DOGE Follows the Money

Also working M-F doesn't cut it and why "It's Classified" is not a defense

Yesterday I saw the above two Xeets and figured that good things were going to show up this weekend. I am entirely unsurprised to wake up today to discover that I was completely right.

Turns out that DOGE is getting access to the computer systems of various agencies and in the process causing much heartburn and people unexpectedly resigning for trying to stop them. The DOGE guys are clearly using that well know investigative adage - “Follow the money” - and to do that they need to see who paid whom under what authority in order to provide what.

However, what has been somewhat of a surprise is that previous news releases have allowed some journalists to find all kinds of interesting details about, say, USAID. This may help explain the panic behind DOGE getting access to their systems. Likewise open government laws have allowed a lady who Xeets as DataRepublican to build databases cross referencing government grants with various NGOs. With help from some others (I think), it looks like she has now put together a graphical tool that shows how money flows from the US government and then between the various NGOs to end up in some unexpected places, such as the grubby paws of an NGO whose president is a certain W. Kristol, which spends a lot of money on salaries and not a lot on anything else

These sorts of details from the public data suggest that when one gets access to the actual payment details some fascinating discovering will be made about where NGOs actually bank their cash and who they share with. Hints from Musk’s Xitter feed suggest that they are already finding irregularities in the process. Hence the hyperventilation from people like Fauxahontas:

This is amusing because it unintentionally shines a light onto the differences between trust/integrity and the official clearence / classification process.

Warren is concerned, as is fellow senatorial blowhard Ron Wyden, that DOGE is controlled by Elon Musk and Musk does business in West Taiwan and so will leak sensitive banking data to the Chicoms. Or something. The logic escapes me.

Considering that OPM was already penetrated seriously by the West Taiwanese PLA cyber people in the Obama era anyway this seems somewhat… unconvincing.

I have however seen various people, including Wyden in the link above, say stuff like:

The press has previously reported that Musk was denied a high-level clearance to access the government’s most sensitive secrets. I am concerned that Musk’s enormous business operation in China -- a country whose intelligence agencies have stolen vast amounts of sensitive data about Americans, including U.S. government employee data by hacking U.S. government systems -- endangers U.S. cybersecurity and creates conflicts of interest that make his access to these systems a national security risk.

Does anyone seriously think that the richest man in the world is going to send data to a regime which subsidizes competitors to pretty much all of his businesses. It is, of course, possible that Musk’s personal data infrastruture could be hacked by the Chicoms (or other nation states) but the level of grasping here makes the underpants gnomes business plan look plausible.

[Let’s ignore the admission about “a country whose intelligence agencies have stolen vast amounts of sensitive data about Americans, including U.S. government employee data by hacking U.S. government systems” and what that says about US government IT security practices]

First it assumes that the DOGE people are unthinking Musk minions who will slurp up all the data and stick it on a USB stick (or equivalent) and hand it over to Musk (or other minions). Then Musk (or minions) will put this in a server that they can use for nefarious purposes that is on the piublic internet where anyone can access it. And then that when they do the latter they’ll leave the admin password unchanged and not put in place other security features like ACLs to limit access to specific locations.

Now people have done that - see a certain H Clinton and her emails - but there have not been (m)any examples of that with Musk’s companies. For example people may note the 2023 Tesla data breach which was an insider “whistleblower” copying data but that’s not the same at all since as I undertstand it the individual(s) who did took that data had appropriate access. This is radically different from allowing an external actor to gain access.

If Musk cannot get a clearence then that says more about the broken clearence system than it does about his trustworthyness. It’s also insane because Musk, thanks to SpaceX and Starlink, is in the situation where he personally is the major space player leaving all others, nations as well as individuals, in the dust. If he (and his minions) can be trusted to not share rocketry data with West Taiwan or modify a rocket so that it nosedives on DC and explodes¹, then he should be trusted to see most classified documents that are of far far less concern - and many of which probably shouldn’t be marked classified in the first place.

Musk and the DOGE boys (and girls, and honorary outside members like DataRepublican) are not going to intentionally leak data, they have no motivation to do so. This, of course, is anathema to the DC Swamp creatures who rely on leaking anonymously to the WaPo to influence policy or embarrass rivals/enemies. They come from places in the private sector where data security is critical so they won’t leave stuff open for all the world to hack, and probably they will have learned from things like the Tesla leak and will have controls to stop mass data copying too.

Of course a James O’Keefe like honeypot might be successful, except that unlike the 9-5 M-F bureaucrats, the DOGE crowd are working 24x7 and so probably don’t have time to go and hang out in bars where they can gossip.

In the link above (from Wired about the DOGE boys and clearly intended as a hit job) a couple of things stood out, apart from the way they appear to be pretty much the weaponized autist stereotype. First this:

“To the extent these individuals are exercising what would otherwise be relatively significant managerial control over two very large agencies that deal with very complex topics,” says Nick Bednar, a professor at University of Minnesota’s school of law, “it is very unlikely they have the expertise to understand either the law or the administrative needs that surround these agencies.”

I could be wrong but I’m fairly sure this is a deliberate red herring. These people are not intending to exert managerial control except as it pertains to them getting access to the data. What they are actually doing is mining data to provide reports.

Then there’s the scary concluding paragraph:

“This is consistent with the pattern of a lot of tech executives who have taken certain roles of the administration,” says Bednar. “This raises concerns about regulatory capture and whether these individuals may have preferences that don’t serve the American public or the federal government.”

A certain preacher 2000 years ago told a story about eyes with specs of dust in them and others with large planks in them. An enormous part of the DC swamp is due to regulatory capture. It is highly unlikely that a brand new “agency” that um doesn’t have regulation making capability is going to be captured by the organizations it isn;t regulating. However Bednar absolutely hits it on the head when he says “these individuals may have preferences that don’t serve […] the federal government”. That, you moron, is the point. And in fact these individuals almost certainly have preferences that do serve the American public because the American public elected Trump twice to “drain the swamp”

The swamp is very worried. And if I were Samantha Power I’d be really worried

I predict she’s going to have an interesting Monday when she wakes up and learns that X is investigating all the NGOs that have given her back-scratching deals in exchange for $$$ when she ran USAID

1. Admittedly prior to Jan 20 that might have been seen as a popular act