I continue to wonder why Musk’s goons don’t get bodily removed from more offices. By now, Trumpies are in charge of enough agencies that they can order that computer access be turned over to the invaders, and, as in the takeover of the US Institute of Peace, armed guards play a part. We need to hear more about how the takeovers happen.
A whistleblower, Daniel Berulis, has provided information on what happened after the goons took over the computers at the National Labor Relations Board. When Berulis tried to raise concerns internally, someone physically taped a threatening note to his door that included sensitive personal information and overhead photos of him walking his dog that appeared to be taken with a drone.
His disclosure to Congress and other federal overseers includes forensic data and records of conversations with colleagues that provide evidence of DOGE’s access and activities. NPR wrote a long article summarizing the disclosure.
Matt Johanson nicely summarized the disclosure on Bluesky.
THREAD: A federal whistleblower just dropped one of the most disturbing cybersecurity disclosures I’ve ever read.He's saying DOGE came in, data went out, and Russians started attempting logins with new valid DOGE passwordsMedia's coverage wasn't detailed enough so I dug into his testimony:
Who’s the whistleblower?Daniel Berulis — a senior DevSecOps architect at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), formerly with TS/SCI clearance.He just told Congress the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) pulled off a covert cyber op inside a federal agency.
DOGE demanded root access.Not auditor access. Not admin.They were given “tenant owner” privileges in Azure — full control over the NLRB’s cloud, above the CIO himself.This is never supposed to happen.
They disabled the logs.Berulis says DOGE demanded account creation with no recordkeeping.They even ordered security controls bypassed and disabled tools like network watcher so their actions wouldn’t be logged.
And then the data started flowing out.10+ GB spike in outbound trafficExfiltration from NxGen, the NLRB's legal case databaseNo corresponding inbound trafficUnusual ephemeral containers and expired storage tokens
They used an external library that used AWS IP pools to rotate IPs for scraping and brute force attacks.They downloaded external GitHub tools like requests-ip-rotator and browserless — neither of which the agency uses.
The most daming claim in this statement IMO:Within 15 minutes of DOGE accounts being created…Attackers in Russia tried logging in using those new creds.Correct usernames and passwords.2 options here. The DOGE device was hacked. And I don't think I need to explain the 2nd.
DOGE were given “tenant owner” privileges, which allowed them full control over NLRB’s cloud.
They disabled logging tools so that their actions wouldn’t be logged.
10+ GB spike in outbound data.
Within 15 minutes of DOGE accounts being created, attackers in Russia tried logging in using those new creds. Correct usernames and passwords.
The DOGE teams seem to use their “official” status to gain access to computers, but disabling logging tools suggests that they are not working for the federal government. If they were, logging would be part of the job. It’s been clear for some time that DOGE is taking a lot of sensitive data (our formerly private and personal data) for themselves. The Russian attack is a bit of a surprise; they also disabled some of the safeguards like two-factor login, so it could have been part of the continuing Russian attacks to hack government data. I will leave you to imagine other possibilities.
The world found out shortly before 2 p.m. eastern time on March 15 that the United States was bombing Houthi targets across Yemen.
I, however, knew two hours before the first bombs exploded that the attack might be coming. The reason I knew this is that Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, had texted me the war plan at 11:44 a.m. The plan included precise information about weapons packages, targets, and timing.
This is going to require some explaining.
The story technically begins shortly after the Hamas invasion of southern Israel, in October 2023. The Houthis—an Iran-backed terrorist organization whose motto is “God is great, death to America, death to Israel, curse on the Jews, victory to Islam”—soon launched attacks on Israel and on international shipping, creating havoc for global trade. Throughout 2024, the Biden administration was ineffective in countering these Houthi attacks; the incoming Trump administration promised a tougher response.
This is where Pete Hegseth and I come in.
