12 ms·

Ignoring the horrifying political parts, I think one aspect here about data access that is inherently worrying is that it seems like all usual controls were byp

Ignoring the horrifying political parts, I think one aspect here about data access that is inherently worrying is that it seems like all usual controls were bypassed and the DOGE people had very low level access to systems. So there are probably copies of sensitive data now in their possession, and nobody knows exactly what was copied and where it is stored. This kind of access would be dangerous even in the hands of principled and well-meaning people. Giving it to people with glaring red flags like here is just entirely irresponsible.

the_snooze 2y ago
At the very least, it’s a field day for foreign intelligence in DC. Offering these guys some money, women, status, or drink would pay massive dividends.
- jfengel 2y ago
  Have they even done the training that says "watch out for women trying to get into your pants"? Or did they just show up?
  - moshun 2y ago
    I think we both know the answer. Most of these DOGE people wouldn’t have been allowed in the building, much less the system root a couple of months ago because they’d never pass a clearance check.
    - 1oooqooq 2y ago
      technically, a clearance and background check have never been done on political appointees. the fbi openly says so. at least this is not new... the new thing is the low level of petty criminals being apointed.
      - acdha 2y ago
        Political appointees don’t get root, and they still had to get clearance for sensitive materials (as it’s legally required for the people securing a SCIF not to allow anyone who doesn’t have clearance in the door). Part of why the new administration is trying to bull through the process is that his first term had many delays due to appointees failing those checks.
        jfengel 2y ago
        How do you know who has a clearance? Is there a database they check? Or is it word of mouth from their boss?
        acdha 2y ago
        Yes, there’s a database and people who audit access, ensure that permissions are periodically reviewed (i.e. just because you needed access 5 years ago doesn’t mean your current duties still require the same access), and other events can trigger reviews (e.g. a large amount of personal debt could make someone a greater risk).
        reaperman 2y ago
        Which department/agency maintains the database of who-has-which-clearance?
        acdha 2y ago
        The Office of Personnel Management runs a lot of the standardized stuff, including the system which people use to submit the standard forms, but agencies have their own offices and variations: https://ourpublicservice.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/background-checks-and-security-clearances.pdf https://ourpublicservice.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/back...
        1oooqooq 2y ago
        they get root if the job requires. appointees are interviewed, not vetted by the fbi like federal employs. the dowvote brigade could read the article since im rentioning a literal quote from there.
    - throwaway2037 2y ago
      > much less the system root This comments section is getting wild. Do you have any proof that DOGE team members have been granted "system root" (whatever that means)? When I Google, it is unclear how many DOGE team members have security clearance and at what level.
      - johnnyanmac 2y ago
        > When I Google, it is unclear how many DOGE team members have security clearance and at what level. They are flooding the zone. That's by design. At one point they had "read-only access" to records. Then later people say they had full access and have backups. The only definitive proof we have publicly Is that a federal judge made two orders; One to restrict access to the treasury for all of DOGE except for the 2 people allegedly already working in treasury. And One to order deletion of any records they have backed up. All other reports come from first or second hand sources. AFAIK, no one truly knows DOGE did in the Treasury, and we won't know until a court proceeding later this month.
  - genewitch 2y ago
    There's a rumor that the doge team went and did their metadata dump at treasury on midnight on the 21st or whatever. But what I think would be more interesting is if musk hasn't done anything, and all this crying and screaming is just at the threat of peeking at the books. Because that seems more both their style.
- sangnoir 2y ago
  They could just hack their devices remotely, or physically break into his residence. I suspect a serial leaker will lack neither the discipline to not copy data onto personal devices, nor the opsec to withstand a motivated nation-state, since a lot of the work seems rushed, and is off playbook.
  - SequoiaHope 2y ago
    Perhaps giving an inexperienced script kiddie full access was part of a broader plan to allow someone else to covertly “steal” the data without directly implicating those in charge.
    - gorlilla 2y ago
