this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2025
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Summary

Despite official denials, a technologist from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) had "write access" to critical U.S. Treasury payment systems.

Marko Elez, a former SpaceX and X employee, was granted admin privileges to systems processing trillions in federal payments. Reports suggest he made “extensive changes” before resigning.

Concerns escalated after Treasury officials falsely claimed DOGE only had "read access."

The controversy follows the resignation of a senior Treasury official who opposed DOGE’s access, amid allegations of Musk associates interfering with USAID payments.

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[–] borax451@lemmy.world 1 points 1 hour ago (1 children)
[–] theneverfox@pawb.social 2 points 44 minutes ago

A technical person too inexperienced to have a job title

[–] cultsuperstar@lemmy.world 11 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago) (3 children)

What would happen if every working class American decided to join the ultra rich and not pay taxes this year?

[–] chuckleslord@lemmy.world 6 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

Most people already have and filling would only get them their refunds. Unless you mean 2025 taxes

[–] SpruceBringsteen@lemmy.world 1 points 3 hours ago

Gonna stiff my local taxes the $10 or so they actually have to collect. Muahahaha.

[–] Phoenicianpirate@lemm.ee 3 points 5 hours ago

You would need a unified effort to do that, and it wouldn't work. Also even if the IRS chooses not to go after people, Musk would have some goons to do it and he would 'authorize' them to use lethal force if necessary. Given that his goons would be less qualified than most police (and that is a scary thought) there will be enough bad encounters to scare most people into submission.

[–] __nobodynowhere@sh.itjust.works 1 points 4 hours ago

If you're a working person then your taxes are withheld by your employer and deducted from your paycheck. You may owe additional taxes when you file your return but the bulk is already taken.

[–] Sprocketfree@sh.itjust.works 20 points 11 hours ago (3 children)

I would have to think that ever change is audited in an immutable system by design. I'd be surprised if there's no way to know exactly what they changed and revert. Of course the ones running this are compromised too so... Idk maybe a look back once the bums are thrown out. But then again the fact trump isn't in prison already is such a travisty by the doj.

[–] Phoenicianpirate@lemm.ee 1 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago)

If there is any smidgen of justice in the world, Trump and Elon would go down in history as the world's greatest career conmen.

[–] NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world 14 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago) (1 children)

With the right access, these things are always mutable.

It would need to be a public blockchain with the proper amount of confirmations/finality to be truly immutable

[–] PM_Your_Nudes_Please@lemmy.world 11 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago) (1 children)

Exactly. If he has control of the entire department and the only immutable record is contained within the department… That record is now mutable. The point of blockchain is to be a distributed ledger, which is impossible to fake due to the fact that there are so many identical copies. If there is only one copy, (or to be more specific, all of the copies are under the control of a corrupt department) it’s not immutable.

[–] NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world 6 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago)

A key thing is that it pretty much needs to be a public blockchain of enough scale as well.

If the US government had a private blockchain with a thousand copies all over the country, DOGE could still step in and take control of the entire system and start editing it. It would be much harder, but possible.

By being public you can't compromise the entire system, and the larger the system gets, it gets crazy expensive to try and attack it, and it's better to just play along with the existing incentive structure then waste money on an attack.

[–] Evotech@lemmy.world 1 points 9 hours ago

Are best they got backups

[–] TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 70 points 14 hours ago (4 children)

Why does media keep legitimizing this treating it as anything other than an illegal act, simply because these fucking idiots used the word "department".

Its not a real fucking department.

[–] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 5 points 10 hours ago

They're terrified of the consequences of going against the Trump administration. I kind of don't blame them and I kind of do.

[–] Rentlar@lemmy.ca 22 points 14 hours ago

We're now in an age where the authorative voice of the Treasury Department is just straight up lying about its own actions. This is new territory.

[–] Tm12@lemmy.ca 13 points 13 hours ago

They’ve commandeered the USDS or US Digital Service. A department to improve Federal websites. They created DOGE under USDS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_DOGE_Service

[–] foggy@lemmy.world 12 points 14 hours ago

Because the talking heads have bosses and they're loving this shit.

