Judge cites big OPM records leaks from 2015 in DOGE slapdown

The US federal government's HR department violated the law and bypassed its own cybersecurity safeguards by giving DOGE affiliates access to personnel records, a federal judge ruled Monday, issuing a preliminary injunction to halt further disclosures. President Donald Trump established the so-called Department of Government …

[veti]

We need to borrow from the Nuremberg playbook

Make it a crime to purposely ignore established protocols, or to order someone else to do so.

And make individuals working for government personally liable for any crimes they commit, even if they are explicitly ordered to commit them.

I know the president would only have pardoned them all anyway, but make him actually do it. At least it would increase the visibility of what's going on.

While we're on the subject, can someone bring up the whole "unauthorized spending of government money" by DOGE? Only Congress can create a new government office and allocate public money for it. If Trump took public money without Congressional authorization, that's theft. Of course, if he or Musk funded it out of their own pockets, that's a whole different can o' worms.

[CA Dave]

Re: We need to borrow from the Nuremberg playbook

DOGE has committed more Constitutional and privacy violations in the name of Musk, and by extension Donald "January 6th wasn't an Insurrection but let me send the Guard to California" Trump, the Coward-In-Chief.

Make no mistake, without Elon Musk, none of that crap actually happens, because Trump isn't actually smart enough himself.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: We need to borrow from the Nuremberg playbook

And make individuals working for government personally liable for any crimes they commit, even if they are explicitly ordered to commit them.

I'm rather on the fence about that - being a government employee myself.

As an absolute offence/punishment, I disagree. It's easy to use an extreme example to make bad law - c.f. some of the bad "think about the childrun" justified laws. And often it's not clear to the person involved that something is wrong.

So lets say I'm a junior admin, and given a list of people to give access to. I might question it, but if I'm assured by people at a higher pay grade that people at the relevant level attest that the access is justified (need to know, security measure in place, training, etc.) then I'm probably not in a position to know otherwise - how do I as a junior admin know (for example) whether someone has a need to know for their work about which I know nothing ?

So in a case like this, a reasonable defence would be that you'd questioned it, and had plausible assurances that everything is in order - note the "plausible" bit there.

In (from my vague recollection of Nuremburg), any "I checked and was given plausible assurances it was legal" defence was implausible - to a "reasonable person", an order along the lines of "go off and kill [some group], it's all OK and legal" would not be plausible. But an order "give these people access to [system], they have a need to know, there are security/privacy provisions in place, and they have been trained" is likely to be plausible to a junior admin who won't have the visibility to say those statements aren't true. In my own line of work, we're a sizeable organisation, and a lot of information is "need to know" - so I frequently have to take information I am given at face value as I don't have a need to know about the details it was derived from (I do have a route to question anything I might be cautious about though).