Summary
A vulnerability in the new OPM email server allowed anyone to send mass messages to federal employees, exposing poor cybersecurity.
Over 13,000 NOAA staff received spam and vulgar messages, including crude jokes about Trump and bizarre newsletters, causing widespread outrage.
The breach resulted from an overhaul led by Elon Musk that installed underqualified personnel and an insecure in-house system, sparking a class-action lawsuit for cybersecurity failures.
The unsecured system also inadvertently revealed ties to Project 2025 and a plan to gather government employee data as Trump’s loyalists reshape federal operations.
Expect more of this. Unfortunately, ears will be plugged and eyes will be covered as people just go “lalalalala”
How are Republican voters reconciling any of this? Or has Faux News spun this as something Obama’s responsible for?
I’ve been off Reddit for a while but I’d be lying if I didn’t just go look at /r/conservative to see.
“I pray Trump knows what he is doing, because if this doesn’t work and just results in higher prices and nothing the average person can identify as a positive, then people will sour on Trump.”
“Im really worried this is going to bite us hard causing prices to skyrocket.”
“I’m in the construction industry and would be lying if I said I wasn’t a little nervous for this rollercoaster.” In general, some longer comments are basically saying tariffs will work to bring home manufacturing. The problem with this is we would need manufacturing of most of these things IN PLACE NOW to be ready to do that. We’re not since it’s a surprise to both U.S. citizens and Canada.
Many other posts are being deleted – most I’ve ever seen, but again it’s been a while since I’ve looked at Reddit.Thst must be the polite minority. Most times I dare to look into thedonald2.0 it’s just stuff talking about annexing canada and Bombing europe
Seriously, everyone needs to go check out FoxNews.com because it is insane that anyone could rely on them for their news. I checked out this morning and had to scroll WAY DOWN to find any mention of tariffs, and even then, it was praising trump for keeping a campaign promise.
There’s gotta be a way to make it stop
Guillotines
Costco should start carrying them
I’ve heard of a treatment. The guy who killed Hitler did it. It’s a high speed lead treatment. Very effective
Problem is, we can’t just skip to that part of the story without being accused of being just like the J6 crowd. I hate what is happening, and don’t want to say there’s nothing that can be done, but unfortunately there’s a bunch of people who aren’t gonna wake up and get it until it hurts them personally.
For now, probably the best thing we can do is stand up for those in their crosshairs and support them however we can, while we wait for a bunch of the anti-woke crowd to wake up to the fact that they voted for the leopard that’s eating their face. Now, there should definitely be a limit on how long we wait for them to wake up, but at the speed this leopard is going? I doubt anyone will be unscathed by Spring.
They won’t listen to that. At this point they are pro-Hitler.
They should employ the method Hitler used in the end! It was super effective!
I just wish fascists would follow their leader in that regard.
This is glorious. The mess is amazing, but the money that will be saved after it’s all done will be worth it.
Given the lawsuits this is opening up, I wonder if you’re joking.
They’re firing Inspector Generals? Damn, thats like, expediting the destruction of the federal government.
Edit: for those who don’t know, IGs are independent officials within fed and state agencies that conduct investigations, audits or inspections to employees or agencies.
He illegally fired 17 of them, including one investigating Neuralink, (one of Musk’s companies).
He’s up to over 30 now.
including one investigating Neuralink
And that’s not a coincidence.
How are people just so unaware of what’s happening in their own government?
Like you’re on a site like this, and you know what Inspector Generals do, but you’re not aware that he fired over a dozen of them days into his term? How??
There’s a whole lot of, “I don’t care about or pay attention to politics because nothing really changes for me” morons about to have a rude awakening.
How? Felonious 47 is going after the news media making sure nothing critical gets published. Due to the cowardice of our mainstream media, we no longer have a free press.
Our investigative media has been dead or bought out for a long time, and despite project 2025 being published, it’s all happening really quickly. I have a difficult time believing this isn’t the downfall of America. And we almost reached 250.
At this point I’m hoping America is annexed by Canada or something. It’s too dangerous to leave this country to its own devices, we are begging for invaders to come liberate us.
The upside is that often times throughout history massive actions like what is happening right now are restricted to the start or end of empires. Turns out fucking with how a state functions is a great way for it to collapse, the death of empires is often times slow until its not.
You got too much time in your hands mijo.
They can’t even do a coup without fucking half of it up.
How have they fucked up? No one has stopped them
Because they don’t have to worry about fuck ups. Americans are gonna do jack shit about it. Otherwise something would have already been done.
