Where is all this madness headed? Follow the money.

Got a text from a good friend a few minutes ago: "How are you doing? It's CRAZY out there." For a minute I was like, exactly which crazy is she talking about? 

Was she referring to the weather event we are currently experiencing here in Northern California [1], where an atmospheric river is attempting to merge with its terrestrial cousins? [2] Or the tsunami of corruption and lawlessness washing away the last remnants of a functioning federal government?

The answer was, Yes. 

Where shall we start? As the new administration continues to flood the zone with one outrageous, illegal, unConstitutional, nonsensical stunt after another, it's important to remember the wise words of Ben Bradlee, as voiced by Jason Robards in All The President's Men: Follow the money. [3]

In other words, pay less heed to the theatrics about tariffs and deportations and performative anti-DEI measures — which are all terrible in their own right — and closer attention to the guys who are tunnelling into the vault where the goldbars are stored.

Last night, Wired revealed that Elon Musk, czar of the completely made-up yet deeply dangerous Dept of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE), gave full administrative access to the federal check-writing apparatus to a 25-year-old employee of his named Marko Elez.

Per Wired's report:

Elez’s privileges include the ability not just to read but to write code on two of the most sensitive systems in the US government... [controlling] payments that in their totality amount to more than a fifth of the US economy....

Typically, those admin privileges could give someone the power to ... navigate the entire file system, change user permissions, and delete or modify critical files. That could allow someone to bypass the security measures of, and potentially cause irreversible changes to, the very systems they have access to.  

We're talking about $5.45 trillion dollars worth of payments. In addition to the money that pays all 2.2 million civilian federal employees, Federal Disbursement Services are used to distribute Social Security checks, SSI payments, tax refunds, and veteran's pensions, as well as help the Treasury "collect delinquent debts that taxpayers owe to the federal government or to a state government."

Gee, I wonder why Elon & Co. would want access to that? 

More from Wired:

It gets worse. Talking Points Memo reports "the changes that have been made all seem to relate to creating new paths to block payments and possibly leave less visibility into what has been blocked," and that the code Elez wrote a couple days ago has already been put into production — which would be completely bonkers at a company of any size, let alone one at the scale of the federal government — days before a long-scheduled systems migration is about to happen. 

As someone who has written far too many words about topics like these in his career, allow me to say: HOLY FUCKING SHIT. Not good, not good at all.

UPDATE 06 FEBRUARY: Multiple news sources report that Elez has resigned his unofficial post after numerous racists tweets he posted were uncovered, including "You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity," "Normalize Indian hate," and "Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool."

I thought thinking racism is cool was his primary qualification for the job.

A hacker’s paradise

Even if Elon/DOGE were actually trying to make the payment systems more efficient — and not for a nanosecond do I believe they are — the security risk these changes introduce is off the charts. 

If I were a nation-state hacker — or even a run-of-the-mill cyber criminal — I'd be rubbing my hands together with glee at this moment. Why waste energy attacking US cybersecurity defenses when you only need to compromise one individual to get access to everything? I'd be infiltrating Marko Elez's personal network so deeply that his mom would be making kimchi and speaking North Korean. [4]

Elez apparently went completely dark on social media after Wired exposed his full name, which is totally what someone with no dark ulterior motives would do after mucking about with systems distributing $5 trillion in payments each year. 

This is a story we cannot allow to be buried under more performative 'move fast and break everything' bullshit. And if people's Social Security checks or Veteran Administration benefits stop showing up, I think even MAGAmerica might take notice. We need to make sure they know who's responsible for that when they do.

Going mental

In other news, I've officially started the social media fast I talked about in my last screed. It's going pretty well … [checks watch] … four days in, though I've had to use Facebook and Instagram a couple of times for research purposes.

Instead, I've been playing a lot of Mah Jong, which is good for my ego.

Allow me to assure you that the bar for Mental Giant is pretty darned low. [5] I'll report later on how well I've stuck to my fast after a few more weeks.

How crazy is your life these days? Share your thoughts in the comments or send an email (and spare snorkeling gear) to [email protected].

[1] I am fine, thanks for asking. But at least one home near me has washed away and they’re evacuating other homes along the river, so I might need to brush up on my backstroke.

[2] I understand Cybertrucks are totally airtight, rust- and water-proof, and excel as amphibious vehicles. So if you're a proud Cybertruck owner, please feel free to drive full speed ahead through the floodwaters on your way to your Libertarians Unanimous meeting.

[3] Apparently Bradlee never gave that advice to Woodward and Bernstein in real life, but I'm sure he would have if he'd thought about it.

[4] FWIW, the US State Department, the Office of Personnel Management & Budget, and the US Treasury have all been successfully hacked by foreign adversaries in the past, but none of those attacks gave them access to trillions of dollars of government payments, all under the control of a single admin account.

[5] More like Mental Slightly Taller Than Average.