Original code: https://github.com/Ge0rg3/requests-ip-rotator
Forked: https://github.com/markoelez/async-ip-rotator
Code is pretty much the same, with comments removed, some `async` sprinkled in and minor changes (I bet this was just pasted into LLM with prompt to make it async, but if that worked why not).
Except... Original GPL3 license is gone. Obviously not something you would expect DOGE people to understand or respect.
Archived repo page: https://archive.ph/LI7tt; archived previous repo count: https://archive.ph/tgkg5
0. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/04/i-no-longer-hack...
You can download it as a Git repository from https://archive.softwareheritage.org/api/1/vault/git-bare/sw...
I say "may", because I'm not sure if you have internal code on a public git or FTP server, is that consider "distributing"?
But we know it isn't speculative based on these public data. You're arguing they should have covered up better. I agree. But that doesn't make (a) it okay or (b) this article speculative.
You can fork anything privately for yourself.
But the SHARE IT act really helps formalize what was already happening. Most code is shared and made public. It's paid for by the public. Though it's usually not easily searchable as it's distributed via different platforms, means, and may even require submitting a freedom of information request first. But in more cases than not, there is obligation to share when requested.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/9566
My engineer gives me a list of (for example) valve actuators on a site. I open that list in Emacs, manipulate it a bit, and then use it as input to a function I've written. That function generates a CSV file with things like tag name, Modbus ID, polling method, etc. that I can import into Wonderware. It's considerably faster and less error prone than manually creating and configuring hundreds of instances.
I say it's not interesting because most people in my position write little bits of code like this to automate the repetitive parts of our jobs. I just do it with elisp instead of Excel or Python.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_status_of_works_by_t...
“If this were a side project, it would just be bad code,” the reviewer wrote. “But if this is representative of how you build production systems, then there are much larger concerns. This implementation is fundamentally broken, and if anything similar to this is deployed in an environment handling sensitive data, it should be audited immediately.”
Look at the critique [0] and then look at the code [1].
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20250423135719/https://github.co...
[1] https://github.com/ricci/async-ip-rotator/blob/master/src/as...
Modestly competent presentation is now getting portrayed as an "AI tell".
I was able to generate extremely comparable output from ChatGPT by telling it to create a hyper-negative review, engage in endless hyperbole, and focus on danger, threats, and the obvious inexperience of the person who wrote it. Such is the nature of LLMs it'd happily produce the similar sort of nonsense for even the cleanest and tightest code ever written. I'll just quote its conclusion because LLM verbosity is... verbose.
---
Conclusion This code is a ticking time bomb of security vulnerabilities, AWS billing horrors, concurrency demons, and maintenance black holes. It would fail any professional code review:
Security: Fails OWASP Top 10, opens SSRF, IP spoofing, credential leakage
Reliability: Race conditions, silent failures, unbounded threading
Maintainability: Spaghetti architecture, no documentation, magic literals
Recommendation: Reject outright. Demolish and rewrite from scratch with proper layering, input validation, secure defaults, IAM roles, structured logging, and robust error handling.
---
Oooo sick burn. /eyeroll
Just to check, you know that ChatGPT is fully built on human writing right?
Would it be ironic if I claim "what you write looks like what the tool can output, so you used the tool" if the tool was built to output stuff that looks like what you write.
Fun fact: anything you or me write looks like ChatGPT too. It could be surprising if people didn't spend billions and stole truckloads of scraped unlicensed content including content created by you and me to get the tool to literally do just this.
1. Verbosity. Developers are busy people and security researcher devs are busy even moreso. Someone so skilled wouldn't spend more than 2-3 sentences of time in critiquing this repo.
2. Hostility. Writing bug free code is hard, even impossible for most. Unless your name is Linus Torvalds, Richard Hipp, or maybe Dan Abramov, most devs are not comfortable throwing stones while knowing they live in glass houses.
3. Ownership. "Killshot" comments like this are only ever written by frustrated gatekeepers against weak PRs that would hurt "their baby". Nobody would get emotionally invested in other people's random utility projects. This is just a single python file here without much other context.
4. Author. The author is still an aspiring developer. See their starred repo highlighting adherence to SOLID/DRY principles as a primary feature of their project. Not something you'd expect to see from a seasoned security researcher. https://github.com/SSD1805/EchoFlow
5. Content. The critique is... wrong. It says the single file, utility repo is "awful" for being a "less maintainable" monolith. Hilariously, it calls the code bad because it does not need dependency injection. This was a top critique in the comment!
--
Regardless of political persuasion, I hope this trend of using AI to cyberbully people you don't like goes away.
- Massive verbosity.
- Flawless spelling and grammar.
- Grandiose tone.
- Robotic cadence where every paragraph and sentence has similar length (particularly obvious in longer text.)
- Em dashes everywhere.
- The same few stock phrases or sentence structures used over and over - e.g. "This isn't X—it's Y", which that issue uses twice in two paragraphs:
There is nothing "hardcore" about writing fragile, insecure, and unscalable code. This isn’t pushing boundaries—it’s demonstrating a lack of engineering fundamentals.
If this is what was learned at previous jobs, then it’s time to unlearn it and start following best practices. Because right now, this is not just bad engineering—it’s reckless.
(None of what I just wrote is intended as a defence of DOGE.)
Verbose hostility of that kind and throwing stones, even nitpicking with exaggerated outrage are no exception. And lack of experience never stopped people from feeling and behaving like god given gift to programming profession.
Neither the critique, the critiquer's profile, nor even the Krebs article says that the critique is a security researcher, and it definitely isn't the case that all devs are particularly "busy people". You yourself argue later, in fact, that the signs are that the author is not an experienced dev or security researcher, so it is nonsense (even more than assuming an average rules out an exception in the group) to argue that the code is AI-written based on the assumption that normally, a security researcher would be too busy to write it.
> Hostility. Writing bug free code is hard, even impossible for most. Unless your name is Linus Torvalds, Richard Hipp, or maybe Dan Abramov, most devs are not comfortable throwing stones while knowing they live in glass houses.
If you've been online more than about 5 minutes, you know that there is no shortage of hostility, and that even if it isn't most of any given community, its a highly visible subset of any community online.
> "Killshot" comments like this are only ever written by frustrated gatekeepers against weak PRs that would hurt "their baby". Nobody would get emotionally invested in other people's random utility projects.
