Welcome to DU! The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards. Join the community: Create a free account Support DU (and get rid of ads!): Become a Star Member Latest Breaking News Editorials & Other Articles General Discussion The DU Lounge All Forums Issue Forums Culture Forums Alliance Forums Region Forums Support Forums Help & Search

Nevilledog

Nevilledog's Journal
Nevilledog's Journal
February 8, 2025

Did Trump Quietly Kill a Sensitive Pentagon Probe into Elon Musk?

https://newrepublic.com/article/191330/trump-quietly-kill-sensitive-pentagon-probe-elon-musk

No paywall link
https://archive.li/nfjso

In December, more than a month before Donald Trump took the presidential oath of office, The New York Times reported a blockbuster scoop: Elon Musk and his SpaceX company had repeatedly failed to meet federal reporting requirements designed to safeguard national security despite being deeply entangled with the military and intelligence bureaucracy. These included a failure to provide details to the government of Musk’s meetings with foreign leaders, the Times reported.

Those lapses had triggered a number of internal federal reviews, according to the Times. Perhaps most interestingly, the Defense Department’s inspector general had opened a probe of the matter sometime during 2024. The Air Force and the Pentagon Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security also launched reviews in November.

Now that Trump is president and controls the executive branch—including the Defense Department—it’s time to raise what appears to be a forgotten question: What exactly is going on with these government reviews into Musk? Have they continued? Or are they effectively dead?

When Trump fired over a dozen independent inspectors general last month, one of them was the Defense Department IG, Robert Storch. We don’t know whether the Musk probe was a reason for this firing, but it now seems awfully convenient for the SpaceX billionaire, who is known to be enraged about having to face regulations and oversight while enjoying immensely lucrative contracts with the federal government.

*snip*
February 8, 2025

Anna Bower: DOGE-ing Questions in Federal Court

https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/doge-ing-questions-in-federal-court


Anna Bower
Anna Bower
@annabower
Meet The Authors
Published by The Lawfare Institute
in Cooperation With
Brookings
Subscribe to Lawfare
On Wednesday, Feb. 5, Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly held a status conference in Alliance for Retired Americans et al. v. Secretary of the Treasury. The suit alleges that the secretary of the treasury, Scott Bessent, violated federal privacy law by allowing individuals associated with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) access to the Department’s payment system. According to the complaint, the system maintains sensitive personal and financial information about “every individual” who makes or receives a payment from the federal government. Among other disbursements, the system is responsible for distributing tax refunds, federal employee salaries, payments to government contractors, and Social Security and Medicare benefits.

The purpose of the hearing was to set a schedule on the plaintiff’s motion for a preliminary injunction. But Judge Kollar-Kotelly spent much of the hearing in fact-finding mode, peppering a Justice Department attorney, Bradley Humphreys, with questions about the nature and extent of the access provided to the DOGE-aligned individuals. Humphreys, for his part, provided answers that were carefully hedged with qualifying language—and that were often inconsistent with public media reports. Far from clarifying what exactly DOGE and its associates are up to, Humphreys’ responses raised more questions than they answered.

Below, here are three disputed factual issues that remain unresolved following the hearing.

Question #1: Who has or had access to the information maintained in the payment system?

During the hearing on Wednesday, Humphreys, on behalf of the Justice Department, initially stated that only one DOGE associate had access to the Treasury Department’s payment system: Marko Elez, a 25-year-old Elon Musk ally who reportedly worked at Musk’s companies, SpaceX and the social media platform X, before joining the government. Later, Humphreys clarified that the system is also accessible to Tom Krause, a software executive affiliated with DOGE.

According to Humphreys, Krause supervised Elez’s work within the Treasury Department, where both men were designated “special government employees.” A special government employee is a person who is expected to work in the federal government for a 130-days or less during a 365-day period. Special government employees are subject to most government ethics and conflict of interest rules, though “sometimes in a less restrictive way.”

*snip*
February 7, 2025

Memory-Holing Jan. 6: What Happens When You Try to Make History Vanish?

https://www.propublica.org/article/january-6-erasure-doj-database-trump-history

On Jan. 10, the U.S. Department of Justice released a 123-page report on the 1921 racial massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which claimed several hundred lives and left the thriving Black neighborhood of Greenwood in smoldering ruins. The department’s investigation determined that the attack was “so systematic and coordinated that it transcended mere mob violence.” While it conceded that “no avenue of prosecution now exists for these crimes,” the department hailed the findings as the “federal government’s first thorough reckoning with this devastating event,” which “officially acknowledges, illuminates, and preserves for history the horrible ordeals of the massacre’s victims.”