      I believe the term is 'patsy' or, more generally, a scapegoat.
- Aurornis 2y ago
  This person was fired from a trivial teenage script kid job after two months because he couldn’t resist sharing their internal information. Only a few years later, he was thrust into the core information systems of the United States right next to people with security clearance. Targets like this are a dream come true for foreign adversaries looking for someone to corrupt. Who knows how much compromising content his old peers already have on him. The chat logs revealed they’re already thinking about how much access he has to valuable secrets.
  - the_snooze 2y ago
    SF-86 Section 13A Employment Activities >For this employment have any of the following happened to you in the last seven (7) years? >Fired, quit after being told you would be fired, left by mutual agreement following charges or allegations of misconduct, left by mutual agreement following notice of unsatisfactory performance. >Provide the reason for being fired. https://www.opm.gov/Forms/pdf_fill/sf86.pdf https://www.opm.gov/Forms/pdf_fill/sf86.pdf
    - CoastalCoder 2y ago
      I don't believe the POTUS is bound by the government's assessment of an employee's security risk. Whether or not ignoring such things is a good idea is something voters must judge.
      - mannykannot 2y ago
        You have a point - there are probably no defined rules about whether security risk rules apply when POTUS is employing someone to do something illegal or unconstitutional. If anyone gets to judge, however, it will be SCOTUS, not voters. It's hard to guess, right now, whether that's a plus for security.
    - hackyhacky 2y ago
      Security clearances are granted by the president, or someone delegated by him. The president has absolute authority to bypass, modify, or shut down the clearance credentialing system. There is no law or Constitutional requirement dictating security requirements or how they are applied. As the sibling comment pointed out, this is not to say that doing so is a good idea. But it's very probably legal.
beart 2y ago
Agreed. The political motivations need not even be a factor. Data privacy and access policies were bypassed by unauthorized actors.
- FranzFerdiNaN 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - amazingamazing 2y ago
    I agree with your point, but it isn't Trump that showed that. It was the country itself. Even with full control of everything, the Democrats were not able to properly punish Trump. This is in large part due to the Supreme Court helping out, but also due to ineffectual prosecution (e.g. Garland), and incompetency (e.g. the Georgia case) and blatant "lawfare" (hate that term), with a misdemeanor being upgraded to a felony in New York. This has created a scenario where the average person believes lawsuits against Trump are without merit, even though that's not true. Add in the incompetent media and you have a powerful potion.
    - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
      > Democrats were not able to properly punish Trump We’ve still got Chuck Schumer playing it business as usual. There is nothing in the Democratic Party that signals an emergency; the DNC didn’t even hint at lessons learned.
      - intended 2y ago
        The Dems are playing it the way they have to - which is like a legitimate political party. So I suppose they are playing it according to the constitution, which means things have to go to the courts. Which is the right thing to do. The deal is that the Trump is upping the ante constantly.
    - dboreham 2y ago
      Yes, except the bit about the upgraded charge. It was perfectly valid, and a serious crime, just very poorly explained. Which gets to the real problem: the combination of people in charge of enforcing consequences don't have the proper incentives to do so; and a criminal willing to resort to violence.
threeseed 2y ago
Also apparently huge scores of data was just dumped into a Microsoft hosted LLM [1]. So that data is (a) publicly available if you don't secure your VPC properly and (b) available to anyone without RBAC or request logging. This is an extraordinary degradation of the level of private and security controls. [1] https://www.firstpost.com/tech/elon-musks-team-at-doge-feeding-highly-sensitive-data-to-microsoft-azures-ai-bots-13860544.html https://www.firstpost.com/tech/elon-musks-team-at-doge-feedi...
- animal_spirits 2y ago
  The primary source for this is from The Washington Post - https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2025/02/06/elon-musk-doge-ai-department-education/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2025/02/06/elon-musk-d...
ineptech 2y ago
What's more worrying is whether the access can realistically be revoked. As a general rule, when a security even rises to the level of root access to internal systems, you don't even try to remove them - you just rebuild the affected VMs from scratch because it's the only way to be sure the attacker didn't leave anything behind. For the systems we're talking about, payment processing stuff at Treasury and Social Security and so forth, one wonders if they can even be rebuilt on a reasonable timeframe?
