Shodan was the boss in System Shock who addresses the player as 'hacker', iirc. It was a few years ago when I played it. The search engine it's named after is a popular tool for finding hackable devices.
If Elol's pet skiddie has left publicly accessibly backdoors in government systems he needs to get the boot before the Norks siphon a load of money out of somebody else's bank again.
Al Qaeda barely did shit in the West after 9/11 (gee, almost like the government let them get away with it). I think they blew up some Britbong buses and that was it.
7/7 involved bombing both a bus and 3 tube trains. The year before there were coordinated truckbombs in Istanbul and the year after was the large-scale bombing of trains in Madrid that killed 191 people.
No attempt at lampshading what they're doing, they will just bust your knee caps with hammers. No ratified "torture manual" on their desks... they make it up as they go and they GO.
It's also a flex for them. The 2 big assassinations (1 of which failed) in the UK were intended to make a statement. The first used polonium (it has a short half life so it can't be stockpiled, you need direct access to a research reactor to get a lethal quantity of it) and the other a nerve agent that was only produced by the Russians and administered by people who thought that throwing things in a bin is for plebs. Both instances left a trail of poison around London and some randoes, weeks later, found the perfume bottle that was used to administer the nerve agent and got poisoned by it.
itt. waiting room for when you realize cutting spending for spendings sake is not necessarily good for the economy or how i stopped worrying and demolish soft power.
I only bitch at them when they want us to pay for their defense. Though it isn't a white land. But I'm fine with coloreds having their colored lands. But don't try to make us police your arabs and ferry them over to Europe. No.
The more the federal government is dismantled the better it is for everyone. Just about everything the feds do the states could do better.
I would be amazing if the average American realized how little the federal government does for them, thats why i'm pro shutdown.
The fact that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is the next to go will be AMAZING!!!!.
Banks should be allowed to do whatever they want with no oversight, and if they steal your money because of some gay loophole, then you have no rights.
Don't you trust the banks!!! Fuck it is going to be amazing.
Please deal with the department of education.
It's existence does nothing but enrich Unions.
States once again can run their own education systems as they do now.
I can also see the kiwi libtards and reddit infiltration in this thread. We see you.
More on Edward Coristine. It's either hilarious shitposting, or he built a CSAM host. Excerpts:
Edward Coristine, a 19-year-old member of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), launched an image-sharing website in 2021 that featured custom “shitposting” web addresses that redirected to content hosted on his site. URLs that redirected to Coristine’s site referenced the sale of child sexual abuse material, racial slurs, and rape. Among the links were “child-porn.store” and “kkk-is-cool.club,” according to web traffic tracked by BuiltWith.
An analysis of URL traffic to tesla.sexy between April 2021 and September 2021 shows that numerous noxious URLs redirected to Coristine’s site, including, “children-sex.party,” “child-porn.store,” “kkk-is-cool.club,” “nigga.rentals,” “nigga-sex.download,” “owns-a-slave.shop,” “raping-women.club,” “ketamine-rape.date,” “rape.business,” and “rapes-wo.men.” Internet archives of the URLs show they redirected traffic to tesla.sexy but any content they may have linked to has disappeared.
It is unclear whether Coristine, who has gone by the online monikers “Rivage,” “Big Balls,” and “JoeyCrafter,” used or created any of the URLs. But they reflect the kinds of sordid online communities Coristine trafficked in during his high school years.
According to Krebs on Security, Coristine was a member of “The Com,” a disparate community of Telegram channels and Discord chatrooms that serves to facilitate collaboration between cybercriminals. A Wired report found that one of the domains operated by Tesla Sexy LLC provided a service to create AI bots for Russian Discord servers. In 2022, Coristine interned at Path, a security company that hired former cybercriminals to protect customers from denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. During the same year, a Telegram handle associated with Coristine sought to hire someone to commit a DDoS attack in a Com chatroom that exists for the sale and solicitation of cybercrimes.
China is better at propaganda and quick iterative designs on stolen technology. Plus they have all the manufacturing power in the world, practically, but they have to build it with money they've gained producing things for other nations, mostly piggybacking off the US. They seem to be genuinely awful at new ideas and horrible at infrastructure at scale, and have made a system that promotes people producing crap quickly to get CCP $$, at the same time the CCP is willing to spend countless cash on actually useful shit and doesn't give a damn about DEI, rather they care about the nation first, well the image of it. The US hadn't for decades. They're both massively suffering from their endless growth philosophy but also getting the fruits of such a system on steroids. They are competitive with the US, not better, and the US is quickly realizing that they can easily beat their asses if they start trying again. Made blatantly obvious by one American company (SpaceX) demolishing practically the entire world, including China, in launches and rocketry.
