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DOGE worker’s code supports NLRB whistleblower

krebsonsecurity.com

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Re: DOGE worker’s code supports NLRB whistleblower

#161

Post by BrenBarn »

awesome_dude wrote: post #139
j2kun wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A twisted justification for suggesting someone who broke serious laws not face consequences. We live in a nation of laws, whether or not conspiracy-minded individuals prefer to follow them.

Laws are only as strong as the enforcement. One of the things that is being exposed by the current administration is that, even though the Judiciary is an arm of the government, and supposed to provide a check on the Executive, the reality is that the Executive has the power to pardon anyone it sees fit, voiding the power of the judiciary (the argument is that the ultimate power lies with the voters who can pass thei…

> Laws are only as strong as the enforcement.

This is one of the fundamental issues that underlies our broken system in the US. The gaps between what the law actually is, what people think it is, what people want it to be, and what it in practice is, are enormous.

Some of the recent deportation cases highlight this. You have cases where people were living in the US illegally for decades but faced no repercussions, and now people are upset because they were suddenly detained and/or deported. Virtually all the framing I see is about how it's a sudden and horrible injustice that they were detained during a "routine" ICE check-in --- very little about how we have accumulated this palimpsest of rules and enforcement policies resting on laws which don't actually encode the state of affairs most people want.

If we want people to be able to immigrate easily and safely (and I do), we need to stop breathing sighs of relief when a new president comes in and issues some kind of temporary executive order that makes things okay in the short term. We need to fix the laws at all levels, including criminalizing enforcement actions that are contrary to the law. That would likely mean massive purges of many individuals in local and state governments and law enforcement agencies, with many of them sentenced to considerable prison terms for the kind of enforcement discretion that we currently accept as normal. It's not going to be pretty. But it has to be done if we want to return to a system grounded in the actual rule of law and not the rule of law enforcement.

Re: DOGE worker’s code supports NLRB whistleblower

#163

Post by llm_nerd »

dfedbeef wrote: post #111

The CEO of Tesla and Space-X; a self-proclaimed high IQ individual, an alleged programmer, has apparently hired a straight-up script kiddie to their elite delta force of technical government downsizers.

There is a phenomena I've noticed in this industry where people who lack a skill compensate by convincing themselves that they are a savant at seeing and exploiting that skill they lack in others. They find and encircle themselves with people who they believe are the Best of the Best, at least in their imagination, and it is critical for their ego that this is never challenged. They will be blind to any evidence to the contrary because they need the people they "identify" to be extraordinary, justifying their great people curation.

I mean, I guess this really happens in all industries. Art, music, leadership, software development. People who maybe once had credibility in something and now desperately try to foist Their People as the best in the industry.

I feel like that is what is happening here. None of the people who Elon surrounds himself are notable in any way, and their skills are hugely suspect, but he has to have his harem of "Super Coders" to prop up his own mythology.

Re: DOGE worker’s code supports NLRB whistleblower

#164

Post by jayd16 »

wmf wrote: post #75
twalkz wrote: post #8

> According to a whistleblower complaint filed last week by Daniel J. Berulis, a 38-year-old security architect at the NLRB, officials from DOGE met with NLRB leaders on March 3 and demanded the creation of several all-powerful “tenant admin” accounts that were to be exempted from network logging activity that would otherwise keep a detailed record of all actions taken by those accounts. Feels like a pretty good Occa…

[flagged]

This doesn't really make sense. If its in the logs, then they already did it. They weren't slowed at all.

This doesn't really apply to the situation in the slightest.

Re: DOGE worker’s code supports NLRB whistleblower

#165

Post by BrenBarn »

nativeit wrote: post #98
dboreham wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Time to remove the pardon powder. Has it achieved anything productive in the last 100 years?

I think it's been used properly in a lot of instances, especially when you consider that federal law can quickly become out-of-step with modern sensibilities, so being able to relieve those harmed by laws flawed under contemporary standards is important. There's probably a better way of handling that, but it's one instance where the power of presidential and governors' pardons have been applied appropriately.

> I think it's been used properly in a lot of instances, especially when you consider that federal law can quickly become out-of-step with modern sensibilities, so being able to relieve those harmed by laws flawed under contemporary standards is important.

