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Comment by tw04

20 hours ago

Someone needs to go to prison over this. It’s not just a misunderstanding, it is an intentional attack on every US citizen.

107 comments

tw04

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candiddevmike  20 hours ago

The people who need to see/understand this live in a different reality where uncomfortable things like this are ETL'd into righteous anger towards people they don't like.

This is the deep state they've been worried about, this is the boot that will tread on them.

EDIT: parent comment was highest ranked comment for the article and is now at the bottom?

  • j2kun  19 hours ago

    A twisted justification for suggesting someone who broke serious laws not face consequences.

    We live in a nation of laws, whether or not conspiracy-minded individuals prefer to follow them.

    • padjo  19 hours ago

      That law now officially includes an individual who is immune from the law and who can issue pardons to anyone for anything. So you live in a nation with optional laws.

      1 reply →

    • tines  19 hours ago

      All the evidence is contrary to your assertion that we live in a nation of laws.

    • awesome_dude  19 hours ago

      Laws are only as strong as the enforcement.

      One of the things that is being exposed by the current administration is that, even though the Judiciary is an arm of the government, and supposed to provide a check on the Executive, the reality is that the Executive has the power to pardon anyone it sees fit, voiding the power of the judiciary (the argument is that the ultimate power lies with the voters who can pass their judgement on the Executive, and its use of its powers, by voting them out, hopefully)

      10 replies →

mikeyouse  20 hours ago

I fully believe there's a stack of pardons in Trump's drawer for everyone involved in this debacle. I can't imagine breaking so many laws all over the government if you thought you'd ever have to face consequences. The alternative to pardons in preventing the next congress & administration from cleaning this up is too dire to really contemplate.

9283409232  16 hours ago

You forget who the president is. They will get away with all of this and everything else. Doesn't mean we shouldn't try but lets be realistic here.

root_axis  18 hours ago

Not really possible since they would be pardoned even if anyone was ever willing to prosecute them.

pluc  20 hours ago

[flagged]

  • MOARDONGZPLZ  20 hours ago

    > it's fun to watch

    Watching the misery of others makes me feel ill.

    • pluc  1 hour ago

      Watching the misery of a nation who have been hiding behind the second amendment for decades to defend mass slaughter and who now won't lift a finger to get out of authoritarian decisions and an oppressive regime is delicious hypocrisy. I can't wait for dessert.

    • tokioyoyo  20 hours ago

      Don’t agree with the OP how it’s fun to watch, but you have to acknowledge how citizens of basically every other country feel after being made fun of for the past few months. I have close relatives living in the states, and I feel bad for them. But your own government has been belittling your neighbours across both of your borders and calling them weak. I’m not going to say that the government does not deserve some of the repercussions of their own actions.

      1 reply →

the_optimist  20 hours ago

Explain please.

  • MOARDONGZPLZ  20 hours ago

    The complaint alleges that DOGE was able to get unlimited-permissions admin accounts that were not subject to logging. They also downloaded external repositories that gave users of those repos lots of different IPs. The complaint further alleges that the DOGE person used the combination of these things to "download... more than 10 gigabytes of data from the agency’s case files, a database that includes reams of sensitive records including information about employees who want to form unions and proprietary business documents."

    If this is all true, this is basically hacking sensitive data in the open. We already know the current administration has worked to hobble unions. So putting these things together, this act is not only wrong in and of itself, but the data is likely going to be used to harm americans' interests. So, deserving of punishment.

    • alabastervlog  20 hours ago

      And they fucking illegally fired the IGs who are supposed to act as watchdogs for and light-shiners-on-of blatantly-illegal activity like this in the executive. The ones we added after Nixon's crimes. It was one of the first actions of the administration, blanket firing without actual cause, which is supposed to be required, and without the required notice-period to Congress.

      That should have exhausted any benefit of the doubt right off the bat, even among those inclined to think Trump's maybe not great but also some ordinary amount of bad for a politician. You don't do that unless you fully intend to do some crimes. Not only that, they were so goddamn eager to crime that they couldn't wait the 30 days or whatever. They intended to do criminal shit immediately.

      1 reply →

  • mingus88  20 hours ago

    If you take a step back and realize that the intent is to utterly destroy the social safety net provided by social security, Medicare, etc that we have all been paying into our entire adult lives, tell me why every citizen affected should not pursue civil and criminal charges of theft and fraud with malicious intent?

    And then the means to do so have involved ignoring the courts and bypassing constitutional checks and balances? Please tell me how this isn’t criminal if not treasonous?

    • cap1434  18 hours ago

      Not only did you not explain the original comment, you added more assertions that are significantly more extraordinary without explaining your reasoning for those either.

  • Cthulhu_  20 hours ago

    Sensitive government data was (sure, allegedly) extracted to Russia via an account that was expressly created to hide / not create logs. This is treason. Allegedly.

    • goatlover  20 hours ago

      This administration is doing a lot of things that are borderline treasonous. Hopefully they get prosecuted when they get voted out or ideally get removed form power.

