Over at @WIRED, reporters like Vittoria Elliott are doing excellent work documenting Musk's takeover of the federal government
In this piece, she tracks down the names of the people Musk has installed at various agencies
these guys are all 19 to 24 year old engineers -- one is a Thiel fellow
Story here: https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-government-young-engineers/
Unpaywalled: https://archive.is/L2C7d
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@clive
Surely nothing could go wrong if you outsource the US government to AI.
@WIRED
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@SuperMoosie @clive @WIRED AI being a pseudonym for the Oligarchy.
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@SuperMoosie @clive @WIRED not sure which is worse AI or the team of Junior Devs incapable of renting a car.
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@SuperMoosie @clive @WIRED Any AI/LLM would probably make a better president than the one currently playing one in the White House.
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@clive @WIRED It’s rather bizarre. Social engineering 3.0: just waltz into government offices and act like you’re in control. The way they take over systems is really a cyberattack in broad daylight. Literally. Openly gaining access to sensitive information that they have no business with. They should be arrested and locked up!
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@ArtHarg @clive @WIRED Putin just could have done this himself years ago, apparently, and saved himself a lot of money.
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@ArtHarg @clive @WIRED The article discusses an incident where a DOGE team was thwarted from accessing classified information, and the people that thwarted the access were put on leave and DOGE was given the information.
The cops are part of the executive branch. The executive branch is led by Trump (and Elon).
I think oversight is over.
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@j3rn @ArtHarg @clive @WIRED
Just noting: If the data would have been encrypted at rest with keys only in the heads of people responsible for data security (and a spine), just throwing the circuit breaker would have been enough to secure the data (and could have been by the janitor).
People responsible for data need to think about how to secure the data. They should have done so 2 months ago, already.
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@ArtHarg @clive @WIRED
already did it with Twitter and used it to get Trump a designated idiot president
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@ArtHarg @clive @WIRED Who is going to do the arresting? The DoJ? The FBI? Oh.
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@martinvermeer @ArtHarg @WIRED
Yep
I don’t know the law here but the only other authority is congress, so, yeah, nothing there either — unless they happen to commit a state crime
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@clive @ArtHarg @WIRED It looks bad, right? One possibility is a military intervention. Seems almost unthinkable, as the US military has been faithfully serving civilian rule like forever; but Trump has already undermined this taboo by using the military for police tasks. It may happen when soldiers are ordered to fire on protesters. Their oath is to the Constitution, not to any person or regime.
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@ArtHarg @martinvermeer @WIRED
that moment – when he orders them to fire on protesters – is absolutely coming , and I have to say I can’t predict what’s gonna happen
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@clive @WIRED@flipboard.com I just checked, I don't know any of them.
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@drwho
I hadn't heard of any of them either
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@clive @WIRED I remember the things I believed at that age - I was still a Libertarian because its internal logic made a lot of sense to me and I hadn't had enough life experience yet to recognize that its core assumptions are a complete crock.
This is not good - they'll be the kind of clever that hasn't yet learnt to consider the human dimension to what they do, nor understand why it matters.
Elon has chosen his tools well :/
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@StryderNotavi @WIRED
oh my stars and garters, yes
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@clive @StryderNotavi @WIRED It's almost funny. He's a lot older, so his 'spending the rest of his life in prison' will be much shorter than theirs. If they get that far, of course - more likely they'll be fired fairly soon. Are they on H1B visas?
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@StryderNotavi @clive @WIRED
The moment you get any kind of real world experience it becomes clear its a crock.
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@clive @WIRED I imagine that all of the data will be ingested into Musk's AI.
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@markwoll @WIRED
yes, another good point
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@clive @markwoll @WIRED
Trump needs to pump money into his own ventures, Musk is a useful idiot
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@clive @WIRED So at least one of the people dismantling the US govt is doing it for free! Elon is going to throw those boys to the wolves when the shit hits the fan.
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@Ooze @WIRED
I know
one thought I had is, if any of these activities ever get taken to court, these guys may discover that Musk really set them up as fall guys
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@clive
Same as it ever was
The techie proud boys
@Ooze @WIRED
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@Ooze @clive @WIRED
Thiel will be waiting. Just like he nurtured JD Vance. We see how that ended up.
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@Ooze @clive @WIRED They're expendable.
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@Luna @clive @WIRED Absolutely
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@clive @WIRED
everything goes well - planned 💥
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Are the Thiel fellows the folks who forego higher education for Thiel money? More of an antifellowship, really.
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@clive @WIRED every foreign intelligence service is going to be up those guys’ asses without them even knowing it.