- nicce 2y ago
  The bigger question is whether there is currently any personnel physically even allowed to do such thing.
- MisoRamen 2y ago
  How does someone even clean up this mess? One of the DOGE kids may have just cloned every repo and then connect the machine to public internet because they need to fed it to an AI to figure out how things work. We can only assume the worst and that foreign adversaries may already be combing the code line by line. What will happen when PIIs of every individual with dealings with the Treasury gets leaked? Then there is going to be thousands of hours of meetings to review various processes...
  - nicce 2y ago
    > One of the DOGE kids may have just cloned every repo and then connect the machine to public internet because they need to fed it to an AI to figure out how things work. May... https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2025/02/06/elon-musk-doge-ai-department-education/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2025/02/06/elon-musk-d...
    - nelsonic 2y ago
      This is _exactly_ what overpriced management consultants would have done … the only question is which AI tools are they feeding the data to?
  - 2y ago
dkjaudyeqooe 2y ago
The amount of commercially and politically valuable information there is in these systems is incredible. If these people are scooping up this information you can imagine they might be tempted to monetize or weaponize it at some point, or use the threat of such for their own gain. This is absolutely chilling when you think about it.
- hypothesis 2y ago
  The best part is that even if courts force them to destroy all the pillaged data right now, it won’t stop them from making stuff up and weaponizing it anyway.
- cduzz 2y ago
  I wonder what this is going to do to the value of the dollar in the next couple years...
  - whatwhaaaaat 2y ago
    [flagged]
- A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 2y ago
  On the other hand, we may all experience privacy at levels uncomfortable for a lot of people, which MIGHT trigger some desire to actually make things more privacy conscious.
JumpCrisscross 2y ago
[flagged]
- fnimick 2y ago
  > Coristine wrote impressive, profitable tech. He should have a future as a productive member of society, perhaps even one of its titans. When did "profitable" become the sole metric by which we judge someone's work? Does what is morally correct factor into it at all, or should the impressiveness someone's accomplishments make them a "titan" regardless of intent or outcome?
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > When did "profitable" become the sole metric… You’re quoting a sentence with two adjectives. > should the impressiveness someone's accomplishments make them a "titan" regardless of intent or outcome? For a teenager? Barring violence, yes. An impressive, misguided teenager is a net asset to a community and society in the developed world. I challenge anyone intelligent to honestly say they didn’t have any really stupid opinions or worldviews before their prefrontal cortex had finished developing.
    - fnimick 2y ago
      I certainly didn't say anything akin to the recent racist tweets from another Doge staffer, no. There's also a very large unspoken piece left out of your sentence, which is that they are an asset if taught and guided well. Do you think Musk is likely to do that, or to instead encourage careless "technically impressive and profitable" behavior without regard to ethics or morals?
      - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
        > certainly didn't say anything akin to the recent racist tweets from another Doge staffer, no Were you on Twitter? I don’t remember anything that heinous. But I do remember telling off-colour jokes. If I’d done that in public and received validation from someone I respected and admired, is it implausible I’d have gone down the rabbit hole? > unspoken piece left out of your sentence, which is that they are an asset if taught and guided well That’s my point. These kids show potential. It’s being squandered for the short-term gains of old men.
grandempire 2y ago
(EDIT: Moved to comment I intended to reply to)
- lazyasciiart 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - grandempire 2y ago
    Yes. I don't know many accountants who are familiar with polynomials let alone what a DAG is, etc. I am sure there are graph concepts they use by other names. > Light SQL skills tend to be the upper end of technical accounting This would be the main point that would need correction if I am wrong.
    - lazyasciiart 2y ago
      Accounting isn’t auditing.
  - dang 2y ago
    Please don't cross into personal attack, regardless of how wrong another commenter is or you feel they are. If you know more than someone else, two good options are (1) to share some of what you know, so we all can learn; or (2) not post. Snarky putdowns are not a good option. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
