Judge says US Treasury ‘more vulnerable to hacking’ since Trump let the DOGE out Trump administration policies that allowed Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency to access systems and data at the Bureau of the Fiscal Service (BFS) have left the org “more vulnerable to hacking” according to federal Judge Paul A. Engelmayer in New York City. Judge Engelmayer used that phrase in an order [PDF] filed …
Just wait, you can guarantee that the FAA, SEC, EPA, and various other government departments looking at worker rights, health and safety, and anything else that might get in the way of Lord Musk's businesses, will be next on the list for having their funding removed...
I'm somewhat surprised he hasnt gone after them already, but I suppose he's waiting for the American people to grow bored with the various cost cutting, and so they wont be pay any attention when he starts going after his personal bugbears...
"When"? He already did. Organisations supporting trans rights and transition are under attack, and Musk hates having a trans child (and she hates him). Teslas are the most dangerous vehicles on American roads by a factor of 800% or more, and there's already a bill to destroy OSHA. USAID was a major player in the collapse of South African apartheid.
Honestly though, every branch of government oversight is a personal bugbear to Musk. He can't stand there being someone who can tell him that he can't do something or have something.
Further to my last: Robert Reich reports that Musk is pushing to kill the Consumer Financial Protection Board. The CFPB is the body that would enforce consumer protection laws on the Twitter-based Visa payment app that Musk signed off on at the end of January. To reiterate what I said yesterday: Musk is removing all control and oversight over his own actions.
Meanwhile, across in Tesla, that "bug" where the Model 3's AI4.1 motherboard half fries itself so most of the safety features stop working still hasn't been reported to NIST and Tesla is pretending everything's fine when customers complain, so I'm sure he'll take due care and attention with Federal government data.
They don't care. One of the cultists teslas didn't merge correctly at the end of a lane, and was totalled hitting a post.
He *thanked* Musk for the fact he came out of it without a scratch (the pole, on the other hand, is consulting with its lawyers)
Post screenshot: https://www.jamiejones.org/misc/Musk_cultist_crash.png
Post original: https://x.com/MrChallinger/status/1888546351572726230
The more unfixed flaws in Teslas the better, double good if they refuse to fix them. Hurt the people who support the Nazi. (Yes I have sympathy for those who bought before he made it impossible to deny he's a Nazi, but he's made it pretty obvious for 2+ years what kind of person he is so if you own a 2023 or newer Tesla my sympathy is extremely limited)
You misunderstand: corruption for the capitalist class is a feature, not a bug.
Remember, slaves were happy working in the fields and you should be happy, too, getting injured or dying on the job for their cause.
Because move fast and break things. As long as it's not them getting broken.
Changing the constitution is difficult. Much simpler to back-door the treasury and install someone about as bad as Musk at OMB. Anyone with the authority to kick out an ex-president can be de-funded and have their record of employment with the US government expunged and replaced by a Trump supporter. Extra road blocks can be introduced by blocking future elections so there is no replacement candidate. Tax records can be falsified so opposition candidates will be found guilty of tax fraud. The current strategy to to break laws so rapidly that no-one can keep up. It is the published strategy to limit bad news.
Even Putin didn't serve 3 terms straight up, he found a willing lackey in Medvedev. Trump could do similar because his endorsement may be worth a lot in 2028 (depending how the next few years go). He'd just need to find someone he held enough power over to keep them in line.
I think his bigger problem will be being an old senile cunt 82. That didn't go well for Biden.
Yikes. It looks unambiguously ambiguous to me. So one for the Supreme Court to untangle. Which is better than it being a full-on loophole.
The Vice President's primary role is being a back-up President so the intent of the 22nd amendment should presumably be to prevent a two-term President running for Vice too, especially given the wording around those succeeding a President for 2 years or more only being allowed one term. But they messed up not stating that explicitly.
Changing the constitution requires not only 2/3 of congress (which he will never get) but 3/4 of the states, so that road is blocked to him. It is a good thing the founders had the foresight to not make that congress only, as that could work if he had his DOJ start indicting democrat congressmen and putting them in jail without bail. Then the quorum is smaller and they could hit the 2/3 threshold. But needing 38 states makes it an impossible task.
He'd have to corrupt the Supreme Court even more than it already is and have them decide to simply ignore something stated in plain English. They haven't come close to going that far yet.
This assumes he lives long enough for that to matter, and I'd say odds are less than 50/50 given his terrible diet and his pronounced mental decline in just the last couple years. He's gonna have big stroke soon....fingers crossed!
It's one thing scripting an access to AD (for example) stuffing an IIS box (for example) onto the network and sending spam to the workers and it's another thing hardening it all.
Then there's probably the eejit who copied all the data to a db on his/her laptop and took it home to play with.
Only one part of the treasury's IT system needed hardening: Marko Elez had write access to the code. His obvious first step would be to add hardened back doors for remote access by anyone at DOGE.
I was pondering whether they would leak it themselves so they can continue accessing it. And then use the leak as a justification for their further involvement to "protect" the system from hacks.
In other news, I see Musk has told Trump not to pay US debt ("Treasuries") which is pretty much what he did at Twitter. The world can survive a few companies doing that. The world's largest economy is a different matter. I don't know enough to fully understand the implications. (Waiting for Krugman to write on it.) But the dollar would stop looking like a safe haven and a good store of value if a mango dictator can refuse to pay you back your money.
to decide what is or is not illegal. It's now POTUS
or so J.D.Vance is tweeting.
