Can Musk be stopped?

[mister_coffee]

People do choose to be suckers and marks.

Even if all of Jingles' fantasy screed was even remotely true, no sane person would run the risks we are being forced to run to address that spending.

The reality is that all such programs, imaginary or not, are just tiny things in a multitrillion dollar federal budget. If you really are serious about reducing federal spending you are going to go after defense or popular entitlement programs that benefit hundreds of millions of Americans, many of whom might not vote for you if you take away their benefits. Good luck with that.

If this were really about fiscal responsibility they wouldn't need DOGE. They have majorities in the House and Senate and the could do things how Americans always have done them and pass a budget cutting the spending they do not like. But bullies are always cowards and so they are doing this unlawful end run.

What this is really about is eliminating federal spending they are ideologically opposed to. By bypassing the law and the constitution. And also viciously ripping us off in the process

[Rideback]

It's ironic that Trump finds himself unable to control Musk, as Musk is doing what Trump did to the Republican Party. Trump gained control of the GOP by pushing the outer limits of what behavior the GOP would tolerate. Trump's grip on the MAGA base eventually made it impossible for the establishment to rein him in. Musk has a similar psychic hold over his massive fan base, which gives him significant leverage over Trump. Trump also knows Musk is willing to out crazy him.

As the days roll on the edges of the Trump/Musk bromance are becoming more ragged. Two narcissists battling for Time magazine's cover and Musk won which resulted in Trump publicly expressing his rage. More Rep Congressmembers are going directly to Musk for direction rather than approaching the WH. CEO's are interacting with Musk, leaving Trump out of the conversation. Trump is attempting already to claw back the powers of the Presidency but is being relegated to his designs on the Kennedy Center where he can direct the entertainment.

[Rideback]

Trump has claimed $50 but at 5 cents each that's a billion condoms. LOL
https://www.reuters.com/fact-check/no-e ... 025-01-30/

[Rideback]

So you do know how to use Google, right?
Each one of your concerns was fabricated and not anywhere close to the reality most of us live in. Surely your common sense tells you that the story about condoms is a sick joke.

[Jingles]

Makes me wonder about those complaining that DOGE has revealed over 75 billion of wasted tax payers funds what programs they are involved with that might get their slush funds cut off?
Was it the 10 million to send condoms to Hamas?
The money to pay for a Sesame street program in Egypt?
The money spent to promote Drag programs in Venezuala?
These are but a few of the programs being exposed and what is wrong with cutting off funds for this wasteful spending? Whu stop Musk? Personally I would encourage him to audit all spending

[Rideback]

Birthright citizenship upheld by 84 year old Reagan appointed judge:
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/202 ... e-law.html

[mister_coffee]

Apparently there have been changes made to the systems. Untested, unverified, and untracked changes.

https://www.techdirt.com/2025/02/05/a-2 ... snotes.com

Phrases like “freaking out” are, not surprisingly, used to describe the reaction of the engineers who were responsible for maintaining the code base until a week ago. The changes that have been made all seem to relate to creating new paths to block payments and possibly leave less visibility into what has been blocked. I want to emphasize that the described changes are not being tested in a dev environment (i.e., a not-live environment) but have already been pushed into production. This is code that appears to be mainly the work of Elez, who was first introduced to the system probably roughly a week ago and certainly not before the second Trump inauguration. The most recent information I have is that no payments have as yet been blocked and that the incumbent engineering team was able to convince Elez to push the code live to impact only a subset of the universe of payments the system controls. I have also heard no specific information about this access being used to drill down into the private financial or proprietary information of payment recipients, though it appears that the incumbent staff has only limited visibility into what Elez is doing with the access. They have, however, looked extensively into the categories and identity of payees to see how certain payments can be blocked.

The best analogy I can give is this is like letting a four-year-old play with a chainsaw. It is only a matter of time until something horrible happens.

[PAL]

We can hope that there will be leaks. Again, it's hard for some people to keep a secret.
To clarify, not leaks of our personal data, but what they are doing. The kid did do some bragging it appears at his former job.

[Rideback]

Bloomberg reports: 19 year old DOGE kid was fired from previous job for leaking info
https://crooksandliars.com/2025/02/musk ... ed-leaking

David, the post you put up might be a bit more reliable if he managed to Talking Points Memo name correct. Yes WIRED and Josh's team have been breaking the stories on the DOGEkids' intrusions.

