Doge accesses federal payroll system and punishes employees who objected | Hacker News Reader

Doge accesses federal payroll system and punishes employees who objected

arstechnica.com

50 pointsunsnap_biceps11 comments

I understand this entry will not stay in the front page long, but this makes me think.

If it would have been any company or org firing IT people who just exercised good security practices, it would have been discussed here.

It feels like the Trump gov has won this: they can get away with things that would not have been accepted in other places, because they either 1) managed to normalize the incorrect idea that any criticism towards them is political and ideological, or 2) managed to create a climate where any criticism will just generate the usual nonconstructive tar pit, so constructive people will not even try.

I hope the justice system goes hard on Doge and Elon for this.

I'm curious what the courts can do about this. My thought is that a president should not have this power to intervene with foundational government processes without congressional approval. Otherwise the next president will re-write the software to cater to their political agenda, and so forth.

The memo "also warned that individuals with the elevated access to the system could become prime targets for cybersecurity attacks by terrorists, nations or other malicious actors,"

...and they say Americans don't do irony!

Makes you think the Dems should have been harder on Trump. Although he has been convicted he has served no time at all. And he could still run for President after Jan 6.

I will never understand this.

Too many people would not have believed that the consequences of a free Trump would have been this. This is so far outside the range of norms.

This was always the obvious outcome, those who didn’t believe it were delusional. I won’t speak for anyone but me, but this is exactly where I thought we’d get based on the chain of outcomes.

Those too many people are naive if they think Trump operates within 'the norms'. The first term showed us he doesn't, I don't understand why everyone would have thought differently. Did everyone's memory get fried during the pandemic?

The US seems to always be first with innovations, while the rest of the world follows & learns from what works and doesn’t. The playbook being run by DOGE et al is impressively complex since it is up against a complex system of checks and balances, but so far said playbook is working..

I suspect the US situation helped France treat Le Pen as an actual criminal rather than going with a light touch “just in case a criminal is what voters want”.

The lessons will be learned but it’ll take 10-20 years for forward-thinking leaders to emerge and help bake them into the political systems of the future. Your unborn children will thank you for living through this.

So someone following Federal Law gets punished ? I wonder what all Federal Employees think about DOGE grabbing their pay information ?

I am sure all this data will be saved on private servers owned by Musk, maybe for AI purposes. But hey, at least it is not emails.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com