Comment by derangedHorse
1 day ago
> DOGE wasn't an audit. It was an excuse to exfiltrate mountains of your sensitive data into their secret models and into places like Palantir
Do you have any actual evidence of this?
> I recommend anyone presume the best of actual people and the worst of our corporations and governments
Corporations and governments are made of actual people.
> Then presumably the game is finding the best way to turn you into a human slave of the state.
"the state" doesn't have one grand agenda for enslavement. I've met people who work for the state at various levels and the policies they support that might lead towards that end result are usually not intentionally doing so.
"Don't attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence"
>Do you have any actual evidence of this?
Apart from the exfiltration of data, the complete absence of any savings or efficiencies, and the fact that DOGE closed as soon as the exfiltration was over?
>Corporations and governments are made of actual people.
And we know how well that goes.
>"the state" doesn't have one grand agenda for enslavement.
The government doesn't. The people who own the government clearly do. If they didn't they'd be working hard to increase economic freedom, lower debt, invest in public health, make education better and more affordable, make it easier to start and run a small business, limit the power of corporations and big money, and clamp down on extractive wealth inequality.
They are very very clearly and obviously doing the opposite of all of these things.
And they have a history of links to the old slave states, and both a commercial and personal interest in neo-slavery - such as for-profit prisons, among other examples.
All of this gets sold as "freedom", but even Orwell had that one worked out.
Those who have been paying attention to how election fixers like SCL/Cambridge Analytica work(ed) know where the bodies are buried. The whole point of these operations is to use personalised, individual data profiling to influence voting political behaviour, by creating messaging that triggers individual responses that can be aggregated into a pattern of mass influence leveraged through social media.
> Apart from the exfiltration of data, the complete absence of any savings or efficiencies, and the fact that DOGE closed as soon as the exfiltration was over?
IMHO everyone kinda knew from the start that DOGE wouldn't achieve much because the cost centers where gains could realistically be made are off-limits (mainly social security and medicare/medicaid). What that leaves you with is making cuts in other small areas and sure you could cut a few billion here and there but when compared against the governments budget, that's a drop in the bucket.
Social security, Medicare, and Medicaid are properly termed "entitlements", not "cost centers". You're right that non-discretionary spending dwarfs discretionary spending though.
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I think we’re mistaking incompetence with malice in regards to DOGE here
Hanlon's razor is stupid and wrong. One should be wary and be aware that incompetence does look like malice sometimes, but that doesn't mean that malice doesn't exist. See /r/MaliciousCompliance for examples. It's possible that DOGE is as dumb as it looked. It's also possible that the smokescreen it generated also happened to have the information leak as described. If the information leak happened due to incompetence, but malicious bad actors still got data they were after by using a third party as a Mark, does that actor being incompetent really make the difference?
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> The people who own the government clearly do.
Has anyone in this thread ever met an actual person? All of the ones I know are cartoonishly bad at keeping secrets, and even worse at making long term plans.
The closest thing we have to anyone with a long term plan is silly shit like Putins ridiculous rebuilding of the Russian Empire or religious fundamentalist horseshit like project 2025 that will die with the elderly simpletons that run it.
These guys aren't masterminds, they're dumbasses who read books written by different dumbasses and make plans thay won't survive contact with reality.
Let's face it, both Orwell and Huxley were wrong. They both assumed the ruling class would be competent. Huxley was closest, but even he had to invent the Alpha's. Sadly our Alphas are really just Betas with too much self esteem.
Maybe AI will one day give us turbocharged dumbasses who are actually competent. For now I think we're safe from all but short term disruption.
Orwell did not. He modeled the state after his experience as an officer of the British Empire and the Soviets.
The state, particularly police states, that control information, require process and consistency, not intelligence. They don’t require grand plans, just control. I’ve spent most of my career in or adjacent to government. I’ve witnessed remarkable feats of stupidity and incompetence — yet these organizations are materially successful at performing their core functions.
The issue with AI is that it can churn out necessary bullshit and allow the competence challenged to function more effectively.
