For those genuine actors here: this theoretical outrage assumes the premise of something immoral or illegal, and completely ignores the authority structure. This looks and smells like an info operation.
Just, as an exercise, list out 3 good reasons someone might want untraceable admin accounts then list 3 really bad reasons they might want that. If you manage to find 3 good reasons does the outcome of those those outweigh the risks of the potential bad reasons?
I appreciate the question. The most obvious is that this is an “audit the auditors” exercise, and they do not want to leak information toward a likely adversarial counterpart. If they have the authority to so, then they do. An adjacent complaint about “not following Treasury policy is similar.” If these systems exist, there is a governing authority structure, and that does not begin at the level contemplated in this document.
Good:
1. The account-level below that doesn't have access to certain stuff and just happened to have untraceable stuff
2. They just said "give me the highest level of access" and didn't investigate what that meant
3. Can't think of a good third atm
Bad:
1. They want to do nefarious things untraceably
2, 3. I think 1. covers pretty much everything.
Personally, if I'm put in charge of overhauling a system I don't want to waste my time waiting on approvals for BS, I just want to be given the highest level of access I can be given to get on with work.
I'm not saying this is fine, but the information here is basically a random list of things that happened and it doesn't really tell a nefarious story to my eyes.
I honestly don't understand the defenses of these actions here. Forget about the nature of data we're talking about here. If I was an engineer working at say google, and I put in mechanisms to access a bunch of data and bypass both auth and audit, I'd get fired instantly.
If those mechanisms already existed and you requested and were granted access to them then there wouldn't be anything to comment on really? There would be no firing, nothing would happen.
I'm not defending anything, I'm trying very hard to see what the specific problem is here and all I see is "now things XYZ might happen" and I'm just thinking that I'd be far more interested in an article about XYZ actually happening than this "reporting" on "maybe things ABC happened and maybe things XYZ will happen".
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Trump will blanket-pardon anyone who's still on his good side. And maybe some who aren't, just to limit the reach of investigations. And Trump himself's untouchable—while it remains technically possible to criminally prosecute a President for actions in office, it's in-practice impossible short of some unlikely hypothetical scenarios, thanks to the Supreme Court (the Roberts court loves leaving things technically intact, but actually not)
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
Agree with the overall perspective, but the union thing is marginal at best. Do you think swearing alliance and allegiance to a different org, delegating authority to it, and funding it is a guaranteed success? The game theory of this is tipped to iterate to failure.
Just plug in to something you like, do your best, and recognize it for what it is. You should have neither an adversarial nor misrepresented relationship. If you have it, you by definition support it.
Do you anticipate that someone is going to tell you, specifically, that they do not support rabid DEI, some of the highest tax rates in the world, widespread and severe drugs, poverty, and homelessness, endless war, vote dilution through importation of new voters, calling a random sample of political nemeses rapists and racists, and now, painting Swastikas on vehicles? Do you truly both believe that is disconnected from reality, and that someone would reveal this in a conversation with you?
I’ve heard most of that. And yeah, it’s pretty disconnected from reality.
Rabid DEI? Mythical.
Highest tax rates in the world? No we don’t. And did you notice that this guy just enacted a massive tax hike? Voting Trump for lower taxes is idiotic.
Drugs, poverty, war? Trump has no effective plan to fight any of these.
Importation of new voters? Why do Republicans assume immigrants are automatic Democratic votes? Hispanic culture is pretty socially conservative. Those millions of people coming in over the southern border should be an easy demographic for the Republican Party to recruit.
Rapists and racists? When you support a rapist and racist to run the country, expect that to be criticized. And aren’t Republicans supposed to be all about “free speech”? But oh no, somebody called me names, it’s awful.
My brother in christ......Donald Trump wears makeup. How many actual "tough guys" do you know that wear makeup?
Back in the days of my parents, a fat guy with lifts and orange makeup would have been called a (anti-gay slur) and would have been the butt of every joke.
He's bankrupted 2 casinos, failed to sell football steaks airlines and liquor to Americans, he shits himself and wears a diaper, and is so intellectually deficient that me, an autistic guy, could run circles around him in debate.
Yet somehow, he's seen as a "business genius". HA!
Okay. Let’s say you have a compelling and coherent argument. Where can I go to read more about each of the things you write of, and share community with like-minded people?
You speak oddly of people like they are monolithic and lacking perceptive nuance (more like animals than any people I know). In the US, of all places, there is tremendous heterogeneity. What are the key elements that you know of “they”?
I think it’s safe to say that there is severe overfitting and pattern matching behavior involved. When I come across someone who says something so broadly judgmental and unfounded, I become immediately intrigued as to how this person is either exploiting or exploited, one of which is assured. I hope you are doing okay.
selling out is a marketing piece. If they wanted to raise money for development of AT Proto they could raise more by taking backorders and shipping when available. Selling a limited edition in order to sell out is because it's cheaper to get people to write about you than it is to buy ad placement.
It can be both, and there's nothing wrong with that. Could they have gathered a few bucks more if they had taken orders as long as they come in? Sure. But at some point they'd inevitably go "we could make even more with larger batches" only to end up with considerably loss on that one last batch.
Taking the publicity instead of squeezing the lemon past the easy part is a perfectly rational decision.
It’s a poor definition. The same “subsidization and directive influence” applies to all of Krugman’s Nobel-wining domestic champion, emerging market development leaders, in virtually all ‘successful’ economies. It also applies in the context of badly run, failed and failing economies. Safe to say this factor is only somewhat correlated. Broad assertions are going to be factually wrong.
The key element here is that the power exchange in this case goes both ways. The corporations do favors for the administration (sometimes outright corrupt payments and sometimes useful favors, like promoting certain kinds of content in the media, or firing employees who speak up.) And in exchange the companies get regulatory favors. While all economic distortions can be problematic — national champion companies probably have tradeoffs - this is a form of distortion that hurts citizens both by distorting the market, and also by distorting the democratic environment by which citizens might correct the problems.
All snakes have scales, so there is a 100% correlation between being a snake and having scales.
That does not imply that fish are snakes. Nor does the presence of scaled fish invalidate the observation that having scales is a defining attribute of snakes (it's just not a sufficient attribute to define snakes).
For correlation to be 1, it's not enough that all snakes have scales. You also need all scaly animals to be snakes.
Here's a toy example. Imagine three equally sized groups of animals: scaly snakes, scaly fish, and scaleless fish. (So all snakes have scales, but not all scaly animals are snakes.) That's three data points (1,1) (0,1) (0,0) with probability 1/3 each. The correlation between snake and scaly comes out as 1/2.
You can also see it geometrically. The only way correlation can be 1 is if all points lie on a straight line. But in this case it's a triangle.
You’re looking for the logical argument here, not the statistical one. You sampled from snakes and said there is a 100% correlation with being a snake (notwithstanding the counterarg in an adjacent comment about scale-free snakes).
I am noting that the logical argument does not hold in the provided definition. If “some” attributes hold in a definition, you are expanding the definitional set, not reducing it, and thus creating a low-res definition. That is why I said: ‘this is a poor definition.’
So then you agree that the original post that called this "text book fascism" was wrong, as this is just one very vague, and only slightly correlated property.