Sadly Ayn Rand was right when she said…
“The question isn’t how can I do such things, but who is going to stop me?”
Suda 51 was right, there really are No More Heroes.
Not true. The Democrats will form a committee to discuss language to be placed in a letter to the administration, they may even call a news conference to state that they are disappointed in what is happening and if it continues they may have to do more drastic measures like actually sending the letter that the committee put together.
At this point I’ll be geniunely surprised to learn that Democrats with survival instincts exist.
We need to return to the days when dueling on the senate floor was acceptable.
Not true. The Democrats will form a committee to discuss language to be placed in a letter to the administration, they may even call a news conference to state that they are disappointed in what is happening and if it continues they may have to do more drastic measures like actually sending the letter that the committee put together.
Wait, it gets better! The Democrats are going to form a committee to discuss language for the letter, which is sure to be a 500-page document that will get printed out on recycled paper and ceremoniously burned in a symbolic gesture of disappointment. And after weeks of debate, they’ll finally agree on a single sentence that reads, ‘We are disappointed in the administration’s lack of action.’ Wow, that’ll definitely send shockwaves through Washington!
But wait, there’s more! They’ll then call an emergency press conference to declare their outrage, where they’ll all stand in front of a teleprompter and read from their carefully crafted statement. And to really drive the point home, they might even release a 3-minute video montage of footage from the committee meeting, set to a dramatic score, just to make sure everyone knows how “serious” they are.
And if that’s not enough, they’ll then proceed to actually send the letter – but only after making it clear that they’re only doing so because they have to, and not because they actually expect anything to change. And when the administration inevitably ignores them or responds with a half-hearted gesture of tokenism, they’ll be like, ‘See, we told you so! We sent our letter and… oh wait, nothing happened.’ It’s going to be hilarious!
That’s the frightening part … either they are idiots that are completely messing everything up including their own plans … or they are following a well orchestrated plan of disruption and chaos to gain control of everything and everyone
Either way, they are undoing a lot of things that will take years or decades to bring back
“From barbarism to civilization requires a century; from civilization to barbarism needs but a day.”
- Will Durant
I’ve always heard it as “democracy is only six missed meals away from anarchy.”
they are idiots that are completely messing everything up including their own plans
Incompetence is one of the hallmark qualities of a fascist government.
And that’s pretty lucky, because it means they will be the architects of their own downfall.
The question isn’t if or even when will Trump fall, it’s how many of us will die in the process.
Hey, people think Hitler’s Germany was a success story until he started to loose the war but it was actually a clusterfuck right from the beginning and doomed to fail from the start.
If you start a mechanized war without significant oil reserves you’re gonna have a bad time
I mean, he loosed war pretty early, so it wasn’t that long according to what you say.
Now now… incompetence is the hallmark of any government
It’s much easier to fight a enemy that is confused, disorganized, and fighting amongst itself. This is by design.
Just wait until all the backdoors are discovered. Or front doors I guess…with how inept these idiots are. Can’t wait for someone with some power/money to actually get sick of these clowns and just end them
“Flood the zone with shit” strategy.
Either way, they are undoing a lot of things that will take years or decades to bring back
This is what the accelerationists didn’t account for.
I’m betting on stage 1 underpants gnomes.
And true to form, our boy Klip exposed the malignant incompetence while taking the opportunity to advertise his substack 😄
The breach resulted from an overhaul led by Elon Musk that installed underqualified personnel and an insecure in-house system, sparking a class-action lawsuit for cybersecurity failures.
And y’all let him have access to government.
The world will burn from climate and war because of American stupidity.
Trump won by 1.5% of the vote. And that amount was basically the number of people the Republicans managed to disenfranchise during this election.
WE did nothing. The vast majority of Americans want this madness to end but no one with any sort of power to do anything is standing up to the orange bully.
For all the guns we own, this country has very few Luigis who understand this is a class war. So what else are the people who didn’t vote for the asshole in the oval supposed to do about it?
They rigged the vote and Trump threw him in there. How did WE do this exactly?
As much as I wish otherwise, Trump got a plurality of the vote, and pre-election day polling was clear that such a result was very possible.
The plurality of the people who bothered to vote put Trump in, who was quite clear about his alliance with Musk.
This is on us.
I mean it is worth noting the added legal schenanegins that are known.
https://hartmannreport.com/p/trump-lost-vote-suppression-won-c6f
Even if some form of manipulation or shenanigans pushed Trump over the edge, it couldn’t have done that if it hadn’t been close to begin with. It shouldn’t have been close.
