The elephant in the china shop
The Atlantic, about DOGE (US Department of Government Efficiency, led by the impetuous Elon Musk):
DOGE representatives have obtained or requested access to certain systems at the U.S. Treasury, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Office of Personnel Management, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, with eyes toward others, including the Federal Aviation Administration. “This is the largest data breach and the largest IT security breach in our country’s history—at least that’s publicly known,” one contractor who has worked on classified information-security systems at numerous government agencies told us this week.
What this paragraph reads is “somebody, we have not vetted, got access to critical platforms”, where “critical” really means critical, like airplanes not flying into each other.
What exactly they want is unclear. And much remains unknown about what, exactly, is happening here. The contractor emphasized that nobody yet knows which information DOGE has access to, or what it plans to do with it.
That is the outcome of the lack of communication and transparency., a consequence of the “we know better” mindset. I’ve seen it at work, it never ended well.
These are not systems you tamper with lightly. Musk and his crew could act deliberately to extract sensitive data, alter fundamental aspects of how these systems operate, or provide further access to unvetted actors. Or they may act with carelessness or incompetence, breaking the systems altogether. Given the scope of what these systems do, key government services might stop working properly, citizens could be harmed, and the damage might be difficult or impossible to undo. As one administrator for a federal agency with in-depth knowledge about the government’s IT operations told us, “I don’t think the public quite understands the level of danger.”
I don’t believe Musk would “steal” the data, he owns that data, why steal it? The biggest issue here is the complexity of the platforms, and their criticality:
These systems are immense, they are complex, and they are critical. A single program run by the FAA to help air-traffic controllers, En Route Automation Modernization, contains nearly 2 million lines of code; an average iPhone app, for comparison, has about 50,000. The Treasury Department disburses trillions of dollars in payments per year.
Two million lines of code is impressive as fuck, so the only way I believe Musk will approach it would be with the help of AI. Now imagine Grok 3, the most likely tool for DOGE to use to understand the code, starts hallucinating. No other likelier issues, just hallucinating. How can DOGE test the re-written code, in what environment? They don’t say, because “they know better”.
Trump has said that Musk is acting only with his permission. “Elon can’t do and won’t do anything without our approval,” he said to reporters recently. “And we will give him the approval where appropriate. Where it’s not appropriate, we won’t.”
That is not much of an assurance, Trump is no hacker. You can tell him you’re 100% certain your changes will work, and if you’re South African, he’ll believe you.
Systems can have subsystems; each of these can have their permission structures. It’s hard to talk about any agency’s tech infrastructure as monolithic. It’s less a database than it is a Russian nesting doll of databases, the experts said.
That’s a full-blown matryoshka, only it’s gotten human lives involved.
CNN reported yesterday that a 23-year-old former SpaceX intern without a background check was given a basic, low tier of access to Department of Energy IT systems, despite objections from department lawyers and information experts. “That these guys, who may not even have clearances, are just pulling up and plugging in their servers is madness,”
The elephant.
Would they even know what to do after logging in to such a machine? We asked. “No, they’d have no idea,” the payment expert said. “The sanguine thing to think about is that the code in these systems and the process and functions they manage are unbelievably complicated,” Scott Cory said. “You’d have to be extremely knowledgeable if you were going into these systems and wanting to make changes with an impact on functionality.”
Hah! Piece of cake, even a baby can manage his way through this!
“It’s like walking into a nuclear reactor and deciding to handle some plutonium.”
Fake news!
“There’s this bizarre belief that being able to do things with computers means you have to be super smart about everything else.”
That is, I believe, the entire issue: managing a team of smart engineers to make your cars run, and your rockets fly, gives you a false sense of confidence you can do anything. That is a very intellectually pauper mindset. There is no savant in this world that doesn’t consider himself (herself) an idiot in all other domains of expertise. Mainly because they know how much it takes to understand and master a single, niched subdomain.
Musk has a Messiah complex: all the diseases are treatable by his touch, all the issues in the world have answers if you are smart enough.
Remember the labyrinth task that Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) gave Ariadne (Ellen Elliot Page) in Inception: complicated processes can take time to understand and solve, by design. Sheer power or wits are not the solutions to quicken the process, nothing is.
You cannot give birth to a healthy child in 4 weeks just because the project manager asks you to.