[mister_coffee]

If you dig into this it might clarify things:

https://www.crisesnotes.com/treasury-se ... s-in-play/

Some of his earlier blog posts are also good. He has incredibly good sources and knows what he is talking about.

[PAL]

Does anyone know what the DOGE kids are doing? Weve been told Elon was to make recommendations, but it sounds like they are already changing the systems? Maybe they are not actually doing that, as you say "untracked and untested changes to running production systems should never ever be done."

[mister_coffee]

I don't think non-technical people understand how abnormal and bizarre what we are seeing is.

You don't, you really don't ever, make untracked and untested changes to running production systems. Much less critical systems that people's lives might depend upon. There are processes in place for a reason. Even though those processes are burdensome and sometimes maddening, they are there to keep catastrophic things (like people dying) from happening.

People get fired if they do an end run around those processes. Sometimes people get fired for not stopping their coworkers from doing that stuff. If managers are doing it (which sometimes happens) or managers are permitting outsiders to do it you should expect a wave of resignations in the future.

On highly secure systems like, I don't know, the ACH or systems controlling airspace, the barriers are even higher. And on a highly secure system, every single file (and remember that on a modern computer there might be millions of files) has to be vetted -- what it is, what it does, where it comes from, and where it changes. Often times the change tracking systems are more complex than the systems themselves and just as critical.

[Rideback]

https://thelefthook.substack.com/p/maga ... irect=true

The effort to bring apartheid to our shores is in full swing

[Rideback]

The White House daily briefing is cutting off access to a free press:
Rotating out: NYT, WaPo, NBC, CNN, Politico, The Hill, The War Zone, NPR
In: NY Post, Washington Examiner, OAN, Newsmax, Huffington Post, Free Press, Daily Caller, Breitbart

Without access it's not a free press. I'm sure the questions lobbed at the press secretary will now be much more in line with Trump's agenda.

[PAL]

Some, like now unemployed FBI agents need to start surveilling these people. I mean physically too. Like that kid. And secretly.
And somewhere, sometime, someone will leak out what is really happening. A lot of these people cannot keep a secret.

[Rideback]

from The Atlantic, byline by Charlie Warzel and Ian Bogost
'Elon Musk’s unceasing attempts to access the data and information systems of the federal government range so widely, and are so unprecedented and unpredictable, that government computing experts believe the effort has spun out of control. This week, we spoke with four federal-government IT professionals—all experienced contractors and civil servants who have built, modified, or maintained the kind of technological infrastructure that Musk’s inexperienced employees at his newly created Department of Government Efficiency are attempting to access. In our conversations, each expert was unequivocal: They are terrified and struggling to articulate the scale of the crisis.

Even if the president of the United States, the head of the executive branch, supports (and, importantly, understands) these efforts by DOGE, these experts told us, they would still consider Musk’s campaign to be a reckless and dangerous breach of the complex systems that keep America running. Federal IT systems facilitate operations as varied as sending payments from the Treasury Department and making sure that airplanes stay in the air, the sources told us.

Based on what has been reported, DOGE representatives have obtained or requested access to certain systems at the U.S. Treasury, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Office of Personnel Management, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, with eyes toward others, including the Federal Aviation Administration. “This is the largest data breach and the largest IT security breach in our country’s history—at least that’s publicly known,” one contractor who has worked on classified information-security systems at numerous government agencies told us this week. “You can’t un-ring this bell. Once these DOGE guys have access to these data systems, they can ostensibly do with it what they want.”

Read: If DOGE goes nuclear

What exactly they want is unclear. And much remains unknown about what, exactly, is happening here. The contractor emphasized that nobody yet knows which information DOGE has access to, or what it plans to do with it. Spokespeople for the White House, and Musk himself, did not respond to emailed requests for comment. Some reports have revealed the scope of DOGE’s incursions at individual agencies; still, it has been difficult to see the broader context of DOGE’s ambition.

The four experts laid out the implications of giving untrained individuals access to the technological infrastructure that controls the country. Their message is unambiguous: These are not systems you tamper with lightly. Musk and his crew could act deliberately to extract sensitive data, alter fundamental aspects of how these systems operate, or provide further access to unvetted actors. Or they may act with carelessness or incompetence, breaking the systems altogether. Given the scope of what these systems do, key government services might stop working properly, citizens could be harmed, and the damage might be difficult or impossible to undo. As one administrator for a federal agency with deep knowledge about the government’s IT operations told us, “I don’t think the public quite understands the level of danger.”