On Tuesday, March 11, I received a connection request on Signal from a user identified as Michael Waltz. Signal is an open-source encrypted messaging service popular with journalists and others who seek more privacy than other text-messaging services are capable of delivering. I assumed that the Michael Waltz in question was President Donald Trump’s national security adviser. I did not assume, however, that the request was from the actual Michael Waltz. I have met him in the past, and though I didn’t find it particularly strange that he might be reaching out to me, I did think it somewhat unusual, given the Trump administration’s contentious relationship with journalists—and Trump’s periodic fixation on me specifically. It immediately crossed my mind that someone could be masquerading as Waltz in order to somehow entrap me. It is not at all uncommon these days for nefarious actors to try to induce journalists to share information that could be used against them.
I accepted the connection request, hoping that this was the actual national security adviser, and that he wanted to chat about Ukraine, or Iran, or some other important matter.
Two days later—Thursday—at 4:28 p.m., I received a notice that I was to be included in a Signal chat group. It was called the “Houthi PC small group.”
A message to the group, from “Michael Waltz,” read as follows: “Team – establishing a principles [sic] group for coordination on Houthis, particularly for over the next 72 hours. My deputy Alex Wong is pulling together a tiger team at deputies/agency Chief of Staff level following up from the meeting in the Sit Room this morning for action items and will be sending that out later this evening.”
The message continued, “Pls provide the best staff POC from your team for us to coordinate with over the next couple days and over the weekend. Thx.”
The term principals committee generally refers to a group of the senior-most national-security officials, including the secretaries of defense, state, and the treasury, as well as the director of the CIA. It should go without saying—but I’ll say it anyway—that I have never been invited to a White House principals-committee meeting, and that, in my many years of reporting on national-security matters, I had never heard of one being convened over a commercial messaging app.
One minute later, a person identified only as “MAR”—the secretary of state is Marco Antonio Rubio—wrote, “Mike Needham for State,” apparently designating the current counselor of the State Department as his representative. At that same moment, a Signal user identified as “JD Vance” wrote, “Andy baker for VP.” One minute after that, “TG” (presumably Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, or someone masquerading as her) wrote, “Joe Kent for DNI.” Nine minutes later, “Scott B”—apparently Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, or someone spoofing his identity, wrote, “Dan Katz for Treasury.” At 4:53 p.m., a user called “Pete Hegseth” wrote, “Dan Caldwell for DoD.” And at 6:34 p.m., “Brian” wrote “Brian McCormack for NSC.” One more person responded: “John Ratcliffe” wrote at 5:24 p.m. with the name of a CIA official to be included in the group. I am not publishing that name, because that person is an active intelligence officer.
The principals had apparently assembled. In all, 18 individuals were listed as members of this group, including various National Security Council officials; Steve Witkoff, President Trump’s Middle East and Ukraine negotiator; Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff; and someone identified only as “S M,” which I took to stand for Stephen Miller. I appeared on my own screen only as “JG.”
That was the end of the Thursday text chain.
After receiving the Waltz text related to the “Houthi PC small group,” I consulted a number of colleagues. We discussed the possibility that these texts were part of a disinformation campaign, initiated by either a foreign intelligence service or, more likely, a media-gadfly organization, the sort of group that attempts, and sometimes succeeds, to place journalists in embarrassing positions. I had very strong doubts that this text group was real, because I could not believe that the national-security leadership of the United States would communicate on Signal about imminent war plans. I also could not believe that the national security adviser to the president would be so reckless as to include the editor in chief of The Atlantic in such discussions with senior U.S. officials, up to and including the vice president.
The next day, things got even stranger.
At 8:05 a.m. on Friday, March 14, “Michael Waltz” texted the group: “Team, you should have a statement of conclusions with taskings per the Presidents guidance this morning in your high side inboxes.” (High side, in government parlance, refers to classified computer and communications systems.) “State and DOD, we developed suggested notification lists for regional Allies and partners. Joint Staff is sending this am a more specific sequence of events in the coming days and we will work w DOD to ensure COS, OVP and POTUS are briefed.”
At this point, a fascinating policy discussion commenced. The account labeled “JD Vance” responded at 8:16: “Team, I am out for the day doing an economic event in Michigan. But I think we are making a mistake.” (Vance was indeed in Michigan that day.) The Vance account goes on to state, “3 percent of US trade runs through the suez. 40 percent of European trade does. There is a real risk that the public doesn’t understand this or why it’s necessary. The strongest reason to do this is, as POTUS said, to send a message.”