      1 reply →

  • malfist  20 hours ago

    If I told you someone went to your bank and demanded the right to setup accounts with permissions to do everything and to have all logging of that users activity disabled, and then a whistleblower pointed out that they downloaded everyone's bank statements, you'd probably be pretty up set.

    After all, why do they need unfettered access? Why do they need your bank statements? Why do they need to hide what they're doing with the unfettered access?

    That's what's happening here. There is no good explanation other than bad actors

skissane  17 hours ago

The problem with prosecuting them – they are employees of a White House office, doing what their bosses told them to do, and it is clear their bosses are carrying out the President's wishes.

If Joe Blow off the street walks into a federal agency and takes all their data – open and shut case, throw the book at them, see you in a few decades.

If someone from the White House walks into a federal agency, tells the agency leadership "the President wants me to take all your data", and the agency leadership replies "sure, go right ahead" – not a scenario people were expecting, so the existing laws haven't been crafted to clearly criminalize it. Maybe some enterprising prosecutor can find a way to map it to the crimes on the statute book, maybe it is just too hard. But even if the prosecutor overcomes that hurdle, it will be far from easy to convince the jury / trial judge / appellate courts that the legal elements of the crime are actually met – and if it actually gets as far as a conviction upheld by the appellate court, what do you think the conservative SCOTUS majority are going to do with that when they get it? And many prosecutors, foreseeing those low odds of ultimate success, will stop before they even get to an indictment.

So, I think the odds of anyone ultimately being convicted over this are low, even if Trump never pardons them.

Maybe, Congress might pass a law to make it more clearly illegal, which might make it easier to prosecute if a future administration repeats the same behavior.

EDIT: if people are downvoting this because they think my analysis of the likelihood of successful criminal prosecution is wrong, it would be great if they could reply to explain where they think I got it wrong

  • j_w  17 hours ago

    The claim that because your boss tells you to do something illegal means that you should just do it is bullshit. It's your social responsibility to not capitulate under these circumstances.

    If you don't feel that way then you deserve the world you are creating.

    • skissane  16 hours ago

      The problem is a lot of relevant criminal laws contain this word “unauthorized”. If you have access to a computer system, and it is authorized by the people who own the system, it isn’t a crime. These people will say that whatever they did/bypassed was (1) authorized by the President (of course if you ask Trump if he authorized them to do whatever he’ll say “yes”); (2) authorized by the senior agency leadership (because Trump has made clear that if they refuse to authorize it they’ll be fired).

      So, how do you prosecute them for accessing a computer system (or data or whatever) without authorization when both the President and the senior agency leadership say they authorized it?

      Well, you can’t-unless you want to argue that the President / agency leadership’s authorization is illegal and hence illegally invalid, ultra vires. But even supposing you are right about that in the abstract, will you be able to convince a judge and jury of it? And even supposing you convince a jury, trial judge and appellate court, there’s a dozen different ways SCOTUS could overturn it (from narrow questions of statutory construction to sweeping rulings about the President’s inherent constitutional power to demand information from the executive branch), and I think the main question for the current SCOTUS majority will be which of those ways they choose.

      My impression is that a lot of people are mixing up what they think the law ought to be, with what it actually is. Just because something ought to be a crime doesn’t mean it actually is one - and that’s especially going to be the case with unprecedented situations, it is hard to make something a crime if nobody foresaw it would one day happen.

  • cmurf  12 hours ago

    All public servants take the oath found in 5 USC 3331. The oath is to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. Not a person.

    • skissane  11 hours ago

      That's not a counterargument to my position that successful criminal prosecution is unlikely.

      If you are going to charge them with a crime, which one? CFAA?

      How then to prove that access is unauthorized under the CFAA given evidence that both the President and senior agency leadership authorized it? Trying to claim that those authorizations are legally invalid gets into rather murky areas of law, and is (AFAIK) without precedent. Can you point to any previous cases of a successful CFAA prosecution where the access was authorized by a senior federal official but that authorization was declared legally void?

      How do you get past the fact that the law is ultimately whatever SCOTUS says it is, and it seems more likely than not that the majority of current SCOTUS will want to say that this specific situation isn't a crime?

      I feel like people are rejecting my position because they don't like it or don't want it to be true. Of course, maybe I'm wrong – maybe Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanagh, Barrett and Roberts are all secretly dreaming of sending Musk and his minions to federal prison; or maybe they'll dispassionately follow their own judicial philosophies to the logical conclusion that doing so (using CFAA or whatever) is statutorily and constitutionally required - but that doesn't seem very likely to me, given their track records. Do you really think I'm wrong about that?

happyopossum  20 hours ago

You’d have to prove a crime here to send someone to jail, correct? What would the charges be?

  • 9dev  19 hours ago

    Without knowing the specifics of US law, there’s a lot in there for a reasonable case. Improper handling of sensitive data, interfering with ongoing legal proceedings, abuse of telecommunications infrastructure (looks like the guy runs a brute forcing crawler on a government system) and probably even more.