by liberal japonicus
If you haven't noticed, this is not the place for breaking news. But this does seem to be something we might want to talk about.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWpqJ8pD2Ng
AMNA NAWAZ: Since President Trump reentered the Oval Office, billionaire Elon Musk and his DOGE team have been sweeping through federal agencies, accessing sensitive data as part of the effort to scale back the size of government. We're getting new information about the scope of that access at one independent federal agency. That's the National Labor Relations Board, which protects workers' rights to organize and investigates unfair labor practices. A whistle-blower complaint filed by an I.T. staffer at the NLRB claims that DOGE gained access to closely guarded data, including case files, and that could have led directly to a — quote — "significant cybersecurity breach." That whistle-blower, Daniel Berulis, joins me now, along with his lawyer, Andrew Bakaj. Welcome to you both. [...] So, Daniel, let's just start with you. You had been at the agency for about under a year or so. It was about early March when the DOGE team arrived at the headquarters. When and how did you notice that something wasn't right, something was going on?
DANIEL BERULIS: Sure. I was doing metrics review, kind of looking around, trying to do optimization of our own, because we're always trying to save money. And we were identifying different things, and we noticed something that was off. Me and a couple of different people noticed different points, but it kind of added up to a bigger picture. They're called indicators of compromise in the private sector. And so, when I noticed these indicators, red flags went off in my head, and I said, something's up here. So I investigated farther at that point. [...] At first, I didn't have a good picture, so I started to try to rule out possibilities of what benign could have caused these large exfiltration of data, could cause these large spikes of internal transfers. [...] There's a 200 or 300 percent increase in that time period as to what normal baseline is. So that's definitely unusual and warranted more investigation.
AMNA NAWAZ: And in the affidavit, you say that you detected the removal of 10 gigabytes worth of data. Do you have any idea what kind of data we're talking about, why this would cause concern?
DANIEL BERULIS: Sure. So what that data spike correlated with was data that was transferred off of an internal record-keeping device that was only used for internal case data. So this system only has the private information about union organizers. The privileged business proprietary, technologies, competitors, those kind of things are in that system only. There's no other data. There's nothing else except that. So that correlated data spike lined up in the exact time window and the same amount. And so that's what we can determine was taken, was data out of that system particularly.
From his lawyer
ANDREW BAKAJ: If the administration is taking the position that having data exfiltrated out of the United States government and potentially into other nation-states, if that's about efficiency and effectiveness for the nation, it doesn't make any sense. Within 15 minutes of DOGE engineers creating accounts, years, names and passwords within internal systems within DOGE, within 15 minutes of the creation of those accounts, somebody or something from Russia tried to log in with all of our credentials, meaning they had the right usernames and right passwords. And the question is, how do they get that and why? The second question that I have is that why is it that from what Dan has seen, as well as others — because we have spoken to other individuals who are able to corroborate this — which is that some of the data is also using Starlink as a backdoor. And that's another way to get data out of internal databases within agencies. And Starlink has now direct access where information is likely, we believe, is funneled directly into Russia.
Cherry on the top
ANDREW BAKAJ: [...] prior to our filing the whistle-blower disclosure this week, last week, somebody went to Dan's home and taped a threatening note, a menacing note on his door with personal information.
DANIEL BERULIS: While I was at work, yes.
ANDREW BAKAJ: While he was at work, and it also contained photographs of him walking his dog taken by a drone. So...
AMNA NAWAZ: This was on your front door to your home?
DANIEL BERULIS: Taped straight on, not inconspicuous, just right there in a white envelope.
ANDREW BAKAJ: You can't get any more direct — a direct threat than that.
Oopsie!
Posted by: bobbyp | April 16, 2025 at 10:48 PM
The "Oopsie" being that they got caught doing it.
Makes me wonder how many other agencies' data got similarly hijacked.
Posted by: wj | April 16, 2025 at 11:41 PM
David Brooks has joined the revolution: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/conservative-nyt-columnist-david-brooks-calls-for-national-civic-uprising-to-defeat-trumpism-complete-with-mass-rallies-strikes/ar-AA1D8EKx?ocid=BingNewsSerp
Posted by: wonkie | April 18, 2025 at 04:27 PM
will preznit gif me eester aigg?
Posted by: bobbyp | April 20, 2025 at 12:51 PM