That I cannot disagree with… Will 100% agree that flaws were made with… (in no particular order)
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Voters not actually researching until it was too late. The amount of trump voters posting “what do you mean tarrifs will raise prices on stuff”. and amount that were searching “what is a tarrif”, stories of actual trump supporters that literally are getting deported etc… There’s absolutely a lot of trump voters, that wouldn’t have voted it if they took the time to understand what trump was literally openly saying he’d do… and did.
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Non voters… IE via apathy or disagreements on the democratic party. Be it over just lazyness, or to try and get the democratic party to represent them better… the end result is now it’s going to take years of work whenever power is taken just to bring the country back to where it was a month ago… let alone improve it in the ways they wanted.
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The democratic party. Honestly there’s 2 pretty blaring mistakes IMO in this campaign… starting with bypassing the primary, covering up Biden’s senility and letting him re-run. Rushing the flip to harris with now no primary or system in place of letting anyone chose our candidate… Then some major misteps on the harris campaign, which I felt was doing amazing early on… making solid steps solid grabs, minor misstep in refusing to criticize or draw a strong contrast between herself and biden., climbing in the polls… Before suddenly making a hard right turn on messaging. Courting the unobtainable red voters instead of focusing on motivating her own base to get out and vote.
I agree, trump is awful enough, that this should have been a slam dunk. the fact that this was ever anywhere close is an embarasment to the country as a whole constantly.
That being said… it still sucks that there’s a very good chance that even through those flaws, there’s still reason to question if we had won by a few percent… because honestly the potential of a small scale sabatoge (IE one to drop a few percent of votes rather than just outright change the machines and do it in bulk), would just be a 4th factor to add to that list.
the end result is now it’s going to take years of work whenever power is taken just to bring the country back to where it was a month ago
The Republicans had project 2025 ready to go on day one. Why do Democrats never have a plan like that?
Because they don’t want to govern. They just want to voter shame and play footsie with fascists while making craptons of money.
The Democratic party is guilty of nothing less than total political malpractice from the moment they allowed Biden to run again.
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“us” being “a bunch of apathetic idiots and idiots deeply opposed to the rest of the country”
We can put a significant amount of blame in the laps of Democrats (as in, DNC officials) and their sycophants and defenders in both media and online.
Lemmy itself worked to become an echo chamber reflecting an uncritical assessment of both Democrat performance from 2021-2024, and as well the legitimate electoral performance of both the Biden, and separately, the Harris campaign.
Reality: the denialism around how bad and unpopular both Biden and Harris were in their role as Executives in Cheif, did substantial damage to Harris and probably cost them the election.
That denialism was RAMPANT across lemmy, and still persists today.
You can not make a convincing argument that your team should be the ones elected when you are asking people to deny the evidence of their lives experience, and that’s exactly what both the Biden and Harris campaign did. Lemmy moderators also worked to suppress any media or users critical of Harris and Biden.
Harris needed to feel the pressure from the electorate that Americans sensed that the country wasn’t doing well and was going in the wrong direction. She needed to understand and respond to the fact that Americans, in general, wanted a change from how Democrats had been managing.
Building an echo chamber, in both mainstream media and social media, to shut that view point out, and ultimately leave it unaddressed, is why the Harris campaign failed.
That echo chamber shielded the campaign from critical information they needed to be aware of to make the right kinds of changes which might have led to success.
And every moderator here, who suppressed criticism, or who uses bans to create an echo chamber in forums like c/World, c/Politics, and c/PoliticalMemes is in part to blame.
Even now I routinely get hammered with downvotes when I say “Harris wasn’t a good candidate.”
I mean, elections are how you judge whether a candidate is a good candidate. We have an objective measure of how good a candidate she was. It wasn’t very.
I’m not sure what better candidate the Democrats could have fielded by the time Biden withdrew, but that just shows that Biden waited way too late to drop out.
The Democrats are masters at pulling defeat from the jaws of victory.
I’m not sure what better candidate the Democrats could have fielded by the time Biden withdrew*
Bernie was RIGHT THERE.
And if he said he would have been a one term transitional president, he would actually keep that promise. Unlike Biden.
I love dismantling this take people have on Harris.
You are a bad poster. You didn’t convince me with your argument.
That statement, by your logic, is not an opinion - it’s “truthful”. Disregarding the validity of whatever argument you’re making, if you judge it by its convincingness, ignores the intelligence or bias of the audience. Then, it’s possible that ANY argument is bad.