The Vance account then goes on to make a noteworthy statement, considering that the vice president has not deviated publicly from Trump’s position on virtually any issue. “I am not sure the president is aware how inconsistent this is with his message on Europe right now. There’s a further risk that we see a moderate to severe spike in oil prices. I am willing to support the consensus of the team and keep these concerns to myself. But there is a strong argument for delaying this a month, doing the messaging work on why this matters, seeing where the economy is, etc.”
A person identified in Signal as “Joe Kent” (Trump’s nominee to run the National Counterterrorism Center is named Joe Kent), wrote at 8:22, “There is nothing time sensitive driving the time line. We’ll have the exact same options in a month.”
Then, at 8:26 a.m., a message landed in my Signal app from the user “John Ratcliffe.” The message contained information that might be interpreted as related to actual and current intelligence operations.
At 8:27, a message arrived from the “Pete Hegseth” account. “VP: I understand your concerns – and fully support you raising w/ POTUS. Important considerations, most of which are tough to know how they play out (economy, Ukraine peace, Gaza, etc). I think messaging is going to be tough no matter what – nobody knows who the Houthis are – which is why we would need to stay focused on: 1) Biden failed & 2) Iran funded.”
The Hegseth message goes on to state, “Waiting a few weeks or a month does not fundamentally change the calculus. 2 immediate risks on waiting: 1) this leaks, and we look indecisive; 2) Israel takes an action first – or Gaza cease fire falls apart – and we don’t get to start this on our own terms. We can manage both. We are prepared to execute, and if I had final go or no go vote, I believe we should. This [is] not about the Houthis. I see it as two things: 1) Restoring Freedom of Navigation, a core national interest; and 2) Reestablish deterrence, which Biden cratered. But, we can easily pause. And if we do, I will do all we can to enforce 100% OPSEC”—operations security. “I welcome other thoughts.”
A few minutes later, the “Michael Waltz” account posted a lengthy note about trade figures, and the limited capabilities of European navies. “Whether it’s now or several weeks from now, it will have to be the United States that reopens these shipping lanes. Per the president’s request we are working with DOD and State to determine how to compile the cost associated and levy them on the Europeans.”
The account identified as “JD Vance” addressed a message at 8:45 to @Pete Hegseth: “if you think we should do it let’s go. I just hate bailing Europe out again.” (The administration has argued that America’s European allies benefit economically from the U.S. Navy’s protection of international shipping lanes.)
The user identified as Hegseth responded three minutes later: “VP: I fully share your loathing of European free-loading. It’s PATHETIC. But Mike is correct, we are the only ones on the planet (on our side of the ledger) who can do this. Nobody else even close. Question is timing. I feel like now is as good a time as any, given POTUS directive to reopen shipping lanes. I think we should go; but POTUS still retains 24 hours of decision space.”
At this point, the previously silent “S M” joined the conversation. “As I heard it, the president was clear: green light, but we soon make clear to Egypt and Europe what we expect in return. We also need to figure out how to enforce such a requirement. EG, if Europe doesn’t remunerate, then what? If the US successfully restores freedom of navigation at great cost there needs to be some further economic gain extracted in return.”
That message from “S M”—presumably President Trump’s confidant Stephen Miller, the deputy White House chief of staff, or someone playing Stephen Miller—effectively shut down the conversation. The last text of the day came from “Pete Hegseth,” who wrote at 9:46 a.m., “Agree.”
After reading this chain, I recognized that this conversation possessed a high degree of verisimilitude. The texts, in their word choice and arguments, sounded as if they were written by the people who purportedly sent them, or by a particularly adept AI text generator. I was still concerned that this could be a disinformation operation, or a simulation of some sort. And I remained mystified that no one in the group seemed to have noticed my presence. But if it was a hoax, the quality of mimicry and the level of foreign-policy insight were impressive.
It was the next morning, Saturday, March 15, when this story became truly bizarre.
At 11:44 a.m., the account labeled “Pete Hegseth” posted in Signal a “TEAM UPDATE.” I will not quote from this update, or from certain other subsequent texts. The information contained in them, if they had been read by an adversary of the United States, could conceivably have been used to harm American military and intelligence personnel, particularly in the broader Middle East, Central Command’s area of responsibility. What I will say, in order to illustrate the shocking recklessness of this Signal conversation, is that the Hegseth post contained operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing.