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You're ignoring that the people that are effective at getting things done are more likely to do the crazy things required to begin their plans.
Just because the average person cant add fractions together or stop eating donuts doesn't mean that Elon cant get some stuff together if he sets his mind to it.
> Has anyone in this thread ever met an actual person? All of the ones I know are cartoonishly bad at keeping secrets, and even worse at making long term plans.
That's the trick, though. You don't have to keep it secret any more. Project 2025 was openly published!
Modern politics has weaponized shamelessness. People used to resign over consensual affairs with adults.
Those simpletons seem to have been able to enact their plans, so you can be smug about being smarter than they are, but it seems that they've been able to put their plan into action, so I'm not sure who's more effective.
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I think you're wildly underestimating the heritage foundation. It's called project 2025 but they've essentially been dedicated to planning something like it since the 1970s. They are smart, focused, well funded, and successful. They are only one group, there are similar think tanks with similarly long term policy goals.
Most people are short sighted but relatively well intentioned creatures. That's not true of all people.
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> > DOGE wasn't an audit. It was an excuse to exfiltrate mountains of your sensitive data into their secret models and into places like Palantir
> Do you have any actual evidence of this?
I will not comment on motives, but DOGE absolutely shredded the safeguards and firewalls that were created to protect privacy and prevent dangerous and unlawful aggregations of sensitive personal data.
They obtained accesses that would have taken months by normal protocols and would have been outright denied in most cases, and then used it with basically zero oversight or accountability.
It was a huge violation of anything resembling best practices from both a technological and bureaucratic perspective.
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> I will not comment on motives, but DOGE absolutely shredded the safeguards and firewalls that were created to protect privacy and prevent dangerous and unlawful aggregations of sensitive personal data.
Do you have any actual evidence of this?
https://www.npr.org/2025/04/15/nx-s1-5355896/doge-nlrb-elon-...
https://www.wired.com/story/doge-data-access-hhs/
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/02/doge-...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46149124
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> Berulis said he and his colleagues grew even more alarmed when they noticed nearly two dozen login attempts from a Russian Internet address (83.149.30,186) that presented valid login credentials for a DOGE employee account
> “Whoever was attempting to log in was using one of the newly created accounts that were used in the other DOGE related activities and it appeared they had the correct username and password due to the authentication flow only stopping them due to our no-out-of-country logins policy activating,” Berulis wrote. “There were more than 20 such attempts, and what is particularly concerning is that many of these login attempts occurred within 15 minutes of the accounts being created by DOGE engineers.”
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/04/whistleblower-doge-sipho...
I’m surprised this didn’t make bigger news.
Every time I see post-DOGE kvetching about foreign governments' hacking attempts, I'm quite bewildered. Guys, it's done, we're fully and thoroughly hacked already. Obviously I don't know if Elon or Big Balls have already given Putin data on all American military personnel, but I do know, that we're always one ketamine trip gone wrong away from such event.
The absolute craziest heist just went in front of our eyes, and everyone collectively shrugged off and moved on, presumably to enjoy spy novels, where the most hidden subversion attempts are getting caught by the cunning agents.
I'm genuinely confused about this story and the affiliated parties. I've actively tried to search for "Daniel Berulis" and couldn't find any results pointing to anything outside the confines of this story. I'm also suspicious of the lack of updates despite the fact that his lawyer, Andrew Bakaj, is a very public figure who just recently commented on a related matter without bringing up Berulis [1].
Meanwhile, the NLRB's acting press secretary denies this ever occurred [2]:
> Tim Bearese, the NLRB's acting press secretary, denied that the agency granted DOGE access to its systems and said DOGE had not requested access to the agency's systems. Bearese said the agency conducted an investigation after Berulis raised his concerns but "determined that no breach of agency systems occurred."
One can make the case that he's lying to protect the NLRB's reputation, but that claim has no more validity than Daniel Berulis himself lying to further his own political interests. Bearese has also been working his position since before the Trump administration started, holding the job since at least 2015. It's very hard for me to treat his account seriously, especially considering the political climate.
[1] https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2025/nov/18/us-federal-wor...
