Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'
krebsonsecurity.com
krebsonsecurity.com
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I always hope that such recruits had a bit tighter surveillance from their employee, but no one in the industry describes such recruits as "highly susceptible to extortion and coercion from current members of the same gang", and absolutely no one described them as members of violent street gang. It might have been a fair label but at most, such teens were describe as smart but mischievous. Might not be the best people to be responsible for national security, or peoples bank accounts, but it seemed to be the culture of that industry.
Has other people in the IT security industry had the similar experience of this culture?
But in infosec a lot of people probably got into it because 'hacking' is cool and glorified by the media. It's rebellious and appeals to a lot of teens I think. I don't think it's as serious as Krebs suggested that you could be extorted or compromised. It seems like it's just a bunch of inexperienced people in a discord channel. Soliciting a DDoS on there, to me, just seems like youthful nonsense. If you were actually in some kind of criminal hacking enterprise I bet you would know not to make mistakes like leaving a paper trail to your identity in a discord channel where you solicited a crime.
I haven't seen the people with criminal records for cyber crimes be less trustworthy in the industry. Some of them just made stupid mistakes when they were younger and sometimes dumb kids get way overcharged for cyber crimes. For the most part I think it's fine for kids to go through a phase where they think it's cool but they don't really know what they are doing. A lot of people have done that. A lot of 13 yr old kids on the internet have talked about hacking banks and things like that and they aren't all going to be in a gang. Another analogy is how a lot of people get into chemistry because they like blowing things up. Not all those people are terrorists.
Just linking this back to the story, am I mistaken in saying that DOGE is not an intelligence agency? (It certainly is a great position to exfiltrate information however.)
I don't think the argument they can act as an informer for things going on inside government agencies works. They've never been on the inside.
And I don't see what it has to do with IT security. What are they doing that's security related? Isn't what they're claiming to be doing pretty much data analysis?
The only overlapping skill I can see is a willingness to exfiltrate data, if they're doing that, without giving consideration to the rules or consequences.
The debate isn't whether he should go to jail. The debate is whether he should get a clearance for some of the most powerful access someone can possibly get. He's not suitable. Why can't Musk replace him? He's just a kid.
I say 90% of security is admin work where one has access to various stuff.
Then you have red teams, pentesters, consultants- that don’t have ever privileged access to anything. They should find flaws and pass recommendations to IT admins. If they hack anything at all - it has to be outlined in scope and strictly monitored. For both sides protection as if „hacking person” doesn’t get blame for something he did not touch by him but at the same time someone pulled off something nasty.
Their story repeats itself a dozen times over from my now-fragmented friend group from that time. Many young kids getting into ill-fated get rich quick schemes ranging from credit card fraud to refunding (mail fraud) all the way to sim swapping, blackmail, doxxing, and even real life violence and gang activity. A few of my earliest friends were just indicted for home invasions and armed robbery in some scheme to steal crypto. All of them from Minecraft, weirdly enough.
Anyways, those who didn’t end up in jail or “on the run” from participating in these stupid schemes, I tend to notice a common trend towards security related work. I know one guy who went from fraternizing with the same now-criminally-indicted people I hung around to working for the FBI’s cyber crimes unit (fitting, I guess). Another one now works with a defense contractor developing spyware, as far as I can tell. Many more work in different areas of cyber security and programming et al, including myself.
The cyber-crime adjacent to cyber security pipeline is very much so real.
That's actually ok in a military context. Most kids right out of highschool dont serve more than a handfull of years. Then they are the corporate world's problem.
What does the infosec industry have to do with DOGE?
The latter displays no competency in hacking or cybersecurity, only the attempt to harm another.
My concern in their access to secure government systems is not their hacking competency (which has not been demonstrated), but their sociopathy which has.
Imagine if DOGE feeds all the data they get their hands on into an LLM and he sells a copy of that to a foreign nation, allowing any other government a text-based interface to ask any questions of any of the internal workings of the US administration, government, citizens or even some of its secrets.
The details about cybercrime discords involved in SWATting and DDOS attacks are fascinating.
The idea that anyone involved in this would be fast-tracked for a clearance is beyond the pale.
To be honest, this is my first time hearing about The Com. Does anyone have any more reading on this? You'd think they'd use something more secure than Discord (which has 0 encryption) and Telegram which doesn't have encryption by default and whose gov't backdoor is basically an open secret[0]
> Violent online groups are targeting and manipulating vulnerable children and young people across widely accessible online platforms. There are multiple groups, associations and evolving subgroups that make up the online network known as The Com – short for community. The Com is a virtual community of groups and individuals who conduct illicit activities that glorify serious violence, cruelty, and gore.
> Elements of The Com network are known to have extreme ideological views and victimise children, coercing them to commit violent acts. Predators groom their victims through different methods – one approach is establishing friendships based on trust or romantic relationships. Another technique involves the use of power or coercive tactics with one goal – taking control over the victims, while getting them to engage in serious violence, self-harm, or other gruesome. It’s a vicious cycle - the predators in this network influence children or young people into conducting acts that increasingly shame, incriminate, or isolate them, this in turn makes them more vulnerable to further exploitation.
You can go down a really dark rabbit hole if you really dig deep into some of these groups within The Com.
This is where the worst of the worst spend all their time.
I feel that discord the company probably let's it slide because:
1. Moderation at scale is incredibly difficult. 2. They work with law enforcement agencies to execute warrants and subpoenas.
His general overview: https://www.maargentino.com/the-pillars-of-the-com-network/
That piece doesn't get specific at all about Com activities but be aware that some of the manifestos and other material he discusses is quite disturbing.
He worked in contact with Musk and his sponsorship to create this tool
Interesting cybercrime research credentials
Yes there's not evidence available that this research was used for crime, just that the project is capable of what's described and that it was done under Musk's sponsorship and that he was hired after building this in contact with Musk
This does not strike me as nefarious in any way and there is a really valid reason for generating the ballot images -- testing, which is exactly how it is used in the project.
