You don't necessarily need "access to White House computers" to collect information about DNS queries made by White House computers.
Access to a DNS caching server or a DNS provider (like UltraDNS, of which Joffe was the founder) providing services to the White House, would be sufficient.
I would assume collecting the DNS information from the White House is no no. Unless this person/company had explicit permission to capture and then disseminate this information I think they are probably going to be in some legal trouble.
Sure, it's ethically and legally wrong, but I was reacting to the "access to White House computers" in the title. But it's understandable that journalists think that monitoring of DNS traffic implies access to the computers that initiate the traffic.
Got it. Yes I would completely agree its unfair to categorize it "access to white house computers". It would be more accurate imo to say they were monitoring where traffic was going on the white house computers.
Most DNS queries probably can't be traced back to an individual computer from that alone. I would expect NAT or on-premise DNS servers to prevent telling whether a DNS query came from the president, an advisor, or an intern.
It's not out of the realm of possibility, but I would think that you'd need more info to actually be able to tie a specific computer to a DNS query.