Summary
Despite official denials, a technologist from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) had “write access” to critical U.S. Treasury payment systems.
Marko Elez, a former SpaceX and X employee, was granted admin privileges to systems processing trillions in federal payments. Reports suggest he made “extensive changes” before resigning.
Concerns escalated after Treasury officials falsely claimed DOGE only had “read access.”
The controversy follows the resignation of a senior Treasury official who opposed DOGE’s access, amid allegations of Musk associates interfering with USAID payments.
‘member when stuff like this was treason?
When America had any sense of shame or self preservation?
Can you keep it down? I’m getting mine at any cost while devoting an even greater amount of energy to ensuring those below me suffer harshly.
Why does media keep legitimizing this treating it as anything other than an illegal act, simply because these fucking idiots used the word “department”.
Its not a real fucking department.
We’re now in an age where the authorative voice of the Treasury Department is just straight up lying about its own actions. This is new territory.
They’ve commandeered the USDS or US Digital Service. A department to improve Federal websites. They created DOGE under USDS.
Because the talking heads have bosses and they’re loving this shit.
They’re terrified of the consequences of going against the Trump administration. I kind of don’t blame them and I kind of do.
I’ve seen various discussions that sort all this out — he only had read access to the data, not write access.
Separately, he had write access to the underlying software stack and committed changes to live production systems, bypassing revision control and hub and spoke test environments.
All of this ended when someone surfaced tweets of his which identified him as a white supremacist — when that happened, he quit and left the facility.
There’s no way this person quit because their white supremacist tweets were uncovered. No moral hang-ups committing a coup but racism is where he gets shy???
Maybe once it was uncovered, he got promoted?
maybe when push came to shove, even he wasn’t willing to do the nazi salute to elon to keep his job.
Murica is dying with a whimper
something something, the apathy stage of a nation.
as the saying goes “uneducated, starving peasants make very poor revolutionists” and we have plenty of uneducated and plenty of starving.
There’s another saying, “Give them bread and circuses, and they will never revolt.” These statements are in direct conflict with each other.
I mean, bread sure but circuses aren’t known for teaching much aside from clown college.
You sure do! Good luck out there!
I would have to think that ever change is audited in an immutable system by design. I’d be surprised if there’s no way to know exactly what they changed and revert. Of course the ones running this are compromised too so… Idk maybe a look back once the bums are thrown out. But then again the fact trump isn’t in prison already is such a travisty by the doj.
With the right access, these things are always mutable.
It would need to be a public blockchain with the proper amount of confirmations/finality to be truly immutable
Exactly. If he has control of the entire department and the only immutable record is contained within the department… That record is now mutable. The point of blockchain is to be a distributed ledger, which is impossible to fake due to the fact that there are so many identical copies. If there is only one copy, (or to be more specific, all of the copies are under the control of a corrupt department) it’s not immutable.
A key thing is that it pretty much needs to be a public blockchain of enough scale as well.
If the US government had a private blockchain with a thousand copies all over the country, DOGE could still step in and take control of the entire system and start editing it. It would be much harder, but possible.
By being public you can’t compromise the entire system, and the larger the system gets, it gets crazy expensive to try and attack it, and it’s better to just play along with the existing incentive structure then waste money on an attack.
If there is any smidgen of justice in the world, Trump and Elon would go down in history as the world’s greatest career conmen.
Are best they got backups
What would happen if every working class American decided to join the ultra rich and not pay taxes this year?
Most people already have and filling would only get them their refunds. Unless you mean 2025 taxes
Gonna stiff my local taxes the $10 or so they actually have to collect. Muahahaha.
You would need a unified effort to do that, and it wouldn’t work. Also even if the IRS chooses not to go after people, Musk would have some goons to do it and he would ‘authorize’ them to use lethal force if necessary. Given that his goons would be less qualified than most police (and that is a scary thought) there will be enough bad encounters to scare most people into submission.
If you’re a working person then your taxes are withheld by your employer and deducted from your paycheck. You may owe additional taxes when you file your return but the bulk is already taken.
Extensive changes, huh? Why do I get the feeling those involved linking directly to foreign bank accounts?
Wtf is a “technologist”?
A technical person too inexperienced to have a job title
As a technologist, fuck you.
More accurately, a technologist is kinda like a tweener between being neither a technician, nor an engineer, but somehow both at the same time. The education requirements are different, and a lot of us start as technicians and eventually become engineers.
Are you a technologist, or a <something> technologist?
Technologist implies operating/maintaining something with enough understanding of how it works to mess with it on the fly. Without an adjective, that just means you’re good at technology in general… That’s not a job, that’s an affinity
Like Musk
dorks.
