This part is really damning: a real efficiency audit might need a lot of access to look for signs of hidden activity, but they’d never need to hide traces of what they did:
> Meanwhile, according to the disclosure and records of internal communications, members of the DOGE team asked that their activities not be logged on the system and then appeared to try to cover their tracks behind them, turning off monitoring tools and manually deleting records of their access — evasive behavior that several cybersecurity experts interviewed by NPR compared to what criminal or state-sponsored hackers might do.
The subsequent message about Russian activity could be a coincidence–Internet background noise-but given how these are not very technically skilled and are moving very fast in systems they don’t understand, I’d be completely unsurprised to learn that they unintentionally left something exposed or that one of them has been compromised.
> The subsequent message about Russian activity could be a coincidence–Internet background noise
These weren't random login attempts. It says the Russian login attempts had the correct login credentials of newly created accounts.
If the article is correct, the accounts were created and then shortly afterward the correct credentials were used to attempt a login from a Russian source.
That's a huge issue if true. Could be that someone's laptop is compromised.
It certainly needs a full investigation but I don’t want to presume the results. It wouldn’t be the first time some tool reported a wildly incorrect location for an IP address and the focus should be on DOGE breaking a number of federal laws and doing things which no legitimate auditor ever needs to do.
Is it really a compromise if the opps (or should I say: "opps") are deliberately welcomed in with open arms? Granting Russians access here wouldn't even crack the top 10 gifts this administration has given to Putin in the last month.
The use of DNS tunneling and skirting logs makes my head spin. Even if justification of exfiltrating 10GB of sensitive data could be made, there's widely available means of doing so that aren't the methods of state-sponsored hackers and the like.
"DNS tunneling" (abnormal number of DNS requests) actually might be caused by a software that doesn't use DNS cache. I was once banned by 8.8.8.8 (Google's DNS server) for sending too many requests because youtube-dl was making a DNS request for each tiny segment of a video (and there were thousands of them).
Well, maybe one shouldn't be using Google DNS server when violating ToU to download Google's video.
Everything's going to have to be replaced and it's going to be hugely expensive. But that's not going to happen until at least 2029 - plenty of time for bad actors to get settled in and cause real damage.
So NLRB handles confidential complaints. The complainant's idenity might be kept confidential. Exact details may be kept confidential.
Why aren't we to believe that this is Elon Musk going after anyone filing a complaint to the NLRB (from X, Twitter or SpaceX) or, worse yet (from Elon's POV), anyone potentially organizing any unionization effort?
There's absolutely no reason DOGE should have access to this information. There's absolutely no reason their activity, such as what information they accessed, should be hidden.
Compromised implies they're not the Russian team to start with. I'd be looking for one of them to lose nerve and betray that ALL of them are the Russian team.
I'm going to wait a while and see if this information pans out. Remember when there was a huge scandal about Trump communicating with Russia but then it just turned out to be a spam email? https://theintercept.com/2016/11/01/heres-the-problem-with-t...
(Non-American here.) If they weren't already, it seems like private businesses, security researchers, and I suppose the general public, should start treating US government agencies as privacy and security threats, just like you'd treat any other phisher, scammer, etc.
If government agencies are compromised - via software backdoors or any other mechanism - any data and systems they can access should be considered compromised too.
The unfortunate reality is that a half of the US population sees the NLRB as a burden on small businesses—primarily because its policies shift frequently, making compliance costly and complex for those without deep legal resources. [1]
And the same half of the population do not trust anything what npr.org says.
Understanding the above dynamic is key to grasping the current state of discourse in the U.S.
This isn't really a shock to me, but what's more frustrating I guess is that absolutely nothing will come of this. I have zero confidence any of this will even be cleaned up, just the same ranting about "fake news".
That the intrusion came over Starlink from Russia with valid login credentials would be unbelievable in a tale from speculative fiction. Reality Winner looks like a hero compared to these clowns.
Politicians are only afraid of not being re-elected. So I see that the only way is to advocate voters to hold their representatives accountable. Start a campaign in you state about that, and I think you'll get an answer pretty fast, since they are very sensitive to popularity and competition matters.
Looks like Elon's staff went in and made a copy of everything - which in this case NLRB, so sensitive stuff, but any state department going to have a ton of sensitive stuff - and sent it who knows where; this after disabling all logging and a ton of security, presumably to try to cover their tracks.
This is bad. These guys are looking like bad actors, with State-level authorization for access to everything.
Also looks like they're kids and don't have the hang of security, and the professional Russian State run APTs have hacked them.
I think we should be trying to understand what NxGenBdoorExtract is. NxGen is a system for NLRB. Bdoor is pretty evocative of a back door. He took he git offline or made it private. I can't find it on archive.org.
On the other hand, there are two things about that screenshot of the repo which is a little weird. First, the timestamp of that repo is cutoff, but, the items seem to be in reverse chronological order, which would put that repo sometime in 2021-ish, or before.
The owner could, of course, just make it public again, or put it back up, and end all the speculation.
I'm intrigued by the "Mission 2" notation. That suggests, perhaps, that DOGE has a "Mission 1" (its public, ostensible purpose) and a hidden "Mission 2" known only to Musk and his minions.
This confuses me greatly. Comparing your link, I can find the repos in that screenshot in the archive snapshot, but as you say, the NxGenBdoorExtract repo is not there, and the repo where it would be is a tinder-react-native clone (updated Sep 20 2020)...
I'm trying to think through this:
1. if the screenshot is not doctored, then the implied ordering of last updated would have had it last updated before January 20, 2021; which would mean it has nothing to do with what is alleged in the article.
2. But in the archive.ph snapshot from 2/28/25 doesn't have it at all anywhere.
3. Archive.org's 3/21/25 snapshot shows the same thing as archive.ph
4. The article states that after this tweet (https://x.com/SollenbergerRC/status/1895609294810464390) dated 2/28/25 (the date of the archive.ph 2/28/25 snapshot), Berulis noticed NxGenBdoorExtract in the repo: "After journalist Roger Sollenberger started posting on X about the account, Berulis noticed something Wick was working on: a project, or repository, titled "NxGenBdoorExtract." Wick made it private before Berulis could investigate further, he told NPR.
Of course, if it really only was public for a very brief moment then it might not be in the snapshot, and the article isn't clear exactly how long after that tweet that Berulis supposedly discovered this.
All I can say is this: I can't figure out for the life of me what all this adds up to.
Some context as I understand it is DOGE employees are all temporary gov't employees whose employment expires (in June?). Assuming they follow the law there (big If), then they scramble around these agencies with tremendous urgency trying to please Elon (or the powers that be?).
And they absolutely should be resisted with this deadline in mind...
They are using heavy-handed tactics. Per this article, the whistleblower was threatened. At the SSA, a 26-year veteran was dragged out of the building. Similar story at the IRS. DOGE has the backing of US Marshalls and the president. They can resist, but they'll just end up locked out.
Well, being locked up is not the worst thing that can happen, especially for a noble purpose. And maybe later someone would film movies about their [in]actions.
If the CEO of your company empowers a team to audit your work, would you 'resist'?
And this Chief Executive was elected by the majority of the country, specifically to take these actions that he'd clearly stated he would take.
The resistance is actually the violation of federal law. It's no different from contempt of court; within the President's domain, he has a huge amount of power. The President can also modify existing policy (regulations) at any time and literally make new laws (Executive Orders have the force of law) as long as they don't conflict with current law, as well as overturning previous President's Executive Orders.
Of course, then the shoe will be on the other food someday, too, just as it was when Biden took over from Trump and then they switched places again.
As President Obama said, "I've got a pen, and I've got a phone."
> ... DOGE employees demanded the highest level of access ... When an IT staffer suggested a streamlined process to activate those accounts in a way that would let their activities be tracked, in accordance with NLRB security policies, the IT staffers were told to stay out of DOGE's way, the disclosure continues.
But did they actually "turn off logging"?? How do you even do that? Anyone know what access control system they are talking about?
It sounds to me like there's some application-level logging on this NxGen system, and DOGE obtained permissions to read the underlying storage without going through the application. But the article does also say later on that there are specific controls and monitoring systems Berulis did find turned off.
Makes sense, this is a lawless reactionary attack on the republic. Their purpose is to put capital ever more firmly in charge. That means attacking workers.
I'd always assumed that we had three letter agencies whose entire job was to keep this sort of thing from happening, but it seems that none of them are concerned about protecting our government's secrets or even our democracy. What good is the panopticon if the watchers are asleep on the job?
Those agency can do their security work as long as there are laws and mandates about that.
But those agencies cannot do anything if an elected/named official decides to work for an adversary, since those agencies are under command of the elected/name official.
That's why democracy is beyond the scope of those agencies.
Those agencies are "fences" to protect a teenager from doing mistakes. But it cannot protect the teenager from setting himself on fire.
In my view, democracy was always vulnerable if the people or elected official can be convinced of whatever.
They’ve all been either fired or out in a leash as musk collects all the PII and secrets in every agency & department and feeds it into a private subnet of his AI. His minions are certainly doing that.
The template here is not Nazi Germany but Pinochet. The CIA have backed right-wing authoritarianism everywhere else in the Americas, why not in America itself?
"Supporting democracy" in Latin America always meant anti-communism, even to the extent of ending free elections.
What is that saying they like to say all the time? “If you aren’t doing anything wrong, you should have nothing to fear.” Certainly seems like they are afraid of people seeing what they are doing for “not doing anything wrong”.
This coupled with the hot mike incident yesterday where Trump was saying how El Salvador needed to build more mega prisons for the "home grown..terrorists" is beyond concerning. Sure sounds like DOGE is compiling lists of 'less desirable s' that will soon be swept off the streets in unmarked vans. America has turned fully fascist.
It should be clear at this point that DOGE is trying to create a unified database of all persons in the US for targeting. Every single bit of data that they can get about you from the government or social media will be tagged to you Minority Report style. They were clear about wanting to deport citizens to El Salvador as well. Once you are identified as the other side they will come for you. If you are waiting for it to get worse before taking action and getting involved, we are already at that point.
> And Berulis noticed that an unknown user had exported a "user roster," a file with contact information for outside lawyers who have worked with the NLRB.
Possibly looking for lawyers for Trump to target with EOs or blackmail.
If someone is incompetent enough to understand Cobol databases, I doubt they are thinking about it on this level.
Given all of Musks actions, he is probably wanting to destroy any agency that went against him, because he truly believes he is the humanities savior and his companies are doing things the right way.
How you are getting downvotes is beyond me. People are finally waking up to the idea that the whole point of the Trump admin is to privatize the government, but haven't woken up to the fact that we are entering an era of state terror. Keep your heads buried HN, you'll be dragged kicking and screaming into reality in a few months anyways.
It's extremely frustrating and something I've thought a lot about over the years where we were pretty obviously building towards this outcome. A couple things:
First the "average" american is softly but ideologically committed to liberalism¹ & democracy as fundamental values. From that perspective the mind kind of recoils from accepting this. If this is really what's happening, what does civic obligation demand of me? How does that reconcile with my inability to keep my family safe in the face of a motivated & powerful state that wishes to harm me through them? Easier to believe this isn't what is happening, I don't need to take action yet. A powerful example of motivated reasoning.
Second a significant part of the userbase here, as with the general population, supports some or all of these actions. Simple as.
¹ Like in the traditional sense, ie "a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, the right to private property, and equality before the law" from wikipedia.