No, that is exactly what we don't need. When law becomes out of step with modern sensibilities, the law needs to be changed. Precisely the problem we currently have is that we have become too accustomed to dealing with a sort of "shadow law" system where the way things actually work is not the way they're supposed to work according to the law. That is a recipe for confusion, bias, favoritism, and inequity. What we need is a system of laws that actually lets the people fix things when they are broken instead of patching around them. (This is, in my view, a byproduct of other aspects of our legal system, in particular the grossly over-restrictive process for amending the constitution.)

Re: DOGE worker’s code supports NLRB whistleblower

#166

Post by llm_nerd »

underyx wrote: post #97
timewizard wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article is written very poorly. The disclosure itself is far more readable. https://whistlebloweraid.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/2025...

Also this PDF contains a detail I haven't seen reported elsewhere: > Furthermore, on Monday, April 7, 2025, while my client and my team were preparing this disclosure, someone physically taped a threatening note to Mr. Berulis’ home door with photographs – taken via a drone – of him walking in his neighborhood. The threatening note made clear reference to this very disclosure he was preparing for you

It's an interesting detail because if true -- and I fully assume it is -- the intention likely wasn't to dissuade him from going public, but instead to make him look like a conspiratorial nut. When I first saw this story and heard that "drone shot of him / threatening note" I admit that I immediately assumed it was a flake, but on further details I think that was actually the reason for doing that.

Re: DOGE worker’s code supports NLRB whistleblower

#167

Post by frumplestlatz »

shakna wrote: post #159
jiggawatts wrote: post #58

This is much ado about nothing. The article tries to very hard to make something ordinary sound nefarious. This appears to be DOGE employees simply doing their job. You may not agree with what they’re doing in a political sense, but if you were tasked with the same problem you’d come up with a nearly identical solution. For example: “tenant admin” is probably the special role that can bypass access control (not audit…

> Furthermore, on Monday, April 7, 2025, while my client and my team were preparing this disclosure, someone physically taped a threatening note to Mr. Berulis’ home door with photographs – taken via a drone – of him walking in his neighborhood. The threatening note made clear reference to this very disclosure he was preparing for you

It would be astonishingly stupid to threaten a whistleblower in such an amateurish manner when you’re backed by the party in power and have the full and official apparatus of the state at your disposal.

Re: DOGE worker’s code supports NLRB whistleblower

#168

Post by dekhn »

jiggawatts wrote: post #58

This is much ado about nothing. The article tries to very hard to make something ordinary sound nefarious. This appears to be DOGE employees simply doing their job. You may not agree with what they’re doing in a political sense, but if you were tasked with the same problem you’d come up with a nearly identical solution. For example: “tenant admin” is probably the special role that can bypass access control (not audit…

I don't believe your statement that you ask for, and successfully receive, tenant admin rights from large government departments.

DOGE employees aren't simply doing their job. They are actively subverting the government to fatally wound it.

Re: DOGE worker’s code supports NLRB whistleblower

#169

Post by bdangubic »

frumplestlatz wrote: post #167
shakna wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Furthermore, on Monday, April 7, 2025, while my client and my team were preparing this disclosure, someone physically taped a threatening note to Mr. Berulis’ home door with photographs – taken via a drone – of him walking in his neighborhood. The threatening note made clear reference to this very disclosure he was preparing for you

It would be astonishingly stupid to threaten a whistleblower in such an amateurish manner when you’re backed by the party in power and have the full and official apparatus of the state at your disposal.

astonishingly stupid sounds about right for the people leading apparatus of the state :)

Re: DOGE worker’s code supports NLRB whistleblower

#170

Post by sepositus »

watwut wrote: post #60
nop_slide wrote: post #46

I find the following bizarre. Ignoring who this marko guy is, why would a random person post such a "take down" of the repo? I have never randomly passed by a repo and wanted to just dunk on it. Also this critique reeks of being AI generated. > On February 6, someone posted a lengthy and detailed critique of Elez’s code on the GitHub “issues” page for async-ip-rotator, calling it “insecure, unscalable and a fundament…

Are you genuinely puzzled or just wanted an excuse to point us all toward that comment? If "the comment" is correct word for what amounts to full article in length.

Why would they want an excuse to point everyone to that comment when it's literally linked in the article?
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