The only person to reply to the update from Hegseth was the person identified as the vice president. “I will say a prayer for victory,” Vance wrote. (Two other users subsequently added prayer emoji.)
According to the lengthy Hegseth text, the first detonations in Yemen would be felt two hours hence, at 1:45 p.m. eastern time. So I waited in my car in a supermarket parking lot. If this Signal chat was real, I reasoned, Houthi targets would soon be bombed. At about 1:55, I checked X and searched Yemen. Explosions were then being heard across Sanaa, the capital city.
I went back to the Signal channel. At 1:48, “Michael Waltz” had provided the group an update. Again, I won’t quote from this text, except to note that he described the operation as an “amazing job.” A few minutes later, “John Ratcliffe” wrote, “A good start.” Not long after, Waltz responded with three emoji: a fist, an American flag, and fire. Others soon joined in, including “MAR,” who wrote, “Good Job Pete and your team!!,” and “Susie Wiles,” who texted, “Kudos to all – most particularly those in theater and CENTCOM! Really great. God bless.” “Steve Witkoff” responded with five emoji: two hands-praying, a flexed bicep, and two American flags. “TG” responded, “Great work and effects!” The after-action discussion included assessments of damage done, including the likely death of a specific individual. The Houthi-run Yemeni health ministry reported that at least 53 people were killed in the strikes, a number that has not been independently verified.
On Sunday, Waltz appeared on ABC’s This Week and contrasted the strikes with the Biden administration’s more hesitant approach. “These were not kind of pinprick, back-and-forth—what ultimately proved to be feckless attacks,” he said. “This was an overwhelming response that actually targeted multiple Houthi leaders and took them out.”
The Signal chat group, I concluded, was almost certainly real. Having come to this realization, one that seemed nearly impossible only hours before, I removed myself from the Signal group, understanding that this would trigger an automatic notification to the group’s creator, “Michael Waltz,” that I had left. No one in the chat had seemed to notice that I was there. And I received no subsequent questions about why I left—or, more to the point, who I was.
Earlier today, I emailed Waltz and sent him a message on his Signal account. I also wrote to Pete Hegseth, John Ratcliffe, Tulsi Gabbard, and other officials. In an email, I outlined some of my questions: Is the “Houthi PC small group” a genuine Signal thread? Did they know that I was included in this group? Was I (on the off chance) included on purpose? If not, who did they think I was? Did anyone realize who I was when I was added, or when I removed myself from the group? Do senior Trump-administration officials use Signal regularly for sensitive discussions? Do the officials believe that the use of such a channel could endanger American personnel?
Brian Hughes, the spokesman for the National Security Council, responded two hours later, confirming the veracity of the Signal group. “This appears to be an authentic message chain, and we are reviewing how an inadvertent number was added to the chain,” Hughes wrote. “The thread is a demonstration of the deep and thoughtful policy coordination between senior officials. The ongoing success of the Houthi operation demonstrates that there were no threats to troops or national security.”
I have never seen a breach quite like this. It is not uncommon for national-security officials to communicate on Signal. But the app is used primarily for meeting planning and other logistical matters—not for detailed and highly confidential discussions of a pending military action. And, of course, I’ve never heard of an instance in which a journalist has been invited to such a discussion.
Conceivably, Waltz, by coordinating a national-security-related action over Signal, may have violated several provisions of the Espionage Act, which governs the handling of “national defense” information, according to several national-security lawyers interviewed by my colleague Shane Harris for this story. Harris asked them to consider a hypothetical scenario in which a senior U.S. official creates a Signal thread for the express purpose of sharing information with Cabinet officials about an active military operation. He did not show them the actual Signal messages or tell them specifically what had occurred.