“Until this day, the Justice Department has not spoken publicly about the race massacre or officially accounted for the horrific events that transpired in Tulsa,” said Kristen Clarke, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, in announcing the report. “This report breaks that silence through a rigorous examination and a full accounting of one of the darkest episodes of our nation’s past. This report reflects our commitment to the pursuit of justice and truth, even in the face of insurmountable obstacles.”

Only two weeks later, the department took a strikingly different action regarding the historical record of a violent riot: It removed from its website the searchable database of all cases stemming from the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol that were prosecuted by the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia.

These jarringly discordant actions were, of course, separated by a transfer of power: the inauguration of President Donald Trump, who swiftly moved to issue pardons, commute prison sentences and request case dismissals for all of the 1,500-plus people charged with crimes on Jan. 6, including seditious conspiracy and assaulting police officers. That sweeping clemency order — “Fuck it, release ’em all,” Trump said, according to Axios — prompted a wave of outrage, and criticism even from some Republicans. “I’ve always said that when you pardon people who attack police officers, you’re sending the wrong signal to the public at large,” said South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham.

*snip*
February 7, 2025

One Tech Tip: How to block your phone from tracking your location

https://apnews.com/article/tech-tip-disabling-phone-tracking-33f6dedaa4c6f587a4049bceb87daadc

LONDON (AP) — Smartphones are useful tools for everyday life, but they’re privy to nearly everything about you, including all the places you’ve been — if you let them.

When you use a map app to find the new restaurant your friend recommended, or your phone’s browser to check the price of something you saw while window shopping, you could be unwittingly allowing your phone to track your location and share that information with others.

Phones use various signals to find your location, including cell tower pings, Wi-Fi access points, Bluetooth and GPS.

Sometimes your phone needs to know your location to provide a useful service, like telling the Uber driver where to pick you up. But in other cases, there’s little justification for tracking your whereabouts, which then can be exploited by apps, ad services or even hackers.

“From fitness tracking to navigation, every location ping potentially reveals details about our routines and movements – which could be risky in the wrong hands,” said Darren Guccione, CEO of Keeper Security. “Users should turn on location tracking only when necessary, such as during navigation, emergencies or sharing updates with trusted contacts, and disable it immediately afterward.”

*snip*
February 6, 2025

Trump and Musk are Pushing an Absurd Lie About Government and Media

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-musk-lie-government-funding-politico-1235258376/

No paywall link
https://archive.li/JKn7q

Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Fox News, Republican lawmakers, and countless prominent right-wing commentators across social media are pushing a ridiculous lie about the Biden administration funding the media.

It started on Tuesday when staff at Politico reportedly didn’t receive their paychecks on time because of technical glitch. The right began speculating that the delay was related to Musk taking a blowtorch to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), with many pointing out that the government had ferried $8.2 million to Politico over the past year.

Musk — the world’s richest man, whose companies have substantially benefited from government contracts and subsidies — began amplifying the narrative on Wednesday, and it was off to the disinformation races, with conservatives using some truly hare-brained sleuthing to claim payments to Politico and other outlets prove the government and the media are working together nefariously to prop up Democrats and take down Trump.

The reality isn’t so scandalous. Politico is by no means a left-wing outlet, and it has often been criticized for being too deferential to conservative and corporate interests. It covers the machinations of Congress, more than anything, and it offers an extremely expensive “Politico Pro” service that many government offices use to track these machinations.

The $8.2 million figure represents the total spent by the entire federal government; USAID paid Politico only $44,000 from 2023-2024. The Washington Post points out that earlier this week the Trump White House’s Office of the National Cyber Director signed a $35,000 contract for a Politico Pro. Plenty of congressional offices pay for the subscription, too, including the office of Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), who posted yesterday that Musk was “exposing” Politico’s “grift.”

*snip*
February 6, 2025

US immigration is gaming Google to create a mirage of mass deportations

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/06/ice-us-immigration-deportations-google

No paywall link
https://archive.li/rtvNk

News of mass immigration arrests has swept across the US over the past couple of weeks. Reports from Massachusetts to Idaho have described agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) spreading through communities and rounding people up. Quick Google searches for Ice operations, raids and arrests return a deluge of government press releases. Headlines include “ICE arrests 85 during 4-day Colorado operation”, “New Orleans focuses targeted operations on 123 criminal noncitizens”, and in Wisconsin, “ICE arrests 83 criminal aliens”.

But a closer look at these Ice reports tells a different story.