The only reason we are talking about this on HN is that this isn't some random "other people's random utility project". The critique was posted while the author of the code being critiqued was a high profile figure in current news stories, and the critiquer posted a more explicitly political followup the day after the original critique addressing the author's highly-publicized resignation due to the news coverage.
> The author is still an aspiring developer. See their starred repo highlighting adherence to SOLID/DRY principles as a primary feature of their project.
That...doesn't support the critique being AI. In fact, it undercuts it because it provides a simpler explanation than AI as the explanation for your next bullet point, that the critique is wrong (especially, the SOLID/DRY focus is particularly consistent combined with the "aspiring dev" status you describe is particularly consistent with the specific things you focus on the critique being wrong about.) It also undercuts your first bullet point, as already discussed, which hinges on the assumption that the critique was written by an very busy experienced security researcher, and not an aspiring dev..
I mean, if excess verbosity, a more regularized format than is typical for the venue, and being wrong together are hallmarks of an AI written critique, then I'd say your post is at least as much AI-suspicious as the critique under discussion.
x_forwarded_for = headers.get("X-Forwarded-For")
if x_forwarded_for is None:
x_forwarded_for = ipaddress.IPv4Address._string_from_ip_int(
randint(0, MAX_IPV4)
)
So, it's set as a header, sent to a user owned proxy, then to the actual external endpoint.
On the other hand I think the receiving API Gateway will be able to see and log your AWS account identifier when you do this. So your IP may not be the only identifying information that needs to be obscured for this to actually work.
You can take a look at plugins like IPRotate. We are currently working on bringing that into our product.
Even this example if you maxx out your usage of regions appears to only give (2,4 * num_regions) or let's say 70-80 ip's maximum. And they are AWS ip's, which means it is gonna be really easy to detect and block that traffic.
But if you know your target receives lots of traffic from AWS systems all around the world ... this is a good way to mimic that.
It's possible, but very unlikely, the copyright license wasn't actually violated because, for example, the fork could have arranged a separate license.
The best example of this is the Qt Project's code: https://www.qt.io/qt-licensing
You can get it under a GPL license for free. You can pay them money to get it under a Commercial license that would let you modify the code without releasing changes.
So, while I doubt it happened, the person who forked it here could have contacted the original author, the copyright holder, and asked for an exemption from the GPL terms.
You are only required to keep the GPL3 license if you re-distribute it. Putting it in a GitHub repo, is ambiguous whether or not it is re-distributing it, at least morally.
If you want to delete the license in a personal copy, that is perfectly valid according to the license terms. If you then happen to upload that to a private GitHub repo, also perfectly valid.
If you then happen to upload that to a public GitHub repo, because of, say, restrictions on free private repos, without intent to distribute, then what?
Then you keep the license eh? Distributing without an intent to distribute is distributing.
Git is free and open source. If you want version control and collaboration and NO unintended distribution completely for free you can just use Git. It even has a built in server to share with your work buddies.
To be fair I see in my daily life folks who copy and paste from stack overflow or random GitHub repo and move on with their day. They ignore the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike or whatever license is applied to the code they copied.
I see on this very site people who will share copyrighted articles that are behind a paywall (just because it is on some archive site doesn’t make it right).
Please don’t take this as support for DOGE and the headaches they are causing. To make a cheap jab at a group of people while ignoring the group that you associate with is bad form.
Copy pasting from stack overflow without attribution is wrong but it's also harder to claim "ownership" over single lines or small snippets. It depends how "obvious" they are. You definitely can't copyright trivial functions. There's a lot of gray here but yes attribution is always good.
But things get a lot less murky when we're talking about forking a project. That's usually nontrivial and non obvious. I think what's most important is that removing a license is an active decision. Certainly that would make a critical difference in a court [0]
Then there's further escalation by who is doing the action. The more power and influence you have the greater responsibilities. All men are not created equal. Men with more power can disproportionally do more damage and require higher accountability. So yeah, I care a fuck ton more about a government employee doing something bad especially while performing official duties more than some rando. The ability to do harm is very different.
The reason I dislike your comment is because it's dismissive of the action. "Other people do it!" Is not a defense nor excuse. It is even worse by ignoring multiple points of context.
[0] though protecting open source has been traditionally hard for many reasons. Specifically it's hard for small developers to take legal action, especially against larger bodies. But isn't this something we should want to be fixed? Credit for our own contributions?!
What group does the person who makes the comment associate with?
irony
" On or about March 11, 2025, NxGen metrics indicated abnormal usage at points the prior week. I saw way above baseline response times, and resource utilization showed increased network output above anywhere it had been historically – as far back as I could look. I noted that this lined up closely with the data out event. I also notice increased logins blocked by access policy due to those log-ins being out of the country. 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. "
The worst possible interpretation is straightforward - they are working for the Russians as agents and let the Russians in or installed the keyloggers for Russia.
Excerpt: "How much more proof do we need that this administration is completely compromised? There is zero reason for the US to relax any offensive digital actions against Russia. If anything, we should be applying more."
Or it could be state sponsored and they didn’t think they needed to be covert as they could walk through the front door on invitation of the executive branch.
I struggle to see what Russia would gain with nlrb data, but getting caught “helping doge” furthers distrust between the two sides of our country - which is something they gain from
A list of whistleblowers at American companies who presumably don't want said companies to know the details of their work.
>furthers distrust between the two sides of our country - which is something they gain from
How?
Yeah Trump winning seems to help them in Ukraine but their need is disruption as much as different policy in the longer term.
This story will percolate up to many democrats who will be furious that Russia is “helping” “doge”.
Separately, it won’t (or will be dismissed as “overreacting” or “lying”) by republicans. They will see the democrats as overreacting and having trump derangement syndrome.
Meanwhile, the next doge encounter with an agency now brings greater fear of illicit acts for internal IT people and more controls for doge to demand are turned off creating more conflict within government function.
The sides believe in the evil and stupidity of the other will be further ossified. Meanwhile, Russia is effectively able to do espionage in a way where getting caught doesn’t diminish the value of the espionage work they are engaged in.
They were accessing Github over the internet from superuser accounts they were presumably also using as their user account. Given the code quality, I doubt their opsec is put together, either.
Best possible case I see would be that the whistleblower has made some mistake (or is being intentionally dishonest). Seems plausible for instance that "it appeared they had the correct username and password" based on "our no-out-of-country logins policy activating" could just be a misunderstanding of how/when the policy triggers. Not to say it's the most likely explanation, just the least concerning one.
