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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'

#361

Post by themgt »

RIMR wrote: post #304
chmorgan_ wrote: post #272

Why the security concerns now and not with the thousands of employees with potentially similar access? NOW it's a concern because the idea occurred to people that who might have access to data is important? Imo the faux outrage is so far beyond rational that it turns people away. Let's have a reasonable discussion about data access and controls, and whether they are being followed, rather than some reflexive response…

> Why the security concerns now and not with the thousands of employees with potentially similar access? Because there aren't "thousands of employees" with this kind of access, and few people who have had it were thoroughly vetted. > Let's have a reasonable discussion about data access and controls, and whether they are being followed, rather than some reflexive response based on political points of view. We are well…

Because there aren't "thousands of employees" with this kind of access, and few people who have had it were thoroughly vetted.

I mean, we've had multiple classified info leaks by low-level employees, most recently a 20 year old Massachusetts Air National Guard member who leaked hundreds of top secret Pentagon docs on the Ukraine War to his bros on the "Thug Shaker Central" Discord channel. Some hundreds of thousands of people had access to this stuff. If there are specific subsets of documents with very limited need-to-know access, you need to be clear about which documents and how many people have access.

We are well beyond partisan "points of view" here. This isn't really about policy, this is about the law and whether or not anyone has any interest in enforcing it.

Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution: "The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America." The law is the president has ultimate authority over the executive branch and e.g. all classified information and can disclose it to anyone he wants. Obviously there are certain asterisks and exceptions to this authority, so if you want to be specific about which laws being violated please go ahead, but painting with a broad brush that individuals who have been delegated authority by the president are breaking the law by accessing executive branch information is unserious.

The claim that no one in America is enforcing the law anymore is extremely grave and should not be made lightly by a civic minded person.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Teixeira#Publication_of_l...

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

#362

Post by jacobjjacob »

milesrout wrote: post #294
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…

I don't see how this kind of story is on-topic for HN. Yes, we all appreciate that HN is more than just a website for discussing garbage collection algorithms, graph algorithms, javascript frameworks, etc (i.e. computer science and programming) but isn't it meant to be about things that hackers would find interesting by virtue of being hackers ? My understanding of that broader topicality was that it was intended to…

This site is called hacker news… the article is news about hackers

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

#363

Post by cytocync »

Elon Musk's DOGE team is raising eyebrows with their seemingly reckless behavior.

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.

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

#364

Post by nicce »

MisoRamen wrote: post #341
ineptech wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Secu…

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…

> 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-d...

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

#365

Post by malkia »

purplethinking wrote: post #276
malkia wrote: post #262

[flagged]

[flagged]

How would you know what I've been screaming for the last 15 years? I said in the "digital world" - equating what a dumbass does with his goons thinking he knows everything.

Most of us here are software engineers, we all know that sudden change causes issues, even if it's for the good. He does this without any transparency, and just spits out like a cowboy programmer - "Here I saved it! I'm the hero! I've changed the whole `codebase` on Friday afternoon - so enjoy!"

No it doesn't work like this... Sorry

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

#366

Post by [deleted] »

dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #42
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…

> All: please don't post the sort of low-information / high-indignation comment that could just as easily appear in any semi-related thread. Such generic comments make the discussion less interesting and more activating. That's not what we're trying for here. We'd love to have the sort of useful discussion you're aiming for, but all new discussions that reference Musk are being systematically flagged by apparent supp…

[deleted]

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

#367

Post by discreteevent »

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.

This is beyond belief. It's a Whitehouse website with a list of claims of wasted money on the part of USAID. But instead of evidence unearthed by DOGE the first three claims link to a Daily Mail page. The Daily Mail is a junk newspaper in the UK!

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

#368

Post by jandrewrogers »

9283409232 wrote: post #79

Why are high level figures in these departments just letting them walk in and have access? Tell them to kick rocks until they have proper clearances.

Because the DOGE people have the proper clearances and authority. There seems to be a lot of confusion on this point. The executive branch can immediately grant clearance and access to random people at their discretion, and they routinely do in every administration. You don't even need to apply for a security clearance, never mind hold one. If the DNI wants to read in a Starbucks barista on the secret space alien bunker program, they can do that.

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.

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

#369

Post by tzs »

SoftTalker wrote: post #353
amazingamazing wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

All of those were full of traditional experts.

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

#370

Post by barkingcat »

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?

this just exposes the double standard and agism in tech industries. in tech, a lot of companies won't hire you in technical roles or as programmer because you're over 40.

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.

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