That four-day operation in Colorado? It happened in November 2010. The 123 people targeted in New Orleans? That was February of last year. Wisconsin? September 2018. There are thousands of examples of this throughout all 50 states – Ice press releases that have reached the first page of Google search results, making it seem like enforcement actions just happened, when in actuality they occurred months or years ago. Some, such as the arrest of “44 absconders” in Nebraska, go back as far as 2008.

All the archived Ice press releases soaring to the top of Google search results were marked with the same timestamp and read: “Updated: 01/24/2025”.

The mystery first caught the attention of an immigration lawyer who began tracking Ice raids and enforcement actions when Donald Trump took office. She spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal from the administration. At first, she was baffled when she clicked on these seemingly new press releases and they detailed Ice raids from more than a decade ago.

So she set to work doing some digital sleuthing and enlisted a friend who’s a tech expert to help. What they found leads them to believe that Ice is gaming Google search.

*snip*
February 6, 2025

Warzel: The 'Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly' of the United States Government

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/02/elon-musk-bureaucratic-coup/681559/

No paywall link
https://archive.li/c6fng

Elon Musk is not the president, but it does appear that he—a foreign-born, unelected billionaire who was not confirmed by Congress—is exercising profound influence over the federal government of the United States, seizing control of information, payments systems, and personnel management. It is nothing short of an administrative coup.

As the head of an improvised team within the Trump administration with completely ambiguous power (the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, in reference to a meme about a Shiba Inu), Musk has managed quite a lot in the two weeks since Inauguration Day. He has barged into at least one government building and made plans to end leases or sell some of them (three leases have been terminated so far, according to Stephen Ehikian, the General Services Administration’s acting administrator). He has called in employees from Tesla and the Boring Company to oversee broad workforce cuts, including at the Office of Personnel Management (one of Musk’s appointed advisers, according to Wired, is just 21 years old, while another graduated from high school last year). During this time, OPM staffers, presumably affiliated with DOGE, reportedly set up an “on-premise” email server that may be vulnerable to hacking and able to collect data on government employees—one that a lawsuit brought by two federal workers argues violates the E-Government Act of 2002 (there has not yet been a response to the complaint). Musk’s people have also reportedly gained access to the Treasury’s payments system—used to disburse more than $5 trillion to Americans each year (a national-security risk, according to Senator Ron Wyden, a democrat from Oregon)—as well as computer systems that contain the personal data of millions of civil servants. (They subsequently locked some senior employees out of those systems, according to Reuters.) Musk did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Over the weekend, the Trump administration put two senior staffers at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) on administrative leave—staffers who, according to CNN, had tried to thwart Musk’s staff’s attempts to access sensitive and classified information. Musk posted on X yesterday that “USAID is a criminal organization. Time for it to die.” USAID staffers were barred from entering the unit’s headquarters today.

This is called “flooding the zone.” Taken in aggregate, these actions are overwhelming. But Musk’s political project with DOGE is actually quite straightforward: The world’s richest man appears to be indiscriminately dismantling the government with an eye toward consolidating power and punishing his political enemies.

*snip*
February 6, 2025

Their democracy died. They have lessons for America about Trump's power grab.

https://www.vox.com/politics/398068/trump-musk-power-grab-hungary-orban

No paywall link
https://archive.li/U1IER

A leader who voters rejected several years ago returns to power, largely thanks to discontent with the incumbent party’s economic performance. Almost immediately upon taking office, the leader launches a blitzkrieg designed to strengthen his personal grip on power. He claims unprecedented power over the budget, fires the leaders of government oversight agencies, and places vast policymaking power in the hands of an unelected wealthy ally. The opposition, divided and disorganized after electoral defeat, struggles to formulate an effective response as democracy begins to buckle.

The country I am describing is, of course, Hungary in 2010.

That year, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán returned to power after his defeat in 2002. He then launched an ambitious plan for turning a vibrant democracy into an authoritarian state, moving so swiftly to remove all formal checks on his power that few Hungarians truly understood how much power he was accruing. Judges and watchdogs were replaced with pliant cronies; his top allies took command of policymaking apparatus while developing tools for controlling the press.

The power Orbán had accrued in those early days made it possible for him to systematically and secretively erode the fairness of Hungarian elections in the coming years. By the time he was up for reelection in 2014, the opposition barely had a chance. In hindsight, the first year may have been the entire ballgame — even if no one quite knew it at the time.