I think less concerning than keyloggers, while still assuming the whistleblower is correct, would be that a DOGE employee was using a VPN/proxy/Tor. Probably not a great idea to have traffic going through a hostile nation state even with encryption, but less bad than keyloggers on their machines stealing and trying credentials within minutes.
Definitely concerning though, to be clear - just steelmanning/answering the question of best possible interpretation.
If they're trying to exfiltrate data, they might want to rotate through IP addresses in order to obfuscate what's going on or otherwise circumvent restrictions. Using a simple ip rotator like the post talks about would maybe be an approach they'd use. If they're not careful with the IP addresses, once in a while one might get caught due to some restriction like being outside the US. It'd maybe appear as though you're getting these weird requests from Russia, but that's just because you're not logging the requests that are not being flagged from the US.
Maybe I'm reading the post incorrectly though (if so, please correct me!)
The objective may not have been to obtain access or any useful data. The objective may have been to get the scary headlines about Russians and use the existing media and political agitprop to further destabilize the government you seek to color revolution away.
Why does it increase support for AI in government?
I'm not saying they didn't do that, just that it's not in line with their support for Putin and Russia. Maybe as a false flag it give Putin the cover to crack down on hacking groups that don't throat him.
Though with nation state actors you can't rule out Pegasus like zero-click infiltrations.
This is the evidence which strongly suggests that the DOGE personnel are using various cloud IP addresses to scrape.
Probably the least expected location to connect from, if it was genuine. Not saying it necessarily isn't, but it's not usual either and doesn't make much sense.
This context enables two important things:
- Granular exceptions: If Alice is attending a conference in Toronto, you can say "Allow Alice to log in from Canada next week" without opening Canada-wide logins for everyone. Pre-auth geo-blocking forces you into an all-or-nothing stance.
- Better threat intelligence: A valid login from an unexpected region (e.g. Moscow when Alice is normally in D.C.) is a far stronger signal of compromise than a failed attempt. Capturing "successful login + wrong location" helps you prioritize real threats. If you block pre-auth, you'd never know Alice's account was compromised.
Putting geo-checks after authentication gives you precise control over whom, exactly, is logging in from where, and offers richer data for your security monitoring.
[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/entra/identity/conditional...
Why would they attempt a login from Russia (if it was indeed Russians)?
It is incredibly cheap to use a VPN with a US residential IP.
Many non technical people use VPNs to access region restricted content. It is trivial to understand and use.
Assuming this all actually happened as described, it sounds like someone wanted it to appear that these attempts were coming from Russia.
It's not behavior that makes any sense assuming even a semi-rational/intelligent actor.
Explains this:
> why would DOGE be immediately leaking just-granted NLRB login credential
The implication is that the credentials were for more than this specific system. It's entirely feasible that a bad actor would immediately try to vacuum up as much data from as many systems as possible, it's just that this system had a geo block that made it clear this was happening.
I don't think we need to assume that this was a targeted attack on this specific NLRB system, just that this specific NLRB system was the one that caught the attempts.
So, what systems DIDN'T block authentication?
It has details of labor disputes. Which if you’re Russia who thrives on fostering conflict in the US would be an ideal data set.
> Why would DOGE be immediately leaking just-granted NLRB login credentials to Russian assets
Because they are young, highly inexperienced engineers who have been tasked with rolling out their LLM system as quickly as possible. Their priority is not security.
Furthermore, that the NLRB data would somehow be of sufficient value to Russian state actors to justify risking burning their access to DOGE employees/data/credentials through frankly idiotic OPSEC, despite there being much higher value targets than the NLRB?
This even remotely doesn't pass the smell test.
b) This system: https://www.wired.com/story/doge-is-just-getting-warmed-up-d...
c) DOGE under its current form will end in the next weeks/months as Musk moves on. So if you’re Russia the best bet is to get as much data now as you can.
Feels like a pretty good Occam’s razor case… but is there any legitimate reason why one would request this?
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.
----
0: Text of the 5th Amendement: "...nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself..."
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'.
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-...
> 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-...
Is this normal to build this sort of functionality into a software system? Especially software systems that heavily rely on auditability?
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.
From the previous post, they had auditor roles built in that they purposely chose to go around
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 mean, if we were to apply the equivalent from the article, then no they would not have had a reason nor been time gated.
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 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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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 make decisions about such tradeoffs every day.
This doesn't really apply to the situation in the slightest.
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.
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.
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.
I'm not going to go 'gentle' on the team of clowns who have done things like make employees work for 36 hours straight to issue RIF notices while shouting at them for "incompetence", or "created new admin accounts that were within minutes attempting to log in from Russian IPs, immediately after demanding all logging be turned off", or "repeatedly lied about savings and contracts on their own website" in some ... "assume good faith" type scenario.
Whatever good faith they deserved, they burned within days (hours, even) of being let loose.
They're already plenty of evidence that they've exfiltrated sensitive information to a variety of non-government entities that are not even remotely entitled to that data, either at NLRB or elsewhere.
Your claim is that "it's entirely possible that these are all just innocent bureaucratic errors" and I would put it to you that that claim, in the face of everything already known, also needs substantiation, and yes, not that thin veneer of Wikipedia-like "assume the absolute possible best intention, regardless of plausibility" that we're getting.
God knows there must be enough normally unused rules in the federal government.
"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.
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.
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?
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.
That is how it was designed.
This fairly clear.
The story says that DOGE attained access to an account that had huge permissions into what it could see and alter. The person or persons from DOGE may have downloaded 10GB of data. The person may have used this in a manner that is illegal. Or it is illegal to start with. With the understanding that POTUS may or may not be allowed grand such access. (I dont think POTUS can)
2. DOGE employee downloaded code that could be used to use a huge pool of IP addresses, from AWS to bypass forms of throtheling. 3. The code was badly written. 4. The person is a racist
How would a person from DOGE use "unlimited" number of IP adderssess from AWS to hammer and automaticlay screenscape webpage, benefit from it when it came to copying extremly sensetive data from an internal National Labor Relations Board database?
Did 10.000 sessions authenticate to the database at the same time, using AWS UP addresses and scraped the data?
Something is pretty broken if the system with extremly sensetive data is available from external IPs -and- allowing a single account to login 10.0000 times to concurrently scrape data off the interal database?
