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The original complaint mentions:

"7. March 3rd - I received a call during which an ACIO stated instructions were given that we were not to adhere to SOP with the doge account creation in regards to creating records. He specifically was told that there were to be no logs or records made of the accounts created for DOGE employees."

Which part of doing an audit, or some other DOGE employee's job, requires logs or records not to be made of their accounts?

Another quote:

"They were to be given what are referred to as “tenant owner” level accounts, with essentially unrestricted permission to read, copy, and alter data. Note, these permissions are above even my CIO’s access level to our systems. Well above what level of access is required to pull metrics, efficiency reports, and any other details that would be needed to assess utilization or usage of systems in our agency. We have built in roles that auditors can use and have used extensively in the past but would not give the ability to make changes or access subsystems without approval. The suggestion that they use these accounts instead was not open to discussion."

Audits don't require being able to alter data.

Also, some of the data is mentioned as being sensitive. Although granting access to the data of another agency may make sense, I have trouble believing that direct access to data such as sensitive personal information of third parties would routinely be given to people from outside of the organization. Even within the organization the group of people given access to sensitive data should be as limited as possible.

I have taken part in audits for several organizations over the years, and I can assure you that's not how audits are done at all.

In fact, should the auditor find there is a way for them to access sensitive data without it being logged, they will flag it immediately. That would be the case even under simple financial regulation.

There is absolutely the risk that the people you audit will lie to you or present you with false data. In practice that's not common, because they stand to at the very least lose their jobs. It could also be illegal. Not worth it.

A normal audit, sure. This isn’t that. This is the prison guards flipping the mattress looking for contraband.

All of the public complaining is by staff that don’t understand their new position in the pecking order.

There is a King in charge and he cares not for the wailing of the petty nobles.

>This is the prison guards flipping the mattress looking for contraband.

No its not. These prison searches in fact do tend to find knives and what not and do in fact have some role in managing prison violence.

This is not about anything like that at all.

It’s an analogy about established civilised audit procedure versus whatever DOGE is doing, which is… not that.

It’s not about literal shivs.

Speaking of finding things under the mattress, they did find corruption and waste, which they feel justifies their approach.

In my opinion the tiny amount of “waste” they uncovered is arguably not worth the damage and risk done, but that’s my opinion, not theirs.

Again: the damage and humiliation is part of their agenda. They feel that departments are “disloyal” to the King… err… President and hence ill treatment is not only justified but warranted.

To what extent has those findings been verified? I know the was a lot of noise about things that turned out to be mostly imaginary.

> Speaking of finding things under the mattress, they did find corruption and waste, which they feel justifies their approach.

As far as I know, they did not found much. Every time their claims were checked, it was hot air. We do not have to lie on their behalf to appear reasonable.

> Furthermore, on Monday, April 7, 2025, while my client and my team were preparing this disclosure, someone physically taped a threatening note to Mr. Berulis’ home door with photographs – taken via a drone – of him walking in his neighborhood. The threatening note made clear reference to this very disclosure he was preparing for you

It would be astonishingly stupid to threaten a whistleblower in such an amateurish manner when you’re backed by the party in power and have the full and official apparatus of the state at your disposal.

astonishingly stupid sounds about right for the people leading apparatus of the state :)

What could they possibly hope to accomplish with a threatening note and drone photos other than to provide fodder for his complaint?

Why would drone photos even be necessary when you’ve already demonstrated that you know where they live?

What possible purpose does such a threat serve?

To intimidate. To scare into silence.

Except that all you’d be doing is creating a trail of physical evidence demonstrating a felony conspiracy — and a frankly stupid one at that.

From recent news it seems unlikely these guys are interested in behaving rationally.

It just doesn’t pass the smell test.

- Who decided to threaten the whistleblower and why?

- Who approved such an idiotic idea?

- Who determined his home address?

- Who flew the drone, timed to capture photos of the whistleblower while on his way to/from his home?

- Who took the drone photography, printed out the images, and wrote a threatening note?

- Who then took all that and physically posted it on his door?

That’s a very involved process, with substantial risk, with no realistic upside. None of the incentives are aligned with the behavior. It simply doesn’t make sense.