If the administration was even remotely competent, this would be scary. There is EASILY a list of things that they could do if they truly cared about going full authoritarian.
But when they start doing stuff like tarrifs for no reason what so ever, to the point where even Musk thinks its stupid, the situation is sad more than scary. US has lost its edge for literally nothing in return.
They're downvoting it because it feels bad. And well, it does! This sucks major ass.
Part of me is sympathetic to them because a lot of these people are people who live privileged lives and have never before been in any political pressure. These people have previously been able to just detach from politics because they knew, no matter what, they would end up on top. And now, that assumption is no longer true and they have the enter a world that a variety of minority groups have already been living in. They have to face the reality that politics isn't just something on the TV, but something that affects their lives.
Not all illegal, no. While Abrego Garcia originally came to the country illegally, he was granted the ability to stay here legally, is married to a citizen, and had been dutifully checking in with his immigration officer yearly.
B) You can’t know if someone is here illegally if they don’t have a way to challenge that claim. They could easily abduct you or anyone else and ship you off without allowing you to challenge it in court
I think it's obvious that some of those affected by these reforms, or by fraud/abuse cutting, are going to come at DOGE with everything they got, so while I think people should review and monitor DOGE's actions, accusations should be taken with a grain of salt (and maybe a kickback).
What reforms or fraud/abuse cutting? I haven't seen any signs of either coming from DOGE. I have seen plenty of signs of DOGE creating and participating in fraud/abuse.
DOGE might have hired too fast without the necessary background checks. So DOGE might now employ a lot of foreign spies (Russian, Chinese, etc) which take their chances.
If they're accessing data that requires clearances, they have the required clearances. That's mandatory, and no one is going to show them anything without them.
My guess, based on the fact you use terms like "protected government data" is that you don't even know enough about this topic to make up words about it.
No, access to data does not imply clearance. And they are forcing access to data. No it is not legal, but neither Trump nor DOGE nor Musk care about legality.
Here is the thing that blows my mind: why is there an implicit assumption that this article is an honest reporting and not a propaganda piece? Don't get me wrong, I am not saying that it is. What I am saying is that, at the very least, this question should always be asked first about any reporting.
NPR is a public entity. It's funding, governance, and leadership structure are well known and well trusted. From Wikipedia...
.....Regarding financing;
>Funding for NPR comes from dues and fees paid by member stations, underwriting from corporate sponsors, and annual grants from the publicly funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting.[4] Most of its member stations are owned by non-profit organizations, including public school districts, colleges, and universities. NPR operates independently of any government or corporation, and has full control of its content.[5]
.....Regarding governance;
> NPR is a membership organization. Member stations are required to be non-commercial or non-commercial educational radio stations; have at least five full-time professional employees; operate for at least 18 hours per day; and not be designed solely to further a religious broadcasting philosophy or be used for classroom distance learning programming. Each member station receives one vote at the annual NPR board meetings—exercised by its designated Authorized Station Representative ("A-Rep").
Now, I do question the authenticity of your question. Everyone knows that NPR is reputable and everyone knows why. Their reputation precedes them. But I entertained your charade and now I implore you to entertain one of mine.
Can you provide me the same detailed information which demonstrates why someone should trust OAN? How about Breitbart? How about Newsmax? Can you please pick one and demonstrate why they are trustworthy using a similar format that I provided for you?
> NPR is a public entity. It's funding, governance, and leadership structure are well known and well trusted.
Ehhhh... I remember vividly a moment during the Iraq war in which NPR's ombudsman spent 20 minutes justifying the network's use of the euphemism "enhanced interrogation" when speaking about torture conducted by the CIA and others. It was terminology being pushed by the then-current administration, which NPR chose not only to parrot, but to justify. To the benefit of the administration and the detriment of human rights. I haven't had illusions about the network's accuracy, neutrality, or journalistic integrity since.
24 years?
I guess you could call that well known. Not in a good way.
> So what that data spike correlated with was data that was transferred off of an internal record-keeping device that was only used for internal case data. So this system only has the private information about union organizers. The privileged business proprietary, technologies, competitors, those kind of things are in that system only. There's no other data. There's nothing else except that.
...
> This is a difficult topic for Dan to discuss, but prior to our filing the whistle-blower disclosure this week, last week, somebody went to Dan's home and taped a threatening note, a menacing note on his door with personal information.
> While he was at work, and it also contained photographs of him walking his dog taken by a drone. So…
This checks out because all those DOGE hires appear to be hackers, and they are now state sponsored.
Most of them could never pass a basic background check, much less a TS or even public trust from one of the more invasive Federal agencies.
It is worth pointing out that many of these people are probably violating Federal and possibly even some state laws. Violations of Federal laws can be pardoned, if the President is so inclined. State laws can't. No prosecution will occur during this administration, but this administration will not last forever.
> The best-known member of Elon Musk's U.S. DOGE Service team of technologists once provided support to a cybercrime gang that bragged about trafficking in stolen data and cyberstalking an FBI agent, according to digital records reviewed by Reuters.
I've said this repeatedly, but write this down: before this administration is out we are going to have a major (probably multiple) scandal where DOGE staffers get caught with some kind of horrifying self-enrichment scam based on the data they're hoovering. It could be simple insider trading, it could be selling the data to a FBI sting, it might take lots of forms. But it's going to happen.
These are a bunch of 20-something tech bro ego cases convinced of their crusade to remake government along libertarian axes they learned from Reddit/4chan/HN. These are simply not people motivated out of a genuine desire to improve the public good. And they've been given essentially unsupervised access to some outrageously tempting levers.
Personal enrichment? There's already an enormous amount of evidence here to indicate that DOGE is working on behalf of a foreign nation state. It is seeming more and more likely that members of the DOGE team are simply secret agents for a foreign military.
> Within minutes after DOGE accessed the NLRB's systems, someone with an IP address in Russia started trying to log in, according to Berulis' disclosure. The attempts were "near real-time," according to the disclosure. Those attempts were blocked, but they were especially alarming. Whoever was attempting to log in was using one of the newly created DOGE accounts — and the person had the correct username and password, according to Berulis.
I think it's worse than that as the DOGE staffers are presumably picked according to Musk's preferences and he's not going to be looking for generous, well adjusted do-gooders, but selfish, arrogant, greedy racists. Presumably, they're also going to be targetted by other countries intelligence services with a mind to getting hold of the same data.
Doesn't matter if they're good people or not "given essentially unsupervised access to some outrageously tempting levers" that scandal WILL happen eventually.
> horrifying self-enrichment scam based on the data they're hoovering.
Did you miss the presidential cryptocurrency?
DOGE guys will probably end up wiring money directly to their own bank account, proudly brandish the receipts on national television, and no Republicans will make a move against them.
Also it's right there in the name DOGE. It's Elon's favorite coin and of course he's trying to pump it by naming a goddamn government department after it. It's plain as day.
Even by the standards of this administration...... yikes:
Meanwhile, his attempts to raise concerns internally within the NLRB preceded someone "physically taping a threatening note" to his door that included sensitive personal information and overhead photos of him walking his dog that appeared to be taken with a drone, according to a cover letter attached to his disclosure filed by his attorney, Andrew Bakaj of the nonprofit Whistleblower Aid.
JD Vance is a poster boy for Y Combinator adjacent fascists. Marc Andreessen, when he is not cheering on opiate overdoses in his hometown and praising the British Raj, loves what's going on. We need to accept that Silicon Valley has major culpability here. After all, how much do you see on HN that you should ignore the law because it's better to ask forgiveness than permission?
"Fascism" today just means "right wing politician I do not like" or "conservative who is successful at pushing back the left".
Plenty of people here can have a problem with this administration and Vance himself, or not, without those who disagree pretending that we're a week away from goose stepping down 5th Avenue in NYC.
I am not sure how it's possible to defend the kind of stuff DOGE is doing anymore. Even the veneer of looking for efficiency is gone. There have only been claims of 'fraud' with no real evidence backing up the claimed scale of fraud.
At this point it simply looks like DOGE is yet another attempt to use a popular trope (Govt fraud and waste) to push through changes specifically designed to give unchecked power to one individual.
This much concentrated, unchecked power opens up vast opportunities for fraud and corruption and there are pretty much no instances in history where it turned out be to a good thing in retrospect.
Also, very surprised this story made it to the front page. Typically, stuff like this gets flagged off the front page within minutes.
> Or are there actual DOGE sympathies within the HN population?
AFAIK a small number of them is enough to hide stuff from the front page. I don't know why is this the case, honestly I don't see any benefit over full time-moderators hiding problematic stuff, only negatives. Like why should a small political group be able to distort the news on the front page?
Politics are everywhere. It’s how we negotiate consensus and make collective decisions. From what a government should do down to what features will be worked on this sprint and where are we having lunch today.
Tech being apolitical is an illusion, and a very dangerous one.
Sahil Lavingia founder of Gumroad is DOGE. Joe Gebbia co-founder of Airbnb is DOGE. Not sympathetic to, they are DOGE. Those are just the ones I know off the top of my head from listening to basic reporting. The All In podcast is super pro-Trump/DOGE, with Sacks being the Trump regime's crypto czar (bringing that cohort on board). Peter Thiel. Musk. That's a lot of pro-DOGE headspace in HN related circles. A lot of people that HN related circles look up to and aspire to emulate. A lot of people that HN circles network with/have perverse incentives to support.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
Anyone who knew anything about the public sector knew there were already efficiency initiatives. USDS(which became DOGE) was this, and they were doing a great job. If you care about efficiency this is what you would support, not taking an axe to everything and having a near-singular focus on lower headcount.
It is hilarious what does, and does not, get flagged on this website in 2025.
The other day on /active, there was a story about a French politician being banned from running for office, due to being convicted of outright fraud for the second time. Absolutely nothing to do with technology or business, nothing to do with the USA. Pure politics in a foreign country. Not flagged.
There was a story directly below which involved the USA, technology and business, but had an uncomfortable narrative for some users. Flagged.
As someone who still likes this site a lot, this just makes me laugh at this point. I don't know how else to react.
There's always a ton of randomness with these things. People tend to underestimate how that affects nearly every aspect of HN. That is, they misinterpret a random outcome as being meaningful and then attribute a meaning to it.
If you assume that rhyme or reason is involved, then of course the results seem bizarrely inconsistent and the only models that fit will be Rube Goldberg or Ptolemaic ones. Simply understand that randomness plays the largest role, and the mystery goes away. (But I know that's less internet fun.)
In terms of all these political stories getting flagged: it's a simple consequence of there being a huge influx of intense political stories while HN's capacity remains "30 slots on the frontpage" (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
Thanks Dan, I never mean to point fingers at moderation here. I always assume it's users. Not sure if that's the correct assumption, but it's one I stick with.
Follow-up: I should add that in 2025, deleting stories with a tinge of US politics is highly detrimental to the HN user base’s understanding of what is happening in the business world.
Case in-point: a US-based family member employed at a FAANG just told me that his Canadian coworkers now reset their phones prior to entering the USA, then restore from backup. This is somewhat similar to what happens when they go to China.
This is terrible for business. This kind of information should not be ignored.
These stories aren't being deleted—there was quite a large thread (in fact maybe two large threads?) about precisely that, within the last couple weeks. I'll see if I can dig up the links, or maybe someone else remembers?