Of are they saying that this code was adapted to use 10.000/100 IP addresses internal to National Labor Relations Board and scrapes using those?
The automation later noted makes a lot more sense to aid the work.
What data in a federal agency could the chief executive not have authorization to access?
We can also add to that IRS data. The articles of impeachment against Nixon included the following:
"He has, acting personally and through his subordinates and agents, endeavoured to obtain from the Internal Revenue Service, in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, confidential information contained in income tax returns for purposes not authorized by law" (emphasis mine).
There actually are laws regulating the handling of personal data collected by the government and it generally doesn't have a "the president wants to see it" exception.
I wonder, if he was alive today would he stand by those words?
I think that he can access a health or irs record for cause - anything which would not get him impeached.
Personally? For starters, he can't access anything the Legislature's laws say he can't.
The Executive is there to implement the law, and that includes obeying them him/her-self.
A President telling other people to break the law on his behalf by threatening to fire them is also a crime of extortion.
Can the legislature make rules for the president without constitutional amendment?
I am interested- I’ll see if I can find examples.
It would mean a President is is legally permitted to ignore laws against raping a child on the sidewalk outside 1600 Pennsylvania avenue Ave then murdering all of Congress by blowing up the Capitol.
Recently, a majority on the Supreme Court has claimed there's immunity for "Official Acts", but hasn't laid out any rule for when an official-looking act is actually an unofficial one... They're basically reserving the right to decide later. (Ex: Officially ordering the US military to kill Congress and Supreme Court Justices.)
Not that I want to give the current one any more evil ideas.
That said, I was surprised to learn much later that, by all accounts, Elon Musk was a competent and resourceful leader in SpaceX's early days. Maybe these stories are just his personality cult in action, but I found it plausible. It appears he once knew his place as an engineering manager, without LARPing as a Chief Engineer (he didn't appoint himself to CTO until quite a bit later). I worked for a really good manager who didn't know how to code, but he knew a lot about software and was very good about pulling back on coding things vs pushing forward on software design. It seemed like Musk was similar at SpaceX.
Which is all to say that celebrity is a helluva drug. I don't think Musk was ever an especially "high-IQ individual," and his first marriage suggests he's always been a misogynistic loser. But being anointed "a real life Tony Stark!" seems to have destroyed his brain. Ketamine probably doesn't help.
He's good at having and raising money which was what SpaceX needed, I think he was probably the same then as he is now. Reading about his early days at Tesla and the PayPal stuff, I don't really buy the idea he was ever different and took a dark turn. He's the type of person that will never self-regulate and somehow has never faced any negative consequences for lying and self-aggrandizing so has kept pushing it further
Eric Berger's book in particular suggests that, before Falcon 1 was successful, Musk was much more humble and collaborative with the other early SpaceX hires, and typically deferred to their expertise. He was always reckless and megalomaniacal. But after Falcon 1 he became much worse.
Not trying to defend the means to the end, but I would really like my tax money used more efficiently. I will also say am extremely worried about the levels of access that they are being given, especially since it comes with basically no accountability
If you could prove that billions were saved in pure waste, then I’d imagine any sane citizen would agree with you, setting aside matters of decorum and human decency (e.g. RIFs that may ultimately be necessary but conducted in an inhumane way)
I’d like my tax money used efficiently, but this group does not merit the trust to carry out those changes, even on a technical level
Except by most accounts so far it was being used efficiently by the federal workforce. This whole debacle will end up costing the US tax payer more money. See cutting the IRS or USAID which will probably lead the US to bailing out farmers. And if they privatize, then it'll be even more expensive.
Then a lot of those had to be reinstated because you simply can't operate a hospital without sanitation.
Just like they had to scramble to hire back the folks at the National Nuclear Safety Association.
Yeah, efficiency is great. But this is like ordering tacos and getting... a used tire and some dirty diapers...?
This is immature thinking, because, who wouldn't?
The contention comes from differing opinions on what is waste.
I agree, but for a different point.
Generalising, but under the age of 25, most people don't have enough experience (business/government) to understand things such as business ethics, the consequences, auditing practises, privacy concerns, etc.
With professional experience, you develop a better understanding and build up that depth of knowledge of how things impact the wider "world" rather than the immediate task at hand. Meaning, you gain a better understanding of the ethical implications of what you're doing.
As an example - in law, it'd be easier to manipulate a law graduate than a lawyer with 20+ years experience, who would think outside the direct question or task that was asked.
That is what the GAO is for https://www.gao.gov/ , and these people are much better than script kiddies.
> I would really like my tax money used more efficiently
Me too! You are on hacker news so I assume you are firm believer in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law ! If you would like your tax money used efficiently, are you willing to discuss cuts to social security, medicare, medicaid, veteran benefits, and whatever else is at the top of the budget? https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61181? What would you cut?
Personally, I would increase taxes on anyone making over $500K/year and stop nickle and diming our federal government so the US can actually become a first world country for everyone that isn't a software engineer.
This is like the derelict father with partial custody who parachutes in one weekend a month to buy his son ice cream and a new video game to leave two days later the conquering hero. Meanwhile mom works two jobs, has to set all the expectations and responsibilities for the child, and the father is late on child support payments.
DOGE blitzkrieged government IT. It'll be years before we understand the scope of what they've done and given available evidence: these are script kiddies who worship Musk, I don't think there is ANY reason for optimism or charitable consideration.
I mean, I guess this really happens in all industries. Art, music, leadership, software development. People who maybe once had credibility in something and now desperately try to foist Their People as the best in the industry.
I feel like that is what is happening here. None of the people who Elon surrounds himself are notable in any way, and their skills are hugely suspect, but he has to have his harem of "Super Coders" to prop up his own mythology.
> On February 6, someone posted a lengthy and detailed critique of Elez’s code on the GitHub “issues” page for async-ip-rotator, calling it “insecure, unscalable and a fundamental engineering failure.”
Link from quote: https://github.com/markoelez/async-ip-rotator/issues/1
The follow comment is interesting to be a coincidental, such a weird interaction.
I must be missing something here; surely the level of elite technical skill implicit in his résumé would preclude this kind of thing
I would say that Elmo picked a bunch of junior devs because they don't have enough maturity to talk back and will do anything they're asked but I think that's too charitable. I think he actually went this route because Elmo is a sad man in his 50s who is desperately trying to pretend that he is, and has not matured beyond, his 20s.