Musk also believes (either arrogance, or true belief) that much of this stuff can be figured out from first principals without much need of traditional experts.
History has one answer for the deployment of reams of young fiery-loyalist men to the front lines: cannon fodder.
Elon has contempt for rules and laws. Blame the fuckups on the deep state or whatever. He will run wild until the president cuts off his head.
USAID: 0.6% of the budget CFPB: 0.011% of the budget
It has nothing to do with saving money and is well beyond the executive order than instantiated the agency.
If all they do is disrupt things enough for some crypto dorks and Russians to make a play it was all worth it.
Given the highly volatile, and legally gray, situation; I'd expect the front line people who usually grant access are at least flagging these requests to their boss, who flags to their boss etc. Is everyone up the chain just giving a shrug and saying "seems legit, give them the access".
Of course people don't want to loose their jobs, but I would have expected someone in a senior leadership position to take a stand in preventing this (unless their all on board?)
Musk is not concerned with producing false accusation for example. Obviously he could find corrupt auditors and probably did, but those are slower. They take more time to produce what was asked from them.
Though I note at SpaceX he seems to hire actual rocket scientists.
There is a claim that many federal payments do not have information necessary for traditional financial audits. Maybe a team of forensic auditors would be more apt?
When you build a machine like this you should ask, "would I be comfortable if my political opposites had control of this?" If the answer is no, then you DON'T BUILD IT.
Meanwhile someone goes in there to try to break up this 30 year pile of technical debt and it's all lawsuits and handwaving theatrics to try to stop it.
Maybe it's a question of wording, but I would agree if the word were "inexperienced" instead of teenage (in reality, they are young adults).
I have no horse in this DOGE race and all the discussions, but I find this "reverse ageism" (for lack of a better term) quite sad, 'cause it does not sound condescending but infantilizes youth and hides one of the biggest elephants in the room in the modern world, which is the real lack of representation of youth in politics (and maybe in the public service?) [1][2].
I was a 19-year-old holding an assault weapon in my daily work in the military with the power to terminate the lives of almost 99.99% civilians, friends with 23 starting piloting USD 5 million machines, and it's just sad to see that we as a society do not see young adults as capable as their older counterparts.
I speculate that at least in Europe, due to this credibility bias in favor of older politicians, we are facing one of the biggest violations of the intergenerational pact, which is the fact that this same youth will end up without retirement [3].
[1] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/congress-age-de...
[2] - https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/both-republicans-and-de...
[3] - https://www.dw.com/en/pension-fund-crisis-looms-in-germany-a...
One might as well ask "if you want to stop HIV/AIDS in Africa why pay a bunch of young kids with international relations degrees instead of AIDS researchers". Grunt work takes grunt effort.
If it's working, why would it matter? The most curious thing in all these discussions is that the elephant in the room is never addressed: they already found on hundreds of billions of pure fraud and funding for extremely dubious endeavors.
But nobody talks about that: everybody attacks the messenger. Everywhere.
Are people not happy that the fraud team already uncovered the following:
USAID fund diverted to the Clinton family, part of which funded a $3m for Chelsea Clinton's wedding and $10m for Chelsea Clinton's mansion.
$41m to study transgender mice
$3m to BBC (seriously, what? BBC in the UK? With US taxpayers dollars? Why? To push what kind of narrative?)
$8m to the supposedly independent "Politico"
$40m+ to EcoHealthAlliance to fund gain-of-function on modified bat viruses (moreover now official report to Congress says the most likely source for the Covid-19 outbreak is a lab-leak: so we have USAID partially responsible for the *death of tens of millions of people*
$20m for a "Sesame Street" show in Iraq
$110m to find water in Afghanistan
funding of a movie in Portugal glorifying incest
countless NGOs worldwide who got funded by USAID and who constantly pushed for tens of millions of illegal migrants to make their way both to the US and the EU (now you may believe it's a good thing that countless NGOs do actively work towards migrating tens of millions of people to the US and the EU but *why* is this done with US taxpayers' money?)
But the elephant in the room is constantly dodged: why? The elephant in the room is there. And it's a gigantic elephant.
Why is it that to some, like me, it looks like USAID (and certainly more with more revelations to come) is basically a gigantic money laundering operation combined with the push of a worldwide leftist agenda?
And the curious thing: people keep crying "attack on democracy" although DOGE keeps exposing, day after day, actual attacks on democracy, where US taxpayers dollar were used to fund a leftist agenda.
To me DOGE is doing something right. Instead of shooting the messenger, discuss the actual findings they already did.
Explain to me how you defend $40m+ going to fund gain-of-function bat viruses and how you defend Biden pardoning Fauci who lied about it in Congress? Because that's what DOGE is exposing.
a lot of doge/elon's team is from the various tech companies he owns, so of course, they're going to be teenagers and senior people are pretty much laid off.
think about the next tech layoff you hear in the news (facebook/meta, etc) and think about what portion of the layoff is younger than 20 and what portion are older than 40.
So to me this argument sounds the same as "how can young kids think they can program like experienced engineers".
Another answer is that financial auditors don't have ALL the technical skill for this scope of project. Light SQL skills tend to be the upper end of technical accounting (many workers on a project is good for corporate billing). Reports indicate Doge is employing graph analysis, LLMs, etc. Getting the data looks like a SW problem perfect for young people. I have no evidence that this how the organization functions, but I can imagine them as technical analysts, who simply pass information to higher ups who do have organizational experience.
https://bsky.app/profile/cartwright776.bsky.social/post/3lhr...
This is just someone who took Coristine's previous handle [0]. That post was made 1 day after the WIRED article revealing his handle. Lots of conspiracies around election stealing going round (and sadly, quite prevalent in some corners of Bluesky), don't fall for it!
