In the past week or so, the courts have begun to try to set some boundaries on the Musk–Miller–Trump administration’s early blitz of recklessness.
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This judicial review provides at least a small reprieve, hope that some of the administration’s most destructive impulses will be stopped. Or at least pared back. But even with the courts stepping up, and even with the reality of the administration’s ineptitude sinking in, this early Musk–Miller–Trump blitz remains very—maybe irreparably—damaging. Of course, there are a lot of moles to whack: the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau are being dismantled at an alarming rate, and the court system is not known for being nimble. The administration is betting, perhaps rightly, that at least some of its thoughtless, lawless efforts will slip through the cracks.
But even if the courts caught them all—and even if every court facing each lawless escapade said, “Nope, that’s not a thing”—still the entire process would be doing serious damage to our institutions. Think of it as someone spoofing your identity and going on a shopping spree with your credit cards. Even if the goon gets caught, you still have to go store by store to argue that the fraudulent purchase wasn’t legitimate and hope the debt is forgiven. And all the while, perhaps long after all the debts are dealt with, the torrent of uncertainty kills your credit score.
Their actions? How else do websites vanish? Whiy aren’t we getting livetracks on Elon’s location, or his toadies? Where are the server crashes?
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No, I mean crashes if the Whitehouse web sites… or breaking the auth systems for Trump officials… or delaying fleet vehicle reservations for motorcades so they come up short, or have to cancel…
The only way these things can happen so fast is by civil servants just doing what they are told.
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There are myriad ways to take something offline, which is easily plausible as an “oops” moment. There are also myriad tarpits to send requests to.
My old job, if I wanted to totally de-rail a project? I’d push it over to the project management office, and then to the infosec office. Almost guaranteed, the project would fail, because of those two tarpits.
Get a special request? Schedule a meeting for 4 business days out. Spend 1/3 of the meeting catching up and socializing. Spend 1/3 pre-planning the next meeting. Spend 1/3 laying out all the issues needing to be solved, and “circle back” when we get “scheduling lined up”…
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Oh damned… for some reason the last 4 backups failed… Crap.
Regardless, it’s 20 minutes of outage. And sure, you look incompetent to your peers and supers, who hopefully, would be on your side, anyways. Or, they are Fascist Toadies, and it’s best you look incompetent. How can someone incompetent sabotage anything?
No, it doesn’t. It requires a few days of not checking a misconfigured backup job. And the misconfiguration is just an “oops”, easily explained away.
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It’s not like that’s on the horizon, anyways.
Ok, cool! They can explain away, and help make the “oops” more plausible…
That is happening, anyways. Thankfully, Public Servants are unionized.
If it’s up to date… Of course, you can slow walk the restores, or even re-deploys… Again, at best, my example was a 20 minute outage. But it’s still an outage.
Ok, so just “accidentally hit a key, and have it back up the wrong directory, and forget to check backup reports…”
I fully understand what I’m saying. And I fully understand what Simple Sabotage means. It doesn’t mean you will be the single thing that stops the machine… But you can muck up the works.
It’s very easy to insist other people make sacrifices on your behalf.