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Comment by the_snooze | Hacker News Reader

At the very least, it’s a field day for foreign intelligence in DC. Offering these guys some money, women, status, or drink would pay massive dividends.

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This person was fired from a trivial teenage script kid job after two months because he couldn’t resist sharing their internal information.

Only a few years later, he was thrust into the core information systems of the United States right next to people with security clearance.

Targets like this are a dream come true for foreign adversaries looking for someone to corrupt.

Who knows how much compromising content his old peers already have on him. The chat logs revealed they’re already thinking about how much access he has to valuable secrets.

SF-86 Section 13A Employment Activities

>For this employment have any of the following happened to you in the last seven (7) years?

>Fired, quit after being told you would be fired, left by mutual agreement following charges or allegations of misconduct, left by mutual agreement following notice of unsatisfactory performance.

>Provide the reason for being fired.

https://www.opm.gov/Forms/pdf_fill/sf86.pdf

Security clearances are granted by the president, or someone delegated by him. The president has absolute authority to bypass, modify, or shut down the clearance credentialing system. There is no law or Constitutional requirement dictating security requirements or how they are applied.

As the sibling comment pointed out, this is not to say that doing so is a good idea. But it's very probably legal.

Nope, it's not illegal at all. This where one of the "traditions" should have come in and congress/the people should have burned Trump at stake for doing so, though. All those concerns about Hilary Emails 9 years ago, but we let Trump fast track his circus in no problems.

I don't believe the POTUS is bound by the government's assessment of an employee's security risk.

Whether or not ignoring such things is a good idea is something voters must judge.

You have a point - there are probably no defined rules about whether security risk rules apply when POTUS is employing someone to do something illegal or unconstitutional.

If anyone gets to judge, however, it will be SCOTUS, not voters. It's hard to guess, right now, whether that's a plus for security.

Have they even done the training that says "watch out for women trying to get into your pants"? Or did they just show up?

I think we both know the answer. Most of these DOGE people wouldn’t have been allowed in the building, much less the system root a couple of months ago because they’d never pass a clearance check.

technically, a clearance and background check have never been done on political appointees. the fbi openly says so. at least this is not new... the new thing is the low level of petty criminals being apointed.

Political appointees don’t get root, and they still had to get clearance for sensitive materials (as it’s legally required for the people securing a SCIF not to allow anyone who doesn’t have clearance in the door). Part of why the new administration is trying to bull through the process is that his first term had many delays due to appointees failing those checks.

How do you know who has a clearance? Is there a database they check? Or is it word of mouth from their boss?

Yes, there’s a database and people who audit access, ensure that permissions are periodically reviewed (i.e. just because you needed access 5 years ago doesn’t mean your current duties still require the same access), and other events can trigger reviews (e.g. a large amount of personal debt could make someone a greater risk).

Which department/agency maintains the database of who-has-which-clearance?

The Office of Personnel Management runs a lot of the standardized stuff, including the system which people use to submit the standard forms, but agencies have their own offices and variations:

https://ourpublicservice.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/back...

they get root if the job requires.

appointees are interviewed, not vetted by the fbi like federal employs. the dowvote brigade could read the article since im rentioning a literal quote from there.

Political appointees typically work on policy, they’re not shelling into servers and moving data around. This is especially true of the “special government employee” category Musk is using where it’s short-term (not more than 130 days in a 365 day period) and intended for consulting type expert advice rather than bypassing the normal hiring rules.

> the dowvote brigade could read the article since im rentioning a literal quote from there.

Alternately, consider that they’re recognizing that the scope of this situation is different both in terms of the level of access and nature of the work and unwillingness to follow policies. For example, when they tried to barge into the SCIF at USAID the staff who tried to stop them were under a legal obligation to do so - they’re charged with requiring everyone who enters to have a clearance. Historically, people got those and so it was never codified into law that they had to. Similarly, if people were requesting the access needed to perform their official task and using agency accounts and equipment to do so, you didn’t need an “auditor” to get approved at the level needed to be a system administrator. This is turning into a big scandal not just because it’s so highly politicized but also because bulling through so many process protections dramatically increases the potential risk.

As a simple example, reports have these guys getting admin access and using personal email accounts and equipment. Consider what happens if someone emails them a PDF saying it has evidence of fraud and it has a nasty payload. If they have unnecessary levels of access or have demanded that restrictions be removed, the fallout for that will be much worse than it would be if they were following the rules. Every federal agency has people employed specifically to prevent all of those layers of failure from happening.

Background checks have always been done on political appointees. They aren't a requirement for getting the position but historically they've been done prior to appointment so that leadership knows if they are a security risk.

And for appointees that require congressional confirmation the checks have been giving to congress prior to hearings for the same reason.

They weren't required but they very much have been done for political appointees in every admin in recent history except this one.

exept they haven't

https://www.vox.com/trump-administration/388627/fbi-backgrou...

That article you linked says exactly what I said. They aren't required but they are customary.

> technically, a clearance and background check have never been done on political appointees. the fbi openly says so.

"Trump team agrees to DoJ background checks for nominees"

* https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/03/trump-team-b...

"FBI background checks of presidential nominees, explained":

* https://www.npr.org/2025/01/15/nx-s1-5260953/fbi-background-...

This has been the case since Eisenhower in 1953:

* https://www.archives.gov/federal-register/codification/execu...

    > much less the system root

This comments section is getting wild. Do you have any proof that DOGE team members have been granted "system root" (whatever that means)? When I Google, it is unclear how many DOGE team members have security clearance and at what level.

> When I Google, it is unclear how many DOGE team members have security clearance and at what level.

They are flooding the zone. That's by design. At one point they had "read-only access" to records. Then later people say they had full access and have backups.

The only definitive proof we have publicly Is that a federal judge made two orders; One to restrict access to the treasury for all of DOGE except for the 2 people allegedly already working in treasury. And One to order deletion of any records they have backed up. All other reports come from first or second hand sources. AFAIK, no one truly knows DOGE did in the Treasury, and we won't know until a court proceeding later this month.

There's a rumor that the doge team went and did their metadata dump at treasury on midnight on the 21st or whatever. But what I think would be more interesting is if musk hasn't done anything, and all this crying and screaming is just at the threat of peeking at the books.

Because that seems more both their style.

They could just hack their devices remotely, or physically break into his residence. I suspect a serial leaker will lack neither the discipline to not copy data onto personal devices, nor the opsec to withstand a motivated nation-state, since a lot of the work seems rushed, and is off playbook.

Perhaps giving an inexperienced script kiddie full access was part of a broader plan to allow someone else to covertly “steal” the data without directly implicating those in charge.

I believe the term is 'patsy' or, more generally, a scapegoat.

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