- Aurornis 2y ago
  > So to me this argument sounds the same as "how can young kids think they can program like experienced engineers". This is about a specific person who has a history of bad behavior, not a generic discussion on the abilities of young people.
  - grandempire 2y ago
TheRealNGenius 2y ago
[dead]
chmorgan_ 2y ago
"it seems like all usual controls were bypassed". Apparently it isn't known. Let's answer this question and be impartial about it. A story about China having access to Treasury Department workstations landed a few months ago. There may be a LOT of bad practices in place. We should be pushing to improve them if so.
alecco 2y ago
Did everybody already forget only a month ago it was revealed Chinese hackers had access to US Treasury computers including US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen's own? https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-01-16/chinese-hacked-us-treasury-secretary-yellen-s-computer-in-breach https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-01-16/chinese-h... (https://archive.ph/xeEaO https://archive.ph/xeEaO) (January 16, 2025)
- blondie9x 2y ago
  That's a bit different than complete access to the complete payments database isn't it?
  - SoftTalker 2y ago
    OPM has had major leaks. I think it’s safe to assume most federal IT leaks like a sieve.
    - daveguy 2y ago
      So why should we care if the administration busts up the dam with a sledgehammer!
      - torstenvl 2y ago
        If outsiders with the CCP's interests at heart are able to use this data, why can't outsiders with the U.S.'s interests at heart be able to use this data? I always feel like there's a Monty Hall aspect to these discussions where people forget that the past has occurred and it has a bearing on the present. The choice isn't between "observe data protections" and "don't observe data protections." Something was behind door #3.
        acdha 2y ago
        Your personal data is already public due to commercial breaches. Does that mean that your current bank, etc. shouldn’t be expected to obey privacy laws?
bad_username 2y ago
> all usual controls were bypassed and the DOGE people had very low level access to systems Before DOGE, somebody obviously had to have this access as well, and similarly could have copied and stored. Why be concerned with DOGE but not their predecessors? Honest question.
- adgjlsfhk1 2y ago
  Because before the people that had access to this data got that access after passing background checks, had years in the treasury, supervision from higher-ups, and other processes in place. Now it's being accessed by cyber-criminal Nazis in their 20s who describe themselves as wanting to "Normalize Indian hate", " want a eugenic immigration policy", and who "were racist before it was cool" https://www.npr.org/2025/02/06/nx-s1-5289337/elon-musk-doge-treasury https://www.npr.org/2025/02/06/nx-s1-5289337/elon-musk-doge-....
  - A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 2y ago
    Hmm. I am hesitant to engage this post, but it may be well worth to point out, that some of issues with status quo are precisely the result of "people that had access to this data got that access after passing background checks, had years in the treasury, supervision from higher-ups, and other processes in place". Until now it was old boys club that did not dare to shake things up a little. My point is that there is plenty to dislike here, but if your argument against him is: he is a nazi, you have already lost, because you do not understand the sentiment out there.
    - throw0101d 2y ago
      > Hmm. I am hesitant to engage this post, but it may be well worth to point out, that some of issues with status quo […] Is one of the issues that an audit log of actions was created? Because it seems to me some of the levels of access given to the DOGE folks mean that auditing and traceability has now gone out the window like a Russian oligarch. I'm a sysadmin who 'just' runs a bunch of HPC stuff—nothing 'important' like HIPAA or SOX—and even my systems have some level of auditing and logging.
trallnag 2y ago
Sadly governments won't learn from this incident. The British one for example will keep on insisting backdooring everything.
Aeolun 2y ago
What I don’t understand is how this thing happened on the first place. Someone just shouldn’t be able to be appointed by a single dictator, and suddenly have access to a wealth of data that would have made the (here we go) nazi’s green with envy.
- dools 2y ago
  Wrestling
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  Because everyone turned their back with the appointment instead of throwing protests 3 months ago. We know there's a limit of tolerance for this because Matt Gaetz didn't make it through. But "modern day Tony Stark" was fine.
rsoto2 2y ago
It's almost as if the plan is to destabilize, gut and privatize the federal government, and the US itself. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rn52wL1b334 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rn52wL1b334