The problem isn't that the major stories are deleted; it's that even if a story spends hours on the front page, the set of users who actually see it still has measure zero [1]. Then inevitably a few of the rest assume that they didn't see it because it was sinisterly suppressed, whether by mods or user flags.
Where this ends up getting us is the 'nobody goes there anymore it's too crowded' theory of HN threads! [2] It's always been like this—it's baked into the fundamentals of how HN works (the limited frontpage space, the dynamics of the internet, the fact that most people don't use HN Search). It's just showing up more intensely these days because the times are more intense and we've been in a tsunami phase for a few months now.
Because, naturally, people on here want to harm you. We can't say it out loud, but that's where the U.S. climate is right now. HN is not immune from it, and is likely more susceptible to it given the demographic. They flag to keep people from saying it.
I mean, there were Tesla earnings calls this year flagged, which would be front page news even a year ago. Tech earnings calls are almost never flagged otherwise.
I'm mostly convinced a lot of stuff is flagged and the mods work overtime to pick and choose what to unflag. On what metric? No clue, if I'm being honest.
Many forums (including this one) have bans on "politics" or topics that are "inflammatory". 95% of the time what constitutes either is simply "things I disagree with".
For US politics in particular, as much as the right-wing cries about being censored, social media in particular bends over backwards not to silence such views whereas anything critical of those right-wing positions gets flagged or downranked as being "political" (eg [1]).
Typically this process isn't direct. ML systems will find certain features in submissions that get them marked as "inflammatory" or "low quality" but only on one end of the spectrum. For sites such as HN, reddit and Tiktok, right-wing views have successfully weaponized user safety systems by brigading posts and flagging them. That might then go to a human to review and their own biases come into play.
As for France vs the US, I'm sorry but France is irrelevant. As we've seen in the last 2 weeks, what the US does impacts the entire world. All the big social media sites are American (barring Tiktok) so American politics impacts what can and can't be said on those platforms.
Twitter has become 4chan, a hotbed for neo-Nazis, racists and homephobes.
And which French politican are we talking about? Marine Le Pen? If so, the relevance is the rise of fascism in Europe between National Front in France, Reform in the UK, AfD in Germany and, of course, Hungary.
It's the opposite, actually. This place has always been owned and operated by a musk crony. Musk only got his paws on reddit recently, and has barely had any success besides getting the admins to shut down r/cyberstuck.
Here on HN anti-musk/regime posts get deleted automatically, TERF and other bigoted posters are allowed to post through spam filters from freshly made accounts, and everything else that isn't clearly delineated as 'liberal media' but negative for the regime just gets flagged or deranked from listing.
In the same way that finding waste while increasing the federal budget isn't efficiency.
Technically, maybe you can squint and find small pieces that are more efficient but in the grand scheme of things they goal doesn't seem to be a smaller government.
Well you have to put context around what is being made more efficient.
Reducing headcount reduces labor costs and can be a form of financial efficiency. Reducing headcount also usually reduces the sheer number of people involved in any project, much like a small startup can move drastically quicker than a large, established org.
That said, there goal here doesn't seem to be clear as to what is being made efficient and they definitely aren't reducing the budget or size of government (outside of literal headcount, most people complain instead of red tape and regulations).
It's not the storage, but processing with NR and DataDog is what's expensive. That's why the efficiency team asked to not have their actions logged in the first place.
That way they can save some money litigating Elon and his goons. It's not like that litigation would get anywhere anyway, so better to save the public the waste /s
I fixed it for you: "Whistleblower details how a temporary group of very young people, who would never get access to sensitive data, are disabling/hiding what they are doing with highliy sensitive data of an executive, potentially circumventing safety mechanism in place to protect the data of all americans".
Btw. there is NO reason why they couldn't do all of that in a sincere way. Trump was voted in for 4 years.
> This is like 947 on a list of terrible things happening because of this administration.
This is on purpose. Trump has been slowly pushing the Overton window. It seems everything is fair game and US citizens are largely apathetic, scared or favorable to Trump's action.
Supreme Court justice Sotomayor notes that nothing in the government’s reasoning about not returning Garcia is unique to noncitizens. President Trump says he wants to send “homegrowns” to the gulag in El Salvador, and is exploring his legal options. In court, the government has argued that they have no recourse to force the return of any prisoner from that gulag. This is neither false nor inflammatory; it is the administration’s stated goal.
They've already sent an innocent man there and acknowledged he was innocent, then refused to bring him back when the courts, the opposition and finally SCOTUS each commanded them to bring him back.
This was just a test, and it was successful. They can now disappear and deport anyone they want with no repercussions whatsoever. The GOP is a criminal organization and their followers share the responsibility of what happens next.
It was extra ridiculous/insulting/terrifying to see the heads of both countries in the same room saying that there was nothing they could do about the situation.
It's too soon to say it's "successful": SCOTUS was 9-0 against and that was still only a few days ago, so far from being a success it's now turning into a constitutional crisis... assuming the administration doesn't fold, or flip-flop, or some combination of the two - which we've already seen plenty of[1].
----------
[1] the seemingly arbitrary and capricious tariff changes announced almost every day ever since the-day-after-April-fools-day.
This is not an accurate account of the situation. While I don't agree with the actions the government is taking here, I also don't think we are entitled to our own private facts about it.
Mr Garcia does not have a criminal record, but he was ordered to be deported years ago. He was able to get a temporary reprieve from this by hiring lawyers and working through the legal process, but he did this by almost certainly committing perjury by claiming there were criminal gangs who would kill him if he returned to El Salvador. If you believe the filings in immigration appeals you would have to believe that 99% of the people in the world are being personally pursued by criminal gangs. Perhaps you believe this but I don't find it to be credible. Regardless, whether the legal process is effective doesn't matter here, it IS the legal process and must be followed. My point is the fact Mr Garcia was deported is not itself the issue, it's that it was done in a way that ignores the rule of law (even though it did respect due process). Legally Mr Garcia should be deported eventually, he was only allowed to stay temporarily until he is not "at risk for his life" if he were deported, but the legal process must be respected.
SCOTUS did not command anyone be brought back. They declined to issue an emergency decision blocking an order to 'facilitate' his return, but specifically sent back to the lower court and took issue with the order to 'effectuate' his return. So they are not commanding the government to bring him back, rather they are commanding the government to not prevent his return. Yes this is tedious but reality is often tedious.
> They can now disappear and deport anyone they want
I think you have not made any case that it is valid to assume that we would go from "one person who has already been ordered for deportation by a federal court" who was very publicly deported to "anyone they want" and "disappear".
I basically agree with your sentiment inaccuracy and hyperbole doesn't benefit anyone.
Combined with "oops can't get them back" it's very powerful. Combine it with not advertising faces of snatched people on broadcast TV, and it's a very useful tool inded. People will just disappear. It won't be legal or illegal, just a thing that happens from time to time. Police won't search too hard for the missing people, because no good can come out of finding out.
The security community didn’t ignore hard evidence - the “hard evidence” didn’t stand up to basic scrutiny.
These claims may well be false, but they deserve scrutiny, and waving them away while perpetuating a much repeated lie isn’t helping anyone except criminals and corruption.
> The NLRB is governed by a five-person board and a general counsel, all of whom are appointed by the president with the consent of the Senate. Board members are appointed for five-year terms and the general counsel is appointed for a four-year term. The general counsel acts as a prosecutor and the board acts as an appellate quasi-judicial body from decisions of 36 administrative law judges, as of November 2023.[4] The NLRB is headquartered at 1015 Half St. SE, Washington, D.C., and it has over 30 regional, sub-regional, and residential offices throughout the United States.
> Why would real Russian hackers not do anything to obscure their ip?
Why would the fox bother hiding the hole someone dug for it under the henhouse?
Its also worth noting that the NLRB has a proposed budget of $320M for the the 2025 fiscal year and a total of around 1,300 employees [1].
I'm a strong proponent of small government and don't know enough about the NLRB to say if I would find them useful, but that is well within the range of a small federal department today.
The NLRB is one of many independent agencies of the executive branch created by Congrees, and they don't report to anyone except for their own boards. The president and Congress have influence over the boards but no direct control over the agency. The idea that the president can just ignore these laws because of a "unitary executive" theory is authoritarian bullshit.
And the concern probably isn't Russian hackers, it's American hackers spoofing their IP address. Also you are ignoring that DOGE made the server public when it wasn't supposed to be.
> The idea that the president can just ignore these laws because of a "unitary executive" theory is authoritarian bullshit.
The question of whether the president is violating congresses power by downsizing or neutering an agency they have created is something democrats should pursue.
But no - there are no people outside the org chart. That’s just dysfunctional, no man can serve two masters, etc.
If it were true than congress can create agencies for themselves with more power than is granted them in the constitution.
Well it would help if there weren’t numerous issues with the data as presented on that site. Specifically now they are only claiming somewhere around 28 billion saved in cancelled contracts when in early February they claimed like 55 billion. Seems odd that over time the amount saved would go down despite the alleged number being of cancellations going up.
Also it is concerning that the largest amount from an individual contract saved is a cancelled deportation facility contract. Seems at odds with the Administration’s goals to ramp up mass deportation but cancel the contract for building a holding facility for unaccompanied minors.
My suggestion would be if the goal is to eliminate debt we would need to target social security reform such as raising the retirement ages and eliminating the cap on the payroll tax. Additionally, but far less realistic would be implementing a Land Value Tax. Not cancel random contracts that amount to a tiny fraction of the budget and propose massive tax cuts like the current administration seems to be doing.
The parent's russian propoganda post does not mention that the posted savings are full of inaccuracies.
Nor does the propoganda define "waste", if one looks at the actual cuts, it seems to be focused on "things Herr M. doesn't like". which is not a good definition of "waste".
There are also constant ongoing efforts at improving efficiency, which is why they keep going “ah ha! We found it!” then poor bureaucrats who are trying to do their fucking jobs while these idiots run around messing things up have to explain, “no, you’re seeing an artifact of record-keeping practices that exist because [very good reason], you’re wrong yet again, maybe try asking literally anyone who knows about these data sets”
They also love to throw around the word “fraud” while bringing no charges. Despite the DOJ being in Trump’s control. Same pattern as other lies (“rampant voter fraud! We have proof” ok so when you’re in change you’ll prosecute, right? You should! That’s bad if true! I mean I’ve looked at your proof and it doesn’t appear true, but maybe you have more proof you haven’t shown! “Uhhh… [smoke bomb]”)
Plus, we have the GAO and CBO. Trump won’t want to listen to them because they’ll say “our #1 problem is we keep cutting taxes”, and “there’s not much waste to be eliminated cutting government workers”, because that’s true at this point, but they exist. It’s not like nobody’s been looking at these kinds of things. That’s just bullshit.
Realistic alternative? How about starting by reading tfa? I’d say you don’t need to physically threaten people who ask for basic security practices to be followed, for one.
What they got was a pocket-lining idiot, and genuinely one of the most morally bankrupt people I've ever known of as his tech right-hand man. Musk is a moral imbecile, a 13-year old incel trapped in the body of an overweight mid-50s mess. Yes, he's been involved in some great things (SpaceX and Tesla), but he thinks that translates into a god-like ability to do anything and that he's right about everything.
These numbers don't even stand up to casual scrutiny. And I'm from the UK so it doesn't really directly affect me (although the orange idiot's shenanigans have done so to a small degree). But if you really believe this site, you're divorced from reality, and maybe drinking the same kool-aid that the tech muppets who are on DOGE are.
