DOGE – Page 3 – Burningbird

Adding on to my previous post, about the lawsuit against Treasury for allowing DOGE free reign in sensitive systems, we’re now hearing that DOGE people are illegally accessing sensitive data at the Department of Education, and feeding it wholesale—without scrubbing it of identifying information—into a Microsoft Azure cloud-based AI tool of some kind.

In other words, sending all that confidential and protected data to an external data system outside of the control of the federal government.

Why should we stop the Russians and Chinese hacking our systems when Musk is putting the data out for easy access to anyone who promises to perform some gee wizbang tech voodoo on it? Now we can save them time by eliminating any federal protection.

Oh, but we’re told, these DOGE people are ’employees’ who have been properly vetted. That’s the same gotcha that I mentioned would happen to get around the court order in the lawsuit I covered.

But wait…there’s more.

The original lawsuit was about DOGE people _accessing_ data. But the court order allowed ‘read only’ access, which actually plays into the Trump/Musk minion hands.

How did this happen? Why did we allow this to continue even when there’s a court case to stop it?

Because we got caught up about the script kiddies changing the code, and we forgot that the real danger was them vacuuming up every bit of confidential data about all of us, and offloading it to an external cloud-based system. And we got so caught up in them mucking with such a key system in the Treasury, we neglected to extend that concern to all systems.

As for the employee-trick, what DOGE is doing is grossly illegal for _anyone_, even DOGE people masquerading as government employees. I have to wonder if these people realize that they could be liable for possible criminal penalties for their activities?

Oh right, Trump will just pardon the bunch.

The lawyers for Treasury system lawsuit need to either amend their complaint or expand it, or a new set of lawyers needs to make a broader lawsuit that would encompass all data systems in the federal government.

And next time…talk to the damn techs, first.

I’m following several lawsuits related to recent Trump/DOGE antics. Among them is a lawsuit by the Alliance for Retired Americans related to DOGE access to Treasury fiscal systems.

First of all, none of the DOGE techies who have been mentioned at Wired have the expertise to even understand the Treasury systems, much less modify them without hopelessly breaking them. Most of the DOGE people are script kiddies, not folks who have worked with large enterprise systems—especially systems likely to have been written in Java.

Secondly, most of these people have no training in working with larger enterprise systems. Working with Teslas and space ships does not equip you to create the massive systems in place at Treasury and likely many other government systems. Heck, there’s no indication any of them even know how to use project management systems such as Git, if this screenshot of a X-witter post is any indication.

Rookie Mistake 1: no backups

To stop the costly destruction that could be catastrophic for so many people in this country, lawyers for several groups filed a lawsuit against Treasury, demanding that DOGE be stopped from potentially damaging these essential systems. They also asked for a Temporary Restraining order to take effect while the case is litigated.

During a hearing yesterday, the judge and both sides agreed to a proposed order to ‘maintain the status quo’ of the systems by only allowing limited read-only access to DOGE ‘special employees’. However, they agreed to let Treasury employees unfettered access to the systems.

Any person who is an employee (but not a Special Government Employee) of the Department of the Treasury and who has a need for the record or system of recordsin the performance of their duties;

Employees like Thomas Shedd, who was brought in by DOGE. Employees like Shedd who is an employee solely because of DOGE coercion.

Employees like Shedd who can now rummage about these systems without any hindrance, doing whatever he wants to these systems.

Legal folk: you don’t like techies like me to write about or dabble with the law because we’re not experts. At the same time, you don’t bring in tech experts likebe me to ensure you’re not making a terrible mistake with the legal agreements you make. And this was a hell of a bad agreement.

You should have phrased the order to only include employees who were employed in the Treasury before January 1, 2025. Now, DOGE could tell Bessant to ‘hire’ any number of DOGE people who will have free reign over these system, and they won’t violate this court order.

In fact, Bessant can go to Congress or write letters to Congressional members stating that the DOGE special employees have read-only access, while DOGE-affiliated techs have unrestricted access to everything.

Bad call. Really bad call. Lawyers, next time, talk to the techs.

Also published at Substack