the_snooze 2y ago

At the very least, it’s a field day for foreign intelligence in DC. Offering these guys some money, women, status, or drink would pay massive dividends.

jfengel 2y ago
Have they even done the training that says "watch out for women trying to get into your pants"? Or did they just show up?
- moshun 2y ago
  I think we both know the answer. Most of these DOGE people wouldn’t have been allowed in the building, much less the system root a couple of months ago because they’d never pass a clearance check.
  - 1oooqooq 2y ago
    technically, a clearance and background check have never been done on political appointees. the fbi openly says so. at least this is not new... the new thing is the low level of petty criminals being apointed.
    - acdha 2y ago
      Political appointees don’t get root, and they still had to get clearance for sensitive materials (as it’s legally required for the people securing a SCIF not to allow anyone who doesn’t have clearance in the door). Part of why the new administration is trying to bull through the process is that his first term had many delays due to appointees failing those checks.
      - jfengel 2y ago
        How do you know who has a clearance? Is there a database they check? Or is it word of mouth from their boss?
        acdha 2y ago
        Yes, there’s a database and people who audit access, ensure that permissions are periodically reviewed (i.e. just because you needed access 5 years ago doesn’t mean your current duties still require the same access), and other events can trigger reviews (e.g. a large amount of personal debt could make someone a greater risk).
        reaperman 2y ago
        Which department/agency maintains the database of who-has-which-clearance?
        acdha 2y ago
        The Office of Personnel Management runs a lot of the standardized stuff, including the system which people use to submit the standard forms, but agencies have their own offices and variations: https://ourpublicservice.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/background-checks-and-security-clearances.pdf https://ourpublicservice.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/back...
      - 1oooqooq 2y ago
        they get root if the job requires. appointees are interviewed, not vetted by the fbi like federal employs. the dowvote brigade could read the article since im rentioning a literal quote from there.
  - throwaway2037 2y ago
    > much less the system root This comments section is getting wild. Do you have any proof that DOGE team members have been granted "system root" (whatever that means)? When I Google, it is unclear how many DOGE team members have security clearance and at what level.
    - johnnyanmac 2y ago
      > When I Google, it is unclear how many DOGE team members have security clearance and at what level. They are flooding the zone. That's by design. At one point they had "read-only access" to records. Then later people say they had full access and have backups. The only definitive proof we have publicly Is that a federal judge made two orders; One to restrict access to the treasury for all of DOGE except for the 2 people allegedly already working in treasury. And One to order deletion of any records they have backed up. All other reports come from first or second hand sources. AFAIK, no one truly knows DOGE did in the Treasury, and we won't know until a court proceeding later this month.
- genewitch 2y ago
  There's a rumor that the doge team went and did their metadata dump at treasury on midnight on the 21st or whatever. But what I think would be more interesting is if musk hasn't done anything, and all this crying and screaming is just at the threat of peeking at the books. Because that seems more both their style.
sangnoir 2y ago
They could just hack their devices remotely, or physically break into his residence. I suspect a serial leaker will lack neither the discipline to not copy data onto personal devices, nor the opsec to withstand a motivated nation-state, since a lot of the work seems rushed, and is off playbook.
- SequoiaHope 2y ago
  Perhaps giving an inexperienced script kiddie full access was part of a broader plan to allow someone else to covertly “steal” the data without directly implicating those in charge.
  - gorlilla 2y ago
    I believe the term is 'patsy' or, more generally, a scapegoat.
Aurornis 2y ago
This person was fired from a trivial teenage script kid job after two months because he couldn’t resist sharing their internal information. Only a few years later, he was thrust into the core information systems of the United States right next to people with security clearance. Targets like this are a dream come true for foreign adversaries looking for someone to corrupt. Who knows how much compromising content his old peers already have on him. The chat logs revealed they’re already thinking about how much access he has to valuable secrets.
- the_snooze 2y ago
  SF-86 Section 13A Employment Activities >For this employment have any of the following happened to you in the last seven (7) years? >Fired, quit after being told you would be fired, left by mutual agreement following charges or allegations of misconduct, left by mutual agreement following notice of unsatisfactory performance. >Provide the reason for being fired. https://www.opm.gov/Forms/pdf_fill/sf86.pdf https://www.opm.gov/Forms/pdf_fill/sf86.pdf
  - CoastalCoder 2y ago
    I don't believe the POTUS is bound by the government's assessment of an employee's security risk. Whether or not ignoring such things is a good idea is something voters must judge.
    - mannykannot 2y ago
      You have a point - there are probably no defined rules about whether security risk rules apply when POTUS is employing someone to do something illegal or unconstitutional. If anyone gets to judge, however, it will be SCOTUS, not voters. It's hard to guess, right now, whether that's a plus for security.
  - hackyhacky 2y ago
    Security clearances are granted by the president, or someone delegated by him. The president has absolute authority to bypass, modify, or shut down the clearance credentialing system. There is no law or Constitutional requirement dictating security requirements or how they are applied. As the sibling comment pointed out, this is not to say that doing so is a good idea. But it's very probably legal.