Musk did a "poll" on X that voted for rehiring Elez to DOGE, by February 20th Elez had a US Government email address again, and on Febrary 21st he was reported as working for DOGE at the Social Security Administration.
the 2nd comment in the issue explains why the 1st was posted pretty clearly
The public repos for this person that I could find that weren't forks with no activity to upstream consisted of a dice-rolling guessing game, rock-paper-scissors, and some kind of framework for downloading and transcribing audio files that does not yet download or transcribe, but implements a whole bunch of boilerplate. I find it rather difficult to believe this person engaged in a good-faith review of the async-ip-rotator code base.
Go look at the list of pardons this administration has handed out. These guys won’t even be charged.
That seems like a lot. Source?
https://www.impactcounter.com/dashboard?view=table&sort=inte...
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01191-z
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/usaid-funding-sav...
This is just USAID. It's not even considering the cuts to HHS or other agencies.
But more than just money is gone. US-led organizations formed logistical backbones of these systems. Wads of cash won't replace the networks of people and things that are able to productively bring TB meds to people who need it.
Just as its only worth complaining about geriatric geezers in office until the cheeto man brings in young hackers, then the problem is that "the old impaired people were good, actually".
Don't observe. Don't think. Merely repeat the approved message.
> The Party told you to ignore the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.
This is the deep state they've been worried about, this is the boot that will tread on them.
EDIT: parent comment was highest ranked comment for the article and is now at the bottom?
We live in a nation of laws, whether or not conspiracy-minded individuals prefer to follow them.
You stopped living in a nation of laws a while ago. Now you live in a nation of might makes right.
The thing about the law in the US, it's slow and heavy. You'll need to be pretty mighty to move it if it catches up to you.
This is what happens with the authoritarian faction, present in all societies, wins an election. The people who stand for the Constitutional order didn't do enough. Whether they weren't sufficiently positive persuasive or negatively persuasive, here we are with President Psycho in office.
The law didn't fail. Order didn't fail. The self-governed, the people, failed to support and defend the Constitution.
One of the things that is being exposed by the current administration is that, even though the Judiciary is an arm of the government, and supposed to provide a check on the Executive, the reality is that the Executive has the power to pardon anyone it sees fit, voiding the power of the judiciary (the argument is that the ultimate power lies with the voters who can pass their judgement on the Executive, and its use of its powers, by voting them out, hopefully)
This is one of the fundamental issues that underlies our broken system in the US. The gaps between what the law actually is, what people think it is, what people want it to be, and what it in practice is, are enormous.
Some of the recent deportation cases highlight this. You have cases where people were living in the US illegally for decades but faced no repercussions, and now people are upset because they were suddenly detained and/or deported. Virtually all the framing I see is about how it's a sudden and horrible injustice that they were detained during a "routine" ICE check-in --- very little about how we have accumulated this palimpsest of rules and enforcement policies resting on laws which don't actually encode the state of affairs most people want.
If we want people to be able to immigrate easily and safely (and I do), we need to stop breathing sighs of relief when a new president comes in and issues some kind of temporary executive order that makes things okay in the short term. We need to fix the laws at all levels, including criminalizing enforcement actions that are contrary to the law. That would likely mean massive purges of many individuals in local and state governments and law enforcement agencies, with many of them sentenced to considerable prison terms for the kind of enforcement discretion that we currently accept as normal. It's not going to be pretty. But it has to be done if we want to return to a system grounded in the actual rule of law and not the rule of law enforcement.
Deport them all if they came here illegally and that was _proven_, but the government just skipped all due process and as we’re seeing and as the government already admitted, people are being mistakenly deported to these camps and then the same government says they can’t do anything to reverse it.
You can’t be waxing poetic about the rule of law and how we need to enforce everything when they can’t even follow due process
I don't disagree that there are huge problems with how enforcement is currently happening. My point is that we've had those problems for a long time and the current situation is just pushing things to the breaking point along the same axis.
I believe the concern is the cases where the person had a temporary stay.
> We need to fix the laws at all levels, including criminalizing enforcement actions that are contrary to the law.
This is never going to happen - politics aside of what you might or might not believe about the current situation.
It's about as likely to happen as every religious individual on the planet obeying every rule in their sacred book.
The reason that they don't happen is because peoples' ideas on what is acceptable and isn't in a society changes, sometimes quite rapidly - note that the current US Administration was (attempting) to use a statute from the 1700s, are you obeying all the laws (that haven't yet been repealed) from then?
edit: An obvious example is the fact that the USA exists - it's on land that was acquired via theft, and murder. Therefore every person living on that land is receiving stolen property - let me know when that law is being enforced.
Arguably, if you impeach someone in public office, even if they aren't convicted by the Senate, any pardon of those same acts becomes moot and they can be tried in court for the same offenses. At least, that's what the DoJ suggested in 2000.
Is your mental model of the pardon process actually confused? Yes, the president can unilaterally issue pardons, and Donald Trump is president until the end of his term, so he can issue pardons on his last day in office.
The comment was about last-day pardons, not pardons in general. Its a topic many presidents have gotten flak or attention for.
edit: oh, I guess "and Donald Trump is president until the end of his term" could come off as patronizing. I meant it just as a statement in a chain of reasoning
No, that is exactly what we don't need. When law becomes out of step with modern sensibilities, the law needs to be changed. Precisely the problem we currently have is that we have become too accustomed to dealing with a sort of "shadow law" system where the way things actually work is not the way they're supposed to work according to the law. That is a recipe for confusion, bias, favoritism, and inequity. What we need is a system of laws that actually lets the people fix things when they are broken instead of patching around them. (This is, in my view, a byproduct of other aspects of our legal system, in particular the grossly over-restrictive process for amending the constitution.)
Like a pardon for someone convicted of being gay in the early 20th century?
These are symbolic and provide no practical relief. Losing this to stop all pardons would be worth it to me
[1]: https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artII-S2-C1-3...
[2]: https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artV-1/ALDE_0...
It doesn't affect the power of congress so why would they care?
[1]: https://www.newspapers.com/article/news-and-record-truman-ex...
Watching the misery of others makes me feel ill.
If this is all true, this is basically hacking sensitive data in the open. We already know the current administration has worked to hobble unions. So putting these things together, this act is not only wrong in and of itself, but the data is likely going to be used to harm americans' interests. So, deserving of punishment.