Each of our four sources, three of whom requested anonymity out of fear of reprisal, made three points very clear: These systems are immense, they are complex, and they are critical. A single program run by the FAA to help air-traffic controllers, En Route Automation Modernization, contains nearly 2 million lines of code; an average iPhone app, for comparison, has about 50,000. The Treasury Department disburses trillions of dollars in payments per year.

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Many systems and databases in a given agency feed into others, but access to them is restricted. Employees, contractors, civil-service government workers, and political appointees have strict controls on what they can access and limited visibility into the system as a whole. This is by design, as even the most mundane government databases can contain highly sensitive personal information. A security-clearance database such as those used by the Department of Justice or the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, one contractor told us, could include information about a person’s mental-health or sexual history, as well as disclosures about any information that a foreign government could use to blackmail them.

Even if DOGE has not tapped into these particular databases, The Washington Post reported on Wednesday that the group has accessed sensitive personnel data at OPM. Mother Jones also reported on Wednesday that an effort may be under way to effectively give Musk control over IT for the entire federal government, broadening his access to these agencies. Trump has said that Musk is acting only with his permission. “Elon can’t do and won’t do anything without our approval,” he said to reporters recently. “And we will give him the approval where appropriate. Where it’s not appropriate, we won’t.” The specter of what DOGE might do with that approval is still keeping the government employees we spoke with up at night. With relatively basic “read only” access, Musk’s people could easily find individuals in databases or clone entire servers and transfer that secure information somewhere else. Even if Musk eventually loses access to these systems—owing to a temporary court order such as the one approved yesterday, say—whatever data he siphons now could be his forever.

Read: Trump advisers stopped Musk from hiring a noncitizen at DOGE

With a higher level of access—“write access”—a motivated person may be able to put their own code into the system, potentially without any oversight. The possibilities here are staggering. One could alter the data these systems process, or they could change the way the software operates—without any of the testing that would normally accompany changes to a critical system. Still another level of access, administrator privileges, could grant the broad ability to control a system, including hiding evidence of other alterations. “They could change or manipulate treasury data directly in the database with no way for people to audit or capture it,” one contractor told us. “We’d have very little way to know it even happened.”

The specific levels of access that Musk and his team have remain unclear and likely vary between agencies. On Tuesday, the Treasury said that DOGE had been given “read only” access to the department’s federal payment system, though Wired then reported that one member of DOGE was able to write code on the system. Any focus on access tiers, for that matter, may actually simplify the problem at hand. These systems aren’t just complex at the code level—they are multifaceted in their architecture. Systems can have subsystems; each of these can have their own permission structures. It’s hard to talk about any agency’s tech infrastructure as monolithic. It’s less a database than it is a Russian nesting doll of databases, the experts said.

Musk’s efforts represent a dramatic shift in the way the government’s business has traditionally been conducted. Previously, security protocols were so strict that a contractor plugging a non-government-issued computer into an ethernet port in a government agency office was considered a major security violation. Contrast that with DOGE’s incursion. CNN reported yesterday that a 23-year-old former SpaceX intern without a background check was given a basic, low tier of access to Department of Energy IT systems, despite objections from department lawyers and information experts. “That these guys, who may not even have clearances, are just pulling up and plugging in their own servers is madness,” one source told us, referring to an allegation that DOGE had connected its own server at OPM. “It’s really hard to find good analogies for how big of a deal this is.” The simple fact that Musk loyalists are in the building with their own computers is the heart of the problem—and helps explain why activities ostensibly authorized by the president are widely viewed as a catastrophic data breach.

The four systems professionals we spoke with do not know what damage might already have been done. “The longer this goes on, the greater the risk of potential fatal compromise increases,” Scott Cory, a former CIO for an agency in the HHS, told us. At the Treasury, this could mean stopping payments to government organizations or outside contracts it doesn’t want to pay. It could also mean diverting funds to other recipients. Or gumming up the works in the attempt to do those, or other, things.

In the FAA, even a small systems disruption could cause mass grounding of flights, a halt in global shipping, or worse, downed planes. For instance, the agency oversees the Traffic Flow Management System, which calculates the overall demand for airspace in U.S. airports and which airlines depend on. “Going into these systems without an in-depth understanding of how they work both individually and interconnectedly is a recipe for disaster that will result in death and economic harm to our nation,” one FAA employee who has nearly a decade of experience with its system architecture told us. “‘Upgrading’ a system of which you know nothing about is a good way to break it, and breaking air travel is a worst-case scenario with consequences that will ripple out into all aspects of civilian life. It could easily get to a place where you can’t guarantee the safety of flights taking off and landing.” Nevertheless, on Wednesday Musk posted that “the DOGE team will aim to make rapid safety upgrades to the air traffic control system.”