[0]: https://www.wired.com/story/edward-coristine-tesla-sexy-path... - "He also *previously* used an account on X with the username @edwardbigballer"
From what I can tell, it’s widely been reported that
- Elon Musk was allowed into the Department of Education
- “Big Balls” accessed Treasury computers
- etc…
But I have not been able to find any first person testimony that confirms those statements.
From what I can tell Tom Krause is actually the one who was given access by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. And Tom Krause is an employee of the Treasury and has security clearance.
I see a lot of people claiming there was some sort of illegal access, but I would love to read a source that explains exactly who accessed exactly what system improperly.
Can anyone point me at that source?
Ordering them to delete everything they got copies of, and the subsequent frustration from Musk.
Why cares who personally violated federal law? However he managed to, Musk got unlawful access to restricted data.
That many in DOGE had access and that two would continue to have it is not in question: https://thehill.com/business/5130107-treasury-department-lim...
The legality is also clearly in question: https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/08/politics/elon-musk-doge-treas...
Versus whatever the media is reporting
Or Elon saying he's "deleting" the IRS free file group. How is that wasteful? It's providing a service that actually solves a real problem for people - people have complained for years about having to pay TurboTax to file their taxes. What metric is being used to decide if it's wasteful? It seems entirely like government by whim.
And if they really think there are great people in these departments, why are they terrorizing them? Right now federal workers are facing daily emails telling them to quit, their bosses calling them unproductive, chaos and upheaval at work, and many of them are going to have to make these huge life changes to suddenly return to the office (long commutes, disruption to childcare and other schedules, maybe having to move on short notice). To my knowledge, all of the companies that did RTO gave much more notice.
Where? The lack of transparency from DOGE has been a pain point even for advocates. I haven’t seen anything more than generic “we’re doing good work, trust us” PR
The media is reporting the history of some of these people and their actual actions. Of course these people aren’t going to discuss their past membership in script kiddie DDoS groups or their highly racist Twitter rants.
Unfortunately, from what we know of the people they've hired, they have little to no experience in doing that. They're not being transparent, we have no idea what metrics they're using, etc.
If the team was meant to actually do what you claim, it would look very different in terms of its hiring, and there's no reason it would have to be operating so secretively.
Do we believe that six weeks of ordinary work is sufficient to make the claims that Musk is making and take the actions that Musk is taking? "We are working really hard" doesn't give me any more confidence in the speed that things are happening.
Heck, being absolutely exhausted sounds like a great way of making mistakes. If I heard that the team designing and building a bridge I use to commute was work 18 hour days in order to move fast I'd be quite a bit more concerned about that bridge.
Don't they feel any moral compunction to say publicly, actually that is a complete misrepresentation of what we've found?
First, if you go to any department and find N different leaders/managers/etc. and ask them to pick what projects to cut...you'll get a whole range of different answers. There's a lot of bias involved, and a lot of internal politics going on. There's always internal fights for the resources.
Second, if these kids are actually executing orders - meaning that they'll have the authority to do recommendations (based on their interviews with the people mentioned above), how would they even know if the recommendations are sound? It can take years for managers to become knowledgeable enough with the ongoing project and products.
If you were DOGE, and wanted to "game" this process, you could really just: Identify the most critical voices in some organization, preferably those on the way out, and ignore the rest. Then you give these 18-year olds the mandate to recommend cuts based on those talks. And tell them that the ones that can cut most "fat" wins.
To give you an idea of how poorly this has been handled, my wife's friend is an attorney working in non-profit immigration.
She got told on Monday that her company is going to lay off 50% of their staff because they have no more money from USAID. Her boss found her a job at another firm a week later thankfully. Then Friday she got called by the CEO to come back since it turns out they were not going to get cut. Obviously, she declined.
They are messing with real peoples lives and destroying businesses that help people.
Is the goal to save money? Balance the budget? If so, fixing tax loop holes and going after waste in the military will yield more than 10x what cutting USAID does.
FWIW I'm all for fixing government spending, but treating it like a CI/CD pipeline where you will just "rollback" is idiotic.
1. What is the metric these folks are using to identify fraud, waste, and abuse?
2. Given that we have had independent OIGs for ages, why was fraud, waste, and abuse not previously reported?
3. Given that Congress folks are running every 2-6 years and shine like a shiny button (and get a lot of political cred) when championing substantive removal of fraud, waste, and abuse, why have no Congress people similarly exercised their Constitutional role of oversight for any of these agencies for decades?
4. Why do the agencies targeted tend to have overlap with investigations into or run-ins with Elon Musk's companies?
5. Why do forensic accountants take a long time to flag and identify fraud, waste, and abuse, even when working with compliant insiders, versus Musk's DOGE taking minutes to hours to identify fraud, waste, and abuse?
6. How is labeling groups with different ideas, such as Lutheran Family Services in the service of immigrants and refugees as terrorists, conducive to the identification of fraud, waste, and abuse? Which law enforcement office led the review of this group in particular to make this designation, which Mr. Musk and others decided to (potentially libelously) use to inflame public opinion against them?
I have no doubt that DOGE folks probably feel pretty proud of the work they are doing. That doesn't mean they are actually having the outcomes they are commissioned for -- improving efficiency. Having worked some within government support, process bottlenecks are regulatory or otherwise required by statute. People spend time really considering the decisions and improving them incrementally.
I see. And you know these people? Where are you hearing these "stories"?
Without evidence, yoh are normalizing what has been a shocking and unconstitutional approach to auditing that has very little resemblance to how actual auditing is done.
Perhaps the hostility comes from the combination of unconstitutionality, unaccountability, unelected nature of Mr. Musk, and your "trust me, i know a guy" claims.
One of these kids might have worse skeletons in their closet. Given how well-known their names are, adversaries of the USA are likely combing through their own intelligence archives, etc and might decide to extract their own pound of flesh from the government.