That should have exhausted any benefit of the doubt right off the bat, even among those inclined to think Trump's maybe not great but also some ordinary amount of bad for a politician. You don't do that unless you fully intend to do some crimes. Not only that, they were so goddamn eager to crime that they couldn't wait the 30 days or whatever. They intended to do criminal shit immediately.
(It wouldn't change the opinions of anybody who matters, I suppose.)
And then the means to do so have involved ignoring the courts and bypassing constitutional checks and balances? Please tell me how this isn’t criminal if not treasonous?
After all, why do they need unfettered access? Why do they need your bank statements? Why do they need to hide what they're doing with the unfettered access?
That's what's happening here. There is no good explanation other than bad actors
If Joe Blow off the street walks into a federal agency and takes all their data – open and shut case, throw the book at them, see you in a few decades.
If someone from the White House walks into a federal agency, tells the agency leadership "the President wants me to take all your data", and the agency leadership replies "sure, go right ahead" – not a scenario people were expecting, so the existing laws haven't been crafted to clearly criminalize it. Maybe some enterprising prosecutor can find a way to map it to the crimes on the statute book, maybe it is just too hard. But even if the prosecutor overcomes that hurdle, it will be far from easy to convince the jury / trial judge / appellate courts that the legal elements of the crime are actually met – and if it actually gets as far as a conviction upheld by the appellate court, what do you think the conservative SCOTUS majority are going to do with that when they get it? And many prosecutors, foreseeing those low odds of ultimate success, will stop before they even get to an indictment.
So, I think the odds of anyone ultimately being convicted over this are low, even if Trump never pardons them.
Maybe, Congress might pass a law to make it more clearly illegal, which might make it easier to prosecute if a future administration repeats the same behavior.
EDIT: if people are downvoting this because they think my analysis of the likelihood of successful criminal prosecution is wrong, it would be great if they could reply to explain where they think I got it wrong
If you don't feel that way then you deserve the world you are creating.
So, how do you prosecute them for accessing a computer system (or data or whatever) without authorization when both the President and the senior agency leadership say they authorized it?
Well, you can’t-unless you want to argue that the President / agency leadership’s authorization is illegal and hence illegally invalid, ultra vires. But even supposing you are right about that in the abstract, will you be able to convince a judge and jury of it? And even supposing you convince a jury, trial judge and appellate court, there’s a dozen different ways SCOTUS could overturn it (from narrow questions of statutory construction to sweeping rulings about the President’s inherent constitutional power to demand information from the executive branch), and I think the main question for the current SCOTUS majority will be which of those ways they choose.
My impression is that a lot of people are mixing up what they think the law ought to be, with what it actually is. Just because something ought to be a crime doesn’t mean it actually is one - and that’s especially going to be the case with unprecedented situations, it is hard to make something a crime if nobody foresaw it would one day happen.
If you are going to charge them with a crime, which one? CFAA?
How then to prove that access is unauthorized under the CFAA given evidence that both the President and senior agency leadership authorized it? Trying to claim that those authorizations are legally invalid gets into rather murky areas of law, and is (AFAIK) without precedent. Can you point to any previous cases of a successful CFAA prosecution where the access was authorized by a senior federal official but that authorization was declared legally void?
How do you get past the fact that the law is ultimately whatever SCOTUS says it is, and it seems more likely than not that the majority of current SCOTUS will want to say that this specific situation isn't a crime?
I feel like people are rejecting my position because they don't like it or don't want it to be true. Of course, maybe I'm wrong – maybe Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanagh, Barrett and Roberts are all secretly dreaming of sending Musk and his minions to federal prison; or maybe they'll dispassionately follow their own judicial philosophies to the logical conclusion that doing so (using CFAA or whatever) is statutorily and constitutionally required - but that doesn't seem very likely to me, given their track records. Do you really think I'm wrong about that?
Admin accounts without logs is extremely radical. I have literally never seen it, or had anyone request it, in my decade+ of consulting in security.
Unless you think the whistleblower, Krebs, and everyone else reporting are lying. Which, in that case, nothing anyone says is going to change your opinion (and you should just say that, if it's what you think, to save us all time).
"He specifically was told that there were to be no logs or records made of the accounts created for DOGE employees"
That sure sounds like no logs.
If you don't believe the whistleblower, just say that, and skip the insulting me part (and I'll know to skip the replying to you part).
Rich, coming from the person who left the sentence about logs out of their comment and then said "No where in the complaint does it allege anyone asked for an audit-less account".
>Go ahead, read it again please. You have the experience to understand what this means.
Do you get some sort of weird satisfaction out of being ridiculously condescending? Do you think it makes your argument stronger? Are you just an angry person?
>This very clearly means we aren't using the normal account-creation process which itself creates logs of account creation.
You think they requested no logs about account creation, but are cool with the logging after? What on earth would the purpose of that request be?
The request was not stated in a way that implies a point-in-time request to turn off logs solely for account creation. (And, again, that would be a completely nonsense request that accomplishes literally nothing).
Anyways, I have no interest in getting into it with someone that has to throw in little personal jabs in every comment. You can believe that the DOGE team only wanted the account creation to be exempt from logs but wanted the logs turned on immediately afterwards for god knows what reason.
>Try to apply your experience here and calm down a bit.
Had to get one more little jab in there, didn't you? Can't have just one comment without one.
We're not going to convince each other. Hope that in the future, for other people's sake, that you can tone down your condescension and insults. It's a really unpleasant experience trying to discuss important things with someone who can't make a point without belittling the person they are talking to.
Is this some reminder to people that bad things occur that aren't found out.
Considering how everyone is aware of this is your comment some sort of clusterbomb whataboutism?
Suggest reading the complaint: https://whistlebloweraid.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/2025...
https://whistlebloweraid.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/2025...
> 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
"Tim Bearese, the NLRB's acting press secretary, denied that the agency granted DOGE access to its systems and said DOGE had not requested access to the agency's systems. Bearese said the agency conducted an investigation after Berulis raised his concerns but "determined that no breach of agency systems occurred."
https://www.npr.org/2025/04/15/nx-s1-5355895/doge-musk-nlrb-...
A little nit-picking, but that's not what open source means, especially as it relates to the GPL in this case. If you can't use the code commercially, it's neither "open source" (as defined by OSI) nor free software (as defined by the FSF).
