer, healthcare professional, work in HR, etc. it is not at all uncommon to suggest legal ways to accomplish a goal.
According to the article, that’s exactly what happened here: they have various federal laws and regulations covering their work, but as at other agencies, DOGE decided they don’t need to follow those. This confirms that their stated purpose is not their true motivation but it remains to be seen whether there will be any consequences.
Your misunderstanding seems to be to think that the word of the president is the law, like in a dictatorship. In the US system of separation of powers, that's not how it is supposed to work.
As I understood it, this "immunity" is granted for POTUS doing things in the course of their responsibility as POTUS. Could it be argued that breaking laws & orders which bind the activity of POTUS is _inherently not_ the work someone in that role?
Immunity also isn't absolute. For example police in the US typically enjoy broad immunity but that doesn't imply not getting dragged into court. They just have sweeping legal defenses available to them that other people don't.
Except said "chief executive" was not elected by "a majority of the country."
He wasn't even elected by a majority of those who voted (~35-40% of the population), but rather a plurality of those who voted (~20% of the population).
Note that I am not claiming that there was anything nefarious (I have no evidence to support making such a claim), just that those who voted for that person represent only ~20% of the US population, not a "majority of the country."
There are procedures to do the things that he said he wanted to do, because we are well aware of how an unchecked executive can destroy our government by doing what they want however they want.
Allow me to illustrate Exhibit A, unfolding now.
We used to have a government like this, a spoils system, and it didn't work. So both parties created the civil service. Both parties passed things like that Administrative Procedures act.
The President is literally the Chief Executive officer in the United States.
https://people.howstuffworks.com/president4.htm
> Laws and budgets are set by Congress
That's correct, under Article 1, but the President does not have to spend every dime that was allocated.
> EOs do not have the force of law
"Both executive orders and proclamations have the force of law, much like regulations issued by federal agencies"
https://www.americanbar.org/groups/public_education/publicat...
You seem to underestimate the power that is vested in the office of the President as the Chief Executive.
> have been invalidated by courts
As have many, many legislatively-passed laws; this is simply checks-and-balances and allows the judiciary to act on other laws (which originate from Congress) and regulations (which originate from the Executive Branch).
No, he was not. He was elected by ~30% of the possible voters in this country because most people chose no one and stayed home.
But did they actually "turn off logging"?? How do you even do that? Anyone know what access control system they are talking about?