[2] https://news.wgcu.org/2025-04-15/5-takeaways-about-nprs-repo...
> Corporations and governments are made of actual people.
Corporations and governments are made up of processes which are carried out by people. The people carrying out those processes don't decide what they are.
Also, legally, in the United States corporations are people.
The legal world is a pseudowolrd constructed of rhetoric. It isn't real. The law doesn't actually exist. Justices aren't interested in justice, ethics or morality.
They are interested in paying the bills, having a good time and power like almost everyone else.
They don't have special immunity from ego, debt, or hunger.
The legal system is flawed because people are flawed.
Corporations aren't people. Not even legally. The legal system knows that because all people know that.
If you think that's true legally, then you agree the legal system is fraudulent rhetoric.
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> "Don't attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence"
What's the difference when the mass support for incompetence is indiscernible from malice?
What does the difference between Zuckerberg being an evil mastermind vs Zuckerberg being a greedy simpleton actually matter if the end result is the same ultra-financialization mixed with an oppressive surveillance apparatus?
CNN just struck a deal with Kalshi. We're betting on world events. At this point the incompetence shouldn't be considered different from malice. This isn't someone forgetting to return a library book, these are people with real power making real lasting effects on real lives. If they're this incompetent with this much power, that power should be taken away.
> What's the difference when the mass support for incompetence is indiscernible from malice?
POSIWID
The purpose of a system is what it does. - Stafford Beer
I try to look at the things I create through this lens. My intentions don’t really matter if people get hurt based on my actions.
> "Don't attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence"
I don't think there's anything that cannot be explained by incompetence, so this statement is moot. If it walks like malice, quacks like malice, it's malice.
There are more than two explanations.
By all means, give us a few examples.
> Corporations and governments are made of actual people.
Hand-waving away the complex incentives these superhuman structures follow & impose.
The number of responses that could have just been "no I don't" is remarkable.
> "Don't attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence"
To add to that, never be shocked at the level of incompetence.
>Do you have any actual evidence of this?
Any evidence it was an actual audit?
> Corporations and governments are made of actual people.
Actual people are made up of individual cells.
Do you think pointing that out is damaging to the argument that humans have discernible interests, personalities, and behaviors?
> Do you have any actual evidence of this?
There was a bunch of news on data leaks out at the time.
https://cybernews.com/security/whistleblower-doge-data-leak-...
https://www.thedailybeast.com/doge-goons-dump-millions-of-so...
https://securityboulevard.com/2025/04/whistleblower-musks-do...
But one example:
“A cybersecurity specialist with the U.S. National Labor Relations Board is saying that technologist with Elon Musk’s cost-cutting DOGE group may have caused a security breach after illegally removing sensitive data from the agency’s servers and trying to cover their tracks.
In a lengthy testimonial sent to the Senate Intelligence Committee and made public this week, Daniel Berulis said in sworn whistleblower complaint that soon after the workers with President Trump’s DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) came into the NLRB’s offices in early March, he and other tech pros with the agency noticed the presence of software tools similar to what cybercriminals use to evade detection in agency systems that disabled monitoring and other security features used to detect and block threats.”
“Usually”, “not intentionally” does not exactly convey your own sense of confidence that it’s not happening. That just stood out to me.
As someone who knows how all this is unfolding because I’ve been part of implementing it, I agree, there’s no “Unified Plan for Enslavement”. You have to think of it more like a hive mind of mostly Cluster B and somewhat Cluster A people that you rightfully identify as making up the corporations and governments. Some call it a swarm, which is also helpful in understanding it; the murmuration of a flock of psychopaths moving and shifting organically, while mostly remaining in general unison.
Your last quote is of course a useful rule of thumb too, however, I would say it’s more useful to just assume narcissistic motivations in everything in the contemporary era, even if it does not always work out for them the way one faction had hoped or strategized; Nemesis be damned, and all.
I think the quote is misused. Narcissistic self interest is neither incompetence nor malice. It's something else entirely.
It's malice. Nobody ever sees themselves as the bad guy. They always have some rationalization of why what they're doing is justified.
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