If the allegation is true, what would be the motivation of the higher-ups to keep this secret from US-CERT?
It appears to be a severe compromise, and the context suggests that much of the rest of the federal government is imminently vulnerable to the same tactics by the same threat actor.
Where the higher-ups reporting the security crisis through better channels?
Or were they trying to keep it quiet entirely, so might be complicit in something bad?
Let's start with this:
> Berulis said the new DOGE accounts had unrestricted permission to read, copy, and alter information contained in NLRB databases.
> Berulis said he discovered one of the DOGE accounts had downloaded three external code libraries from GitHub
What exactly does that mean? NLRB database accounts are GitHub accounts? (Surely not.) Or the same IP address accessed both, suggesting it was the same person? Define "account".
No coherent point being made here. This story needs to clearly separate the rhetoric about GitHub repositories from the NLRB access, and connect them together coherently.
The flow seems to be:
1. Some DOGE people obtained unbridled access to NLRB, with the ability to erase audit trails.
2. There is some sort of evidence that the same people downloaded tools from GitHub for distributed web scraping, suggesting intent to scrape massive amounts of data from somewhere (inferred to be the NLRB database).
There is no evidence cited in the article for the actual downloading of gigabytes of data; the "whistleblower" is quoted only as saying that DOGE required certain privileged accounts to be created and that the users of the accounts supposedly downloaded some web scraping software from GitHub.
At least mention some circumstantial evidence, like a suspicious increase in access activity, coming from distributed IP addresses in the Amazon cloud, following the download of those tools.
This:
> On February 6, someone posted a lengthy and detailed critique of Elez’s code on the GitHub “issues” page for async-ip-rotator, calling it “insecure, unscalable and a fundamental engineering failure.”
seems neither here nor there; why include that. It may be that the tools DOGE are using are not adequately safeguarding the data, but it seems like an extraneous point, and undigestable without specifics.
Guessing those are the same accounts that got accessed by Russian IPs?
Genuinely wondering whether the US democracy is going to make it to December.
That isn't what "open source" means.
https://www.wired.com/story/white-house-starlink-wifi/
"The ad hoc addition to the otherwise tightly controlled White House information environment could create blind spots and security exposures while setting potentially dangerous precedent."
This is confirmation bias and absolutely unsubstantiated nonsense. Hedging your bets on hyperbolic dreck like this is why people don't take the serious stuff seriously.
Do you think cellphone hotspots - that everyone has in their pocket - are also part of some grand conspiracy?
See: https://infosec.exchange/@briankrebs/114083485241630234
Excerpt: "How much more proof do we need that this administration is completely compromised? There is zero reason for the US to relax any offensive digital actions against Russia. If anything, we should be applying more."
Very weird
Firstly, anyone claiming that "the whole government is compromised" is being conspiratorial. Breaches of this nature are reportable to CISA (US-CERT), the DOJ, local law enforcement, and the FBI. The NLRB has its own cybersecurity incident response team, which includes legal counsel. If both the NLRB and US-CERT determined that this wasn’t a reportable incident then I trust their judgment.
Secondly, I’ve seen a lot of speculative commentary about the Russian IP allegedly logging into the DOGE account. A simple OSINT investigation reveals that this IP has had a negative reputation for over a year, specifically flagged for credential stuffing and scanning activity. Credential stuffing is a common tactic when credentials have been leaked or breached, often showing up on platforms like intelx.io, DeHashed, or BreachForums.
It's also worth noting: no serious nation-state actor would use an IP with such a known bad reputation. Doing so would risk burning any operational investment they’ve made. Nation-state actors almost always use clean infrastructure or proxy chains to conceal their activity.
The timeline the whistleblower presents spans two months, yet I find his interpretation of the activity speculative without hard evidence—especially considering he admits he does not possess the actual logs. That’s a huge red flag.
Thirdly, I tried to find the whistle blower’s official title, and it’s usually hidden in the media. In his official report he states that he is a Dev Sec Ops engineer. He also claims that he lost access to privileges – but the emails in the screen shot seemed to be a zero-trust/principle of least privileges hardening effort. That’s not suspicious to me.
Fourth, the screenshots the whistleblower provided of the Azure environment appeared extremely sparse. While I don’t know the exact size of the NLRB’s infrastructure, unless it's unusually small, I would expect to see more resources. From what I reviewed, the Azure dashboards he used had no filters applied, which raises the question—why are there no other subscriptions, VMs, load balancers, WAFs, etc., visible?
Regarding the DLP policy alerts, he could have easily shown the associated data. Interestingly, the alerts were labeled “test,” which is significant—but he chose not to address or explain that. Omitting that context makes the evidence less compelling. He also leaves out basic critical Indicators of Compromise (IOCs) like src_ip, src_port, dest_ip, dest_port, bytes, and duration. I’m not expecting him to extract mutex and environment variables but showing the basics would be convincing enough consider all they would have been accessible to him from the dashboards he screenshots in the document.
Finally, his claim that the NLRB doesn’t have a SIEM is demonstrably false. The NLRB shares a SIEM with the DOJ, which is operated by MindPoint Group under a SOCaaS contract.
Here’s my general take on the situation: The whistleblower had only been with the organization for six months and served as a mid-level DevSecOps engineer—not a security analyst, incident responder, or SOC analyst. After DOGE was announced, the NLRB began implementing Zero Trust principles and the Principle of Least Privilege. This is typical hardening. As a result, his old admin access which was over provisioned and no longer necessary for his role—was revoked. He panicked. Still having access to some Azure tools, he could have used a test or dev environment (referencing the sparse number of resources in the screenshot but he claimed it to be prod with no filter), toggled a few settings, took screenshot, and constructed a narrative around it. He escalated it to the CEO, who initially listened. However, the incident response team conducted an investigation and found nothing substantiating his claims. NLRB and US-CERT determined it to not be reportable, or which indicates that if it was a security event it was not an incident.
As for the Russian IP, it may be real—but it’s clearly tied to credential stuffing activity, not a sophisticated threat actor. If it genuinely accessed a DOGE account, that would indicate a breach on the DOGE side or weak password hygiene. But again—as mentioned earlier—he doesn’t have the logs to back this up, and his reasons for that are unconvincing. #Doubt.
This appears to be DOGE employees simply doing their job.
