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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'

#351

Post by Kinrany »

lenerdenator wrote: post #265

All I can think of when I hear about DOGE is Robert McNamara's Department of Defense, where the "Whiz Kids" from industry and academia were supposed to magically fix all sorts of problems with the military's bureaucracy. After all, they went to the right schools, and really, how hard could war-making be? We lost in Vietnam and there are people being born there with birth defects from Operation Ranch Hand to this day…

> After all, they went to the right school

The selection process here appears to have been the opposite of traditional credentialism

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

#352

Post by n1b0m »

fujinghg wrote: post #218

I used to hang around with the late 90s's versions of these guys. I grew up, had a family, have had a successful career. They went to prison. I expect the same will happen to this lot.

Except in this case they’ll probably get sweeping presidential pardons

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

#353

Post by SoftTalker »

amazingamazing wrote: post #117
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?

Reporting on this is terrible. There are also senior (in age and experience) people, but much of the focus is on the youngins for obvious reasons. 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.

Well he has done pretty well with that belief so far. Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink…

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

#354

Post by caspper69 »

vimy wrote: post #231
bearjaws wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are mad at your AWS bill, do you slide to your 10th line item? That is effectively what going after USAID is. 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 th…

Marco Rubio said that USAID wasn’t listening to orders. They were a rogue agency. From other things I’ve read it has been an issue for multiple administrations. Watch here: https://x.com/defiantls/status/1888533363117449619?s=46

[flagged]

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

#355

Post by brandonagr2 »

apical_dendrite wrote: post #282
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…

[flagged]

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

#356

Post by swat535 »

I am wondering what will happen at the end of all of this? I see a few possibilities here:

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.

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

#357

Post by jhp123 »

default-kramer wrote: post #287
Aurornis wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> $6 million to fund tourism in Egypt [link explains it is to fund economic development in North Sinai]

This sounds like an absolutely expected program for USAID, given that it is a soft power aid agency. Egypt is a regional partner to the US and this province has been a source of Islamist violence. It also borders the Gaza Strip.

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

#358

Post by Kinrany »

relaxing wrote: post #16

Good reporting here. Clarifies why the kid was fired for leaking documents - it was specifically for leaking internal corporate documents to a competitor. 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.

This assumes that leaking is a compulsive behavior. The federal government has stronger incentives to offer for not leaking information. Getting fired is nothing.

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

#359

Post by milesrout »

fsckboy wrote: post #333
dang wrote: post #684

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent all day responding to the replies here, and then detaching them in order to save space at the top of the thread. But I just had a better idea. This is a stub comment so we have a single root to collapse the replies. This way (1) replies can stay close to their parent (the top comment) without flooding the screen with offtopicness; and (2) we can all re-experience the timeless truth of https://en.wikipedia.org…

a ton of replies to dang's adminsitraviata comment are highjacking his "sticky" to coattail all their comments to the top, and the comments are generally right on the edge of being what dang's comment is trying to warn against. I'd flag them all but fear that would appear heavy handed

I am responding to the content of Daniel's comment, not hijacking his comment to coattail my views of the article itself. I think the replies to his comment are the most appropriate place to respond to it.

The effect you describe is an unfortunate side effect of any threaded forum where the ordering of sibling posts is determined by some measure of quality: all responses to the first top-level comment, no matter the quality, precede the second top-level comment, which is probably of higher quality (on average). This is one of many reasons that threaded comments are flawed. Flat comments (phpBB style) of course have their own flaws and chronological threaded comments (LWN for example) have their own too.

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

#360

Post by SoftTalker »

mvdtnz wrote: post #289
timewizard wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Taxes could be consumption based with no need for anyone’s personal data at all.
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