I’ve spent the past week speaking with Hungarians and experts on Hungary, asking them to reflect on what happened then and offer advice to Americans today. For these observers, events in the US feel like déjà vu. One Hungarian, speaking anonymously for fear of career ramifications, warned Americans that they may see democracy slip away if they don’t act now.

“There’s no time for waiting and watching,” they said. “They can do so much — so much — counting on the fact that everyone is paralyzed.”

*snip*
February 4, 2025

Illegal Executive Spending Decisions Are Happening Now

https://prospect.org/justice/2025-02-04-illegal-executive-spending-decisions-happening-now/

We now have two contradictory stories about the infiltration into the largest and most sensitive government payment systems maintained by the Treasury Department’s Bureau of the Fiscal Service. If you believe the Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, who has only been there less than a week and who gave access to Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team in the first place, it’s limited, read-only, merely for purposes of review, to improve the prudent disbursement of taxpayer funds. If you believe the people who actually have run the system for years, some 25-year-old former SpaceX employee named Marko Elez has administrative, read/write access to the system, which is responsible for 88 percent of all payments made by the federal government.

I think I know who I believe.

According to Wired, Elez can navigate the file system, alter user permissions, write code, and modify files on the system. “You could do anything with these privileges,” said one source. Josh Marshall adds that “extensive” code changes have already been made, and that staffers who know the system are half-helping, basically because they know he could blow it up if he’s not careful. There’s a reason Nathan Tankus has been having the dry heaves for the past five days. (Nathan’s latest update is here.)

What’s more frightening at the moment is what will be done accidentally. One misstep with code could blow up the ordinary, smooth functioning of four million payments a day, with dire consequences almost across the board.

This testimony in a federal lawsuit gives you some sense of the stakes.

A nonprofit in West Virginia with five employees, which does nothing but serve individuals in the community with disabilities—getting them to health treatments or the grocery store, building ramps in their homes so they can get around, helping them live on their own—gets 70 percent of its budget through the Administration for Community Living at the Department of Health and Human Services. They have no cushion or advance payout from the government; they can only draw down to pay immediate bills, a total hand-to-mouth operation. When the Office of Management and Budget memo froze all grants, including their funds, within two days they had to lay off three of their five staffers, or 60 percent of payroll. State grants allowed them to rehire two of the staffers, but without the federal funds they are weeks away from collapse.

*snip*
February 2, 2025

Elon Musk May Have Your Social Security Number

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/elon-musk-doge-treasury-access-federal-payments.html

No paywall link
https://archive.li/5LX4J

The world’s richest man may now have access to the confidential personal information of every taxpayer in the United States. According to a New York Times report, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Friday granted Elon Musk and his minions at the faux-agency DOGE full access to the Treasury’s massive federal payment system. As with the rest of Musk’s wide-reaching project within the U.S. government under Donald Trump, it’s not at all clear what he plans to do with this unprecedented access.

Also on Friday, the top civil servant at the Treasury Department, David Lebryk, was apparently ousted after he refused to give Department of Government Efficiency officials access to the system — or rather, per the Times, he “was put on leave and then suddenly retired on Friday after the dispute, according to people familiar with his exit.”

Lebryk had worked at Treasury for three decades, and had been the Trump-named acting Treasury secretary until Bessent was confirmed by the Senate on Monday. Adds the Washington Post:

Officials affiliated with Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” have been asking since after the election for access to the system, the people said — requests that were reiterated more recently, including after Trump’s inauguration. Tom Krause, a Silicon Valley executive who has now been detailed to Treasury, is among those involved, the people said. Krause did not respond to requests for comment. …

Typically only a small number of career officials control Treasury’s payment systems. Run by the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, the sensitive systems control the flow of more than $6 trillion annually to households, businesses and more nationwide. Tens, if not hundreds, of millions of people across the country rely on the systems, which are responsible for distributing Social Security and Medicare benefits, salaries for federal personnel, payments to government contractors and grant recipients, and tax refunds, among tens of thousands of other functions.

So now Musk and DOGE have access to and power over what the Post notes is basically the American government’s checkbook, weeks before another debt ceiling crisis looms, at a time when Musk is vowing to somehow cut a hysterically large amount of federal spending, and during a chaotic period in which he and other officials in the Trump administration are running amok, if not roughshod across the federal government with they seem to believe is totally unchecked power. On Saturday, Musk was already making wild unsubstantiated claims on X about what his DOGE investigators had discovered about federal payment processes.

*snip*

Profile Information

Gender: Do not display
Member since: Fri Jan 14, 2005, 10:36 PM
Number of posts: 53,494
Latest Discussions»Nevilledog's Journal