The large-scale purge has begun. A reduction in force has been ordered, with exceptions for public safety, immigration, and law enforcement. Agencies are to prioritize operations Trump has already suspended. Being unable to remove perceived ideological opponents, Trump will simply remove their positions. That doesn't get necessarily rid of the person, as many of them will bump someone with less seniority and stick around in another job, but the DOGE people don't seem to understand how RIFs work so they probably didn't know that.
Except for public safety, immigration, and law enforcement, agencies can now only hire one person for every four that depart. Hiring requires approval of DOGE, unless the agency head determines the position should be filled without DOGE's concurrence. All cabinet members have already been vetted for DOGE compliance, and agency heads under their command will be replaced for noncompliance, so DOGE is effectively in charge of most Federal civilian hiring. Agencies may exempt any national security, public safety, or homeland security position, but that doesn't mean those operations will continue unimpeded. When you have lost 75% of your contracting officers, or 75% of your payroll staff, or 75% of your tech support, then all your activities are going to suffer.
It'll take a while to figure out how this affects government services. It's sort of a "pass the bill to find out what's in it" scenario. My first thought is the Department of Veterans Affairs is going to collapse. The VA Medical Centers don't fit any of the exemptions listed in the order, and they won't be able to function if they can't hire healthcare personnel. A lot of VA physicians are new-ish doctors doing internships or whatever they do, so they hire a ton of them every year. When they are cut off from that source, they won't be able to provide primary care any more. Nor will they be able to retain a safe nurse-to-patient ratio, or enough medical support assistants to check people in. They're already losing a lot of psychologists because many of those are remote positions. As the VHA system shuts down, the specialized care like spinal cord injury, PTSD treatment, and MST counseling will go away. Some of that can be found in the community, some of it not so much.
That's just one administration in one department. The process will repeat across countless other agencies, first those with short-term appointments or high turnover, but everyone will be affected in time. As agencies that provide shared services are decimated, the exempt agencies are going to be severely impacted as well. This is going to be fascinating to watch.
Implementing The President’s “Department of Government Efficiency” Workforce Optimization Initiative
EXECUTIVE ORDER
February 11, 2025
By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered:
Section 1. Purpose. To restore accountability to the American public, this order commences a critical transformation of the Federal bureaucracy. By eliminating waste, bloat, and insularity, my Administration will empower American families, workers, taxpayers, and our system of Government itself.
Sec. 2. Definitions. (a) “Agency” has the meaning given to it in section 3502 of title 44, United States Code, except that such term does not include the Executive Office of the President or any components thereof.
(b) “Agency Head” means the highest-ranking official of an agency, such as the Secretary, Administrator, Chairman, or Director, unless otherwise specified in this order.
(c) “DOGE Team Lead” means the leader of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) Team at each agency, as defined in Executive Order 14158 of January 20, 2025 (Establishing and Implementing the President’s “Department of Government Efficiency”).
(d) “Employee” has the meaning given to it by section 2105 of title 5, United States Code, and includes individuals who serve in the executive branch and who qualify as employees under that section for any purpose.
(e) “Immigration enforcement” means the investigation, enforcement, or assisting in the investigation or enforcement of Federal immigration law, including with respect to Federal immigration law that penalizes a person’s presence in, entry, or reentry to, or employment in, the United States, but does not include assisting individuals in applying for immigration benefits or efforts to prevent enforcement of immigration law or to prevent deportation or removal from the United States.
(f) “Law enforcement” means:
(i) engagement in or supervision of the prevention, detection, investigation, or prosecution of, or the incarceration of any person for, any violation of law; or
(ii) the protection of Federal, State, local, or foreign government officials against threats to personal safety.
(g) “Temporary employee” has the meaning given to it in 5 C.F.R. part 316.
(h) “Reemployed annuitant” has the meaning given to it in 5 C.F.R. part 837.
Sec. 3. Reforming the Federal Workforce to Maximize Efficiency and Productivity. (a) Hiring Ratio. Pursuant to the Presidential Memorandum of January 20, 2025 (Hiring Freeze), the Director of the Office of Management and Budget shall submit a plan to reduce the size of the Federal Government’s workforce through efficiency improvements and attrition (Plan). The Plan shall require that each agency hire no more than one employee for every four employees that depart, consistent with the plan and any applicable exemptions and details provided for in the Plan. This order does not affect the standing freeze on hiring as applied to the Internal Revenue Service. This ratio shall not apply to functions related to public safety, immigration enforcement, or law enforcement. Agency Heads shall also adhere to the Federal Hiring Plan that will be promulgated pursuant to Executive Order 14170 of January 20, 2025 (Reforming the Federal Hiring Process and Restoring Merit to Government Service).