All of these lawyers said that a U.S. official should not establish a Signal thread in the first place. Information about an active operation would presumably fit the law’s definition of “national defense” information. The Signal app is not approved by the government for sharing classified information. The government has its own systems for that purpose. If officials want to discuss military activity, they should go into a specially designed space known as a sensitive compartmented information facility, or SCIF—most Cabinet-level national-security officials have one installed in their home—or communicate only on approved government equipment, the lawyers said. Normally, cellphones are not permitted inside a SCIF, which suggests that as these officials were sharing information about an active military operation, they could have been moving around in public. Had they lost their phones, or had they been stolen, the potential risk to national security would have been severe.
Hegseth, Ratcliffe, and other Cabinet-level officials presumably would have the authority to declassify information, and several of the national-security lawyers noted that the hypothetical officials on the Signal chain might claim that they had declassified the information they shared. But this argument rings hollow, they cautioned, because Signal is not an authorized venue for sharing information of such a sensitive nature, regardless of whether it has been stamped “top secret” or not.
There was another potential problem: Waltz set some of the messages in the Signal group to disappear after one week, and some after four. That raises questions about whether the officials may have violated federal records law: Text messages about official acts are considered records that should be preserved.
“Under the records laws applicable to the White House and federal agencies, all government employees are prohibited from using electronic-messaging applications such as Signal for official business, unless those messages are promptly forwarded or copied to an official government account,” Jason R. Baron, a professor at the University of Maryland and the former director of litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration, told Harris.
“Intentional violations of these requirements are a basis for disciplinary action. Additionally, agencies such as the Department of Defense restrict electronic messaging containing classified information to classified government networks and/or networks with government-approved encrypted features,” Baron said.
Several former U.S. officials told Harris and me that they had used Signal to share unclassified information and to discuss routine matters, particularly when traveling overseas without access to U.S. government systems. But they knew never to share classified or sensitive information on the app, because their phones could have been hacked by a foreign intelligence service, which would have been able to read the messages on the devices. It is worth noting that Donald Trump, as a candidate for president (and as president), repeatedly and vociferously demanded that Hillary Clinton be imprisoned for using a private email server for official business when she was secretary of state. (It is also worth noting that Trump was indicted in 2023 for mishandling classified documents, but the charges were dropped after his election.)
Waltz and the other Cabinet-level officials were already potentially violating government policy and the law simply by texting one another about the operation. But when Waltz added a journalist—presumably by mistake—to his principals committee, he created new security and legal issues. Now the group was transmitting information to someone not authorized to receive it. That is the classic definition of a leak, even if it was unintentional, and even if the recipient of the leak did not actually believe it was a leak until Yemen came under American attack.
All along, members of the Signal group were aware of the need for secrecy and operations security. In his text detailing aspects of the forthcoming attack on Houthi targets, Hegseth wrote to the group—which, at the time, included me—“We are currently clean on OPSEC.”
I’m reading that new memoir about working at Facebook,”Careless People,” and it’s just fucking insane.
At one point Facebook wanted to be an international hub for organ donation. The “Lean In” lady asked why she couldn’t go down to Mexico and buy a kidney if her four year old needs one. This is literally on p.57. What the fuck else is going to be in this book if that is on page 57
Facebook also had to have protocols for armed raids of its foreign offices because they violated so many laws or failed to pay taxes or comply with other official protocols!! How is this a company that still exists!!!
“Doing jail time in a foreign country is not a reasonable ask from your bosses” — legitimately an argument the author’s husband had to have with her!!
Is this what gilded age readers felt like when they read Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle”???
Though strangely nothing Mark Zuckerberg does is worse than Sheryl Sandburg, who comes across as an unhinged hypocrite who uses her uncontrollable anger issues to cultivate a reign of terror, I am just… baffled and appalled at how much Zuckerberg does not care about the world outside of Silicon Valley. There have already been two instances of him trying to wear a hoodie to state visits, and not in a Zelenskyy protest way. He just doesn’t like clothes that are not hoodies.
Wow they just abandoned a team member in the middle of an out of control crowd in Indonesia! Horrible company!
Guess who Mark Zuckerberg thinks is the best president of all time?
Hint: it’s Andrew Jackson!
Another mind-boggling line: “I think the point at which you have to explain Nuremberg to the head of the team leading your China entry is probably a red flag.”
Real exchange that happened between book author and the head of the DC office:
This conference room detail seems like too much for satire. But it isn’t!