Even if DOGE members are looking to modernize these systems, they may find themselves flummoxed. The government is big and old and complicated. One former official with experience in government IT systems, including at the Treasury, told us that old could mean that the systems were installed in 1962, 1992, or 2012. They might use a combination of software written in different programming languages: a little COBOL in the 1970s, a bit of Java in the 1990s. Knowledge about one system doesn’t give anyone—including Musk’s DOGE workers, some of whom were not even alive for Y2K—the ability to make intricate changes to another.

Read: The “rapid unscheduled disassembly” of the United States government

The internet economy, characterized by youth and disruption, favors inventing new systems and disposing of old ones. And the nation’s computer systems, like its roads and bridges, could certainly benefit from upgrades. But old computers don’t necessarily make for bad infrastructure, and government infrastructure isn’t always old anyway. The former Treasury official told us that mainframes—and COBOL, the ancient programming language they often run—are really good for what they do, such as batch processing for financial transactions.

Like the FAA employee, the payment-systems expert also fears that the most likely result of DOGE activity on federal systems will be breaking them, especially because of incompetence and lack of proper care. DOGE, he observed, may be prepared to view or hoover up data, but it doesn’t appear to be prepared to carry out savvy and effective alterations to how the system operates. This should perhaps be reassuring. “If you were going to organize a heist of the U.S. Treasury,” he said, “why in the world would you bring a handful of college students?” They would be useless. Your crew would need, at a minimum, a couple of guys with a decade or two of experience with COBOL, he said.

Unless, of course, you had the confidence that you could figure anything out, including a lumbering government system you don’t respect in the first place. That interpretation of DOGE’s theory of self seems both likely and even more scary, at the Treasury, the FAA, and beyond. Would they even know what to do after logging in to such a machine? we asked. “No, they’d have no idea,” the payment expert said. “The sanguine thing to think about is that the code in these systems and the process and functions they manage are unbelievably complicated,” Scott Cory said. “You’d have to be extremely knowledgeable if you were going into these systems and wanting to make changes with an impact on functionality.”

But DOGE workers could try anyway. Mainframe computers have a keyboard and display, unlike the cloud-computing servers in data centers. According to the former Treasury IT expert, someone who could get into the room and had credentials for the system could access it and, via the same machine or a networked one, probably also deploy software changes to it. It’s far more likely that they would break, rather than improve, a Treasury disbursement system in so doing, one source told us. “The volume of information they deal with [at the Treasury] is absolutely enormous, well beyond what anyone would deal with at SpaceX,” the source said. Even a small alteration to a part of the system that has to do with the distribution of funds could wreak havoc, preventing those funds from being distributed or distributing them wrongly, for example. “It’s like walking into a nuclear reactor and deciding to handle some plutonium.”

DOGE is many things—a dismantling of the federal government, a political project to flex power and punish perceived enemies—but it is also the logical end point of a strain of thought that’s become popular in Silicon Valley during the boom times of Big Tech and easy money: that building software and writing code aren’t just dominant skills for the 21st century, but proof of competence in any realm. In a post on X this week, John Shedletsky, a developer and an early employee at the popular gaming platform Roblox, summed up the philosophy nicely: “Silicon Valley built the modern world. Why shouldn’t we run it?”

This attitude disgusted one of the officials we spoke with. “There’s this bizarre belief that being able to do things with computers means you have to be super smart about everything else.” Silicon Valley may have built the computational part of the modern world, but the rest of that world—the money, the airplanes, the roads, and the waterways—still exists. Knowing something, even a lot, about computers guarantees no knowledge about the world beyond them.

“I’d like to think that this is all so massive and complex that they won’t succeed in whatever it is they’re trying to do,” one of the experts told us. “But I wouldn’t want to wager that outcome against their egos.”

[Rideback]

One can't help but wonder, with the problematics of storage, if instead the DOGEkids created backdoor access for continued and future use. The keys to the kingdom if you will.

Access to judges' information across the Country could put the fix in for justice to be served. There is talk that the judge's order stopping access will also grant an audit. We'll see.