(b) Hiring Approval. Each Agency Head shall develop a data-driven plan, in consultation with its DOGE Team Lead, to ensure new career appointment hires are in highest-need areas.
(i) This hiring plan shall include that new career appointment hiring decisions shall be made in consultation with the agency’s DOGE Team Lead, consistent with applicable law.
(ii) The agency shall not fill any vacancies for career appointments that the DOGE Team Lead assesses should not be filled, unless the Agency Head determines the positions should be filled.
(iii) Each DOGE Team Lead shall provide the United States DOGE Service (USDS) Administrator with a monthly hiring report for the agency.
(c) Reductions in Force. Agency Heads shall promptly undertake preparations to initiate large-scale reductions in force (RIFs), consistent with applicable law, and to separate from Federal service temporary employees and reemployed annuitants working in areas that will likely be subject to the RIFs. All offices that perform functions not mandated by statute or other law shall be prioritized in the RIFs, including all agency diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives; all agency initiatives, components, or operations that my Administration suspends or closes; and all components and employees performing functions not mandated by statute or other law who are not typically designated as essential during a lapse in appropriations as provided in the Agency Contingency Plans on the Office of Management and Budget website. This subsection shall not apply to functions related to public safety, immigration enforcement, or law enforcement.
(d) Rulemaking. Within 30 days of the date of this order, the Director of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) shall initiate a rulemaking that proposes to revise 5 C.F.R. 731.202(b) to include additional suitability criteria, including:
(i) failure to comply with generally applicable legal obligations, including timely filing of tax returns;
(ii) failure to comply with any provision that would preclude regular Federal service, including citizenship requirements;
(iii) refusal to certify compliance with any applicable nondisclosure obligations, consistent with 5 U.S.C. 2302(b)(13), and failure to adhere to those compliance obligations in the course of Federal employment; and
(iv) theft or misuse of Government resources and equipment, or negligent loss of material Government resources and equipment.
(e) Developing Agency Reorganization Plans. Within 30 days of the date of this order, Agency Heads shall submit to the Director of the Office of Management and Budget a report that identifies any statutes that establish the agency, or subcomponents of the agency, as statutorily required entities. The report shall discuss whether the agency or any of its subcomponents should be eliminated or consolidated.
(f) Within 240 days of the date of this order, the USDS Administrator shall submit a report to the President regarding implementation of this order, including a recommendation as to whether any of its provisions should be extended, modified, or terminated.
Sec. 4. Exclusions. (a) This order does not apply to military personnel.
(b) Agency Heads may exempt from this order any position they deem necessary to meet national security, homeland security, or public safety responsibilities.
(c) The Director of OPM may grant exemptions from this order where those exemptions are otherwise necessary and shall assist in promoting workforce reduction.
Sec. 5. General Provisions. (a) Nothing in this order shall be construed to impair or otherwise affect:
(i) the authority granted by law to an executive department, agency, or the head thereof; or
(ii) the functions of the Director of the Office of Management and Budget relating to budgetary, administrative, or legislative proposals.
(b) This order shall be implemented consistent with applicable law and subject to the availability of appropriations.
(c) This order is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by any party against the United States, its departments, agencies, or entities, its officers, employees, or agents, or any other person.
Did anyone see this bizarre DOGE press conference today? The fails are stacking up and Musk is eating his own dick listening to the people around him. The “limestone mine” thing was clearly a joke he missed. Guy sounds like he’s been the victim of 29 strokes in a row. Just an absolut lolcow putz.
OPM is the chief human resources agency and personnel policy manager for the Federal Government. Most HR is handled by the individual agencies, but they generally follow OPM regulations, sometimes use OPM shared services, and must refer certain actions to OPM for approval. We'll treat OPM briefly here because its main endeavor, the fork, deserves a post of its own.
