In the past week or so, the courts have begun to try to set some boundaries on the MuskāMillerāTrump administrationās early blitz of recklessness.
. . .
This judicial review provides at least a small reprieve, hope that some of the administrationās 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 administrationās ineptitude sinking in, this early MuskāMillerāTrump blitz remains veryāmaybe irreparablyādamaging. 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 allāand even if every court facing each lawless escapade said, āNope, thatās not a thingāāstill 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 wasnāt 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.
No, I mean crashes if the Whitehouse web sitesā¦ or breaking the auth systems for Trump officialsā¦ or delaying fleet vehicle reservations for motorcades so they come up short, or have to cancelā¦
The only way these things can happen so fast is by civil servants just doing what they are told.
I imagine a lot of people just donāt want to go to jail. Considering thereās substantial criminal penalties (for everyone thatās not a billionaire) to take out a website or anything else you mentioned - thatās my guess.
There are myriad ways to take something offline, which is easily plausible as an āoopsā moment. There are also myriad tarpits to send requests to.
My old job, if I wanted to totally de-rail a project? Iād 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 ācircle backā when we get āscheduling lined upāā¦
And then it gets restored from backup 20 minutes later while you look incompetent to your peers and supervisors.
If you really want to take it down you need to be systematically deleting or corrupting backups for several months; then take it down.
That requires destruction of govt property (up to 20 years in jail).
Oh damnedā¦ for some reason the last 4 backups failedā¦ Crap.
Regardless, itās 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 itās best you look incompetent. How can someone incompetent sabotage anything?
No, it doesnāt. It requires a few days of not checking a misconfigured backup job. And the misconfiguration is just an āoopsā, easily explained away.
How can someone incompetent stay employed in their current role?
If peers and supers are on your side, actions would not need to be explained through incompetence. If peers and supers are not on your side they are going to get rid of you with expediency. Then you canāt do shit either way. For the most part, people donāt really know who is who.
I guess weāll just have to re-deply from git. No big deal.
Intentionally deleting backups is 100% destruction of govt. property. If weāre talking about simply a āfew daysā of backups, itās also not going to do anything meaningful. Thereās been pretty much no new development on anything since Jan 20th, so weād need to be getting rid of backups substantially earlier than that.
Either way, I think you mean well with your inquiry. Hopefully this can help with understanding. >>>
Itās not like thatās on the horizon, anyways.
Ok, cool! They can explain away, and help make the āoopsā more plausibleā¦
That is happening, anyways. Thankfully, Public Servants are unionized.
If itās up to dateā¦ Of course, you can slow walk the restores, or even re-deploysā¦ Again, at best, my example was a 20 minute outage. But itās still an outage.
Ok, so just āaccidentally hit a key, and have it back up the wrong directory, and forget to check backup reportsā¦ā
I fully understand what Iām saying. And I fully understand what Simple Sabotage means. It doesnāt mean you will be the single thing that stops the machineā¦ But you can muck up the works.