Or, even more horrible, they might have family that adversaries can lean on.
Subverting the process to meme faster and blitz the other side puts the entire American system in pretty serious danger. If it's more important to destroy the system than make serious change, I suppose that's how you'd do it.
Remember when Michael Flynn was National Security Advisor? The guy had secret meetings with Russian spies and gave a talk at GRU headquarters. In the first administration there were obvious spies from our adversaries working in top government positions, and the same seems to be true of this administration.
Also remember when Trump gave away nuclear secrets? Or when Russian sources "disappeared" after Trump outed them? Or when the CIA reported dozens of spies being killed, arrested, or compromised?
These randos getting access to so much data aren't a separate threat. They're part of the same threat presented by the administration as a whole.
Also, it's better to go to jail or quit for blackmail then to comply with blackmail, because it caries worst sentences and doesn't have a statue of limitations. Many people with clearances have bad backgrounds and just being honest is all they're looking for in the process. My friend and I even admitted to a bunch of CFAA felonies and was never charged. My friend got a TS/SCI with hacking within the past year of his BI.
Isn't that the case for any government employee?
And that attitude's going to cause a lot of horrible things to happen.
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.
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.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-01-16/chinese-h... (https://archive.ph/xeEaO) (January 16, 2025)
So that data is (a) publicly available if you don't secure your VPC properly and (b) available to anyone without RBAC or request logging. This is an extraordinary degradation of the level of private and security controls.
[1] https://www.firstpost.com/tech/elon-musks-team-at-doge-feedi...
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.
These people are going to cut corners and be sloppy and stuff is just going to end up on USB keys and whatnot.
On the extreme other hand, motivated World's Richest Man gets the inner keys in two weeks to all DC payment process flows ?
Make no mistake, this is disaster in the making, and lets get some details in the sunlight IMHO. but it seems laughable to claim that "China might get more info" when China (and a few others) already have been shown to run circles around core DC IT.
The individual is therefore incentivized against the organization they started at. They were just purchased away from that life. For a price that was probably reasonable. The expectation then is that the individual will cut ties with his old way of doing things and take steps to mitigate any threats from that former life.
The individual then goes through literally 250mb of PDF employment forms where they have to read and agree to a variety of legal punishments for failing the federal government in a variety of ways. They accept personal liability for the job, meaning they have some reason to follow the rules.
Not Musks team. They don't have any of that personal liability, and they get full access to data that causes these agencies to violate their own security and privacy policies. Then they go away with that data, without following any SOPs or chain of custody requirements, without any oversight, and they do whatever they want with it. They use it on personal devices that could be compromised and the government would never know because the data was taken out of scope of their IDS.
Lets say they don't get directly blackmailed, but because this person used to be in a hacker gang they have backdoors on their personal systems from the gang that they are unaware of. We just don't know, and there's no way to make sure the data is being kept safe, no way to monitor what devices it gets put on, no way to ensure anything.
It's just bad security posture all around to be doing this. But I guess that's only true if the goal is an authentic audit. That isn't the goal. Gutting federal agencies and funneling money and information to fascists is the obvious goal here.
The real question now is where is DOGE’s evidence of all of this corruption? There are massive claims of rampant corruption, such as calling the USAID corrupt to their core, but literally zero evidenced has been revealed to anyone. The interviews I’ve caught have been Elon giving definitive statements and refusing to elaborate on anything, as if we’re supposed to trust his private judgment and ask no questions.
USAspending.gov contains public spending data thanks to the bipartisan bill Obama, Coburn, McCain, and Carper passed two decades ago. It's one of many places to start.
This work could have been done without this slash-and-burn approach. It could have been done, in fact, without involving the government at all. The people involved did not actually care before, or they would have known this.
It seems our Continuing Resolution method of funding the government is a failure.
Sorta like cost plus last year.
404 media has ran multiple stories on them. Here is one:
https://www.404media.co/inside-the-com-world-war-robberies-b...
1. Either this project will be a tremendous success for the American people, saving millions and uncovering massive fraud and waste in the government thanks to the audits
2. It will ab a complete failure, nothing of value will get discovered, published and time and money will be wasted for everyone involved (giving the DNC a huge attack vector for the next election)
3. Alternatively, some efforts may yield some positive net results but others will fail to bring anything of value in fruition, this to me, seems to most realistic outcome, but who knows?
This is going to be an interesting experiment for the rest of the world to watch.
For instance say you lower standards for building bridges, how do you assess the success? First you may notice nothing, because all bridges under construction stay with their design, so consequence 0. After a few years, construction costs may go down because the new standard allow to cut some corners. Great! Success! Now 30 years in the future maybe suddenly the bridge has a failure that costs 20x the savings at the time of construction. Well suddenly not great. But changing the standard at that point would not fix all the bridges built over those 30 years.
Evaluating public policies is often very hard and it's sometimes only possible a long time after. I would also say that weather or not a policy is good or has positive impact has little impact on winning or losing elections. Lots of terrible policies can win you voters. Just like building the best product is not the easiest way to make money. For both goods and elections, playing on emotions works a lot better.
In some way, it has started hurting the US. Ask anyone in the world who is not a US citizen if they think the US is stable. I think the answer has changed a lot in, say, the last 10 years.
With that said, the US has been in the dominant world position for so long, it's like they forget what it takes to be there. Soft power, by giving people food and support - like USAID does, is part of what helps keep the US in that dominant position.
A critical subversion of cybersecurity in the United States that leads to decades of compromised computer systems throughout our society -- from infrastructure to military to banking. I heard someone refer to this as a speedrun of the fall of the roman empire, and given the lack of ethics at the top levels of this administration I wouldn't be surprised.
"giving the DNC a huge attack vector..." -- I think you're mistaking an attack vector for a realization that this regime is incompetent and against the safety and security of the United States population.