Elon Musk's woman at OPM is Amanda Scales. She majored in psychology and economics [archive] at UC Davis and graduated in 2012. She interned at the American Enterprise Institute, where she says she learned the value of "clear and concise communication," which she has evidently forgotten. She also received (or is working on) an undergraduate certificate in creative writing from Cambridge in 2025. She has worked in talent positions at Uber, HUMAN CAPITAL, and from October 2024 to January 2025, Musk's xAI. In late January, while still employed by xAI, she was allegedly given access to and control of OPM's database of Federal personnel. She is now OPM's chief of staff. [LinkedIn]
Brian Bjelde, former VP of people operations at SpaceX, is now a senior advisor at OPM. After completing a master's degree in aeronautical engineering at USC, he worked at JPL for a little over a year. Then he moved to SpaceX where he had a variety of mission-related positions until he pivoted into management. He spent ten and a half years as managing director of the food services group and VP of people operations, though the overlap could be due to a data entry error. He helped Musk cut staff at Twitter and informed OPM of plans to remove 70% of that agency's personnel. [LinkedIn]
Greg Hogan is the Chief Information Officer at OPM. He has a degree in computer engineering and spent 24 years in the private sector. He spent the last seven years as VP of infrastructure at Comma.ai, a San Diego company that produces an "AI upgrade" to add self-driving capability to cars.
Riccardo Biasini is a "point of contact" for an OPM privacy impact assessment discussed below. He received a master's degree in automative engineering from the University of Pisa in 2010, then worked for Tesla from 2011 to 2016. He joined Comma.ai in 2016 (picture below), and has reportedly worked for the Boring Company.
Rumors that the DOGE boys, and even Musk himself, have been bedding down at OPM have not been confirmed.
The Government-Wide Email System (GWES)
DOGE got its teeth into OPM early and used it to advance their agenda across the rest of the government. The first evidence of their activity may have been the little-remarked termination of Chief Information Officer Melvin Brown on 1/22/2025. The next day, OPM published an official statement announcing it was testing a capability to send "important communications" to all federal employees. This was remarkable, as OPM has no reason to communicate with all federal employees. It's mostly a policy outfit and rarely gets involved with an invidivdual employee. As almost no one had any reason to pay attention to OPM, no one noticed the announcement.
On 1/24/2025, OPM sent an email from hr@opm.gov to most executive branch employees, as well as employees of the legislative and judiciary branches, reading, "This is a test of a new distribution and response list. Please reply ‘YES’ to this message." It included a link to the original announcement. Many recipients believed it was a phishing attempt and declined to reply or click the link.
OPM then sent a second email reading, "This is the second test of a new email distribution and response list. The goal of these tests is to confirm that an email can be sent and replied to by all government employees. Please reply 'Yes' to this email, regardless of whether you replied to the first test email. If you responded 'Yes' to the first email: thank you. As a reminder, always check the From address to confirm that an email is from a legitimate government account and be careful about clicking on links, even when the email originates from the government." The "reminder" indicated OPM was paying attention to the chatter surrounding their missives. This was the start of a pattern of OPM issuing an unclear or preposterous communication, people talking about its deficiencies, and OPM issuing a clarification.
Satisfied the GWES was up and running--despite many executive branch employees not receiving the emails and many non-executive branch employees receiving them--OPM used the GWES to launch "the fork." This utensil will be covered separately. We will concentrate on the development of and reaction to the GWES.
Around 1/27/2025, an anonymous Reddit user posted the following account of the GWES:
I'm a current employee at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). This is a throwaway account for obvious reasons. I'm posting this because people need to know what's going on at OPM.
I've been an OPM employee for nearly a decade and a Federal Employee for almost 20 years. I've never witnessed anything even remotely close to what's happening right now. In short, there's a hostile takeover of the federal civil service.
Let me say this in no uncertain terms -- OPM has been compromised and taken over. The very backbone of American Government, the HR of all HR in the U.S. Government has been taken over by outside politicals. In just five days, they managed to push aside dozens of non-political, career civil servants who were there specifically to prevent the civil service from becoming the President's henchmen.
The current Acting Director, Charles (Chuck) Ezell is a low-level branch chief. He's the friendliest "yes man" you'll ever meet. He never says no. It's clear they pushed aside all the high-level non political civil servants who refused to do Donald Trump's bidding, until they found Chuck.
Under his name, they've sent numerous requests to all the agencies to collect information on gov't employees that they see as a threat to their agenda. Instructions say to send these lists to Amanda Scales. But Amanda is not actually an OPM employee, she works for Elon Musk. She wasn't even properly cleared by OPM Personnel Security.
Our CIO, Melvin Brown, (also a non political career public servant) was pushed aside just one week into his tenure because he refused to setup email lists to send out direct communications to all career civil servants. Such communications are normally left up to each agency.
Instead, an on-prem (on-site) email server was setup. Someone literally walked into our building and plugged in an email server to our entwork to make it appear that emails were coming from OPM. It's been the one sending those various "test" message you've all seen. We think they're building a massive email list of all federal employees to generate mass RIF notices down the road.