Since you, FaceDeer, failed to convince me, Katana314, of your argument, you are a bad Lemmy poster.
In other words, to dismantle that bolded statement above, you have to recognize that voters, themselves, bear some blame for not being receptive to logical takes.
You are a bad poster. You didn’t convince me with your argument.
The purpose of a candidate isn’t to convince every single person to vote for them. It’s to convince enough of them to vote for them (and in the right places) to achieve victory in the election.
I don’t know how it looks on your instance, but on mine I’ve got twice as many upvotes on the comment you’re responding to than I do downvotes. If I was a candidate in an election that would be a pretty good result!
However, I’m not a candidate in an election. I’m a participant in a discussion forum. The mere fact that you’re engaging with my arguments and discussing them in a rational manner makes this a successful comment, and me a successful commenter.
I think the key here is that Harris could have been a better candidate, and at certain points, especially before the convention, she was a better candidate.
She specifically and intentionally pivoted away from the politics that work for the Democratic party, Democratic Socialism, and towards neoliberalism and neoconservatism, a politics that doesn’t work for the Democratic party. It was cheerleaded by many here on Lemmy, and when told that this wouldn’t work, that it was harmful to her electoral chances, that they were pivoting to a non-existent center, we were called bots, schills, fascists, communists, armchair activists (although many of us making these criticisms, like myself have litterally put in thousands of hours into political campaigns). The briggading, the trolling, the abuse, the gaslighting: moderators and some very prevalent posters here on Lemmy were directly responsible, if not complicit. It was structural, and moderation abuse allowed it to happen and allows it to persist. And while it’s not unique to Lemmy (the same process was happening on Reddit), this is our house and we are collectively responsible for the outcomes that happen here.
Yep, she dropped out before Iowa because she was polling this badly when she ran for President in her own right. So yeah:
- no primary (Dean Phillips and Marianne Williamson would not have been the only candidates if there was a competitive primary).
- everyone in the media just throwing away their credibility by claiming Biden was a young spring chicken, despite us seeing him have senior moments on the regular.
- gaslighting people about the economy (inflation is down, wages went up, stock market is up). Sure, those metrics were all technically correct, but all of those were skewed by the high end of the income scale, and the average person was still worse off than before. I don’t think Biden could’ve done a lot more besides manhandling Manchin and Sinema to get a higher minimum wage passed and renewing the child tax credit, but at least be honest about this and acknowledge that there’s more to be done, and have done plans about what you’ll do about it in a next term.
- all those previous things (and you could add more stuff to that, like Gaza and the tiktok ban), that were obvious to anyone with eyes, and destroyed the credibility of all mainstream media when they talked about project 2025 and Trump being the next Hitler (again, true things, but you need credibility to get through to people).
- wasn’t helped by Kamala running around with the most unpopular politician around that isn’t liked by Democrats or Republicans, and her unwillingness to draw any contrast with Biden in a change election where he’s underwater in the polls.
The people running her campaign committed malpractice, and because of the 2 party system, it’s but like voters can vote for another party without throwing away their vote (which they still should’ve done outside of the swing states, but the left again didn’t have their shit together and the whole thing was a shitshow with Cornell West wasting everyone’s time running for a Greens nomination he wasn’t going to get).
Unless you are suggesting that actual election fraud took place, these guys got democratically elected.
From the outside it seems like this is what the majority of your voting public wanted, and the majority of your adult population were fine with it and chose not to vote. If it were the first time I would consider it as revealing a major flaw in your political system, but this is the second time, non consecutively, that this has happened. That just looks like this is representative of your people. Sorry.
It is. Im tired of people making excuses for the idiots in this country. Idgaf if you thought the Democrats were terrible- theyre clearly far better than these fascists. But enough people decided it wasn’t worth their time anyhow.
Fuck them and fuck all of us because this is who we are.
You’re not wrong.
Imagine if the Dems won and we never experienced this timeline, and it was another boring and mediocre administration.
Then it would have just postponed the inevitable.
It’s the “what have you done for me lately, Eddy?”. The last election was “super duper important guys trust us”. And it absolutely was. And it was a remarkably average presidency. And that’s a good thing.
The majority of the people either have absolutely no understanding of how our government actually functions in the real world (and this includes both the people saying “why aren’t the Dems doing anything” and the people who said “vote third party”), or actually want to watch the world burn.
Basically, they FAFO’d. They had their fun in the first half, and now they’ve got us all trapped in the second half.
There is no way within the system as it stands now to even begin to turn towards normalcy for at least two years.