Elon says things like USAID is a ball of worms, it needs to be scrapped, and if they cut too much they'll roll it back. How? The people getting fired aren't going to stick around waiting for a roll back and, if they're wrong about it being 100% waste, the people that die because they're reliant on those outreach programs can't be brought back to life. It's not software. You can't roll back mistakes that have an immediate human impact.
The risk and fallout of being wrong are so significant that they way they're going about it is reckless. There's also a risk they'll simply claim they were 100% right and no one has any way of verifying it. It's like Bush standing in front of the Mission Accomplished banner. What was the mission and how was it determined to be a success?
And that's the main issue. There's no objective measure for success. That makes debunking false claims of success extremely difficult and time consuming. It takes 5 minutes for Musk to do an interview saying they cut $4 billion of waste by shutting down USAID and an extraordinary amount of work for anyone trying to prove the worth of what they're doing.
That's even more true for anything that's subjective like the value of good will or for anything that seems so obviously beneficial that you never thought you'd need to justify, so didn't keep data proving the value. It's like being accused of being a criminal and having the burden of proof fall on you to prove you've never committed a crime. How do you account for your entire life?
I could be swayed by the argument that security clearances and controlled access to information could be abused to prevent scrutiny, so there's probably some merit in trying to short circuit that stuff, but the way it's done matters. For example, issue an executive order to expedite security clearances for the outsiders you want on the team or create a new class of security clearance where those people get blanket access but have to adhere to controls that prevent data exfiltration.
We have the technology to make sure data isn't tampered with. The DOGE team could be working on-site, creating and digitally signing reports on waste they want to see cut, sending those reports to congress, and auditing to make sure congress sees every report they've signed.
I can see the value in outsider access to data with the intent of bypassing entrenched interests, but unilaterally shutting things down without any oversight or debate is a step too far. At a minimum, those shutdowns should be accompanied by transparent reports detailing the waste, especially when the determination that something is wasteful is subjective.
If you mean that literally they might have success with that but overall American government spending is a pretty boring affair[1], with about 9 out of 10 dollars going to defense, healthcare, interest, social security and the likes. Trying to chase down "woke" fifth columns in the department of education (2% of the budget) is not going to save you a lot of dough. I'd be willing to make a bet they're not going to touch the categories that matter.
[1]https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...
If we are at a point where the FBI is being dismantled, where was the FBI this whole time during the build up?
Even if you believed the FBI was some evil deep state entity - it turns out it was completely benign one because it couldn't even defend itself from an approaching enemy thousands of yards away.
We lost in Vietnam and there are people being born there with birth defects from Operation Ranch Hand to this day partially due to their work, but at least they got to pad out their resumes and were set for life as consultants.
The selection process here appears to have been the opposite of traditional credentialism
Can check out the current HN thread on healthcare if you want to see some who suffer from this diagnosis.
Strangely, there's a dearth of links between that and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiz_Kids_(Department_of_Defen... / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_McNamara
Even a well intentioned benign autocrat if given power would not part ways with said power voluntarily. So even if the current administration is "good" there is no reason why this kind of power couldn't be abused by subsequent administrations. Even the most die-hard republican should be thinking "if the democrats take over 1-3 elections from now, what would they do with this power?".
It is really the same reasoning with dictatorships, even if the dictator is good, competent and capable his successor most likely won't. Democracy is the best form of government because there are clean, regulated ways to transfer power. Not a scramble for dominance that once settled is meant to last in perpetuity.
we should be willing to vote for that.
that seems to be breaking down, throughout the western world.
we should never denigrate or infringe upon the personhood of anyone. we should take the higher road. and I'm not arguing that the oppressed should accept their oppression: I'm arguing that the oppressors should listen to the oppressed, and change.
I live in Australia – our constitution is a strange mashup of the UK model (which is certainly the primary influence), and things gleaned from the US. Something I observe is that we're more willing to admit the possibility of non-partisan spaces. For example, rather than electoral commissions being bipartisan, they're non-partisan, with partisan input. It is a serious matter if an official of such an organisation is found to have publicly stated political views. We have some people who make it their profession to be boring, and to simply uphold the precepts of society: including the rights of minorities. That's a serious sacrifice, made routinely by judges and senior public servants.
I find myself quite terrified that this is being eroded. I don't know how we turn it around: but I certainly speak up for the dignity of all through my ministry. We all ought to speak up.
And here we are with only slightly less broken healthcare with the ACA, a plan originally from GOP, which is constantly hounded on for being terrible. All while drug and medical prices fleece every dollar from every pocket.
So this is what it comes back to when congress can’t do their job of helping the American people or balancing the budget. A populist comes in and smashes the norms.
In my opinion incremental change with a common passage toward a better future is the best way to have long term functioning democracies
The number 1 responsibility of any system of government is how well it handles power transfers, not whether it produces good governments.
I'm old enough to remember nearly identical rhetoric during Bill Clinton's presidency. I suspect that somebody older than me would remember the same even further back. Claiming that the president is abusing his power in irreversible ways just seems to me to be an American tradition.
You're assuming that there will be a successor, in a democratic sense.
So it behooves us to be a little jealous of our own rights, and to push officials to limit other officials.
There's an interesting fork here where you can argue for a very libertarian view, _or_ you can argue for a "government whose interest is in restraining government (the metagame of 'checks and balances')".
And I'd even recommend that the individual president position be replaced by a group of people each of which gets voted in on different years. The monarch-like persona does not belong in a democracy.
The American people voted them into office.
Power was transferred peacefully.
When the repubs are voted out we'll go through this "takeover" process again to whatever extent the dems can control the government.
These powers that are being utilized were in place with Biden, Obama, etc.
Trump hasn't taken anything new.
Honestly, people who don't like Trump will claim he's a dictator but it's mostly they don't like him and not that he's doing anything vastly different.
