go read ruth's 'Violence begets violence, especially in Chump Land,' ava and c.i.'s "MEDIA: YOUR FRIENDS & NEIGHBORS and your non-friends too!," marcia's "Tara Reade update," Stan's "Ted Kotcheff," betty's "Kamala for governor of California? Absolutely!," and elaine's "Lock up MTG?."
let's close with c.i.'s 'The Snapshot:'
Wednesday, April 16, 2025. Whistle blower Daniel Berulis comes forward with disturbing reports on DOGE, Chump continues to wreck the economy and the American dream, MSNBC's web team is still asleep this morning so could someone please wake them, Dems in Congress talk of going to El Salvador to investigate what's going on, and much more.
Let's start with Alien Musk's DOGE which has existed with no real authority and certainly no oversight. We've trusted Musk with access to this country's most sensitive information despite the fact that he's a security risk due to his drug usage, despite the fact that he's depended on huge amounts of money from China and despite the fact that he's not an American citizen (he's first a citizen of South Africa, then Canada and then the US). From yesterday's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED (NPR):
MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
President Trump's Department of Government Efficiency team, or DOGE, appears to be collecting sensitive data from all over the government. A whistleblower has come forward by filing an official disclosure to Congress. The disclosure is over concerning activity at one independent federal agency - the National Labor Relations Board. NPR's Jenna McLaughlin spoke to that whistleblower. He described to NPR what he saw and how DOGE appeared to go to great lengths to try to cover its tracks.
JENNA MCLAUGHLIN, BYLINE: It was a Friday afternoon in February when Daniel Berulis got a call from his boss. DOGE, the new federal cost-cutting unit, effectively led by billionaire Trump adviser Elon Musk, would be arriving soon.
DANIEL BERULIS: I was working on a spreadsheet for some budgeting stuff, and I got a call from my boss saying, hey, it's possible DOGE will show up.
MCLAUGHLIN: The following week - according to his official disclosure to Congress - Berulis and his colleagues watched a black SUV with a police escort pull into the parking garage of the National Labor Relations Board in Southeast Washington, D.C. The small, independent federal agency investigates and adjudicates complaints about unfair labor practices. It stores reams of potentially sensitive data, such as private legal notes in ongoing labor investigations or confidential lists of union organizers.
Most of that data lives on the Cloud, a virtual computer system that can be accessed remotely. It's Berulis' job to watch over the cloud and make sure no single user has access to data or systems they don't need. But for DOGE, those policies and guidelines didn't seem to apply, Berulis says. They had a very specific request.
BERULIS: Do not log the accounts. Don't log the access and stay out of our way.
MCLAUGHLIN: That was just the start for Berulis and his colleagues.
BERULIS: That was a huge red flag. That's something that you just don't do. It violates every core concept of security and best practice.
MCLAUGHLIN: After his suspicions were raised, Berulis was able to hunt down a few details about what took place while DOGE had access. In his disclosure to Congress, there's a ton of complicated technical detail. But here's what it says.
There's clear evidence DOGE got the highest level of access to the system, that a big chunk of data left the agency's internal case management system, followed by another chunk of data leaving the agency itself and that whoever had done those things had turned off security tools and network monitoring logs. They deleted records and appeared to try and disguise the chunks of data leaving the agency as routine web traffic. And after the DOGE accounts were created, someone with an IP address in Russia started trying to log in to the NLRB system, using a username and password that DOGE had created. Even though the attempts were blocked, Berulis says that made him worried the system was more vulnerable now.
The NLRB tells NPR the agency did not authorize DOGE to access their systems, and that there's no record of DOGE requesting it. They also said there was a recent internal investigation that ruled out a breach. However, the disclosure includes forensic evidence and records of communications that seem to tell a different story.
BERULIS: Why was that done? And that's a purposeful effort. That doesn't just happen. Logs don't just disappear. Tools don't just turn themselves off randomly. Everything in a computer has a cause and effect. That means it has to have a trigger.
MCLAUGHLIN: NPR has talked to 10 outside cybersecurity experts - embedded in companies, government agencies and the private sector - who reviewed Berulis' claims. They say the activity is suspicious and that there's no reason a legitimate user would act this way or remove data that is protected by multiple federal laws, including the Privacy Act. They say it is hard to definitively prove what happened without further access to the NLRB systems or without an investigation by agencies with more resources, like the FBI. But from what they can see, none of this behavior is normal. They told NPR the shadowy tactics described in the disclosure are the kinds of things criminals and hackers from China and Russia like to do. Meanwhile, several labor law experts who spoke to NPR say they believe there's no possible reason why DOGE should have had access to or removed NLRB's sensitive labor data.
SHARON BLOCK: There is nothing that I can see about what DOGE is doing that follows any of the standard procedures for how you do an audit that has integrity and that's meaningful and that will actually produce results.
MCLAUGHLIN: Sharon Block is the director of Harvard Law School Center for Labor and a Just Economy. She has held key labor policy jobs in multiple administrations, including as a member of the National Labor Relations Board. She said she thinks DOGE's statements about cutting waste and its behavior don't match up.
BLOCK: That mismatch between what they're doing and what we know the established professional way to do what they say they're doing - that just kind of gives away the store - that they are not about actually finding more efficient ways for the government to operate.