> but he thinks that translates into a god-like ability to do anything and that he's right about everything.
Like when this space youtuber suggested a change to his Mars rocket and he understood, accepted the validity of the idea, and decided to implement it on the spot? Er, I guess that's the opposite of what you said.
Not only that, Trump has already spent US$ 155B more than Biden, DOGE claims to have shaved US$ 150B, overall this administration has already increased spending by US$ 5B even after firing a lot of civil servants.
The worst is that the effects of this shaving off will only be felt over time, when National Parks start crumbling, when ATCs start quitting, the government machine of the USA has been eroded, inevitably it will fall into a landslide.
First, every objective audit has found many problems with that data, ranging from taking credit for things which were terminated under the Biden administration to listing the maximum ceiling on a flexible contract (IDIQ) as the total savings even though the amounts actually spent were far lower (like canceling your credit card and saying you saved the limit), and even counting the same contract multiple times.
Second, you have to look at the cost of their actions. They’ve disrupted the functioning of the entire federal government and doing in a very haphazard manner. That means that a lot of current spending is wasted by DOGE _and_ that the business of the government isn’t getting done. For example, whether or not you think the U.S. should engage in foreign aid, under DOGE they paid money to send people to help in Myanmar only to lay them off after they arrived on site, squandering all possible value. That story is being repeated all over the country right now and in many cases the loses are permanent: if they choose to waste payroll having people come back to an office where they can’t work, the job isn’t getting done and there’s no way to recover the wasted payroll. As they keep losing lawsuits, it’s also likely that the amounts cut will be exceeded by the cost of settlements when they breach contracts or fail to provide a service required by statute.
One really big area is tax collection: the IRS is already estimating revenue reductions on the order of half a billion dollars, and since they’ve been sacking a lot of the law enforcement for businesses and high-net wealth individuals, that will get worse as people feel confident cheating more aggressively.
Lastly, you have to look at the economy. Estimated have each federal job supporting 2-3 other jobs, and federal spending drives the economy in many parts of the country. They’ve already cut growth of the entire economy into the negative (from +2.5% in January to -2-3% now - see https://www.atlantafed.org/cqer/research/gdpnow) and a lot of that is driven by federal cuts.
You do understand, that the upcoming tax cuts for rich people will throw the USA Debt above defence savings?
And it will increase the debt significantly?
All of that while DOGE, some random dudes without any understanding how things work, stop things which are globally agreed on (global aid) or just not even worth mentioning in the grand schem?
But hey if you prefer to defend DOGE ssaving 160 Billion while the tax cut for the rich adds Trillions to debt, yeah do a happy dance. Be proud. Or whatever your comment is trying to do.
Funny that IRS also gets defunded. But hey taxes right? :D
There were already people called "inspector generals" which handled waste, fraud, and abuse but Trump fired about 17 of them in his first week. Deploying tech bros to solve the problem is naive at best and malicious at worst. The arrogance in assuming that no auditor before them looked into the SSA database and saw DOB records going back to 1875 is outstanding.
I hope he doesn't think Trump is his boy and will keep DOJ off his back. The problem is that the institutional funds and market makers will not support this level of Watergate/Enron/WorldCom-like risk and Trump isn't going to become entangled in that (since it means the corporate death penalty as far as public equity and access to bank capital is concerned).
BUT the Report is from a super controversial NGO that has long been targeted by Republicans and may soon be DOGEd, so it could be filled with speculation, half-truths, innuendo and lies.
Still...They didn't use StarLink?! I mean, is that not the greatest evidence you could ever hope for of an obvious NSA backdoor in StarLink? They were willing to risk obscure premises-based (bandwidth) monitoring over holding a mini-dish out the window for a few seconds..Too much! I feel like I owe someone $20 for a ticket.
Meanwhile NPR has new reporting that DOGE has sent two of its boys back to NLRB, but they're going to work remotely. Is the hope here that this will provide ongoing justification for DOGE remote data access as the Feds sort out what they did in the first visit? Like even though NPR's first report stated that Russia has tried to login remotely using valid DOGE credentials just after DOGE personnel left the first time?
> particularly when those staffers noticed a spike in data leaving the agency. It's possible that the data included sensitive information on unions, ongoing legal cases and corporate secrets
This entire article appears to be speculation about data they MAY have taken with no evidence besides large file size that they are misusing something.
The discussion with the “whistle blower” and other experts is only about how serious it would be IF they misused it.
My original comment here has not been flagged - but all my responses to other comments have. This is distorting the conversation. There is only one DOGE narrative allowed on this site.
"This entire article appears to be speculation about data they MAY have taken with no evidence besides large file size that they are misusing something ...[and] is only about how serious it would be IF they misused it."
This paragraph makes it clear it's not just about misusing data and large file sizes.
> Those forensic digital records are important for record-keeping requirements and they allow for troubleshooting, but they also allow experts to investigate potential breaches, sometimes even tracing the attacker's path back to the vulnerability that let them inside a network.
Let's be clear:
> Those engineers were also concerned by DOGE staffers' insistence that their activities not be logged, allowing them to probe the NLRB's systems and discover information about potential security flaws or vulnerabilities without being detected.
Neither of these have to do with "large file size" or misusing data.
"Am I reading it wrong?"
Yes. Now, before you go moving goal posts, you made claims, and I've debunked those claims with quotes you said you needed. Because clearly the article is ALSO talking about these other things as problematic as well, so it's not "the entire article". (Also, the "entire article appears"? Appears? Just read it, it talks about numerous things, and is very clear on the different elements it's talking about.)
This isn't the only stuff mentioned, so be careful about claiming "oh, I just missed that" or some such because there are other things that can be referenced, such as the massive amount of text spent on the whistleblower issues and the threats made to them.
And before you talk about this just being "speculation," that's why we have the process we have, so people can make claims that can then be investigated. And that's what's being stopped.
Finally, "no evidence besides large file size" is also not true.
"Am I reading it wrong?"
As someone said, it's more likely you didn't even read it.
There were already news from weeks ago how they started to put servers on the internet with access to systems, which should not have access to/from the internet for security reasons.
This is just on top of all the other things. happened.
Someone exfiltrated sensitive data. That isn't in question. The only question is who did it and why. As far as DOGE's involvement, there is no proof but there is plenty of evidence.
This part is really damning: a real efficiency audit might need a lot of access to look for signs of hidden activity, but they’d never need to hide traces of what they did:
> Meanwhile, according to the disclosure and records of internal communications, members of the DOGE team asked that their activities not be logged on the system and then appeared to try to cover their tracks behind them, turning off monitoring tools and manually deleting records of their access — evasive behavior that several cybersecurity experts interviewed by NPR compared to what criminal or state-sponsored hackers might do.
The subsequent message about Russian activity could be a coincidence–Internet background noise-but given how these are not very technically skilled and are moving very fast in systems they don’t understand, I’d be completely unsurprised to learn that they unintentionally left something exposed or that one of them has been compromised.
> This part is really damning: a real efficiency audit
There were already people auditing departments, but they got fired early on:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inspector_general#United_State...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_dismissals_of_inspectors_...
There's even an entire agency devoted to auditing:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Accountability_Offi...
Trying to find efficiency by bringing in the private sector is not a new thing:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Commission
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownlow_Committee
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_Commission
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Partnership_for_Reinv...
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> The subsequent message about Russian activity could be a coincidence–Internet background noise
These weren't random login attempts. It says the Russian login attempts had the correct login credentials of newly created accounts.
If the article is correct, the accounts were created and then shortly afterward the correct credentials were used to attempt a login from a Russian source.
That's a huge issue if true. Could be that someone's laptop is compromised.
It certainly needs a full investigation but I don’t want to presume the results. It wouldn’t be the first time some tool reported a wildly incorrect location for an IP address and the focus should be on DOGE breaking a number of federal laws and doing things which no legitimate auditor ever needs to do.
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> That's a huge issue if true. Could be that someone's laptop is compromised.
Or perhaps someone got invited to the wrong group chat again.
No need to have your laptop compromised if your just hand over the information...
Is it really a compromise if the opps (or should I say: "opps") are deliberately welcomed in with open arms? Granting Russians access here wouldn't even crack the top 10 gifts this administration has given to Putin in the last month.
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> Could be that someone is compromised.
ftfy
>A real efficiency audit might need a lot of access to look for signs of hidden activity, but they’d never need to hide traces of what they did
In fact I would imagine they would do exactly the opposite because they would look at the mere ability to hide what they did as an audit finding.
"The new bank-manager has hired some friends of his to improve the security of the bank vault."
"We already have an audit from last year, we just need the funding to improv--"
"Oh, and they want to turn off all the security cameras next weekend. You'll know it's them because they'll be wearing masks."
"Sir, we have a responsibility to our customers, we can't ju--"
"Do it or you're fired."
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The use of DNS tunneling and skirting logs makes my head spin. Even if justification of exfiltrating 10GB of sensitive data could be made, there's widely available means of doing so that aren't the methods of state-sponsored hackers and the like.
"DNS tunneling" (abnormal number of DNS requests) actually might be caused by a software that doesn't use DNS cache. I was once banned by 8.8.8.8 (Google's DNS server) for sending too many requests because youtube-dl was making a DNS request for each tiny segment of a video (and there were thousands of them).
Well, maybe one shouldn't be using Google DNS server when violating ToU to download Google's video.
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Everything's going to have to be replaced and it's going to be hugely expensive. But that's not going to happen until at least 2029 - plenty of time for bad actors to get settled in and cause real damage.
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So NLRB handles confidential complaints. The complainant's idenity might be kept confidential. Exact details may be kept confidential.
Why aren't we to believe that this is Elon Musk going after anyone filing a complaint to the NLRB (from X, Twitter or SpaceX) or, worse yet (from Elon's POV), anyone potentially organizing any unionization effort?
There's absolutely no reason DOGE should have access to this information. There's absolutely no reason their activity, such as what information they accessed, should be hidden.
It also contradicts the idea that they are acting transparently.
Compromised implies they're not the Russian team to start with. I'd be looking for one of them to lose nerve and betray that ALL of them are the Russian team.
I'm going to wait a while and see if this information pans out. Remember when there was a huge scandal about Trump communicating with Russia but then it just turned out to be a spam email? https://theintercept.com/2016/11/01/heres-the-problem-with-t...
> criminal or state-sponsored hackers
It looks to be both
It appears that “appearing dumb and clumsy while opening the doors for enemies” is a plausibly deniable mode of whole Trump’s administration.
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"Interviewed by NPR" -- ok we can stop right there. Remember, they're dangerous enemies of the state, along with PBS and Fred Rogers.
Sarcasm isn’t appropriate for something this serious.
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(Non-American here.) If they weren't already, it seems like private businesses, security researchers, and I suppose the general public, should start treating US government agencies as privacy and security threats, just like you'd treat any other phisher, scammer, etc.
If government agencies are compromised - via software backdoors or any other mechanism - any data and systems they can access should be considered compromised too.
this sounds exactly like that's the goal behind all this.
Neoliberalism -> Corporatism -> Fascism/Autocracy
You are a Human Resource to be commercialized. Ad tech => Private Intelligence.
One is not a person. One has no rights. Unless one can free themself and their loved ones of neoliberal brainwashing.
The unfortunate reality is that a half of the US population sees the NLRB as a burden on small businesses—primarily because its policies shift frequently, making compliance costly and complex for those without deep legal resources. [1]
And the same half of the population do not trust anything what npr.org says.
