Feels like a pretty good Occam’s razor case… but is there any legitimate reason why one would request this?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Is this normal to build this sort of functionality into a software system? Especially software systems that heavily rely on auditability?
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.
From the previous post, they had auditor roles built in that they purposely chose to go around
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.
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?
> 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-...
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.
DOGE needs to be shutdown and everyone of them held as a flight risk while the whole thing is investigated.
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."
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?
Oh good grief. Sensational much?
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.
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.
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.
They downloaded "IP rotation" python libraries to circumvent rate limits.
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
Suggest reading the complaint: https://whistlebloweraid.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/2025...
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
“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.”
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.
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...
> 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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
https://www.npr.org/2025/04/15/nx-s1-5355896/doge-nlrb-elon-...
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 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.
DOGE employees aren't simply doing their job. They are actively subverting the government to fatally wound it.
"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.
> We have built in roles that auditors can use
… and we make sure doesn’t reveal our wrongdoing.
— that’s what DOGE is tasked with uncovering. The “deep state”, the lies, hidden costs, etc…
Now you may think this is counterproductive. You may think this is political posturing. You may think it’s borderline conspiracy theory nonsense.
We agree!
Trump, Musk and DOGE don’t agree with us and don’t trust the staff that they believe are providing carefully constrained access and curated data dumps with strategic omissions.
THIS is why they’re side-stepping the official processes and using the skeleton key.
Again, please, focus on disambiguating the politics from the technical steps being taken.
If the task is: “Get all the data, especially the data they’re trying to hide from us” then asking for Tenant Admin is the right technical choice.
I can pick apart every other statement but I don’t have the time. But as a quick note: it’s common for the RBAC permissions to be the inverse of the organisational permission. As a random subcontractor I often get granted Domain Admin or the equivalent and the CIO, CTO, and CISO staff are treated the same on the network as some secretary might. They’re meeting jockeys, not super admins! The fact that the staff member raised this “issue” automatically implies that they know nothing and that their opinions and statements are suspect.
PS: Most systems don’t have a built-in Tenant Reader role, they only have Tenant Admin. DOGE staffers would have been instructed not to trust any custom role, so… Tenant Admin it is.
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.
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.
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
This is immature thinking, because, who wouldn't?
The contention comes from differing opinions on what is waste.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
" 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. "
This is the evidence which strongly suggests that the DOGE personnel are using various cloud IP addresses to scrape.
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.
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.
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 very bad, perhaps high treason?
tw04•3h ago
the_optimist•3h ago
dmbche•3h ago
malfist•3h ago
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
MOARDONGZPLZ•3h ago
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.
alabastervlog•2h ago
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.
EvanAnderson•2h ago
(It wouldn't change the opinions of anybody who matters, I suppose.)
mingus88•3h ago
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?
cap1434•1h ago
Cthulhu_•3h ago
goatlover•2h ago
alabastervlog•2h ago
candiddevmike•3h ago
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?
j2kun•2h ago
We live in a nation of laws, whether or not conspiracy-minded individuals prefer to follow them.
threatofrain•2h ago
Aeolun•2h ago
You stopped living in a nation of laws a while ago. Now you live in a nation of might makes right.
bilbo0s•2h ago
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.
jayd16•2h ago
myko•1h ago
matwood•23m ago
bagels•1h ago
tines•2h ago
awesome_dude•2h ago
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)
BrenBarn•2h ago
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.
awesome_dude•1h ago
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.
lovich•9m ago
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
padjo•2h ago
willhslade•1h ago
aiauthoritydev•2h ago
mikeyouse•2h ago
dboreham•2h ago
sterlind•2h ago
derektank•1h ago
nativeit•2h ago
BrenBarn•2h ago
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.)
nativeit•1h ago
tcmart14•1h ago
Reason077•2h ago
xorcist•1h ago
woodruffw•2h ago
[1]: https://www.newspapers.com/article/news-and-record-truman-ex...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proclamation_4483
romellem•1h ago
[1]: https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artII-S2-C1-3...
[2]: https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artV-1/ALDE_0...
satanfirst•2h ago
geraldwhen•2h ago
magicalist•2h ago
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.
pests•2h ago
The comment was about last-day pardons, not pardons in general. Its a topic many presidents have gotten flak or attention for.
magicalist•2h ago
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
satanfirst•1h ago
geraldwhen•29m ago
Aloisius•2h ago
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.
happyopossum•2h ago
9dev•2h ago
ceejayoz•2h ago
root_axis•1h ago
pyinstallwoes•1h ago
declan_roberts•1h ago
skissane•14m ago
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, of course" – 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.