beart 2y ago

Agreed. The political motivations need not even be a factor. Data privacy and access policies were bypassed by unauthorized actors.

FranzFerdiNaN 2y ago
[flagged]
- amazingamazing 2y ago
  I agree with your point, but it isn't Trump that showed that. It was the country itself. Even with full control of everything, the Democrats were not able to properly punish Trump. This is in large part due to the Supreme Court helping out, but also due to ineffectual prosecution (e.g. Garland), and incompetency (e.g. the Georgia case) and blatant "lawfare" (hate that term), with a misdemeanor being upgraded to a felony in New York. This has created a scenario where the average person believes lawsuits against Trump are without merit, even though that's not true. Add in the incompetent media and you have a powerful potion.
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > Democrats were not able to properly punish Trump We’ve still got Chuck Schumer playing it business as usual. There is nothing in the Democratic Party that signals an emergency; the DNC didn’t even hint at lessons learned.
    - intended 2y ago
      The Dems are playing it the way they have to - which is like a legitimate political party. So I suppose they are playing it according to the constitution, which means things have to go to the courts. Which is the right thing to do. The deal is that the Trump is upping the ante constantly.
  - dboreham 2y ago
    Yes, except the bit about the upgraded charge. It was perfectly valid, and a serious crime, just very poorly explained. Which gets to the real problem: the combination of people in charge of enforcing consequences don't have the proper incentives to do so; and a criminal willing to resort to violence.

threeseed 2y ago

Also apparently huge scores of data was just dumped into a Microsoft hosted LLM [1]. So that data is (a) publicly available if you don't secure your VPC properly and (b) available to anyone without RBAC or request logging. This is an extraordinary degradation of the level of private and security controls. [1] https://www.firstpost.com/tech/elon-musks-team-at-doge-feeding-highly-sensitive-data-to-microsoft-azures-ai-bots-13860544.html https://www.firstpost.com/tech/elon-musks-team-at-doge-feedi...

animal_spirits 2y ago
The primary source for this is from The Washington Post - https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2025/02/06/elon-musk-doge-ai-department-education/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2025/02/06/elon-musk-d...

ineptech 2y ago

What's more worrying is whether the access can realistically be revoked. As a general rule, when a security even rises to the level of root access to internal systems, you don't even try to remove them - you just rebuild the affected VMs from scratch because it's the only way to be sure the attacker didn't leave anything behind. For the systems we're talking about, payment processing stuff at Treasury and Social Security and so forth, one wonders if they can even be rebuilt on a reasonable timeframe?