Understanding the above dynamic is key to grasping the current state of discourse in the U.S.
[1] https://edworkforce.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?Docum...
That's because NPR is pure left wing propaganda, run by an ex-CIA spook who thinks the truth is inconvenient.
Some may claim that NPR is retaliating for getting defunded for the next 2 years.
"Defunded" NPR gets less than 2% of their income from the government. Defunding them isn't as big of a deal as claims appear.
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An odd claim, since NPR getting defunded is itself a retaliation from the current administration for not reporting positively enough about Trump.
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This isn't really a shock to me, but what's more frustrating I guess is that absolutely nothing will come of this. I have zero confidence any of this will even be cleaned up, just the same ranting about "fake news".
Really feels like the fox is already in the coop.
That the intrusion came over Starlink from Russia with valid login credentials would be unbelievable in a tale from speculative fiction. Reality Winner looks like a hero compared to these clowns.
Over Starlink from Russia. Very evident there's no networking knowledge here.
Politicians are only afraid of not being re-elected. So I see that the only way is to advocate voters to hold their representatives accountable. Start a campaign in you state about that, and I think you'll get an answer pretty fast, since they are very sensitive to popularity and competition matters.
Just read of this on BSky.
Has some of the protected disclosure document from the whistleblower.
https://bsky.app/profile/mattjay.com/post/3ln2dgoksce2e
Looks like Elon's staff went in and made a copy of everything - which in this case NLRB, so sensitive stuff, but any state department going to have a ton of sensitive stuff - and sent it who knows where; this after disabling all logging and a ton of security, presumably to try to cover their tracks.
This is bad. These guys are looking like bad actors, with State-level authorization for access to everything.
Also looks like they're kids and don't have the hang of security, and the professional Russian State run APTs have hacked them.
I think we should be trying to understand what NxGenBdoorExtract is. NxGen is a system for NLRB. Bdoor is pretty evocative of a back door. He took he git offline or made it private. I can't find it on archive.org.
Or who has access to DogeSA_2d5c3e0446f9@nlrb.microsoft.com?
https://oversightdemocrats.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/demo...
On the other hand, there are two things about that screenshot of the repo which is a little weird. First, the timestamp of that repo is cutoff, but, the items seem to be in reverse chronological order, which would put that repo sometime in 2021-ish, or before.
The owner could, of course, just make it public again, or put it back up, and end all the speculation.
I'm intrigued by the "Mission 2" notation. That suggests, perhaps, that DOGE has a "Mission 1" (its public, ostensible purpose) and a hidden "Mission 2" known only to Musk and his minions.
archive.today has a snapshot taken on 28 Feb 2025, although it doesn't show any repository with that name.
https://archive.ph/fUa5Q
This confuses me greatly. Comparing your link, I can find the repos in that screenshot in the archive snapshot, but as you say, the NxGenBdoorExtract repo is not there, and the repo where it would be is a tinder-react-native clone (updated Sep 20 2020)...
I'm trying to think through this:
1. if the screenshot is not doctored, then the implied ordering of last updated would have had it last updated before January 20, 2021; which would mean it has nothing to do with what is alleged in the article.
2. But in the archive.ph snapshot from 2/28/25 doesn't have it at all anywhere.
3. Archive.org's 3/21/25 snapshot shows the same thing as archive.ph
4. The article states that after this tweet (https://x.com/SollenbergerRC/status/1895609294810464390) dated 2/28/25 (the date of the archive.ph 2/28/25 snapshot), Berulis noticed NxGenBdoorExtract in the repo: "After journalist Roger Sollenberger started posting on X about the account, Berulis noticed something Wick was working on: a project, or repository, titled "NxGenBdoorExtract." Wick made it private before Berulis could investigate further, he told NPR.
Of course, if it really only was public for a very brief moment then it might not be in the snapshot, and the article isn't clear exactly how long after that tweet that Berulis supposedly discovered this.
All I can say is this: I can't figure out for the life of me what all this adds up to.
Some context as I understand it is DOGE employees are all temporary gov't employees whose employment expires (in June?). Assuming they follow the law there (big If), then they scramble around these agencies with tremendous urgency trying to please Elon (or the powers that be?).
And they absolutely should be resisted with this deadline in mind...
They are using heavy-handed tactics. Per this article, the whistleblower was threatened. At the SSA, a 26-year veteran was dragged out of the building. Similar story at the IRS. DOGE has the backing of US Marshalls and the president. They can resist, but they'll just end up locked out.
Well, being locked up is not the worst thing that can happen, especially for a noble purpose. And maybe later someone would film movies about their [in]actions.
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If the CEO of your company empowers a team to audit your work, would you 'resist'?
And this Chief Executive was elected by the majority of the country, specifically to take these actions that he'd clearly stated he would take.
The resistance is actually the violation of federal law. It's no different from contempt of court; within the President's domain, he has a huge amount of power. The President can also modify existing policy (regulations) at any time and literally make new laws (Executive Orders have the force of law) as long as they don't conflict with current law, as well as overturning previous President's Executive Orders.
Of course, then the shoe will be on the other food someday, too, just as it was when Biden took over from Trump and then they switched places again.
As President Obama said, "I've got a pen, and I've got a phone."
https://www.npr.org/2014/01/20/263766043/wielding-a-pen-and-...
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> ... DOGE employees demanded the highest level of access ... When an IT staffer suggested a streamlined process to activate those accounts in a way that would let their activities be tracked, in accordance with NLRB security policies, the IT staffers were told to stay out of DOGE's way, the disclosure continues.
But did they actually "turn off logging"?? How do you even do that? Anyone know what access control system they are talking about?
It sounds to me like there's some application-level logging on this NxGen system, and DOGE obtained permissions to read the underlying storage without going through the application. But the article does also say later on that there are specific controls and monitoring systems Berulis did find turned off.
If there are elections again in the future and more sane, qualified people take office, the Justice Department will have its hands full for decades.
The whistleblower and his lawyer gave interviews on CNN & MSNBC:
CNN: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsqgXfrSksI
The only point of DOGE is to cause as much irreparable damage as possible to American infrastructure.
It will go down as the most successful assault on America since 9/11 once the true scale of the damage is understood.
That backdoor code is going to lurk for decades.
Not only will Musk be able to tap into it for years but foreign governments.
This is the real problem, and the reason we never should have allowed access to sensitive government and societal data in this fashion.
Pure ridiculous conjecture.
The “young and inexperienced” staffers narrative is very convenient to perform target operations on (specially) sensitive data.
*targeted
Makes sense, this is a lawless reactionary attack on the republic. Their purpose is to put capital ever more firmly in charge. That means attacking workers.
Why isn’t this considered helping the enemy from within / treason?
Why are people being deported for no crimes or for far lesser crimes?
It is. But since citizens don't do anything about it, they don't need to care.
It's likely that this team was infiltrated by adversary countries
I'd always assumed that we had three letter agencies whose entire job was to keep this sort of thing from happening, but it seems that none of them are concerned about protecting our government's secrets or even our democracy. What good is the panopticon if the watchers are asleep on the job?
Those agency can do their security work as long as there are laws and mandates about that.
But those agencies cannot do anything if an elected/named official decides to work for an adversary, since those agencies are under command of the elected/name official.
That's why democracy is beyond the scope of those agencies.
Those agencies are "fences" to protect a teenager from doing mistakes. But it cannot protect the teenager from setting himself on fire.
In my view, democracy was always vulnerable if the people or elected official can be convinced of whatever.
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They’ve all been either fired or out in a leash as musk collects all the PII and secrets in every agency & department and feeds it into a private subnet of his AI. His minions are certainly doing that.
The template here is not Nazi Germany but Pinochet. The CIA have backed right-wing authoritarianism everywhere else in the Americas, why not in America itself?
"Supporting democracy" in Latin America always meant anti-communism, even to the extent of ending free elections.
What is that saying they like to say all the time? “If you aren’t doing anything wrong, you should have nothing to fear.” Certainly seems like they are afraid of people seeing what they are doing for “not doing anything wrong”.
This coupled with the hot mike incident yesterday where Trump was saying how El Salvador needed to build more mega prisons for the "home grown..terrorists" is beyond concerning. Sure sounds like DOGE is compiling lists of 'less desirable s' that will soon be swept off the streets in unmarked vans. America has turned fully fascist.
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slippery slope isn't a fallacy, and we're discussing matters that can't be directly analyzed using purely logical arguments.
Nah. It's getting pretty blatant, comrade.
DOGE staff are just behaving like a foreign cyber-espionage group at this point
It should be clear at this point that DOGE is trying to create a unified database of all persons in the US for targeting. Every single bit of data that they can get about you from the government or social media will be tagged to you Minority Report style. They were clear about wanting to deport citizens to El Salvador as well. Once you are identified as the other side they will come for you. If you are waiting for it to get worse before taking action and getting involved, we are already at that point.
> And Berulis noticed that an unknown user had exported a "user roster," a file with contact information for outside lawyers who have worked with the NLRB.
Possibly looking for lawyers for Trump to target with EOs or blackmail.
If someone is incompetent enough to understand Cobol databases, I doubt they are thinking about it on this level.
Given all of Musks actions, he is probably wanting to destroy any agency that went against him, because he truly believes he is the humanities savior and his companies are doing things the right way.
How you are getting downvotes is beyond me. People are finally waking up to the idea that the whole point of the Trump admin is to privatize the government, but haven't woken up to the fact that we are entering an era of state terror. Keep your heads buried HN, you'll be dragged kicking and screaming into reality in a few months anyways.
It's extremely frustrating and something I've thought a lot about over the years where we were pretty obviously building towards this outcome. A couple things:
First the "average" american is softly but ideologically committed to liberalism¹ & democracy as fundamental values. From that perspective the mind kind of recoils from accepting this. If this is really what's happening, what does civic obligation demand of me? How does that reconcile with my inability to keep my family safe in the face of a motivated & powerful state that wishes to harm me through them? Easier to believe this isn't what is happening, I don't need to take action yet. A powerful example of motivated reasoning.
Second a significant part of the userbase here, as with the general population, supports some or all of these actions. Simple as.
¹ Like in the traditional sense, ie "a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, the right to private property, and equality before the law" from wikipedia.
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If the administration was even remotely competent, this would be scary. There is EASILY a list of things that they could do if they truly cared about going full authoritarian.
But when they start doing stuff like tarrifs for no reason what so ever, to the point where even Musk thinks its stupid, the situation is sad more than scary. US has lost its edge for literally nothing in return.
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They're downvoting it because it feels bad. And well, it does! This sucks major ass.
Part of me is sympathetic to them because a lot of these people are people who live privileged lives and have never before been in any political pressure. These people have previously been able to just detach from politics because they knew, no matter what, they would end up on top. And now, that assumption is no longer true and they have the enter a world that a variety of minority groups have already been living in. They have to face the reality that politics isn't just something on the TV, but something that affects their lives.
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Not all illegal, no. While Abrego Garcia originally came to the country illegally, he was granted the ability to stay here legally, is married to a citizen, and had been dutifully checking in with his immigration officer yearly.
Yesterday, Trump was talking about sending "homegrown criminals" to El Salvador, asking for 5 prisons be built for the purpose.
