Comment by ethagknight
2 days ago
This is a very dramatic take on something you (and many others) are making extremely broad presumptions upon. It’s clear that DOGE is reviewing payment data and has the same access to various components of the US Govt that Obama’s US Digital Services, created to rebuild the ACA website but also provisioned for a number of other digital services. DOGE has the same access to services that USDS had. USDS was praised for its “speed and cutting through red tape”
This is wrong and naive.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/doge-dives-into-core-na...
"DOGE currently has far deeper and far more extensive access to U.S. government computer systems — and is far deeper into the national security space — than is conceivably necessary for anything related to their notional brief and goals."
> This is wrong and naive.
I am honestly shocked at the amount of wrong or naive takes being posted on HN as of late.
Considering how crazy the general population is (and other online spaces) it's a small miracle that HN still has this (sub?)culture.
Also things are happening at a breakneck pace and, uhm, the media is tragicomically incompetent.
It's more important that the takes generate "curious" discussion, regardless of how naive and wrong they are. Especially during a "MOT", where things quickly get hidden.
Maybe naïve, but not wrong. They have access that any American citizen should have access to, and the only authority they really have is to flag items for review. The DOGE team is sensational, but i would bet an enormous sum that Trump has a much larger team that the sensationalized DOGE team at making decisions. It’s childish to believe the media’s talking points that there’s a bunch of children being allowed to run rampant controlling the government, especially in light of the recent “Biden is sharp as tack” media narrative.
From your link written by John Marshall, a “progressive liberal”: “It’s obvious that you’d want to be very cautious about centralizing this much power in anyone’s hands, especially people working outside all existing frameworks of oversight and accountability.” It’s called.. the President. The whole point of electing a president alongside of congress is to have a consolidated point of power.
The question isn't what's being accessed, it's who is accessing it.
There's at least some belief that the people looking at the data haven't been vetted or instructed as they should be when handling data of this nature.
It doesn't help that the guy who is running the show is basically doing it as a friend of the president and has some conflicts of interest.
Government employees already have access to every text, call, and email you have ever sent. Where was your outrage since the Snowden leaks?
First, if you’ve used HN at any point since the Snowden leaks there has never been a shortage of outrage here.
Second, while that was a major topic in international news for years, it did at least stay in the national security space where access is restricted. A lot of the concerns around DOGE are because they bulled through all of the normal rules for who gets access to sensitive data and how it’s handled. Say what you will about the NSA, and many here have, they didn’t just hand out credentials to inexperienced people with a history of leaking data or condone use of personal computers for government work.
This is especially of concern if the reports of write access being used to push code changes or deploy monitoring keyloggers are true: do you really want to bet that the guys who made a .gov site world-writable couldn’t be compromised by a foreign intelligence agency? There are legitimate concerns about the level of process overhead in government IT but that doesn’t make the reasons for it go away.
Which is why I personally disagree with
It certainty is a question of what is being accessed. I don't care if it is god damn Mr Rogers with the best intentions. The more sensitive the data, the stronger roadblocks need be in place. Often to the degree of impossible to access because it shouldn't be gathered in the first place.
There will always be good reasons to access data, and sensitive data. There is always good that can come out of this. But just because you can do something good with it doesn't mean you should. You can do a lot of good with a nuclear bomb, but I don't want any ever built because it takes only a small mistake (not an act of malice!) to have huge consequences. There is always a cost, you must always consider if the costs are worth the benefits.
I think a lot of people on hacker news were equally if not more outraged about Snowden leaks. Not sure what you’re trying to say.
Surely the response to the Snowden leaks should not be 'Well, Snowden showed that we have a lot of illegal snopping, so all snooping in the future is also ok'?
Not a totally unfair point, but to be fair, some people are still outraged after the Snowden leaks.
> Where was your outrage since the Snowden leaks?
Did you also miss the global protests against the 2003 invasion of Iraq?
>"Where was your outrage since the Snowden leaks?"
It's been there, and growing, ever since.
2 replies →
It’s another side of the same problem. We REALLY need data privacy laws in this country.
Classic deflection and whataboutism.
There was a huge amount of outrage since the Snowden leaks. What are you talking about?
It is not dramatic at all. Because of the very fact it's contentious, a rebuild will be undertaken by the next government to not trust it. It's an absolute guarantee regardless of how any one side feels about it.
I and many people would argue to rebuild it based on the lack of transparency we have seen. There are enough people that feel that way that a rebuild is inevitable, regardless if you end up right. The position is that we really don't know, so the only way to be safe is a do-over. Or at the very least, a completely transparent audit, which is also insanely expensive and very hard to scope.
i appreciate the optimism that there will be something left to actually have this 'do-over'...
Do you actually trust Elon Musk?
If it wasn't obvious, no. I have a position but I'm really trying to make a neutral point here.
There are lessons that people learn over time and come up with best practices to avoid repeating the mistakes. If the intent is to really uncover waste and fraud then one way could have been
1. To ask for READ access to all the data with PII/sensitive scrubbed.
2. Any action to modify the content/data should ideally have followed the existing path/mechanism
>It’s clear that DOGE is reviewing payment data and has the same access to various components of the US Govt that Obama’s US Digital Services
How is that clear? What proof do you have of this other than Musk's word?
> the same access to various components of the US Govt that Obama’s US Digital Services
…but also much more. It is intellectually dishonest to equate these two.
Cutting through red tape can technically be done by nuking the red tape, but why cause all this harm when you can use scissors?
I don't think intellectually honest people can support the current takeover.
Sadism! That’s why.
Even if what you say is true (and as other posters point out, it isnt), DOGE and the Trump administration are staffed by confirmed Nazis and white supremacists who should be nowhere near the government. And Musk and VP Vance (both of whom interact with and support both Nazis and white supremacists regularly) supported and reinstated at least one, so this whole thing is rotten to the very top.
https://www.texasobserver.org/ice-prosecutor-dallas-white-su... https://gizmodo.com/doge-engineer-resigns-over-extremely-rac... https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/07/musk-doge-st...
But this time we're dealing with a malicious actor on one's end. And I say malicious, because in all honesty I can't justify someone spewing lies continuously while holding a public charge without being malicious
I have no reason to trust Elon Musk and many many reasons not to.