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@Tim_Eagon @clive @WIRED
My first thought was from an #infosec standpoint was “I wonder how much their data is selling for this second.” Cause they have just put targets on themselves that will never go away. They’ve made powerful enemies, and are possibly an open tap to America’s most secure data platform. They’ve just made targets of their families, their girlfriends, and anyone else that can be used to extricate data from them. This is why we have a security protocol and clearance process.
This is so utterly insane I can’t believe I’m seeing it happen.
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@MissConstrue @Tim_Eagon @clive @WIRED They have chosen their side.
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@MissConstrue @Tim_Eagon @WIRED
yeah
they are going to be leaking like sieves, given how foreign intelligence services will be targeting them
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@MissConstrue @Tim_Eagon @clive @WIRED What a unique way to fucking ruin your life. Picking up a meth habit would’ve probably been a better choice for these kids.
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@clive @WIRED
But... we were assured by @protonprivacy that Trump would be fighting against big tech? And now Trump is handing over government directly to big tech?
Surely Proton wouldn't lie to us? 🙄
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@FediThing @clive @WIRED @protonprivacy proton are idiot chuds. Cancel anything you have with them.
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@clive @WIRED these young fellas should expect to end up in jail with all the laws they're breaking..
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@wronglang @clive @WIRED they can easily be pardoned before it comes to that, as long as somebody remembers to put on the president's desk.
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@ghouston @clive @WIRED with what they've done you can keep putting them back in. You think that asshole in the Whitehouse wants to be bothered with pardoning them all the time? You win by attrition.
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@clive @WIRED I think this was done in the 1930’s by a guy in Central Europe (hipster youth)
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@JohnnieMac @WIRED
indeed
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@clive @WIRED
Whatever they're doing, I give it a 95% chance that it's sloppy amateur shit. These young guys were almost certainly picked for their loyalty and not their competency. Classic fascism.
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@jargoggles @WIRED
yep
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@clive @WIRED this is incredibly good
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@codinghorror @WIRED
it really is good to have this reporting on record
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@clive I doubt any of them are engineers.
https://www.nspe.org/resources/issues-and-advocacy/professional-policies-and-position-statements/employment-practices-use#:~:text=Position%20Statement%3A%20It%20is%20the,jurisdiction%20engineering%20licensure%20law%3B%20or
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@clive They should be ashamed of themselves to aiding him in this.
After this is over they should have thier degrees revoked.
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@WIRED @clive There needs to be more naming of names. Let the traitors know we are watching.
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@clive @WIRED I bet none of them can even spell COBOL!
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@Old_IT_geek @WIRED
lol yeah
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@clive @Old_IT_geek @WIRED This is the part I've been waiting for. They're going to get to the IRS, see the mainframes, perhaps remember the outage on Tax Day 2018 due to a bug in the storage array firmware that the subcontractor forgot to apply, and they're going to jump to the conclusion that they can just migrate everything to AWS in a week.
Then they're going to discover that the IRS's millions of lines of mainframe code are IBM mainframe assembly language and not even as portable as COBOL.
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@clive @Old_IT_geek @WIRED The big hurdle with the IRS hasn't been so much the code as the data storage. Right now, they have this massive VSAM data set called the Individual Master File that they've been trying to convert into something more modern like SQL.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Individual_Master_File
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_Storage_Access_Method
Based on their press releases, the IRS has been doing a lot of work since the passage of Biden's IRA in 2022. We'll find out how much Trump's team hinders them.
https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/irs-releases-strategic-operating-plan-update-outlining-future-priorities-transformation-momentum-accelerating-following-long-list-of-successes-for-taxpayers
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@jhamby @clive @WIRED Ah VSAM and ISAM and ADABAS .. such memories
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@Old_IT_geek @WIRED @jhamby
Yeah, very good point – they are totally unprepared, technically, for the vicissitudes of these legacy systems
But I’m not sure they actually want to do any of this work correctly, carefully, and without destroying massive amounts of recordkeeping inside the IRS
For them, I suspect, changing things in a way that absolutely wrecks the IRS’s ability to collect would be a feature, not a bug
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@clive @WIRED @jhamby it takes months to make even the smallest change then test it, prove it works, prove the rollback works, schedule an outage and implement it. Elon has only got six months
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@jhamby @clive @WIRED I have worked on mainframe systems for 30 years. It’s hilarious watching the younglings come face to face with 30-40 year old code that absolutely has to run 24/7 no excuses.
Elons kiddos are in for a huge learning curve, especially if the break one of the payment systems.
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@clive Aren't they microchipped? @WIRED
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CW USpol, Musk, babby's frist coup, quality reporting (@clive)
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@clive @WIRED
Thanks #Doomald!
He HATES this name, so: use it, say it, tweet it, share it, forward it, pass it on, boost it.
[#]trump
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