But I think the point also argues against having an extremely powerful administrative / regulatory state.
For instance, suppose you want to create a department to "fight misinformation" and it will have wide ranging power to push for censorship. But depending who is running it, it might censor vastly different kinds of speech.
If you believe such an entity should exist you should be indifferent to the kind of person running it. As an example, consider garbage removal. I'm relatively happy with my city's garbage removal. I wouldn't really be concerned if it was run by Kamala Harris or Donald Trump. Maybe there would be some graft in one way or another, but it's pretty obvious what the organizations' goals are.
So I think that there's a difference between "government takeover to shrink the size of the state" is different from "government takeover to add another layer of unelected bureaucracy to run our lives"
> Musk’s DOGE teen was fired by cybersecurity firm for leaking company secrets
https://fortune.com/2025/02/07/musks-doge-teen-edward-corist...
We are at the neoliberal endgame. Billionaires and multibillion dollar corporations received massive tax cuts during the first term, and this will likely continue under the second term. He’s going all out for this billionaire donors, buddies, and of course himself. We have a kleptocracy at the federal level with the intent to dismantle it as much as possible.
End game here is federal/people control end, and “network states” (balaji) model with corporations acting as governance over land, regions, and law.
Thiel and the rest of the billionaire class are the parasites that need to be purged. Whether we will recover after 4 years remains to be seen.
D&D Alignment aside, one has to admit this kid has impressive skills and impressive energy. Sidestepping any argument whether criminals should be hired or have access to sensitive data, I do think he's too immature (demonstrably) to be allowed access to all this information.
Thinkst does this
Of course we all want to say : see, obedience and hard work pays off. I’m glad I didn’t do anything reckless. The truth is that the real successful people keep it to themselves.
This is an FAQ of sorts.
Q1: What's wrong with making the government more efficient? My tax dollars are being wasted by Agency X, spending billions of dollars a year on who knows what.
A1: There's nothing wrong with making the government more efficient, but (1) there are good and bad ways of cutting spending (and DOGE, IMO, is really bad), (2) the federal budget is massive [1], 1B or even 10B USD is practically peanuts, so a real cost-benefit analysis is critical while knee-jerk "that's too much money" reactions are usually short-sighted, and (3) the Trump administration is planning to spend FAR MORE on massive tax cuts - a government that's serious about reducing the deficit would not spend 5-10 trillion USD on tax cuts.
Q2: What's wrong with how DOGE is trying to cut spending? Government is filled with red tape, and they're taking a hacker approach to circumvent the things that prevented past governments from fixing things.
A2: Any time a large group of people need to agree on something, it takes time. Small-d democratic governance doesn't prioritize getting things done quickly in normal times, it prioritizes reaching consensus and respecting individual liberties. Occasionally war-time governments will temporarily suspend normal procedures (and rights), but there's good reason why things (mostly) go back to normal after the war ends. And whatever you may be seeing in your news feeds, America is NOT AT WAR.
A2 (pt. 2): The HN community usually (and rightly, IMO) gets very upset and concerned when companies or the government infringe on our privacy. The situation this article brings to light seems analogous to a big tech company bringing in consultants who are later found to have cybercriminal connections, without any safeguards or auditing around access of employee or user data. If that happened, there would be a huge uproar.
A2 (pt. 3): Except, it's worse, because the government is not the same as any old company. The US government was designed with checks and balances precisely to avoid concentrating too much power in the hands of any individual, including the president. Remember, America was establishing a democracy in a time when most countries were monarchies - a monarchical president was something the framers desperately wanted to avoid. There's too much to get into here, but this ongoing story is not just about privacy/security, but also about breaking legal and constitutional safeguards.
Q3: You admit that the federal budget is massive, so it's obvious that it's spending too much money. Sometimes it's hard to fix an old system with lots of parts - we need a ground-up rewrite! Cut first, then add spending back later - what's wrong with that?
A3: What's wrong with that is that people will get hurt. Ordinary people (no, not "woke leftists" - they're real people) will lose their jobs. People who were getting HIV treatment will stop getting treatment. Poor children will lose school lunches. And on it goes. To play along with the analogy, even if you think the only option is a ground-up rewrite, you don't run around the data center unplugging machines that you don't like. But that's also buying into a false premise. The federal budget as a percentage of GDP really hasn't grown all that much [2], and a huge part of that spending is on things that are really hard to cut (because most people don't want to cut it): social security, Medicare, defense.
Q4: Well, tax cuts aren't spending, it's just giving money back to the people! It's too bad you want the US government to spend so much, but that's my tax dollars you're talking about.
A4: Well, unfortunately, we live in a society, one that has historically agreed through democratic processes to care for its elderly, (sometimes) its sick or disabled, and (occasionally) its poor, because our ancestors wisely realized that those are elements of a stable societ where its people can flourish. Feel free to disagree.
Q5: Why report on the identities of these young people? And what's wrong with being young - many startup founders are college dropouts, right?
A5: Founding a startup isn't the same as running a mature company, and even running a mature company isn't necessarily the best preparation for civil service IMO. Youth has its advantages - fearlessness, energy - but wisdom comes with age. On the other hand, youth are impressionable, and can be easily led (or rather, misled) into doing illegal and/or immoral things. That's a pattern we've seen throughout history, and I see no reason to believe that the folks at DOGE are any different. As for making their names and identities public, they were the ones who made the decision to participate in actions that affect millions of people. Anonymity is for Internet commentators, not for supposed public servants cutting off funding to aid workers or scientists (you know, the actual public servants).
Q6: Why is this on Hacker News?
A6: See A2, pt. 2. There's no surprise that a news about hackers in on Hacker News. Also, should Elon Musk only be on Hacker News when it's about Tesla or SpaceX, and not when he's off trying to shut off funding to half the government? If you agree with him, fine - let's have a discussion. Don't flag kill everything that's reporting on what might be one of the most consequential events of this century. (Thanks for giving this a chance, dang.)
