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Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'

krebsonsecurity.com

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Re: Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'

#281

Post by alecco »

fabian2k wrote: post #47

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…

Did everybody already forget only a month ago it was revealed Chinese hackers had access to US Treasury computers including US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen's own?

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-01-16/chinese-h... (https://archive.ph/xeEaO) (January 16, 2025)

Re: Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'

#282

Post by apical_dendrite »

jdross wrote: post #185

I realized I’m treading in extremely hostile waters here, but the stories I hear from folks working in DOGE are closer to “I spend 8am to 2am with the leaders of department X going through all contracts and outflows and identifying what is important versus wasteful given a target of saving $X million per day, and there are some great people in this department who really know what’s been going on and it’s been great t…

This doesn't even line up with what Elon is saying publicly. Mike Flynn searches a public database for grants to organizations with the word "Lutheran" in them and then Elon tweets that they're all illegal and will be canceled. How is that a thoughtful process for identifying wasteful spending?

Or Elon saying he's "deleting" the IRS free file group. How is that wasteful? It's providing a service that actually solves a real problem for people - people have complained for years about having to pay TurboTax to file their taxes. What metric is being used to decide if it's wasteful? It seems entirely like government by whim.

And if they really think there are great people in these departments, why are they terrorizing them? Right now federal workers are facing daily emails telling them to quit, their bosses calling them unproductive, chaos and upheaval at work, and many of them are going to have to make these huge life changes to suddenly return to the office (long commutes, disruption to childcare and other schedules, maybe having to move on short notice). To my knowledge, all of the companies that did RTO gave much more notice.

Re: Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'

#283

Post by brcmthrowaway »

SamBam wrote: post #24

Is it the same Edward Big Baller that tweeted that Elon stole the election and is setting up more computers within the government to be hacked? https://bsky.app/profile/cartwright776.bsky.social/post/3lhr...

Why is there no one explaining this?

Re: Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'

#284

Post by braza »

9283409232 wrote: post #106

The question no one asking is why Elon is sending a team of teenage programmers and not a team of financial auditors if he really wanted to cut government spending?

> team of teenage

Maybe it's a question of wording, but I would agree if the word were "inexperienced" instead of teenage (in reality, they are young adults).

I have no horse in this DOGE race and all the discussions, but I find this "reverse ageism" (for lack of a better term) quite sad, 'cause it does not sound condescending but infantilizes youth and hides one of the biggest elephants in the room in the modern world, which is the real lack of representation of youth in politics (and maybe in the public service?) [1][2].

I was a 19-year-old holding an assault weapon in my daily work in the military with the power to terminate the lives of almost 99.99% civilians, friends with 23 starting piloting USD 5 million machines, and it's just sad to see that we as a society do not see young adults as capable as their older counterparts.

I speculate that at least in Europe, due to this credibility bias in favor of older politicians, we are facing one of the biggest violations of the intergenerational pact, which is the fact that this same youth will end up without retirement [3].

[1] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/congress-age-de...

[2] - https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/both-republicans-and-de...

[3] - https://www.dw.com/en/pension-fund-crisis-looms-in-germany-a...

Re: Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'

#285

Post by Everdred2dx »

_1tan wrote: post #10

Just out of curiosity, has anyone here been able to find one of the sites where "the COM" convenes or am I too old to see?

As another commenter said, Telegram.

404 media has ran multiple stories on them. Here is one:

https://www.404media.co/inside-the-com-world-war-robberies-b...

Re: Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'

#286

Post by TomK32 »

jonhohle wrote: post #41
wobblyasp wrote: post #20

Say what you will about the cuts, you can't have people with zero clearance being given access to all of this data.

Why shouldn’t all public transactions be public? IRS and personal taxes may be legitimate since it’s, well, personal, but we are all “shareholders” with equal stake in all other payments. This is the perfect use case for public ledger. We should all have access to all of this data. All outflows should note which bill authorized that expenditure, every bureaucrat that’s involved with spending it. If I’m getting $600 i…

Go ahead, put some legislation in place. I'd love to see transparency as the Swedes have where you can see how much tax your neighbour has paid. Or at least how much subsidies which company received. I'm sure rich people will LOVE to know the competition got half what they got... Btw, did Trump's tax returns get published yet?

Re: Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'

#287

Post by default-kramer »

Aurornis wrote: post #210
whatshisface wrote: post #165

Why isn't all government budgetary information public to begin with?

Much of it is! Journalists are already using it to debunk some of Elon’s claims like the one they only 10% of USAID reached intended targets (which appears to be based on his complete misreading of a breakdown) The real question now is where is DOGE’s evidence of all of this corruption? There are massive claims of rampant corruption, such as calling the USAID corrupt to their core, but literally zero evidenced has be…

> where is DOGE’s evidence of all of this corruption?

Presumably this was published by DOGE: https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/02/at-usaid-wast...

I encourage everyone to follow the links and determine the accuracy of the claims being made.

Re: Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'

#289

Post by mvdtnz »

timewizard wrote: post #279
9283409232 wrote: post #106

The question no one asking is why Elon is sending a team of teenage programmers and not a team of financial auditors if he really wanted to cut government spending?

The question no one is asking is why does the federal government have so much "sensitive data" on it's citizens in the first place? When you build a machine like this you should ask, "would I be comfortable if my political opposites had control of this?" If the answer is no, then you DON'T BUILD IT. Meanwhile someone goes in there to try to break up this 30 year pile of technical debt and it's all lawsuits and handwa…

How could the US government do things like collect tax or regulate the medical industry without sensitive data?

Re: Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'

#290

Post by sekai »

retskrad wrote: post #75

When Elon stripped the Twitter organisation down to its fundamental parts, saved tons of money and the service is still ran like usual, people said the he’s a moron and the service couldn’t possibly run without a bloated and inefficient workforce. They were wrong. Now that Elon is applying the same philosophy to all of his companies and now the federal government, people are once again saying he doesn’t know what he’…

> When Elon stripped the Twitter organisation down to its fundamental parts, saved tons of money and the service is still ran like usual, people said the he’s a moron and the service couldn’t possibly run without a bloated and inefficient workforce.

- The bot problem is much worse than before the acquisition

- Search is completely broken, borderline unusable

- Financial data is hidden, so no way to compare

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