Feels like a pretty good Occam’s razor case… but is there any legitimate reason why one would request this?
> Within minutes after DOGE accessed the NLRB's systems, someone with an IP address in Russia started trying to log in, according to Berulis' disclosure.
https://www.npr.org/2025/04/15/nx-s1-5355896/doge-nlrb-elon-...
DOGE is a complete clusterfuck. Fwiw I think there is hard to spot fraud in the govt that should be looked at (eg price inflation at the pentagon, VA, Medicaid/Medicare, SS). They should have done the hard work of uncovering that. Instead they just went for clickbait headlines.
It depends what the objectives are. My impression is that they have been very successful pursuing their actual objectives, while providing a cover story of a 'clusterfuck'.
Give Musk a year or two out of DOGE and it won't matter - Tesla will be back up after Musk isn't in the government spotlight. The voters in the US (who by and large are good little consumers) have the memory of a goldfish for things like this.
You can't even get progressives to not eat at Chick-fil-A despite their founders blantent homophobia. This incident is not going to keep people from buying Tesla in the long run.
That narrative is great at stopping people from taking action - I wonder who it comes from? In fact, companies bow to public pressure all the time. Look at those retreating from DEI or support of LGBTQ rights before Trump took office. One of the beer companies' marketing used a trans person and the transphobia, boycotts, etc. led to them firing people and dropping the trans person.
Also if Twitter/X became a payment and banking platform that's a huge revenue source that could dwarf Tesla.
https://whistlebloweraid.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/2025... - page 2 & 11
"This declaration details DOGE activity within NLRB, the exfiltration of data from NLRB systems, and – concerningly – near real-time access by users in Russia. Notably, within minutes of DOGE personnel creating user accounts in NLRB systems, on multiple occasions someone or something within Russia attempted to login using all of the valid credentials (eg. Usernames/Passwords)"
"For example: In the days after DOGE accessed NLRB’s systems, we noticed a user with an IP address in Primorskiy Krai, Russia started trying to log in. Those attempts were blocked, but they were especially alarming. Whoever was attempting to log in was using one of the newly created accounts that were used in the other DOGE related activities and it appeared they had the correct username and password due to the authentication flow only stopping them due to our no-out-of-country logins policy activating. There were more than 20 such attempts, and what is particularly concerning is that many of these login attempts occurred within 15 minutes of the accounts being created by DOGE engineers."
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/04/whistleblower-doge-sipho...
https://www.npr.org/2025/04/15/nx-s1-5355896/doge-nlrb-elon-...
DOGE needs to be shutdown and everyone of them held as a flight risk while the whole thing is investigated.
I never thought I'd be calling for UN observers for an election in the US but here we are
Why? If Democrats take the House in the midterms, which looks more likely the longer Navarro and Musk have West Wing access, they can basically turn these folks' lives into a living hell of back-to-back hearings (and contempt charges down the road). And if Democrats win the next election, they'll presumably put someone with a pulse in charge who doesn't take two years to bring the most important cases of their administration to the docket.
Ironically, one of the most useful things Trump could do is prosecute e.g. Hunter Bide so SCOTUS can strike down preëmptive pardons.
FWIW I think you're not correct here, or rather, it's not merely irrelevant but would actually harm them. The pardon power protects against criminal prosecution by the federal government. But it doesn't protect against mere embarrassment, nor against new actions performed after the pardon. Congress isn't prosecution, their inquiries are just about information finding, and while they can result in information on crimes surfacing, whether or not the USDOJ decides to pursue that or not is completely up to them. The reason a pardon might flat out hurt in such a scenario is that there is an argument it would eliminate any claim of 5th Amendment privileges. That's commonly referred to the right to be silent, and normally that's effectively what it is, but the actual right is the right against self incrimination [0]. If you've been pardoned for something purely federal then by definition it's impossible to incriminate yourself regarding that, because no criminal case can be brought against you. So there'd be no right to refuse to cooperate with a congressional inquiry, and if you didn't that could be treated as contempt which would not be covered by any pardon for the underlying actions.
So yes if a future Administration wanted to pursue criminal prosecutions for crimes that were undertaken by the current Trump Administration, Trump's pardons could certainly put a stop to that. But in terms of "they can basically turn these folks' lives into a living hell of back-to-back hearings", pardons don't help with that one. And if the Democrats just wanted to thoroughly document exactly what went down and who was responsible to make it an indelible part of the history books, with any social consequences that'd come from that, pardons can't help with that either.
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0: Text of the 5th Amendement: "...nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself..."
Trump has so thoroughly poisoned the well on the "weaponized DOJ / weaponized IRS / weaponized Congressional investigations" that the Democrats, having no spine, won't bother doing any of that.