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FGEXPND [2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYONGDA188S
I guess as hackers we instinctively distrust authority, so it is difficult for us to defer to experts in the government and accept that they might know a lot that we don’t.
I don’t understand why the article is flagged as per Dang’s posts. Is it because a lot of HN folks think DOGE is good? I’ve seen some supporting tweets from senior YC people. Or is it just because people are worried posts like this will cause flame wars and be unproductive?
Aside: Some of the DOGE supporting posts from YC have made me sad. Would appreciate it if anyone can provide a perspective that reconciles those posts with a positive view of YC.
> A1: There's nothing wrong with making the government more efficient, but (1) there are good and bad ways of cutting spending (and DOGE, IMO, is really bad), (2) the federal budget is massive [1], 1B or even 10B USD is practically peanuts, so a real cost-benefit analysis is critical while knee-jerk "that's too much money" reactions are usually short-sighted, and (3) the Trump administration is planning to spend FAR MORE on massive tax cuts - a government that's serious about reducing the deficit would not spend 5-10 trillion USD on tax cuts.
You don't actually provide much rationale or provide a broad perspective on the issues at hand.
"DOGE is bad" because we should have a small d "democracy" approach. This completely ignores the Constitution and division of powers with the President in control of the Executive and all the agencies that report to it. Yes, Congress controls spending, and the Supreme Court will likely need to rule on exactly where the line divides between Executive/Legislative powers, but it's not accurate to say that spending cuts should be a small d democracy exercise.
Then you mention how 1B or 10B is practically peanuts (this is a talking point directly from one of the political parties) which isn't a great argument at all because DOGE isn't cutting 1B or 10B and stopping, the intent is to cut hundreds examples of 1B or 10B in spending, which is certainly not peanuts.
Then you mention how "tax cuts are bad and you wouldn't do that if you were serious about the deficit", but that's not true at all. Removing wasteful spending is 100% a goal in and of itself. We have no idea how much wasteful spending will be cut, and if we reduce it by $2T, and Trump decides to cut taxes by $1T, we're still reducing the deficit. That is also a "policy choice", not some universal rule that you can never cut taxes and be financially responsible.
love your fate
become your own ubermensch
you are the master of your soul
be kind
there is so much to love, so much to live for
follow your heart, ok?this is the kind of ground that people SHOULD be covering if they want to pursue a career of this nature
it doesn't make him a bad person, or even a criminal the internet is just the wild west and hacking is prevalent, long live the people who do this because it's needed
As an European, how is this not considered a coup d'etat? From my mindset, right or wrong, that is absolutely unthinkable to happen within a normal functional European country.
The more appropriate parallel would be a massive data leak. Although so far we don't have any confirmed cases of protected data being leaked to anyone who was not given access. But it might just be a matter of time.
You remember the end of Gatsby where Nick turns up at the mansion and some sinister characters have the run of the place and you-know-who is floating in the pool out back...
This is what the US looks like right now. Party's over, no guests ever again. Crims have moved in instead.
Maybe these departments are all wasteful but there are better ways achieve "efficiency" than just shutting down departments without having plans about what is going to happen afterwards.
What is efficient about shutting down departments without notice or without looking at the impact or having alternatives besides just not providing those services. How about seeing if there are better ways to do the same things before just shutting down departments? Or looking at the areas of the government that have more significant budgets? Or considering that there is more to efficiency than money?
A blanket ban on newspaper subscriptions is a pretty easy way to save a few million dollars with minimal effort and relatively low risk.
Actually evaluating whether each employee who gets one needs one along with potential subscription renegotiations could be theoretically better, but requires a great deal of managerial time and talent in the context of a large organisation.
US government was simply never designed for scenarios like this.
The better question is what are all the Congressmen doing cozily on Capitol Hill. Like, not one has walked over to these departments to try and physically stop these kids from gaining the keys to the kingdom?
(EDIT: Whoops, they have.)
Voting for the President is in part voting for this. They don't need to ask permission from the bureaucracy nor can they be impeded by process because it is a Constitutional authority.
Americans really do seem to know nothing about how the Federal government works. This kind of drama happens every four years, they've just never paid attention before. Every administration change brings in a coterie of poorly vetted people like this and gives them the keys to the kingdom. Dialing up the outrage media this particularly time is manipulative. I've been close enough to this action across several administration changes to be pretty blasé about what has occurred so far.
Something something terrorism, but i don't buy it. terrorism is the scapegoat for which we have massively eroded privacy and rights, in the same way that CSAM is the scapegoat for trying to ban encryption every 5 years.
We really don’t know what data is being accessed. We have a lot of people saying lots of things about the access. Such as he will block payments or tarter people based on how they vote. You have not claimed those so I won’t rebuttal then here. But “all this data” I will.
The systems bending accessed are the ones which handle money approved by congress to be spent in a specific way.
As a tax payer I am appalled that this data is not already public and broadcasted live. Even more so that the specific legislation that granted the money was already public.
Now let’s say there are social security numbers and maybe even social security numbers tied to addresses or even names. This is still not a reason to not allow an audit.
You might say. Okay let’s audit. But people need to be verified. And at this point your argument is watered down to “I don’t like who is doing this”, which is the same bullshit politics we deal with in any tech company and the same bs that only delays results.
If people were actually worried they would not be trying to stop musk. What they would actually be doing is asking for somebody who they politically align with to also have access to the data and perform their own audit, on top of making much if not all of the data public so those with real trust issues can draw their own conclusions.
There’s almost certainly no clearance requirement for what they’ve looked at already. Maybe HIPAA. I’m not sure why one executive branch org has any more or less right to access this data than any other.
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The US looks unstable and untrustworthy.
It's incredibly Orwellian.