The non-political civil servants here at OPM are watching helplessly as our government is being systematically dismantled bit by bit. Even the IGs are being fired to prevent them from investigating the numerous whistleblower complaints we've fired. Please share this and tell the world that OPM is not the bad guy. We're just as helpless to stop this as the rest of our fellow public servants. Hopefully someone out there can help us, but it's looking pretty grim.
[Farmer's note: The original text uses a solid emdash and mostly uses curly quotes and apostrophes, which have all been converted to basic ASCII characters in my typewritten copy. However, the original text does use an ASCII apostrophe in a couple places. This suggests the text was originally written in Word or a similar word processor, pasted into the Reddit text editor, and edited again.]
Some of this has been corroborated. Melvin Brown's firing was reported on 1/22/2025, before the GWES tests started. On 1/28/2025, it was reported OPM lacked the technical capability to send a mass email to this many people prior to Trump's inauguration:
But just days before President Donald Trump’s inauguration, OPM did not have the capability to send a mass email of that scale, according to a person familiar with the matter. To send mass emails, the agency had used govDelivery, a cloud communications service provided by public sector IT company Granicus, a different person familiar said.
The govDelivery contract had restrictions on the volume of emails available to send without incurring added costs, and the agency would not have been able to reach 2.3 million people, the approximate number of all civilian federal employees, the second person added.
On 1/27/2025, two Jane Does filed a class action suit against OPM for failure to publish the privacy impact assessment required for this system by the E-Government Act of 2002 (Doe v. Office of Personnel Management). On 2/5/2025, OPM replied by declaring they didn't have to do a PIA, but FINE, we'll write a PIA anyway, GOD. The PIA was signed by OPM's new CIO Greg Hogan, rather than a privacy official. The PIA's point of contact is Riccardo Biasini. On 2/7/2025, the plaintiffs filed an amended complaint alleging the PIA was insufficient. And they added five Does. Lots of Janes. There is now outstanding a motion for a temporary restraining order on one hand, and a motion to dismiss on the other.
EHRI and eOPF
OPM maintains data on tens of millions of Federal employees and applicants, including names, Social Security numbers, employment history, addresses, phone numbers, demographic information, disability status, etc. This data is protected by the Privacy Act, and some may be protected by HIPAA. It's not classified, but it's not something any idiot off the street can peruse at their leisure, either.
Shortly after Trump's inauguration, OPM was directed to give DOGE personnel administrator access to (at least) the Enterprise Human Resources Integration (EHRI) and Electronic Official Personnel Folder (eOPF) systems, USAJobs, USA Staffing, USA Performance, and the Health Insurance Data Warehouse. Career officials with access to these systems had their access revoked in late January. Six DOGE "agents" were given access, including a "high school graduate" who is presumably Edward Coristine. They have allegedly used this access to remove specific government employees. On 2/8/2025, some of their access was revoked.
On 2/10/2025, a whole bunch of people sued OPM and other agencies for this.
On 2/11/2025, a different group of people filed another class action complaint against OPM, calling this "the largest data breach and the largest IT security breach in our country's history."
Schedule F
The Schedule F thing predates DOGE so I won't cover any of these in detail, but there are at least four lawsuits going on:
The Department of State's latest procurement forecast has been posted. Over the next five years, the Bureau of Diplomatic Security plans to spend $400M on armored Teslas, more than all other armored vehicles combined. The forecast was last revised in December; can't tell if they added the Teslas before or after the election. Maybe if USAID had bought some Teslas to haul around food and medicine, they'd still be here.
Given the undeveloped environments in which the State Department sometimes works, one wonders how useful these things will be. How much range do you get in a Tesla loaded down with armor?
70+ members of GSA's Technology Transformation Services were fired today. This is one of the more interesting DOGE targets. With OPM and Treasury, GSA is one of the core enabling agencies that DOGE has infiltrated. It was also one of the first agencies to alert us to the DOGE boys, who were badged in by new TTS director/former Tesla engineer Thomas Shedd because they didn't have government IDs yet. The boys interviewed TTA's employees, purportedly to determine if they were worth retaining.
DOGE's plans for GSA are to massively downsize the agency, sell off half its property, then rent it back from its new owners. The irony of mandating in-person work then selling your office buildings cannot be lost even on an autist like Elon Musk.
DOGE's plans for GSA are to massively downsize the agency, sell off half its property, then rent it back from its new owners. The irony of mandating in-person work then selling your office buildings cannot be lost even on an autist like Elon Musk.