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A) Trump wants to send “home grown” people there
B) You can’t know if someone is here illegally if they don’t have a way to challenge that claim. They could easily abduct you or anyone else and ship you off without allowing you to challenge it in court
I think it's obvious that some of those affected by these reforms, or by fraud/abuse cutting, are going to come at DOGE with everything they got, so while I think people should review and monitor DOGE's actions, accusations should be taken with a grain of salt (and maybe a kickback).
What reforms or fraud/abuse cutting? I haven't seen any signs of either coming from DOGE. I have seen plenty of signs of DOGE creating and participating in fraud/abuse.
DOGE might have hired too fast without the necessary background checks. So DOGE might now employ a lot of foreign spies (Russian, Chinese, etc) which take their chances.
You say its a bug, but maybe thats a feature.
Every single DOGE access to any level of protected government data is a security breach. Not snark. None of them have clearances.
what do you mean by "clearances"?
If they're accessing data that requires clearances, they have the required clearances. That's mandatory, and no one is going to show them anything without them.
My guess, based on the fact you use terms like "protected government data" is that you don't even know enough about this topic to make up words about it.
No, access to data does not imply clearance. And they are forcing access to data. No it is not legal, but neither Trump nor DOGE nor Musk care about legality.
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And what is NxGenBdoorExtract?
Here is the thing that blows my mind: why is there an implicit assumption that this article is an honest reporting and not a propaganda piece? Don't get me wrong, I am not saying that it is. What I am saying is that, at the very least, this question should always be asked first about any reporting.
Because this would be very in line with how DOGE has conducted itself so far.
NPR is a public entity. It's funding, governance, and leadership structure are well known and well trusted. From Wikipedia...
.....Regarding financing;
>Funding for NPR comes from dues and fees paid by member stations, underwriting from corporate sponsors, and annual grants from the publicly funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting.[4] Most of its member stations are owned by non-profit organizations, including public school districts, colleges, and universities. NPR operates independently of any government or corporation, and has full control of its content.[5]
.....Regarding governance;
> NPR is a membership organization. Member stations are required to be non-commercial or non-commercial educational radio stations; have at least five full-time professional employees; operate for at least 18 hours per day; and not be designed solely to further a religious broadcasting philosophy or be used for classroom distance learning programming. Each member station receives one vote at the annual NPR board meetings—exercised by its designated Authorized Station Representative ("A-Rep").
Now, I do question the authenticity of your question. Everyone knows that NPR is reputable and everyone knows why. Their reputation precedes them. But I entertained your charade and now I implore you to entertain one of mine.
Can you provide me the same detailed information which demonstrates why someone should trust OAN? How about Breitbart? How about Newsmax? Can you please pick one and demonstrate why they are trustworthy using a similar format that I provided for you?
> NPR is a public entity. It's funding, governance, and leadership structure are well known and well trusted.
Ehhhh... I remember vividly a moment during the Iraq war in which NPR's ombudsman spent 20 minutes justifying the network's use of the euphemism "enhanced interrogation" when speaking about torture conducted by the CIA and others. It was terminology being pushed by the then-current administration, which NPR chose not only to parrot, but to justify. To the benefit of the administration and the detriment of human rights. I haven't had illusions about the network's accuracy, neutrality, or journalistic integrity since.
24 years?
I guess you could call that well known. Not in a good way.
> So what that data spike correlated with was data that was transferred off of an internal record-keeping device that was only used for internal case data. So this system only has the private information about union organizers. The privileged business proprietary, technologies, competitors, those kind of things are in that system only. There's no other data. There's nothing else except that.
...
> This is a difficult topic for Dan to discuss, but prior to our filing the whistle-blower disclosure this week, last week, somebody went to Dan's home and taped a threatening note, a menacing note on his door with personal information.
> While he was at work, and it also contained photographs of him walking his dog taken by a drone. So…
DOGE is a significant security breach.
This checks out because all those DOGE hires appear to be hackers, and they are now state sponsored. Most of them could never pass a basic background check, much less a TS or even public trust from one of the more invasive Federal agencies.
It is worth pointing out that many of these people are probably violating Federal and possibly even some state laws. Violations of Federal laws can be pardoned, if the President is so inclined. State laws can't. No prosecution will occur during this administration, but this administration will not last forever.
This administration will last as long as the People allow it to. There is no other way this will end.
cite?
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/doge-staffer-big-balls-prov...
> The best-known member of Elon Musk's U.S. DOGE Service team of technologists once provided support to a cybercrime gang that bragged about trafficking in stolen data and cyberstalking an FBI agent, according to digital records reviewed by Reuters.
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Those darn hackers. They probably hang out and get their news... someplace.
More evidence the current POTUS is in cahoots with Russia.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
I've said this repeatedly, but write this down: before this administration is out we are going to have a major (probably multiple) scandal where DOGE staffers get caught with some kind of horrifying self-enrichment scam based on the data they're hoovering. It could be simple insider trading, it could be selling the data to a FBI sting, it might take lots of forms. But it's going to happen.
These are a bunch of 20-something tech bro ego cases convinced of their crusade to remake government along libertarian axes they learned from Reddit/4chan/HN. These are simply not people motivated out of a genuine desire to improve the public good. And they've been given essentially unsupervised access to some outrageously tempting levers.
Personal enrichment? There's already an enormous amount of evidence here to indicate that DOGE is working on behalf of a foreign nation state. It is seeming more and more likely that members of the DOGE team are simply secret agents for a foreign military.
> Within minutes after DOGE accessed the NLRB's systems, someone with an IP address in Russia started trying to log in, according to Berulis' disclosure. The attempts were "near real-time," according to the disclosure. Those attempts were blocked, but they were especially alarming. Whoever was attempting to log in was using one of the newly created DOGE accounts — and the person had the correct username and password, according to Berulis.
or even worse, they’re compromised in some fashion and don’t know it
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I think it's worse than that as the DOGE staffers are presumably picked according to Musk's preferences and he's not going to be looking for generous, well adjusted do-gooders, but selfish, arrogant, greedy racists. Presumably, they're also going to be targetted by other countries intelligence services with a mind to getting hold of the same data.
Doesn't matter if they're good people or not "given essentially unsupervised access to some outrageously tempting levers" that scandal WILL happen eventually.
> horrifying self-enrichment scam based on the data they're hoovering.
Did you miss the presidential cryptocurrency?
DOGE guys will probably end up wiring money directly to their own bank account, proudly brandish the receipts on national television, and no Republicans will make a move against them.
Also it's right there in the name DOGE. It's Elon's favorite coin and of course he's trying to pump it by naming a goddamn government department after it. It's plain as day.
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Sounds like they need to file a CVE.. oh wait.
Even by the standards of this administration...... yikes:
This is exactly what I expect from this administration. Mob tactics. Take the silver or get the lead.
I’d not want to be a whistleblower during this presidency. Whistleblowers tend to have really bad luck crossing the street on a good day.
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Welcome to Elon Musks America
This seems important and incredibly relevant on a site called hackernews. It's credible and from a credible source. Why are we flagging it?
JD Vance is a poster boy for Y Combinator adjacent fascists. Marc Andreessen, when he is not cheering on opiate overdoses in his hometown and praising the British Raj, loves what's going on. We need to accept that Silicon Valley has major culpability here. After all, how much do you see on HN that you should ignore the law because it's better to ask forgiveness than permission?
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"Fascism" today just means "right wing politician I do not like" or "conservative who is successful at pushing back the left".
Plenty of people here can have a problem with this administration and Vance himself, or not, without those who disagree pretending that we're a week away from goose stepping down 5th Avenue in NYC.
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I am not sure how it's possible to defend the kind of stuff DOGE is doing anymore. Even the veneer of looking for efficiency is gone. There have only been claims of 'fraud' with no real evidence backing up the claimed scale of fraud.
At this point it simply looks like DOGE is yet another attempt to use a popular trope (Govt fraud and waste) to push through changes specifically designed to give unchecked power to one individual.
This much concentrated, unchecked power opens up vast opportunities for fraud and corruption and there are pretty much no instances in history where it turned out be to a good thing in retrospect.
Also, very surprised this story made it to the front page. Typically, stuff like this gets flagged off the front page within minutes.
> Typically, stuff like this gets flagged off the front page within minutes.
Why would that be, because it's too "political" for tech news? Or are there actual DOGE sympathies within the HN population?
> Or are there actual DOGE sympathies within the HN population?
I wouldn't mind that so much, except they're minimally-active in the comment section and instead use flagging. At least defend your beliefs.
Switching to https://news.ycombinator.com/active (/active) with showdead is a better HN experience, nowadays.
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> Or are there actual DOGE sympathies within the HN population?
AFAIK a small number of them is enough to hide stuff from the front page. I don't know why is this the case, honestly I don't see any benefit over full time-moderators hiding problematic stuff, only negatives. Like why should a small political group be able to distort the news on the front page?
> too "political" for tech news?
Politics are everywhere. It’s how we negotiate consensus and make collective decisions. From what a government should do down to what features will be worked on this sprint and where are we having lunch today.
Tech being apolitical is an illusion, and a very dangerous one.
Sahil Lavingia founder of Gumroad is DOGE. Joe Gebbia co-founder of Airbnb is DOGE. Not sympathetic to, they are DOGE. Those are just the ones I know off the top of my head from listening to basic reporting. The All In podcast is super pro-Trump/DOGE, with Sacks being the Trump regime's crypto czar (bringing that cohort on board). Peter Thiel. Musk. That's a lot of pro-DOGE headspace in HN related circles. A lot of people that HN related circles look up to and aspire to emulate. A lot of people that HN circles network with/have perverse incentives to support.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
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It's censorship plain and simple.
And the admins/mods are still refusing to admit it.
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Anyone who knew anything about the public sector knew there were already efficiency initiatives. USDS(which became DOGE) was this, and they were doing a great job. If you care about efficiency this is what you would support, not taking an axe to everything and having a near-singular focus on lower headcount.
It’s flagged now - pretty embarrassing for a site called “hacker” news
Yep, it's blatant censorship and the admins/mods are still refusing to admit it.
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hn staff turned off the flags on this story as soon as we found out about it, restoring it to HN's front page.
most of this stuff is getting flagged within minutes.
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It is hilarious what does, and does not, get flagged on this website in 2025.
The other day on /active, there was a story about a French politician being banned from running for office, due to being convicted of outright fraud for the second time. Absolutely nothing to do with technology or business, nothing to do with the USA. Pure politics in a foreign country. Not flagged.
There was a story directly below which involved the USA, technology and business, but had an uncomfortable narrative for some users. Flagged.
As someone who still likes this site a lot, this just makes me laugh at this point. I don't know how else to react.
There's always a ton of randomness with these things. People tend to underestimate how that affects nearly every aspect of HN. That is, they misinterpret a random outcome as being meaningful and then attribute a meaning to it.
If you assume that rhyme or reason is involved, then of course the results seem bizarrely inconsistent and the only models that fit will be Rube Goldberg or Ptolemaic ones. Simply understand that randomness plays the largest role, and the mystery goes away. (But I know that's less internet fun.)
In terms of all these political stories getting flagged: it's a simple consequence of there being a huge influx of intense political stories while HN's capacity remains "30 slots on the frontpage" (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
Thanks Dan, I never mean to point fingers at moderation here. I always assume it's users. Not sure if that's the correct assumption, but it's one I stick with.
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Follow-up: I should add that in 2025, deleting stories with a tinge of US politics is highly detrimental to the HN user base’s understanding of what is happening in the business world.
