[cromwellian]

The issue isn't just Musk's clearances, it's the clearances of the employees he's giving access to. With stuff like Salt Typhoon out there, and reports of Musk's college age hackers hooking arbitrary hard disks up to government computers, can you imagine the potential for potential Russian or Chinese infiltration given how careless Musk has shown his management to have been in the past?

Remember how Israel destroyed Iranian centrifuges with a worm on a USB stick that they just waited for someone to be dumb enough to plug into a government connected intranet?

C'mon man, the people defending Musk's brazen behavior here really need to think long and hard about what they're justifying because the like the guy's cars or rockets, or MAGA politics. This is CRAZY.

[derangedHorse]

If you can find one, I’d like to see a news story showing that the people accessing the data don’t have the proper security clearances to. It seems most people are getting swept up in media narratives rather than the reported facts.

[cromwellian]

What do you consider a proper security clearance? One emergency approved by the President on a whim, or one that is the result of careful vetting over a 6 month process which seems to be the standard for renewals or new clearances? One of them is 19 years old, the other 5 are 24 and younger. You want 6 kids in charge of a 6 trillion dollar system, and one of them with hedge fund connections? Yeah, nothing that could go wrong there.

And what was so urgent about axing USAID that required this weird process of bypassing all of the normal ways people audit a six trillion dollar payment system? Seriously, what was the hurry?

You don’t think they’re being sloppy and reckless? We literally have critical websites going off line, we have airports like San Carlos losing all their ATCs, we have republicans in Congress confused whe their own constituents lose access to services because of misworded EOs, this is not normal.

We couldn’t have had a report prepared over six months, have Musk go to Congress and testify and show all the waste, and a plan to prioritize the cuts, have an orderly wind down, etc?

The US government isn’t X where you fly in in the middle of the night and are so incompetent you start randomly unplugging servers and have to be frantically rescued by heroic sysadmins.

This is the people’s property, not his. We have three branches of government, due process, checks and balances, we don’t have a dictatorship and frankly everyday this is looking more and more like a soft coup.