nicce 2y ago
The bigger question is whether there is currently any personnel physically even allowed to do such thing.
MisoRamen 2y ago
How does someone even clean up this mess? One of the DOGE kids may have just cloned every repo and then connect the machine to public internet because they need to fed it to an AI to figure out how things work. We can only assume the worst and that foreign adversaries may already be combing the code line by line. What will happen when PIIs of every individual with dealings with the Treasury gets leaked? Then there is going to be thousands of hours of meetings to review various processes...
- nicce 2y ago
  > One of the DOGE kids may have just cloned every repo and then connect the machine to public internet because they need to fed it to an AI to figure out how things work. May... https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2025/02/06/elon-musk-doge-ai-department-education/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2025/02/06/elon-musk-d...
  - nelsonic 2y ago
    This is _exactly_ what overpriced management consultants would have done … the only question is which AI tools are they feeding the data to?
- 2y ago

dkjaudyeqooe 2y ago

The amount of commercially and politically valuable information there is in these systems is incredible. If these people are scooping up this information you can imagine they might be tempted to monetize or weaponize it at some point, or use the threat of such for their own gain. This is absolutely chilling when you think about it.

hypothesis 2y ago
The best part is that even if courts force them to destroy all the pillaged data right now, it won’t stop them from making stuff up and weaponizing it anyway.
cduzz 2y ago
I wonder what this is going to do to the value of the dollar in the next couple years...
- whatwhaaaaat 2y ago
  [flagged]
A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 2y ago
On the other hand, we may all experience privacy at levels uncomfortable for a lot of people, which MIGHT trigger some desire to actually make things more privacy conscious.

JumpCrisscross 2y ago

[flagged]

fnimick 2y ago
> Coristine wrote impressive, profitable tech. He should have a future as a productive member of society, perhaps even one of its titans. When did "profitable" become the sole metric by which we judge someone's work? Does what is morally correct factor into it at all, or should the impressiveness someone's accomplishments make them a "titan" regardless of intent or outcome?
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > When did "profitable" become the sole metric… You’re quoting a sentence with two adjectives. > should the impressiveness someone's accomplishments make them a "titan" regardless of intent or outcome? For a teenager? Barring violence, yes. An impressive, misguided teenager is a net asset to a community and society in the developed world. I challenge anyone intelligent to honestly say they didn’t have any really stupid opinions or worldviews before their prefrontal cortex had finished developing.
  - fnimick 2y ago
    I certainly didn't say anything akin to the recent racist tweets from another Doge staffer, no. There's also a very large unspoken piece left out of your sentence, which is that they are an asset if taught and guided well. Do you think Musk is likely to do that, or to instead encourage careless "technically impressive and profitable" behavior without regard to ethics or morals?
    - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
      > certainly didn't say anything akin to the recent racist tweets from another Doge staffer, no Were you on Twitter? I don’t remember anything that heinous. But I do remember telling off-colour jokes. If I’d done that in public and received validation from someone I respected and admired, is it implausible I’d have gone down the rabbit hole? > unspoken piece left out of your sentence, which is that they are an asset if taught and guided well That’s my point. These kids show potential. It’s being squandered for the short-term gains of old men.

grandempire 2y ago

(EDIT: Moved to comment I intended to reply to)

lazyasciiart 2y ago
[flagged]
- grandempire 2y ago
  Yes. I don't know many accountants who are familiar with polynomials let alone what a DAG is, etc. I am sure there are graph concepts they use by other names. > Light SQL skills tend to be the upper end of technical accounting This would be the main point that would need correction if I am wrong.
  - lazyasciiart 2y ago
    Accounting isn’t auditing.
- dang 2y ago
  Please don't cross into personal attack, regardless of how wrong another commenter is or you feel they are. If you know more than someone else, two good options are (1) to share some of what you know, so we all can learn; or (2) not post. Snarky putdowns are not a good option. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Aurornis 2y ago
> So to me this argument sounds the same as "how can young kids think they can program like experienced engineers". This is about a specific person who has a history of bad behavior, not a generic discussion on the abilities of young people.
- grandempire 2y ago