Case in-point: a US-based family member employed at a FAANG just told me that his Canadian coworkers now reset their phones prior to entering the USA, then restore from backup. This is somewhat similar to what happens when they go to China.
This is terrible for business. This kind of information should not be ignored.
These stories aren't being deleted—there was quite a large thread (in fact maybe two large threads?) about precisely that, within the last couple weeks. I'll see if I can dig up the links, or maybe someone else remembers?
The problem isn't that the major stories are deleted; it's that even if a story spends hours on the front page, the set of users who actually see it still has measure zero [1]. Then inevitably a few of the rest assume that they didn't see it because it was sinisterly suppressed, whether by mods or user flags.
Where this ends up getting us is the 'nobody goes there anymore it's too crowded' theory of HN threads! [2] It's always been like this—it's baked into the fundamentals of how HN works (the limited frontpage space, the dynamics of the internet, the fact that most people don't use HN Search). It's just showing up more intensely these days because the times are more intense and we've been in a tsunami phase for a few months now.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43422350 - March 2025 (198 comments)
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Because, naturally, people on here want to harm you. We can't say it out loud, but that's where the U.S. climate is right now. HN is not immune from it, and is likely more susceptible to it given the demographic. They flag to keep people from saying it.
Indeed, I'm sure there's a LOT of people, especially in the HN space are pro-fascist.
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I mean, there were Tesla earnings calls this year flagged, which would be front page news even a year ago. Tech earnings calls are almost never flagged otherwise.
I'm mostly convinced a lot of stuff is flagged and the mods work overtime to pick and choose what to unflag. On what metric? No clue, if I'm being honest.
This is a fair take from my POV. I am very happy not to be modding any forum these days.
edit: and to be clear, I was not originally critiquing the modding here.
Honestly looks like a fairly heavy handed bot. Is very close to the "if it has trans" decisions we know they did in the search for things to cancel.
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Welcome to the Internet.
Many forums (including this one) have bans on "politics" or topics that are "inflammatory". 95% of the time what constitutes either is simply "things I disagree with".
For US politics in particular, as much as the right-wing cries about being censored, social media in particular bends over backwards not to silence such views whereas anything critical of those right-wing positions gets flagged or downranked as being "political" (eg [1]).
Typically this process isn't direct. ML systems will find certain features in submissions that get them marked as "inflammatory" or "low quality" but only on one end of the spectrum. For sites such as HN, reddit and Tiktok, right-wing views have successfully weaponized user safety systems by brigading posts and flagging them. That might then go to a human to review and their own biases come into play.
As for France vs the US, I'm sorry but France is irrelevant. As we've seen in the last 2 weeks, what the US does impacts the entire world. All the big social media sites are American (barring Tiktok) so American politics impacts what can and can't be said on those platforms.
Twitter has become 4chan, a hotbed for neo-Nazis, racists and homephobes.
And which French politican are we talking about? Marine Le Pen? If so, the relevance is the rise of fascism in Europe between National Front in France, Reform in the UK, AfD in Germany and, of course, Hungary.
[1]: https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/leaked-data-israeli-censorshi...
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It's the opposite, actually. This place has always been owned and operated by a musk crony. Musk only got his paws on reddit recently, and has barely had any success besides getting the admins to shut down r/cyberstuck.
Here on HN anti-musk/regime posts get deleted automatically, TERF and other bigoted posters are allowed to post through spam filters from freshly made accounts, and everything else that isn't clearly delineated as 'liberal media' but negative for the regime just gets flagged or deranked from listing.
"Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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I wouldn't be so quick to jump to conspiracy theory territory, it could just be that people get tired of reading the same bullshit everyday.
I'm not american so can somebody please explain me, how is deleting logs and every trace of your actions helping with government efficiency?
Nothing they are doing is related to government efficiency. You can't really put too much faith in names.
The basic rule of government naming: the more of GOOD THING in the name, the less of that it will be.
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In the same way that finding waste while increasing the federal budget isn't efficiency.
Technically, maybe you can squint and find small pieces that are more efficient but in the grand scheme of things they goal doesn't seem to be a smaller government.
How is firing people helping government efficiency?
Well you have to put context around what is being made more efficient.
Reducing headcount reduces labor costs and can be a form of financial efficiency. Reducing headcount also usually reduces the sheer number of people involved in any project, much like a small startup can move drastically quicker than a large, established org.
That said, there goal here doesn't seem to be clear as to what is being made efficient and they definitely aren't reducing the budget or size of government (outside of literal headcount, most people complain instead of red tape and regulations).
Yes, how?
Log storage is expensive.
It's not the storage, but processing with NR and DataDog is what's expensive. That's why the efficiency team asked to not have their actions logged in the first place.
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Nothing about DOGE or the Trump administration is about efficiency. It's just a label they use to con gullible voters.
Their real goal is more likely a combination of grift and settling grudges.
Edit - typos
The next administration won't be able to spend time and money investigating crimes of the current one /s
That way they can save some money litigating Elon and his goons. It's not like that litigation would get anywhere anyway, so better to save the public the waste /s
To more efficiently rout trouble-makers and unions.
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The "looking at" process is still subject to federal law.
I fixed it for you: "Whistleblower details how a temporary group of very young people, who would never get access to sensitive data, are disabling/hiding what they are doing with highliy sensitive data of an executive, potentially circumventing safety mechanism in place to protect the data of all americans".
Btw. there is NO reason why they couldn't do all of that in a sincere way. Trump was voted in for 4 years.
... very young people, of which at least one is affiliated with cyber criminals (and also happens to be the grandson of a KGB spy).
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/02/teen-on-musks-doge-team-...
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> This is like 947 on a list of terrible things happening because of this administration.
This is on purpose. Trump has been slowly pushing the Overton window. It seems everything is fair game and US citizens are largely apathetic, scared or favorable to Trump's action.
There are basically weekly protests at this point.
US Citizens aren't apathetic. Our representatives on the other hand...
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> rampantly false
Is Abrego Garcia not real?
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Supreme Court justice Sotomayor notes that nothing in the government’s reasoning about not returning Garcia is unique to noncitizens. President Trump says he wants to send “homegrowns” to the gulag in El Salvador, and is exploring his legal options. In court, the government has argued that they have no recourse to force the return of any prisoner from that gulag. This is neither false nor inflammatory; it is the administration’s stated goal.
Some of us work in tech and have skin colors that are similar to the person in question, and are deciding on the level of risk we are willing to take.
That this is not obvious to you is a clear indication of the fact that this isn’t something you personally worry about.
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> it'll start with sure actual criminals
Have they targeted any single criminal yet? Because they have sent two planes of people here to Brazil and nobody there was wanted by either country.
Also, Brazil has a list of wanted criminals at Interpol with known addresses in Florida that they aren't arresting.
They've already sent an innocent man there and acknowledged he was innocent, then refused to bring him back when the courts, the opposition and finally SCOTUS each commanded them to bring him back.
This was just a test, and it was successful. They can now disappear and deport anyone they want with no repercussions whatsoever. The GOP is a criminal organization and their followers share the responsibility of what happens next.
> then refused to bring him back when the courts
It was extra ridiculous/insulting/terrifying to see the heads of both countries in the same room saying that there was nothing they could do about the situation.
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> This was just a test, and it was successful
It's too soon to say it's "successful": SCOTUS was 9-0 against and that was still only a few days ago, so far from being a success it's now turning into a constitutional crisis... assuming the administration doesn't fold, or flip-flop, or some combination of the two - which we've already seen plenty of[1].
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[1] the seemingly arbitrary and capricious tariff changes announced almost every day ever since the-day-after-April-fools-day.
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Wasn't the argument for the right to bear arms always that it would prevent a criminal government from having it's way?
Now, how's that working out so far?
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https://documentedny.com/2025/04/14/ice-bukele-cecot-tren-de...
Probably more then one.
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This is not an accurate account of the situation. While I don't agree with the actions the government is taking here, I also don't think we are entitled to our own private facts about it.
Mr Garcia does not have a criminal record, but he was ordered to be deported years ago. He was able to get a temporary reprieve from this by hiring lawyers and working through the legal process, but he did this by almost certainly committing perjury by claiming there were criminal gangs who would kill him if he returned to El Salvador. If you believe the filings in immigration appeals you would have to believe that 99% of the people in the world are being personally pursued by criminal gangs. Perhaps you believe this but I don't find it to be credible. Regardless, whether the legal process is effective doesn't matter here, it IS the legal process and must be followed. My point is the fact Mr Garcia was deported is not itself the issue, it's that it was done in a way that ignores the rule of law (even though it did respect due process). Legally Mr Garcia should be deported eventually, he was only allowed to stay temporarily until he is not "at risk for his life" if he were deported, but the legal process must be respected.
SCOTUS did not command anyone be brought back. They declined to issue an emergency decision blocking an order to 'facilitate' his return, but specifically sent back to the lower court and took issue with the order to 'effectuate' his return. So they are not commanding the government to bring him back, rather they are commanding the government to not prevent his return. Yes this is tedious but reality is often tedious.
> They can now disappear and deport anyone they want
I think you have not made any case that it is valid to assume that we would go from "one person who has already been ordered for deportation by a federal court" who was very publicly deported to "anyone they want" and "disappear".
I basically agree with your sentiment inaccuracy and hyperbole doesn't benefit anyone.
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Combined with "oops can't get them back" it's very powerful. Combine it with not advertising faces of snatched people on broadcast TV, and it's a very useful tool inded. People will just disappear. It won't be legal or illegal, just a thing that happens from time to time. Police won't search too hard for the missing people, because no good can come out of finding out.
Kinda similar in a way to China or Russia “disappearances”
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The security community didn’t ignore hard evidence - the “hard evidence” didn’t stand up to basic scrutiny.
These claims may well be false, but they deserve scrutiny, and waving them away while perpetuating a much repeated lie isn’t helping anyone except criminals and corruption.
Bottom line: this deserves investigation.
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> > The small, independent federal agency
> I still don’t think this notion holds up.
What notion doesn't hold up? That a federal agency can be small & independent?
> Which branch are they under, who do they report to?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Labor_Relations_Board
> The NLRB is governed by a five-person board and a general counsel, all of whom are appointed by the president with the consent of the Senate. Board members are appointed for five-year terms and the general counsel is appointed for a four-year term. The general counsel acts as a prosecutor and the board acts as an appellate quasi-judicial body from decisions of 36 administrative law judges, as of November 2023.[4] The NLRB is headquartered at 1015 Half St. SE, Washington, D.C., and it has over 30 regional, sub-regional, and residential offices throughout the United States.
> Why would real Russian hackers not do anything to obscure their ip?
Why would the fox bother hiding the hole someone dug for it under the henhouse?
Its also worth noting that the NLRB has a proposed budget of $320M for the the 2025 fiscal year and a total of around 1,300 employees [1].
I'm a strong proponent of small government and don't know enough about the NLRB to say if I would find them useful, but that is well within the range of a small federal department today.
[1] https://www.nlrb.gov/sites/default/files/attachments/pages/n...
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> That a federal agency can be small & independent?
Yes. They are either in the legislative, executive, or judicial branch.
And before you send more Wikipedia links, be aware there is a long history and chain of Supreme Court cases about this question.
> Why would the fox bother hiding the hole someone dug for it under the henhouse?
Still spreading the Russian asset conspiracy theory? Why wouldn’t they want to hide their crimes from future enemies?