Last night on THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW (MSNBC), Rachel spoke with the whistle blower and with his attorney. We'd embed the video here but MSNBC's internet team appears to be sleeping on the job and not understanding the importance of breaking news.
David Ingram and Megan Lebowitz (NBC NEWS) note:
The whistleblower report, which NBC News has reviewed a copy of, comes as DOGE and Trump’s billionaire adviser Elon Musk continue to face multiple lawsuits questioning their access to computer systems across the federal government.
Berulis, who works at the labor board, wrote in the declaration that within days of DOGE staffers arriving in March, he noticed a series of “anomalous” events in the board’s computer systems. Those included changes to the use of multi-factor authentication, which is a widely used security protocol, and internal alerting systems being switched off, he wrote in the 14-page statement.
He also wrote that he tracked what appeared to be the outbound transfer of around 10 gigabytes or more of data — “the equivalent of a full stack of encyclopedias” if the data were all text files, he wrote. He wrote that the removal was “extremely unusual because data almost never directly leaves NLRB’s databases.”
The database accessed by DOGE contained personally identifiable information of “claimants and respondents with pending matters before the agency” as well as confidential business information gathered during investigations, he wrote.
e added that after DOGE gained access to the labor board’s systems, there was an increase in attempted logins from locations outside the United States including from a user with an internet protocol (IP) address in Russia. He wrote that the person with the Russian IP address appeared to have a correct username and password, created minutes earlier by DOGE engineers, and was blocked from logging in only because of their location.
“Those attempts were blocked, but they were especially alarming,” Berulis wrote.
Berulis included in his disclosure several screenshots from a computer workstation that he says are evidence of data being transferred. He wrote that he has almost two decades of experience in his field and that he has held a Top Secret security clearance.
Liam Archacki (THE DAILY BEAST) adds:
Musk is currently embroiled in a legal battle with the NLRB over the agency’s ability to enforce labor law. Attorneys for Musk’s SpaceX argued before a court in November that the NLRB’s structure is unconstitutional.
A ruling against the agency could severely diminish its power.
The legal battle began after the NLRB accused SpaceX of illegally firing employees who had publicly criticized Musk.
The nonprofit Whistleblower Aid, which is representing Berulis legally, passed along his sworn disclosure in a letter to Sens. Tom Cotton and Mark Warner, the top Republican and Democrat on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, respectively. It asked the committee to probe the matter.
The letter describes DOGE’s actions as possibly constituting a “significant cybersecurity breach that likely has and continues to expose our government to foreign intelligence and our nation’s adversaries.”
It also claims that ”someone physically taped a threatening note to Mr. Berulis’ home door with photographs – taken via a drone – of him walking in his neighborhood” as he prepared to make his disclosure. The note, which Berulis declined to share with Reuters, specifically referenced the impending disclosure, the letter says.
The spying and intimidation attempts? They started before he went public. Daniel Berulis' attorney explained that to Rachel Maddow last night. Which means that DOGE is also spying on government employees. Yesterday on CNN, Jake Tapper reported on this story and spoke with Daniel.
Alex Shephard (THE NEW REPUBLIC) explains:
It’s worth underlining the caveat that no one quite knows where the data allegedly pilfered from the NLRB is going—if indeed it has left the agency at all. But the information allegedly leaving the NLRB would be extraordinarily valuable to corporate titans like Musk looking for a leg up on rivals, as well as a window into the inner workings of the labor unions they despise. It would also explain why Musk is involved with DOGE to begin with. As a number of his companies, especially Tesla, struggle, the government systems DOGE now controls could provide invaluable information.
The theft of personal information also points to another more nefarious motivation for Musk and DOGE. It’s already abundantly clear that the group will not reduce the deficit. It likely will not even decrease federal spending, which is already $100 billion higher under Trump than it was under Biden at this point in his term. Instead, the group’s slashing of regulations and bureaucracy is aimed not at reducing “waste” but at cutting the many governmental layers that exist to fight risk—and fraud.
In another sense, it really doesn’t matter if this information is being used for nefarious corporate reasons at all. What matters is that unaccountable coders with close ties to the world’s richest man have their mitts on the personal information of millions of Americans—that’s bad no matter what they’re doing with it.
Some reaction on BLUESKY.
On the topic of the economy, we noted yesterday that Chump was destroying travel to the US and the billions of dollars that this travel results in:
This topic was also addressed on THE 11TH HOUR WITH STEPHANIE RUHLE when Stephanie spoke with Wilfred Frost about the upcoming series -- Sunday, April 27th -- on his father journaist David Frost -- a six part docuseries entitled DAVID VS. Stephanie and Wilfred looked at the countries and the drop in travel to the US with Wilfred noting that Denmark had one of the highest fallen rates on travel to the US since Chump was sworn in on January 20th.
Love to post the video but, guess what -- That's right MSNBC's web team just sleeps on the job. We will note this discussion Stephanie had last night at the start of her program.
Staying on the topic of the economy,
Again, this needs to happen.
And Lawrence Tribe discussed this last night. Let's post that video. Oh. Wait. We can't. He did that on MSNBC speaking with Lawrence O'Donnell. Again, MSNBC's web team is sleeping on the job.
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