[mister_coffee]

The kid that resigned. Can anyone know if he took the info with him? Would he be able to sell it to a foreign country? No one probably knows, not even Elon.

We probably can't ever know for sure.

What I would say is that from a practical standpoint that is a lot of data and you wouldn't just sneak it out in a thumb drive. Also that data isn't all in one place and I doubt in the time they had they could have figured out all of the places they'd need to look for all the data. Copying that data would take quite a bit of time and would be hard to hide while they did it.

On the other hand there are hopefully backups somewhere and they could have just walked out with them.

Right now what I fear is that for a brief period at least some of those people had more than "read only" access. So in theory during that time they could have ordered wire transfers of billions of dollars to detergent banking entities somewhere. We'd never know unless they did a full audit and published the results. The odds of that happening are exactly zero. One of my fears is that the current occupant of the White House would figure that out and give himself a trillion-dollar bonus. If you have control of that payment system you could do that and get away with it.

[PAL]

The kid that resigned. Can anyone know if he took the info with him? Would he be able to sell it to a foreign country? No one probably knows, not even Elon.

[Rideback]

Wall Street Journal: 'White House says Musk will police his own conflicts of interest'

[mister_coffee]

...
Regardless, I was happy to see Musk's intrusion into Treasury stopped by a Fed'l judge yesterday. Of course, whether or not Musk will recognize that authority is another question.

Except for the fact that at least two DOGE stooges still have "read-only" access to those systems while the TRO is in effect. Note those people are not authorized by law to have that access, so arguably the TRO is itself unlawful.

Except for the fact that some of the DOGE people had access to modify the systems as well. No word on exactly what modifications might have been made, if those modifications might have been backed out, or really anything about that. What exactly this means is the four-year-old might still be playing with a chainsaw in the other room.

[Rideback]

As almost an aside in the AI commentary is because AI uses so much energy it may have been a surprise to Musk with Trump's tariff debacle that we rely on Canada for 99% of our uranium to keep the nuclear lights on.

Personally, I more inclined to think at this point in AI's development it is more useful in designing the targets of Musk's attacks and gauging people's reactions.

Regardless, I was happy to see Musk's intrusion into Treasury stopped by a Fed'l judge yesterday. Of course, whether or not Musk will recognize that authority is another question.

[mister_coffee]

So you are saying that if they want to use AI, that it would take years to get it going? Or not? With computers many things can go wonky is all I know.

Well, if all they want to do is break stuff and create chaos and confusion, they don't need much time at all. For that matter, they wouldn't need AI to do that either.

AIs need large quantities of labeled training data. Which implies that you need to know what you are looking for. And curating large quantities of labeled training data takes time and effort and money. Lots of money.

AIs are very sensitive to exactly what questions you ask them. And how you ask those questions.

AIs are very bad at looking for needles in haystacks. So if you are searching for something relatively uncommon (e.g. Waste, Fraud, and Abuse amongst hundreds of millions of social security payments) you probably aren't going to have much luck with AI. Unless you resort to extreme trickery. This isn't necessarily a limitation of AIs but how math and statistics work.

AIs like Chat GPT, Claude, and deepseek aren't likely to be very good at ferreting out Waste, Fraud, and Abuse by themselves. You'll need to do a mess of additional work and might not need them at all to do the job.

Getting all that crap right isn't simple and it is extremely unlikely that a half dozen college boys can pull it off in a reasonable amount of time. And if they have any training in the field at all they have to know that.

[PAL]

So you are saying that if they want to use AI, that it would take years to get it going? Or not? With computers many things can go wonky is all I know.

[mister_coffee]

The Pitchforks are coming.

I don't think at this point that any of us can even imagine how deep and dark the hole we are about to fall in can be.

The risk I see is not intentional and malicious damage to the system. The risk is an inadvertent and accidental screw up that spirals quickly out of control. For example they could accidentally stop payments on the federal debt. Which would trigger a default which would be catastrophic.

The Federal Payments System is an enormous and extremely complex pile of software that runs on multiple computer systems. It isn't really designed to be easily shut down or restarted either. My understanding is that changes are being made to that system outside of the normal change control process competent and sober software people would use for such a system. Or even without any kind of testing before pushing the changes. So that means when the poor thing inevitably breaks figuring out what broke and why is going to be hard and take a lot more time than we can imagine.

Like I've said the consulting contracts for fixing this when it breaks are going to be hilarious. If I were retired and had expertise in these systems I'd be starting negotiations at a billion dollars a day.