They also didn't prosecute GWB/Cheney/Rumsfeld for war crimes when they had the chance. This is a long standing policy of theirs.
Not relevant to domestic crimes committed by non-Cabinet folk.
If they won't even investigate the wholesale murder of civilians by the command of the White House and CIA and prosecute those reaponsbile for murder and torture then what hope is there that they'll hold Trump and co to account?
A consistent mistake by the Democrats is thinking foreign policy will win votes. It doesn’t. We’re the centre of the empire and that makes us arrogant and self centred. You can’t win a national election based on war crimes.
Trump won votes in 2024 based on how he said he would handle several foreign policy issues: NATO, Ukraine, Palestine, tariffs, China, and Iran, so I'm not sure what you're getting at here.
> You can’t win a national election based on war crimes.
This clearly is the case, so do the prosecutions after winning the election and running on domestic issues. To do anything less is to both give up the moral high ground and endorse the war crimes by not vigorously investigating them.
Brazenly just logging in from Russia can be a statement all its own.
Is this normal to build this sort of functionality into a software system? Especially software systems that heavily rely on auditability?
You always need it to setup the system initially.
It's like root on Linux: it's an implementation detail that it must be possible.
There is no legitimate justification for this request.
But instead they requested that logging be disabled, thus outing themselves as acting in bad faith.
I’ll agree that Linux security is quite limited and primitive if compared with, say, a mainframe, but it can be made less bad with a reasonable amount of effort.
The short answer would be that mainframes come with RBAC from design, unlike Unix, which has a different security model from conception and then had rbac added on top of it in some cases (such as selinux).
I mean, if we were to apply the equivalent from the article, then no they would not have had a reason nor been time gated.
From the previous post, they had auditor roles built in that they purposely chose to go around
My company retains all e-mails for at least 5 years, for audit purposes. But if some troublemaker were to e-mail child porn to an employee, we'd need to remove that from the audit records, because the laws against possessing child porn don't have an exception for corporate audit records.
So there's essentially always some account with the power to erase things from the audit records.
"No" is the answer to GP: there is no legitimate reason for a fully unlogged superuser account.
If needing things wiped from the audit logs happens often, you might indeed have an audited interface for wiping things from the audit logs.
But if it's very rare? Maybe I just request the production database password for "Incident #12345" and run some careful SQL.
> And there would be other records generated to document the deletion, like I'm sure a long email or slack thread
For sure - but the account capable of deleting entries from the audit logs exists
And if I am ordered to hand it over to someone who doesn't care to explain their actions on slack? Then there won't be any explanations in slack.
Anything musk's dogs claim to find cannot be taken at face value because of this. Because there is no audit, and no evidence that they can offer that they didn't doctor their findings.
The next time they claim that a 170-year old person is receiving SS checks, they have no way to prove that they didn't subtract a century from that person's birthdate in some table.
Of course, given the blatant dishonesty and criminality that the rest of this administration is producing (see: every immigration law case that they are losing in court), you'd have to be a useful idiot to actually assume good intent from them.
They want to prove that AI can do "just as good a job" on these data sets and arrive at "equal conclusions" with a much higher level of effiency.
This is what happens when you get high on your own supply.
That statement might be (slightly) more believable had there not been access attempts from Russian IP addresses using valid (and recently created) DOGE login credentials so very shortly thereafter.
I think if I wanted to describe an account with access to perform "sudo -s" as negatively as possible, I would say "an all-powerful admin account that is exempt from logging activity that would otherwise keep a detailed record of all actions taken by those accounts."
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/nlrb-whistleblower-claims-...
...
While he was at work, and it also contained photographs of him walking his dog taken by a drone.
This is mafia shit.
That's the best I could do. LOL
Some previous attempts for DOGE to get data has resulted in data being deleted before they can look and requests for judges to block access to data.
DOGE may be trying to be covert in order to stop these two activities from happening before they can get and review the data.
By definition, a judge decides what's legitimate.
If DOGE expects their access to be blocked by a court judgement, and bum-rushes agencies to exfiltrate data ahead of the judgement, that's also criminal intent.
I am not sure what you are getting at. "Covert" isn't how I'd describe DOGE's actions. "Brazen" maybe?
What’s happening with judges is very political. We likely won’t know what’s allowed until things have gone through the appeals process. There have been cases of judges admitting they will rule against the current administration no matter the topic or law. This is messy, to say the least.
Yes, this is precisely the accusation being made against DOGE: they are the government actors criminally trying to to prevent the public from knowing what they're doing.
>There have been cases of judges admitting they will rule against the current administration no matter the topic or law.
No, there haven't, but feel free to provide a source.
What exactly did they say and who said it?
What is very political about it?
Since appeals are also decided by judges why is that a better system?
That is how it was designed.