If Americans allow this (and despite all that guff about the second amendment, they seem rather placid) then the coup is complete.
The only joy will be watching SCOTUS dismissed as an irrelevance. They greased the way.
Hmm.
Financial transactions - those will be the ones with identifiers that link back to the relevant department, contract number, recipient ame/title/shoe size etc. To let you dig up all the *standard* information when you want to audit it. The sort of database stuffed full of boring repetitive transactions that just went through without any drama.
But every now and again, Something Happened that isn't completely covered by the usual tick boxes ("The dog chewed up his paycheck, issued duplicate"). So you can add a comment to explain what is going on.
And one of your department's self-assessment runs is "count how many times we had to use the comment field" - because too much use of that indicates that the other fields are not adequate at capturing Real Life, so you ought to look into tweaking something.
So, Musky has just spotted something he can claim is some kind of inefficiency/corruption ("See, they are deliberately leaving this blank! What are they not recording? What are they hiding?") and then initiate "an improvement" that'll just mean wasted time typing "Same as last month" on every janitorial paycheck, makes self-assessments less useful/efficient...
But it means he can squeeze out another self-congratulatory Xit, which is the important thing.
No court in any Australian jurisdiction would take such an outrageous, reckless and unsubstantiated allegations of the corruption of the presiding magistrate by an identifiable public figure without that court's hauling that imbecile's sorry arse before it on a contempt charge.
In the past, judges (at least Assize Judges) "were the King" so I imagine an affront to a judge was an affront to the King and arguably lèse majesté. I wouldn't be too upset if Musk and fellow travellers met the traditional traitor's end - from soup to nuts - the bowels and intestines with head on a spike.
Shows how bad the law is in the US. Anyone else calling someone "pedo guy" based on their appearance (and daring to call out Musk's ignorance) would lose their case in short order. Musk won his and very quickly. His overlord if he was anyone else would also have had at least a night in the cells for contempt for referring to the judge in his trial in the terms that he did so often.
As we know though, in MAGA land corruption is defined as "doesn't agree with Trump", which would actually make Trump himself corrupt given how often he contradicts himself.
Corruption is now good for business, according to Trump’s latest executive order telling the Department of Justice not to enforce the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which makes it a crime for US companies to bribe foreign officials.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/02/10/trump-pauses-doj-bribery-laws-for-us-firms/78392744007/
In Trumpworld, declaring lies a “fact sheet” is a nice touch
https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/02/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-restores-american-competitiveness-and-security-in-fcpa-enforcement/
This is how fascists always seize power, steal democracy.
Anyone who dares stand up to the mob or its leaders will find themselves demonised as an "enemy of the people". They will often end up against the wall or swinging from a lamppost.
"Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!"
Ha ha ... space genius thinks he's thought up a great new innovation for getting more useful insight into costs - he has however just reinvented that hoary old bit of administrative bloat known as the Cost Centre, where every payment has to be assigned to one and only one departmental budget, and vast amounts of time get wasted arguing whether a new toner cartridge should be assigned to "001678393 Admin : Office consumables", "003774874 IT : General equipment" or "008372916 Marketing : Mailout costs". This sort of stuff is generally done so badly by the people who think it up and the people who have to work with it that the resulting data is of poor quality and little practical use.
Most of what Der Fuhrer Drumpf is attempting to do is at least as illegal as his previous attempt to overthrow the duly elected United States government when he lost the last election.
No wonder he didn't put his hand on the Bible while "swearing" to "defend" the Constitution of the United States. He knew full well if the Devil's son did that, his hand would burst into flames!
"Elon Musk appears to have referred to Engelmayer in a Xeet that reads “A corrupt judge protecting corruption. He needs to be impeached NOW!”
He's sounding more and more like Trump every day. Every accusation is a confession. Choose another way to broadcast your bullshit, Elon, you are still trying to convince people that you are clever.
"Over the weekend, the home page of the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CBFP) started to produce a 404: Page Not Found error - the seeming result of a reported decision to shut down the agency for at least a week. The Bureau’s activities include advice on how to avoid phishing and identity theft."
Can't have a federal agency that provably protects consumers against the maliciousness and uncaringness of banks, credit card companies, pay-day loan scum and other financial "institutions" now can we? The poor must be exploited without any pesky, (rich people) money wasting bureaucracy to protect them!
Giving Elon access to sensitive information fills me with dread. There shouldn't be a reason for it either. If the goal is improving efficiency, it's the process, not the data that needs analyzing. A subtlety that would be lost on Elon, for sure.
The US Congress can be their own worst enemy when it comes to waste. In a rush to provide hand-outs during lockdown, they didn't stop to figure out how to make sure those payments wouldn't come with a healthy dose of fraud. It was more important to send out checks as fast as possible. Death-row inmates and 'businesses" that never did any business applied and received big payouts. While some of those have been identified and charges brought, the money isn't going to be recovered and put back. More money is being spent to pursue those cases.
I know my local city is rife with inefficiency. The people that work there can't get two things done in a single day. Records a couple of years old are stored across town (about 3 miles) from the city hall and they charge $150 for retrieval if they need some old plans when you apply for a construction permit. Are they using that money to digitize that flammable and decaying pile? No. They see Code Enforcement as a profit center so it's difficult to have a business in town. That big fat woman (I think it's female) drives around town in a giant dually that gets single digit mileage. I expect it's not gong to fit in a Prius.
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