Buckle up, kids.
And I hope nobody tries to off Trump. As bad as it is, that would definitely just make things worse. Just check out the order of succession.
How far down would they have to go before things start to look better? Best we can do is to just hope some other global power pities us enough to send a mercy nuke to DC.
They rigged the vote
sigh
bro fuck off
You sound like a trump supporter. No, really, exactly like them. And you’re no different.
Remember that every accusation is a confession
Jesus, what a stupid comment. 🤣
Thanks for grouping all Americans together into the same monolith.
How transparently closed minded can you be ffs
Do you care who the Russian soldier in Ukraine voted for?
America is a monolith. This is what it chose to be. You can’t expect the rest of the world to act as nations yet only consider some of the population when one of them attacks.
On the world stage where economies are tanked and people die - this is Americas choice. Your sports team politics is an internal problem that we all have to suffer.
But her emails!?
Just to clarify, i’m talking about Musk. :)
Stop misgendering Elon!
The correct exclamation in this case is Butt Tizzy Males, not Buttery Males
The Eo about gender made everyone a female.
It’s been 4 days.
How did people get these email addresses?
I mean, the domain is known.
But was the system that president musk broke really holding back this torrent of abuse and garbage?
Feels like actual email addresses were leaked.
Unless it was a mailing list that was suddenly exposed.Still seems strange that an email that simply says “yo” suddenly came through as part of the spam.
Feels like email addresses were posted somewhere, and someone jumped on for the lulz. Along with the wall of trolls and abusers jumping on.I mean, as soon as I link a domain to an IP, I see all sorts of “security” scans turn up. Till then, firewall is pretty quiet.
And if I wildcard direct a domain to an ip, the root gets scanned but any sub domains don’t.
I feel email addresses would follow a similar pattern.It’s worse than you think. Last week we got an email that looked like strait up fishing spam demanding that we were to email back “yes” confirming that we got the email. So many people even reported it as spam that we had supervisors have to directly tell us that it was legit. Then they sent out a second email with a warning that is was in fact legit and to respond to that email with “yes” if we got that one.
On the back end at OPM: Musk forced his way in and demanded to redo the email servers. The IT told him it wasn’t possible for what he was asking. So he brought in his own goons to install a non government server with unknown software and unknown security configurations and they plugged it into the OPM network to spoof it as an official OPM server, then sent out those emails.
And sure enough, the idiot didn’t didn’t configure the security correctly or let official government IT people touch it, it ended up backdooring into the entire government HR system, and it had every active government email that responded “yes” to his stupid email that we were required to. And now we know it was compromised. There is no telling what foreign governments now have all of that info as well as what other backdoors they have installed.
Jesus fucking Christ, someone needs to stop these evil motherfuckers
Holy shit.
That’s some shit that contravenes every security briefing, every security best practice.
Then they go and spoof a legit government installation with their own bullshit?!
Fucking Hilary and her email servers. But like times 10. Legitimately compromising the US government communications.
Why is this lawsuits, why isn’t this treason?!It IS treason. But who do we have to stop him? The justice department is run by Trump. The cops all voted for trump. The FBI is being replaced with his goons.
Some history on the word “treason”, it’s not the legal definition, it’s whenever you go against whoever is in control.
This is way worse than Hillary’s email servers.
Hillary occasionally conducted government business on an email servers owned by her, but also on her (not .gov) domain.
I never knew the details. But I wouldn’t doubt that for simplicity sake they probably had multiple accounts configured on the same phone. At that point, it’s incredibly easy to accidentally respond or start a chain from the wrong address. Who among us hasn’t done that, we actually grew up with this stuff.
What Musk did was set up his own separate infrastructure to send and receive emails, on a .gov domain, and use that server, as a private contractor to the president, to circumvent tons of critical processes and security practices, in order to push his clients agenda.
The point of that agenda is to nip checks-and-balances in the balls so the president can unilaterally enact “his” (or the highest bidders…Heritage, Musk, Thiel, Federalists, Illuminati, Skull and Bones, whatever, at this point it’s all the same) agenda.
It. Is. Actual. Treason.
By an illegal immigrant, no less.
why isn’t this treason?!
Because Musk bought the election for Trump, and now Musk do whatever he wants.
I wonder how much of the intended damage he wants us to suffer is going to be mitigated as a result of their incompetence, and then I wonder how long can we count on them to continue making these mistakes before people begin to get seriously hurt…
People have already died from their actions. 2 plane crashes and counting.
But her emails…