Their actions are causing concern for several reasons:
* A 19-year-old with a questionable past has been given access to sensitive US government systems. * The team is reportedly using this access to dig through student loan data. * This could potentially put millions of Americans at risk of identity theft or other forms of financial exploitation.
It's almost the same as the conclusion that the Dominion voting machines were illegally changing votes based on insecure security practices around the networks at the polling locations. There was no proof that this happened and there's no proof that these employees are copying all of our data or writing to it.
It's all fearmongering and trying to distract from the main point: The government has been wasting hundreds of millions of our tax dollars and a good portion of it are going into the pockets of politicians and their supporters.
There was literally no way to track the money or oversight.
Someone should be going to jail over this.
I'll also give honorable mentions to some of their most outrageous takes:
1. Friedberg predicting that NYT and CNN would be replaced by blockchain based news reporting.
2. Chamath predicting the Ukraine/Russia tensions were just blustering prior to a deal being signed.
3. Sacks promoting the story that claimed Biden ordered the Navy to blow up the Nordstream pipeline.
A tangent here, but: Gas taxes paying for roads. There is a relationship between inefficiency and privacy.
I often encounter some libertarian-types complaining about this, that they should only be taxed for the construction and maintenance of infrastructure they personally drive upon. Indirect benefits aside, I try to point out that the billing-system they're asking for requires a creepy surveillance panopticon, something far more ripe for abuse than any gas tax.
I find it shocking and absurd too, but in moments of self-honesty I notice myself doing it too. My sense is that the only contribution one can make to changing this pattern is to notice it in oneself and then shift a bit. That's the only place one has a chance to modify anything.
Getting mad at other people for doing it doesn't change anything, and nobody can be persuaded to change.
No wonder Musk wants to deregulate everything. Regulation interferes with the telemedicine, gut bacteria powders and various other nonsense that these gentlemen invest in.
The (deliberate?) chaos that Trump/Musk create provides great opportunities for those in the know.
I mean, there are outcries. But nowhere near the outcry proportional to how dire this is. So maybe the host is right?
Seriously, have you ever heard them say anything bad about Elon, Trump, or the Republican agenda even one time in the last year? We know that none of those entities are perfect, they know that none of these entities are perfect, and yet they dare not say it. This is same as having politicians that are bought, and it’s maddeningly frustrating how two faced the whole ordeal is. The hosts will look at you directly in your eyes and tell you they’re being honest, and they just want to know the truth like you do. But the lie is hiding in plain sight, and everyone sees it.
What’s the point of it all? They're so narcisstically working and using the show to further their own interests. Especially sacks for whom it paid off handsomely. And they do this at the direct expense to their audience who (many of whom may not know better), doing their part to build a more morally confused and bankrupt nation in the process.
I still tune in every week, to happily outrage myself the convolution and lies and insane double standards that they get find themselves in in each conversation. I don't know why I do, I guess there's no other show that I find discusses politics and tech otherwise in a way that's satisfying. I wish a moderate panel (or even a liberal) one existed to counterbalance all of their BS but I haven't found that.
Celebrities to him are almost what commoners are to rich people. Joe Rogan, the biggest podcaster, has <0.1% net worth. Most have far less: they actually need to make money from podcasting and can't afford certain things, whereas 0.001% of Musk's net worth is enough to live an entire life well-off. And it's not just money; I'm sure far, far more people learned about Rogan when he interviewed Musk than vice versa.
Wealth, attention, and power influence people. If you had more of them, or a solid chance at more, you'd be influenced too.
It seems that at this point, it might be better to "simply" accept the new imperator(s) and learn to live with them and their new rules. And remember, they are NOT breaking the law, they are bending "rules" for the good of humanity... (yeah... nah). They have never tried and will never try to enrich themselves for the sake of their egos.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42979187
Good thorough article on another wild development in this story. Deserves to be seen and read.
https://thehill.com/policy/technology/5134725-elon-musk-impe...
This should be mandatory reading for everyone who argues this is just fine: https://www.amazon.com/They-Thought-Were-Free-Germans/dp/022...
This is Elon who is neck deep in the cesspool parts of the internet and attracts the same kinds of people.
They will continue to break every rule they can and ignore the legal push back as much as possible. They know that there is little they could do here that will result in any criminal prosecution.
Batten down the hatches and expect worse to come, the safeties are off.
Let’s not forget that Trump is the pied piper candidate promoted by the left to make it easier to win elections. I remember when Ron Desantis was successfully undermined by the news media casting him as weird if he was even covered at all. The left celebrated at the time because they assumed Trump would be easier to beat. When our leaders are picked by their enemies it’s understandable that they’re extremely flawed.
I see it as an emergent behavior where it’s easier to damage than it is to build, it’s easier to undermine an opposition than it is to build up your own side.
I would suggest that political parties stop trying the pied piper strategy but if we are to learn one thing from history it should be that no-one learns anything from history.
I'm also not convinced this is a "security breach." They're being allowed to do it. It's more like an unforced error, if anything. Not that it changes anything material about the situation.
That said - a small majority of congress is currently complicit in this, but I expect that to reverse as many Republican states will have congresspeople whose constituents are affected. I'd expect by May of this year some of this will have been reversed.
Sadly that's too long and some damage will be done perhaps permanently...
But it's very interesting if they can release all information. I mean it's a democracy, right?
I would've thought this crowd would've loved lower taxes (more money to build things!), less regulation (less restrictions to build things!), and an unfamiliar friendliness towards the tech industry (more people to build things with!)... I'm really looking forward to building big things in this country in the next few years!
I hope they stay safe, they're doing important work.
They were wrong. Now that Elon is applying the same philosophy to all of his companies and now the federal government, people are once again saying he doesn’t know what he’s doing.
At a certain point, you have to ask yourself if these people who complain like headless chickens are actually serious people …