Applying Occam’s razor, it seems a lot more likely to be fabricated — that’s a scenario in which incentives actually align with the behavior.

In practice, that shouldn’t make a difference to the investigation; given the physical evidence, they should investigate in great detail the origin of the threat — regardless of whether it’s a hoax or real.

You don't think Big Balls can order a drone on amazon? He was already fired once for intimidating rival companies online https://newrepublic.com/post/191325/elon-musk-doge-teen-cori...

I'm not sure what you're referring to; that article says he leaked internal information to a competitor.

That's not ethically excusable, but it's worlds apart from the kind of very real-world felonies involved in this kind of intimidation.

This kind of intimidation would be an incredible and extremely stupid escalation that carries the potential for decades in federal prison, and for what? DOGE has the ruling party and the full force of the executive branch backing their actions. They have no need whatsoever to engage in behavior so ridiculous and counterproductive.

To be clear, this would have required stalking the whistleblower at and around his home, in person. It would have required creating significant physical evidence that could trivially lead back to the perpetrator. There will be cell phone location records, security camera footage, printer microdots, camera lens/sensor fingerprints.

not sure if this is a serious question…? what would it accomplish if you were the whistleblower? if it was me, my family would be on the first flight out of the country

It would convince me that whoever I was whistleblowing on was so remarkably stupid as to engage in a felonious criminal conspiracy while leaving behind physical evidence thereof.

I hope that the threatening note and photos have been turned over to the police, where they can be analyzed for fingerprints, printer microdots, et al, and the police can canvas the neighborhood for security camera footage.

As a tactical move, this kind of threat makes zero sense for anyone in the government to carry out if they are even a semi-rational actor.

our HIGHEST-level government people are texting each other (along with whoever else happens to be in their contacts) war plans so you know, stupid is as stupid does :)

That assumes that legal repercussions are expected. The current administration behaves as if laws are only to be followed in case of failure, and only temporarily.

They refer to "lawfare", where you do whatever you feel necessary, and only engage in legal systems where absolutely required, and only to make whatever inciting behaviour legal in retrospect.

Do you also delete logs, fire the cybersecurity team, and stonewall breach investigations?

https://www.npr.org/2025/04/15/nx-s1-5355896/doge-nlrb-elon-...

In that case, you and departments you work for are either breaking the law regularly or working with public data anyway.

Besides, no one needs unmonitored write access for audit. Even less DOGE who does no audit and don't have knowledge how to do audit. Audits are supposed to he traceable.

No one needs write access, but most systems only have a read/write predefined role for tenant-wide access. If you don’t trust the department staff to give you anything but a predefined role, it’s typically the only option. Similarly if you need to fire privileged IT staff on the spot for headcount reduction you need admin-equivalent rights to lock them out. You can’t in general trust disgruntled admins to lock themselves out!

Also, in some cloud systems full read access can give you direct or indirect access to service keys / API keys which then are write equivalent permissions anyway.

> If you don’t trust the department staff

I find the argument the most absurd in relation to DOGE. There is no reason to give them more trust then to anyone else in goverment ... and multiple reasons to trust them less. Starting from personal histories of some of them and how they were selected.

As such, this "I dont trust" is just reflection of their incompetence, arrogance and a lazy excuse.

I don't believe your statement that you ask for, and successfully receive, tenant admin rights from large government departments.

DOGE employees aren't simply doing their job. They are actively subverting the government to fatally wound it.

Omg they also saw spikes in DNS traffic and high load during days exfiltration ahead of audit...

Clearly the (system) auditing infrastructure wasn't robust enough to still provide a lot of monitoring even in the service is being managed by someone else...

Also a several hundred line teardown of a 300line file is exactly what is wrong with some coders. Not having a CI/CL for every single short tool written once to do a job is called being productive...

> This sounds scary but I regularly request this right from large government departments and I get it granted to me.

Prove it. I want you to give examples of where you did something like this.

It’s not publicly provable for many obvious reasons such as the delegation being time bound.

Anything is publicly provable. And I think you can publicly prove it too. As another poster put it, if that's how you've dealt with systems before then either you were working with publicly available data or you were party to a crime.

Absolute balderdash.