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Comment by wmf | Hacker News Reader

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Thing is: Everything they're doing is against the rules. Except they aren't "rules", they are laws.

The problem is, those tasked with upholding and enforcing the laws aren't doing their job (Congress), are swamped with a deluge of blatant lawbreaking but still have to maintain professional decorum to not open themselves up to attacks (the justice system), or are outright corrupt (higher level federal courts including, sadly, the Supreme Court).

conflating administrative employees with congress/senate is a hint you know nothing about your own government.

also lost of the laws being broken are civil liberties protection and separation of powers, ... the only things holding the corruption under some control, which further proves you are either extremely uninformed or malicious. or worse, an "accelerationist"

These aren't rules made by bureaucrats. They are laws written by Congress, a coequal branch of government, in response to the Nixon administration's abuse of executive power

And in some cases FDR's abuse of executive power. If we manage to get... Someone, I don't know who which is depressing, elected that is interested in preserving democracy above all the other current issues, I'm sure there will be a lot more laws to safeguard this happening again. Personal recommendations, nox the filibuster it creates incentive, use federal money to get all the states to switch to ranked choice voting for all federal positions. And MMP for house and electoral college. Maybe nix the filibuster as the last item of business so that the first Congress without it will have more than two parties (due to those electoral changes which lead to 4-8 parties usually).

I don't think that "arguing that something is against the rules" is in the CIA sabotage manual, because it's not generally considered sabotage. Maybe if you argue things are against the rules that you know aren't, to slow things down?

It’s not so much arguing against the rules. It’s following them to the letter when unnecessary.

It doesn’t matter that the big boss has said that purchasing a $5 knick-knack is ok. You will have that purchase go through the full procurement process, even up to and including an exhaustive search for (cheaper) alternatives.

I also love to unilaterally determine what is and isn’t necessary.

Are you suggesting that’s a valuable use of time?

I make decisions about such tradeoffs every day.

I’m suggesting that a $5 purchase abs a critical government agency’s infosec are different considerations.

What’s that dril quote? There’s no difference between good things and bad things? That’s what this last sentence sounds like.

This doesn't really make sense. If its in the logs, then they already did it. They weren't slowed at all.

This doesn't really apply to the situation in the slightest.

If your logs show your actions are against the rules, pointing that out is not "sabotage". It is being good guy employee, reporting your against the rules actions.

This one is very very clear and unambiguous. There is no symmetry in your example. The Civil servant is actually in the right and doge bro in the wrong.

This doesn’t make sense unless they’re doing something illegal. They have backing from the top to audit the system. They don’t have to answer to any of the people who might complain, so the only reason they need to do this is if they’re doing something which violates federal laws where the penalties are worse then getting an angry email from someone in the security group who your boss will yell at for you.

The other big problem with this theory is that there’s no evidence of sabotage. During the first Trump administration, federal employees followed their leadership just like they had for Obama, Bush, etc. and every sign shows that would have happened again, except for the refusal to take on personal liability for breaking federal laws.

> Now imagine you're a DOGE bro

What does any of this data have to do with making the department more efficient? I can't imagine doing _any_ of this if that was my actual goal.

> and so do the DOGE bros.

When I believe my actions are "fully justified" then that is _precisely_ when I want logging enabled. So no one on Earth could dispute that.

This is… the most reasonable explanation I’ve heard so far for everything that is happening.

God knows there must be enough normally unused rules in the federal government.

The idea that they need to operate -- on hugely sensitive data and systems -- in darkness because any sort of accountability amounts to "sabotage" is dubious.

"Rules for thee, not for me"

This is some sort of "The Deep State is trying to foil them" nonsense.

And to be clear, aside from a weird brute forcing library and the fact that all of the DOGE employees seem to be spectacularly incompetent, there are rational technical reasons someone might want logging temporarily disabled for a one-off. For instance doing an activity that is justified and legitimate and secure and reasonable, but that would yield TB of logs unnecessarily, itself which might cause operational or availability issues. But having a bunch of incompetent script kiddies using their garbage scripts makes that fringe justification unlikely, and they're likely doing very criminal things.

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