Elon Musk’s 'Puter Geniuses Post Classified Info On Public Website, Also Want To See Your Taxes
They’re leaking the DOGE, they’re leaking the cats
Well butterfingers, Elon’s Department Of Government Efficiency That’s Not Efficient Nor A Department oops posted classified “Not Releasable to Foreign Nationals” data from the National Reconnaissance Office. That’s only the federal agency that designs, builds and maintains US intelligence satellites. FUCKING GREAT!
And Sunday night the Washington Post reported that software engineer Gavin Kliger from “Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service is seeking access to a heavily guarded Internal Revenue Service system that includes detailed financial information about every taxpayer, business and nonprofit in the country.” WHAT, I repeat, WHAT the FUCK. Or as WaPo puts it, “it’s highly unusual to grant political appointees access to personal taxpayer data.” Then WaPo reprinted a press release from the White House about waste and fraud, as if it’s just a given that IRS fatcats making $62k a year are a problem, and some random guy named Gavin poking around in 300 million tax returns is possibly the answer.
Remember that time it was a big scandal that Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair John Podesta sent his risotto recipe from a Gmail account that got hacked, so how could anybody ever trust Killary to keep secrets from Russia? Laugh/cry!
Anyway, this latest DOGE OOPS was right around the time that the administration fired National Nuclear Security Administration workers, the ones responsible for designing, building and overseeing the nuclear weapons stockpile. Also the same day a Russian drone strike pierced Chernobyl. And then the administration — whoops! — quickly realized that those employees are critical to safety and national security, actually, and tried to hire them back. But d’oh, they couldn’t find them, because when they were fired their work email accounts were also deleted, because that’s how firing people works, no shit! And then the administration pathetically sent out a beggy email to ALL of the workers at the NNSA begging for help to find the employees: “Please work with your supervisors to send this information (once you get it) to people’s personal contact emails.”
Is the “efficiency” part making one less job for new DNI Tulsi Gabbard or Walt Nauta or whoever is in charge of mishandling classified information in the Trump 2.0 administration? If DOGE goes ahead and compromises all the nation’s deepest secrets, there’s no need to send Putin or Xi passwords, or schlep secret documents in ungainly boxes to some Mar-a-Lago storage room where some spy would hypothetically have to pretend to “find” them on their way to getting lost on the way to the crapper. (Or whatever happened there! The case got dismissed by a very real and serious judge who is real and serious, so we guess we’ll never know.)
Seriously, though, why is Big Balls in these files at all?
And fucking yikes: DOGE has received approval from the Labor Department to use software that allows it to transfer data out. Data on millions of people! Maybe even you! It includes credit reports, student loan information, the identity of whistleblowers (including presumably people who have complained to OSHA, the FAA or EPA about Musk’s companies), Social Security numbers and addresses, personal information on anyone who has accessed Medicare or Medicaid, possibly the identities and addresses of CIA spies, who the fuck knows! It definitely sounds like enough for Musk to build his own database that would have been the envy of the Stasi. And/or China, where business gets done through a combination of bribery and using classified information to blackmail bureaucrats into approving contracts, Miles Guo-style.
Musk’s fascist-humping leaky little boys have already gotten their grubby fingers into Treasury Department data, which even the government’s own lawyers apparently had no idea about. First they insisted that DOGE’s hackerboys had read-only access. Then they admitted that actually Marko “I was racist before it was cool” Elez had a laptop that had “mistakenly” been configured with read/write permissions instead of read-only. And then government lawyers trickle-‘fessed in a footnote that actually Elez did have access to the source code, but he was only making code changes in a “sandbox,” not pushing them live to sites.
What did Elez do with the data he had access to in his little sandbox? Did any of it leak outside of the Treasury Department? On Friday government lawyer Jeffrey Oestericher admitted: “The short answer on that is we don’t presently know.” Heckofajob, Jeff! A judge upheld the order to block those little shits from the Treasury Department, but all the data could already be on the Dark Web and for sale for a handful of Trump memecoins by now for all we know. Not even their own lawyers know!
And DOGE itself might not even know, because look how sloppy these fucks are. Last week DOGE’s own site got hacked, and messages from the hackers stayed up for almost an entire day: “this is a joke of a .gov site” and “THESE ‘EXPERTS’ LEFT THEIR DATABASE OPEN -roro.” Now in the place where the hackers’ messages were is a link that lets you download an empty spreadsheet.
Also the contents of DEI.gov were briefly accessible, which included their SECRET SQUIRREL talking points about the evil things the DEI cabal is allegedly up to. A German researcher found the files on the Internet Archive and posted them to Mastodon. "$3.4 million for Malaysian drug-fueled gay sex app,” tell me more!
(Clutch your pearls! The NIH did study if it was effective to use smartphone technology to reach Malaysian men with health and STI/HIV testing information, as Malaysia apparently has one of the highest HIV rates in the world. That’s what the NIH does/did, it researches best practices, because if you’re going to spend billions on some kind of program, studying and testing that program in a smaller representative population before you roll it out only makes sense. Try a sip of the wine before you buy a case of it! But the rest of it is some Daily Mail-style nonsensical breathless expounding. There’s no app, much less one powered by drugs and gay sex like some. kind of a potato clock or those exercise bikes that can power a television.)
Also leaked, the administration’s plans for DEI purging, which includes employees like the Veterans Affairs office that works to make sure veterans receive equal access to care. Sure hope none of those veterans voted for Trump! Also on the to-purge-list, the Health and Human Services office providing information about the health of minority populations.
DOGE boys are all up in the Labor, Health and Human Services, and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau data too. A coalition of parties sued to get a restraining order, and on Saturday a Bush-appointed judge turned them down.
Maybe today is a good day to freeze your credit?
[Huffpost / Washington Post archive link / Wired / NBC News]
Hey, IRS guys, I don't know if you knew this already or not, but the right really hates when workers they don't like make more than minimum wage.
Signed, a teacher who has had salary FOIAed every year he's been teaching by a right wing think tank.
“it’s highly unusual to grant political appointees access to personal taxpayer data.” It’s also highly unusual to elect a convicted felon to the highest office so this is what you get.