[–] Hobbes_Dent@lemmy.world 78 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

‘member when stuff like this was treason?

When America had any sense of shame or self preservation?

[–] pdxfed@lemmy.world 22 points 14 hours ago

Can you keep it down? I'm getting mine at any cost while devoting an even greater amount of energy to ensuring those below me suffer harshly.

[–] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 7 points 10 hours ago

Extensive changes, huh? Why do I get the feeling those involved linking directly to foreign bank accounts?

[–] qprimed@lemmy.ml 61 points 15 hours ago (2 children)

every single system should now be considered compromised, both hardware and software. faith in any of these systems can never be restored unless everything is ripped out and replaced/audited - and, even then...

trillions of dollars and the ability to crush the US economy at will is one hell of a prize to not leave backdoored for an adversary.

[–] pennomi@lemmy.world 35 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago) (1 children)

Honestly, they should just imprison all the people who illegally accessed the databases. That’s what we do to hackers. Doesn’t matter if you were paid to do it or not, illegal is illegal.

But of course wait until Trump is out because he’d just pardon them.

[–] CharlesDarwin@lemmy.world 7 points 13 hours ago

Yes. Given the slow way these things work (at least for the criminals on the right) maybe they should start the case right about now. In the event we still have a democracy and that qlown donvict is gone...arrest them the first day of next Presidency.

Oh, and let them know this is pending the whole time...so "Big Balls" and whatever the fuck their names are can have something to look forward to.

[–] foggy@lemmy.world 12 points 14 hours ago

Am I the only one who's kind of giggling realizing that the personal accounts of all of these DOGE dipshits are almost certainly being actively aggressively targeted.

Talk about having a target on your back. I had put money on over 50% of their personal devices having Pegasus or similar.

[–] Punchshark@lemmy.ca 29 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

Murica is dying with a whimper

[–] HexadecimalSky@lemmy.world 13 points 12 hours ago (2 children)

something something, the apathy stage of a nation.

as the saying goes "uneducated, starving peasants make very poor revolutionists" and we have plenty of uneducated and plenty of starving.

[–] Punchshark@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 hour ago

You sure do! Good luck out there!

[–] Nollij@sopuli.xyz 4 points 12 hours ago (2 children)

There's another saying, "Give them bread and circuses, and they will never revolt." These statements are in direct conflict with each other.

[–] taiyang@lemmy.world 3 points 9 hours ago

I mean, bread sure but circuses aren't known for teaching much aside from clown college.

[–] adespoton@lemmy.ca 37 points 15 hours ago (2 children)

I’ve seen various discussions that sort all this out — he only had read access to the data, not write access.

Separately, he had write access to the underlying software stack and committed changes to live production systems, bypassing revision control and hub and spoke test environments.

All of this ended when someone surfaced tweets of his which identified him as a white supremacist — when that happened, he quit and left the facility.

[–] evan@midwest.social 13 points 12 hours ago (2 children)

There’s no way this person quit because their white supremacist tweets were uncovered. No moral hang-ups committing a coup but racism is where he gets shy???

[–] adespoton@lemmy.ca 4 points 12 hours ago

Maybe once it was uncovered, he got promoted?

[–] NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world 1 points 11 hours ago

maybe when push came to shove, even he wasn't willing to do the nazi salute to elon to keep his job.

[–] qprimed@lemmy.ml 30 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

I have read that he had administrative filesystem access to systems. god powers on the US governments financial system. INSANE.

[–] atzanteol@sh.itjust.works 1 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

Which systems though? Applications like this run on clusters and have multiple tiers. It's not just a Windows pc.

[–] qprimed@lemmy.ml 1 points 53 minutes ago

the term "system" here is holistic. hypervisors, load balancers, routers, switches, embedded controllers, operating systems, firmware, etc, etc, etc. everything, including client workstations and peripherals.

stuxnet comes to mind.

[–] Quill7513@slrpnk.net 2 points 13 hours ago