TheRealNGenius 2y ago

[dead]

chmorgan_ 2y ago

"it seems like all usual controls were bypassed". Apparently it isn't known. Let's answer this question and be impartial about it. A story about China having access to Treasury Department workstations landed a few months ago. There may be a LOT of bad practices in place. We should be pushing to improve them if so.

alecco 2y ago

Did everybody already forget only a month ago it was revealed Chinese hackers had access to US Treasury computers including US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen's own? https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-01-16/chinese-hacked-us-treasury-secretary-yellen-s-computer-in-breach https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-01-16/chinese-h... (https://archive.ph/xeEaO https://archive.ph/xeEaO) (January 16, 2025)

blondie9x 2y ago
That's a bit different than complete access to the complete payments database isn't it?
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  OPM has had major leaks. I think it’s safe to assume most federal IT leaks like a sieve.
  - daveguy 2y ago
    So why should we care if the administration busts up the dam with a sledgehammer!
    - torstenvl 2y ago
      If outsiders with the CCP's interests at heart are able to use this data, why can't outsiders with the U.S.'s interests at heart be able to use this data? I always feel like there's a Monty Hall aspect to these discussions where people forget that the past has occurred and it has a bearing on the present. The choice isn't between "observe data protections" and "don't observe data protections." Something was behind door #3.
      - acdha 2y ago
        Your personal data is already public due to commercial breaches. Does that mean that your current bank, etc. shouldn’t be expected to obey privacy laws?

bad_username 2y ago

> all usual controls were bypassed and the DOGE people had very low level access to systems Before DOGE, somebody obviously had to have this access as well, and similarly could have copied and stored. Why be concerned with DOGE but not their predecessors? Honest question.

adgjlsfhk1 2y ago
Because before the people that had access to this data got that access after passing background checks, had years in the treasury, supervision from higher-ups, and other processes in place. Now it's being accessed by cyber-criminal Nazis in their 20s who describe themselves as wanting to "Normalize Indian hate", " want a eugenic immigration policy", and who "were racist before it was cool" https://www.npr.org/2025/02/06/nx-s1-5289337/elon-musk-doge-treasury https://www.npr.org/2025/02/06/nx-s1-5289337/elon-musk-doge-....
- A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 2y ago
  Hmm. I am hesitant to engage this post, but it may be well worth to point out, that some of issues with status quo are precisely the result of "people that had access to this data got that access after passing background checks, had years in the treasury, supervision from higher-ups, and other processes in place". Until now it was old boys club that did not dare to shake things up a little. My point is that there is plenty to dislike here, but if your argument against him is: he is a nazi, you have already lost, because you do not understand the sentiment out there.
  - throw0101d 2y ago
    > Hmm. I am hesitant to engage this post, but it may be well worth to point out, that some of issues with status quo […] Is one of the issues that an audit log of actions was created? Because it seems to me some of the levels of access given to the DOGE folks mean that auditing and traceability has now gone out the window like a Russian oligarch. I'm a sysadmin who 'just' runs a bunch of HPC stuff—nothing 'important' like HIPAA or SOX—and even my systems have some level of auditing and logging.

trallnag 2y ago

Sadly governments won't learn from this incident. The British one for example will keep on insisting backdooring everything.

Aeolun 2y ago

What I don’t understand is how this thing happened on the first place. Someone just shouldn’t be able to be appointed by a single dictator, and suddenly have access to a wealth of data that would have made the (here we go) nazi’s green with envy.

dools 2y ago
Wrestling
johnnyanmac 2y ago
Because everyone turned their back with the appointment instead of throwing protests 3 months ago. We know there's a limit of tolerance for this because Matt Gaetz didn't make it through. But "modern day Tony Stark" was fine.

rsoto2 2y ago

It's almost as if the plan is to destabilize, gut and privatize the federal government, and the US itself. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rn52wL1b334 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rn52wL1b334