https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/doge-dives-into-core-na...
"DOGE currently has far deeper and far more extensive access to U.S. government computer systems — and is far deeper into the national security space — than is conceivably necessary for anything related to their notional brief and goals."
I am honestly shocked at the amount of wrong or naive takes being posted on HN as of late.
Also things are happening at a breakneck pace and, uhm, the media is tragicomically incompetent.
From your link written by John Marshall, a “progressive liberal”: “It’s obvious that you’d want to be very cautious about centralizing this much power in anyone’s hands, especially people working outside all existing frameworks of oversight and accountability.” It’s called.. the President. The whole point of electing a president alongside of congress is to have a consolidated point of power.
There's at least some belief that the people looking at the data haven't been vetted or instructed as they should be when handling data of this nature.
It doesn't help that the guy who is running the show is basically doing it as a friend of the president and has some conflicts of interest.
Second, while that was a major topic in international news for years, it did at least stay in the national security space where access is restricted. A lot of the concerns around DOGE are because they bulled through all of the normal rules for who gets access to sensitive data and how it’s handled. Say what you will about the NSA, and many here have, they didn’t just hand out credentials to inexperienced people with a history of leaking data or condone use of personal computers for government work.
This is especially of concern if the reports of write access being used to push code changes or deploy monitoring keyloggers are true: do you really want to bet that the guys who made a .gov site world-writable couldn’t be compromised by a foreign intelligence agency? There are legitimate concerns about the level of process overhead in government IT but that doesn’t make the reasons for it go away.
>> The question isn't what's being accessed, it's who is accessing it.
There will always be good reasons to access data, and sensitive data. There is always good that can come out of this. But just because you can do something good with it doesn't mean you should. You can do a lot of good with a nuclear bomb, but I don't want any ever built because it takes only a small mistake (not an act of malice!) to have huge consequences. There is always a cost, you must always consider if the costs are worth the benefits.
Did you also miss the global protests against the 2003 invasion of Iraq?
It's been there, and growing, ever since.
I and many people would argue to rebuild it based on the lack of transparency we have seen. There are enough people that feel that way that a rebuild is inevitable, regardless if you end up right. The position is that we really don't know, so the only way to be safe is a do-over. Or at the very least, a completely transparent audit, which is also insanely expensive and very hard to scope.
1. To ask for READ access to all the data with PII/sensitive scrubbed.
2. Any action to modify the content/data should ideally have followed the existing path/mechanism
How is that clear? What proof do you have of this other than Musk's word?
…but also much more. It is intellectually dishonest to equate these two.
Cutting through red tape can technically be done by nuking the red tape, but why cause all this harm when you can use scissors?
https://www.texasobserver.org/ice-prosecutor-dallas-white-su... https://gizmodo.com/doge-engineer-resigns-over-extremely-rac... https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/07/musk-doge-st...