You may not agree with what they’re doing in a political sense, but if you were tasked with the same problem you’d come up with a nearly identical solution.
For example: “tenant admin” is probably the special role that can bypass access control (not audits!) and see and read all data.
This sounds scary but I regularly request this right from large government departments and I get it granted to me.
Its use is justified when normal access requests would be too complex / fiddly and error prone. Generally, in a large environment, there is no other way to guarantee 100% coverage because as an outsider you don’t even know what permissions to ask for if you can’t see anything due to a lack of permissions!
Seriously: sit down for a second and think about how you would go about getting access to make a full copy of an organisation’s data for an audit if you fully expect both passive resistance and even active efforts to hide the very things you’re looking for.
"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.
Ok, arguing with DOGE on their own terms… I confess I’m not knowledgeable with these systems, but how do you even trust it when it tells you you’re the “Tenant Admin”? Why would the deep state be unable to fabricate such a role that looks like the real one but is still lying to you? I did enough research to assume this is a Microsoft thing, so you might be viewing a Microsoft domain signed by a Microsoft SSL cert, and trust that Microsoft is telling you you’re really the highest admin. But… we’re talking a vast conspiracy with billions on the line… why would a true-believer DOGE crusader not believe there are also deep state agents in Microsoft, the certificate authorities, and ISPs?
Asking for Tenant Admin or whatever magic term seems like a start to get “the truth”, but completely inadequate to actually take down “the deep state.”
Of course, that’s the beauty of it. A super-powerful, secret enemy can never be vanquished, so they’re always a great excuse to take the next step to demolish the real government and trample the rights of the people.
The NSA might be able to do this, but even they’d be finding it a challenge if forced to do so on short notice with someone looking over their shoulder.
I personally feel that they’re being reckless and sloppy, uncovering “waste” that is often simply an artefact of their hubris. In doing so, they’re risking exposing the internal systems of the government to outside attack.
This is the rough equivalent of the guards in a prison turning over everything in a cell looking for contraband.
It’s not nice. It’s rarely productive. It is also a tool of intimidation. That’s part of the point. The prisoner is not supposed to like it. They’re not invited politely to present what they want others to see. They’re humiliated and powerless. That’s what the MAGA and DOGE want.
2. DOGE is committing treason.
3. DOGE is humiliating those who were formerly in control.
A little of column A, B, and C in my opinion. At this point it doesn't matter what's true. I think all parties are involved to commit terrible acts, whether they're directly assets of a foreign power or just have something to gain. Inept, traitorous, opportunistic, inhumane, careless.. the whole party is here.
I hope when all is said and done, a true accounting is performed and those who committed the damage are held responsible. It won't matter what their associations or intent was. Manslaughter is manslaughter.
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.
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.
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 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.
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?
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
DOGE employees aren't simply doing their job. They are actively subverting the government to fatally wound it.
https://www.npr.org/2025/04/15/nx-s1-5355896/doge-nlrb-elon-...
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.
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.
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.
Prove it. I want you to give examples of where you did something like this.
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...
Why is anything of significance on github in the first place?
Edit: It's not. They just download python libraries to do "IP rotation" to circumvent rate limits.
On the actual complaint: (https://whistlebloweraid.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/2025...)
It seems that the data was stored in Azure which doesn't make it any better.
They downloaded "IP rotation" python libraries to circumvent rate limits.
Then depending on the order of events, either scraping didn't work well enough and were given "unlimited" (not rate limited) access, or the accounts were actually denied so they fell back to scraping. Or perhaps these two things are just unrelated despite what the story is claiming.
Also interesting to note that not only has Berulis' attorney lead multiple lawsuits against the Trump administration in the past, he was also an intern for both Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton. Now that obviously doesn't prove anything, but it could nonetheless be considered a strong indicator this all might be politically-motivated.
Bad: 1. They want to do nefarious things untraceably 2, 3. I think 1. covers pretty much everything.
Personally, if I'm put in charge of overhauling a system I don't want to waste my time waiting on approvals for BS, I just want to be given the highest level of access I can be given to get on with work.
I'm not saying this is fine, but the information here is basically a random list of things that happened and it doesn't really tell a nefarious story to my eyes.
> Upon learning of your resignation, following reports that you were linked to an account advocating to “normalize Indian hatred” and for a “eugenic immigration policy,” I can’t help but address the staggering hypocrisy of these views within the context of the IT industry.
> This field, including your own career, is built on the labor, innovation, and expertise of Indian engineers and developers. To hold such hateful beliefs about a group that forms the backbone of this industry isn’t just reprehensible—it’s a complete contradiction of the reality you benefit from every day.
> My original critique of your code addressed technical issues and provided solutions, but after learning about your expressed views, it’s clear that poor coding isn’t the root problem here. Your mindset is incompatible with the fundamental values of IT: collaboration, respect, and global interconnectedness.
> Someone who advocates for hate cannot build systems meant to serve diverse users, nor can they lead or contribute meaningfully to teams that rely on trust and mutual respect. I strongly suggest you reflect on the harm your beliefs cause—not just to others, but to your credibility and future in this profession.
It doesn't invalidate the same author's critique above it at all (the critique itself manages to do that) but how it ended up mentioned in Krebs' article is puzzling. It harkens back to the days when journalists would quote-mine random Twitter users' tweets as if it meant something. "Twitter user @john89674651684685 said…" Give me a break.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20250423135719/https://github.co...
Now, the govt also has to create rules for itself. So it creates the Privacy Act and layers of beurocratic checks and balances. These rules are to protect the people, not to derisk or protect the govt. After all, the govt has all the power.
So when capitalist businesses leaders are given the keys to govt, the normal ways of ethical alignment don't work. If you don't follow your own rules, who cares? They're your rules! I think what we're seeing is what happens if you apply traditional capitalist business practices to govt administration.
In some countries, this is done with outright bribery. Here, we do it with campaign contributions and lobbying and “we’ll create jobs in your district.”
Honestly, if you were around watching the news 30+ years ago, you would notice a stark difference in how news is covered then versus today. You can't really blame them, they are doing what they can to survive, but coverage today much more tabloid than news.
I would say the "fake but accurate," was the death knell, but it might have been sooner.
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/13/us/politics/doge-contract...
> The employees grew concerned that the NLRB's confidential data could be exposed, particularly after they started detecting suspicious log-in attempts from an IP address in Russia, according to the disclosure.