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The NLRB is one of many independent agencies of the executive branch created by Congrees, and they don't report to anyone except for their own boards. The president and Congress have influence over the boards but no direct control over the agency. The idea that the president can just ignore these laws because of a "unitary executive" theory is authoritarian bullshit.
And the concern probably isn't Russian hackers, it's American hackers spoofing their IP address. Also you are ignoring that DOGE made the server public when it wasn't supposed to be.
> The idea that the president can just ignore these laws because of a "unitary executive" theory is authoritarian bullshit.
The question of whether the president is violating congresses power by downsizing or neutering an agency they have created is something democrats should pursue.
But no - there are no people outside the org chart. That’s just dysfunctional, no man can serve two masters, etc.
If it were true than congress can create agencies for themselves with more power than is granted them in the constitution.
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Well it would help if there weren’t numerous issues with the data as presented on that site. Specifically now they are only claiming somewhere around 28 billion saved in cancelled contracts when in early February they claimed like 55 billion. Seems odd that over time the amount saved would go down despite the alleged number being of cancellations going up.
Also it is concerning that the largest amount from an individual contract saved is a cancelled deportation facility contract. Seems at odds with the Administration’s goals to ramp up mass deportation but cancel the contract for building a holding facility for unaccompanied minors.
My suggestion would be if the goal is to eliminate debt we would need to target social security reform such as raising the retirement ages and eliminating the cap on the payroll tax. Additionally, but far less realistic would be implementing a Land Value Tax. Not cancel random contracts that amount to a tiny fraction of the budget and propose massive tax cuts like the current administration seems to be doing.
The parent's russian propoganda post does not mention that the posted savings are full of inaccuracies.
Nor does the propoganda define "waste", if one looks at the actual cuts, it seems to be focused on "things Herr M. doesn't like". which is not a good definition of "waste".
Clinton / Gore did it, properly, well though out, effectively, in the mid-late 90's. I'm not sure if you'd consider that "modern times" though.
https://youtu.be/lG9pxvpGY-Q?si=cii2iggD-9hAj0ms&t=900
I've timestamped the above video to where it mentions the Clinton / Gore bit, but the whole video is enlightening.
There are also constant ongoing efforts at improving efficiency, which is why they keep going “ah ha! We found it!” then poor bureaucrats who are trying to do their fucking jobs while these idiots run around messing things up have to explain, “no, you’re seeing an artifact of record-keeping practices that exist because [very good reason], you’re wrong yet again, maybe try asking literally anyone who knows about these data sets”
They also love to throw around the word “fraud” while bringing no charges. Despite the DOJ being in Trump’s control. Same pattern as other lies (“rampant voter fraud! We have proof” ok so when you’re in change you’ll prosecute, right? You should! That’s bad if true! I mean I’ve looked at your proof and it doesn’t appear true, but maybe you have more proof you haven’t shown! “Uhhh… [smoke bomb]”)
Plus, we have the GAO and CBO. Trump won’t want to listen to them because they’ll say “our #1 problem is we keep cutting taxes”, and “there’s not much waste to be eliminated cutting government workers”, because that’s true at this point, but they exist. It’s not like nobody’s been looking at these kinds of things. That’s just bullshit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6L1AYL6oxlU
The 8 billion saving that turned out to be a 8 million saving?
Realistic alternative? How about starting by reading tfa? I’d say you don’t need to physically threaten people who ask for basic security practices to be followed, for one.
"The people voted for major reform."
What they got was a pocket-lining idiot, and genuinely one of the most morally bankrupt people I've ever known of as his tech right-hand man. Musk is a moral imbecile, a 13-year old incel trapped in the body of an overweight mid-50s mess. Yes, he's been involved in some great things (SpaceX and Tesla), but he thinks that translates into a god-like ability to do anything and that he's right about everything.
These numbers don't even stand up to casual scrutiny. And I'm from the UK so it doesn't really directly affect me (although the orange idiot's shenanigans have done so to a small degree). But if you really believe this site, you're divorced from reality, and maybe drinking the same kool-aid that the tech muppets who are on DOGE are.
> but he thinks that translates into a god-like ability to do anything and that he's right about everything.
Like when this space youtuber suggested a change to his Mars rocket and he understood, accepted the validity of the idea, and decided to implement it on the spot? Er, I guess that's the opposite of what you said.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/WY73exaVpyw
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DOGE results according to DOGE. We all know what kind of track record Elon Musk has as a bullshitter.
Not only that, Trump has already spent US$ 155B more than Biden, DOGE claims to have shaved US$ 150B, overall this administration has already increased spending by US$ 5B even after firing a lot of civil servants.
The worst is that the effects of this shaving off will only be felt over time, when National Parks start crumbling, when ATCs start quitting, the government machine of the USA has been eroded, inevitably it will fall into a landslide.
Do you have a more independent/reliable source?
First, every objective audit has found many problems with that data, ranging from taking credit for things which were terminated under the Biden administration to listing the maximum ceiling on a flexible contract (IDIQ) as the total savings even though the amounts actually spent were far lower (like canceling your credit card and saying you saved the limit), and even counting the same contract multiple times.
Second, you have to look at the cost of their actions. They’ve disrupted the functioning of the entire federal government and doing in a very haphazard manner. That means that a lot of current spending is wasted by DOGE _and_ that the business of the government isn’t getting done. For example, whether or not you think the U.S. should engage in foreign aid, under DOGE they paid money to send people to help in Myanmar only to lay them off after they arrived on site, squandering all possible value. That story is being repeated all over the country right now and in many cases the loses are permanent: if they choose to waste payroll having people come back to an office where they can’t work, the job isn’t getting done and there’s no way to recover the wasted payroll. As they keep losing lawsuits, it’s also likely that the amounts cut will be exceeded by the cost of settlements when they breach contracts or fail to provide a service required by statute.
One really big area is tax collection: the IRS is already estimating revenue reductions on the order of half a billion dollars, and since they’ve been sacking a lot of the law enforcement for businesses and high-net wealth individuals, that will get worse as people feel confident cheating more aggressively.
Lastly, you have to look at the economy. Estimated have each federal job supporting 2-3 other jobs, and federal spending drives the economy in many parts of the country. They’ve already cut growth of the entire economy into the negative (from +2.5% in January to -2-3% now - see https://www.atlantafed.org/cqer/research/gdpnow) and a lot of that is driven by federal cuts.
You do understand, that the upcoming tax cuts for rich people will throw the USA Debt above defence savings?
And it will increase the debt significantly?
All of that while DOGE, some random dudes without any understanding how things work, stop things which are globally agreed on (global aid) or just not even worth mentioning in the grand schem?
But hey if you prefer to defend DOGE ssaving 160 Billion while the tax cut for the rich adds Trillions to debt, yeah do a happy dance. Be proud. Or whatever your comment is trying to do.
Funny that IRS also gets defunded. But hey taxes right? :D
There were already people called "inspector generals" which handled waste, fraud, and abuse but Trump fired about 17 of them in his first week. Deploying tech bros to solve the problem is naive at best and malicious at worst. The arrogance in assuming that no auditor before them looked into the SSA database and saw DOB records going back to 1875 is outstanding.
They didn't use StarLink?! ROFLMAO
I hope he doesn't think Trump is his boy and will keep DOJ off his back. The problem is that the institutional funds and market makers will not support this level of Watergate/Enron/WorldCom-like risk and Trump isn't going to become entangled in that (since it means the corporate death penalty as far as public equity and access to bank capital is concerned).
BUT the Report is from a super controversial NGO that has long been targeted by Republicans and may soon be DOGEd, so it could be filled with speculation, half-truths, innuendo and lies.
Still...They didn't use StarLink?! I mean, is that not the greatest evidence you could ever hope for of an obvious NSA backdoor in StarLink? They were willing to risk obscure premises-based (bandwidth) monitoring over holding a mini-dish out the window for a few seconds..Too much! I feel like I owe someone $20 for a ticket.
Not even 24 hours later, I called it --the Administration IS asking Congress to de-fund NPR:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-administration-p...
Meanwhile NPR has new reporting that DOGE has sent two of its boys back to NLRB, but they're going to work remotely. Is the hope here that this will provide ongoing justification for DOGE remote data access as the Feds sort out what they did in the first visit? Like even though NPR's first report stated that Russia has tried to login remotely using valid DOGE credentials just after DOGE personnel left the first time?
https://www.npr.org/2025/04/16/nx-s1-5366851/doge-nlrb-whist...
> particularly when those staffers noticed a spike in data leaving the agency. It's possible that the data included sensitive information on unions, ongoing legal cases and corporate secrets
This entire article appears to be speculation about data they MAY have taken with no evidence besides large file size that they are misusing something.
The discussion with the “whistle blower” and other experts is only about how serious it would be IF they misused it.
Am I reading it wrong?
There is evidence DOGE went out of its way to illegally conceal what it was doing. That, alone, is enough to put these kids in jail one day.
What law would they have broken?
My original comment here has not been flagged - but all my responses to other comments have. This is distorting the conversation. There is only one DOGE narrative allowed on this site.
Indeed and sad, it's becoming like Reddit. There is no discourse going on here or nearly anywhere. Sadly on X it's the opposite but equally one sided.
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I came from a mobile app to the site just to see your flagged comments.
I would say you were treated with far more respect than you deserve. If i didn't know any better, I would say you were paid to act this stupid.
None of your arguments were in good faith, you constantly moved goal posts, and actively disregard every piece of eveidence that was presented.
You can claim I am biased. I would agree with you. I am biased against this blatant display of imbecilty.
Yes. You claim:
"This entire article appears to be speculation about data they MAY have taken with no evidence besides large file size that they are misusing something ...[and] is only about how serious it would be IF they misused it."
This paragraph makes it clear it's not just about misusing data and large file sizes.
> Those forensic digital records are important for record-keeping requirements and they allow for troubleshooting, but they also allow experts to investigate potential breaches, sometimes even tracing the attacker's path back to the vulnerability that let them inside a network.
Let's be clear:
> Those engineers were also concerned by DOGE staffers' insistence that their activities not be logged, allowing them to probe the NLRB's systems and discover information about potential security flaws or vulnerabilities without being detected.
Neither of these have to do with "large file size" or misusing data.
"Am I reading it wrong?"
Yes. Now, before you go moving goal posts, you made claims, and I've debunked those claims with quotes you said you needed. Because clearly the article is ALSO talking about these other things as problematic as well, so it's not "the entire article". (Also, the "entire article appears"? Appears? Just read it, it talks about numerous things, and is very clear on the different elements it's talking about.)
This isn't the only stuff mentioned, so be careful about claiming "oh, I just missed that" or some such because there are other things that can be referenced, such as the massive amount of text spent on the whistleblower issues and the threats made to them.
And before you talk about this just being "speculation," that's why we have the process we have, so people can make claims that can then be investigated. And that's what's being stopped.
Finally, "no evidence besides large file size" is also not true.
"Am I reading it wrong?"
As someone said, it's more likely you didn't even read it.
I am genuinely curious as to what your point is. Not saying it's wrong, but a succinct summary might be useful.
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There were already news from weeks ago how they started to put servers on the internet with access to systems, which should not have access to/from the internet for security reasons.
This is just on top of all the other things. happened.
Someone exfiltrated sensitive data. That isn't in question. The only question is who did it and why. As far as DOGE's involvement, there is no proof but there is plenty of evidence.
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> Am I reading it wrong?
Yes
Good comment.
> Am I reading it wrong?
Based on your comments, you're not reading the article at all.
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