This book has gotten so insane I can’t even summarize anymore. I can only post photos of this moment where Sheryl Sandberg wears her pajamas on a private jet and tries to make her heavily pregnant employee cuddle in bed with her on a flight back to California from Davos, Switzerland.
Following this, we discover that Sheryl says, “you should have gotten in the bed,” and ices out the narrator. Sheryl also has her assistant Sadie buy $10k of lingerie for her, and $3k of lingerie for herself, after which Sadie has to go to her house to model the lingerie and stay overnight. What the actual fuck.
Woooow FB knew the whole time that Trump was using trolls and spreading disinformation before the 2016 election but because they were making so much money off of it, they were just fine with it. They completely ignored the author pointing out how Duterte had done the same thing.
Direct quote on p 251: “Outrage is a lucrative business for Facebook right now, a month before the election….”
Jaw-dropping.
Guess who lied to Congress about how the Chinese Communist Party would apply its laws and regulations to Facebook?
Mark Zuckerberg!
A lot of this later stuff about Facebook’s attempts to get into China are going a little over my head but I can see why Meta was trying to discredit the book and shut down reviews. She’s whistleblowing violations of US AND international laws. I doubt they’ll see consequences under Trump but YIKES
“By now it feels like the day-to-day at Facebook is lurching from one dismaying shit show to the next.”
SEEMS ACCURATE
This is so evil!!!
I don’t even know how to summarize the particularly heinous things that happened with Facebook in Myanmar and I’d have to take photos of the whole chapter to select bits but BASICALLY
-thanks to a telecoms deal Facebook came preloaded on a lot of mobile phones and often time on FB didn’t count towards your minutes so to many in Myanmar Facebook WAS the internet
-nonetheless FB was not optimized for Burmese, Myanmar was not renders on Unicode, and the terms of service were translated extremely late and passed out on paper flyers instead of posted anywhere. FB in Myanmar had little to no oversight and there was only one contractor in Dublin monitoring hate speech in Burmese even when there were LITERAL RIOTS caused by misinformation posted on Burmese FB
-Myanmar was not a priority for FB leadership so after LITERAL RIOTS they only hired one other contractor who seemed to remove posts from peace activists rather than hate speech or posts calling for violence
-due to what seems like internal politicking against the author, the person she tries to hire to be in charge of Myanmar in the right time zonenever gets hired
-FB higher ups were warned in advance of huge misinformation efforts like troll accounts and takeovers of fan accounts for pop stars but did nothing, leading pretty much directly to what the UN calls genocide and crimes against humanity
Why did it all happen? The author’s conclusion: higher ups “didn’t give a fuck.”
Wow and after all that they fired the author for reporting sexual harassment from her Bush-trained, Trump insider boss
Holy shit was this a harrowing read. These insanely rich people have so much money they are insulated from the consequences of any and all actions and don’t care what countries they smash as long as they can pull money from the wreckage
However much publicity this book gets, it's not enough. It's embarrassing that this post is the most I've been able to read about it, as all the other press is scared of the Trump administration
The first Trump FCC tried to give Musk nearly a billion dollars to deliver expensive Starlink access to some traffic medians and airport parking lots. The Biden FCC clawed back most of those subsidies, (correctly) arguing that the service couldn’t deliver consistent speeds, and if we’re going to spend taxpayer money on broadband, more future-proof and less capacity constrained options like fiber and 5G should probably be prioritized.
Not surprisingly, Trump 2.0 is going to massively over-compensate for this fake scandal, and slather their favorite fake engineer billionaire manbaby with cash at every conceivable opportunity.
That apparently starts with giving Musk and Starlink a lucrative new FAA contract as Musk and his 4chan tween DOGE minions set about pretending to fix government by throwing it into chaos. Musk appears to be trying to elbow out Verizon, which has an existing 15 year, $2 billion contract with the agency to upgrade its infrastructure that was obtained through traditional transparent bidding processes.
The length and price tag of Starlink’s new FAA contract were, unsurprisingly, not publicly disclosed. Which is weird for a DOGE figurehead that professes to care so much about transparency:
“The contract comes while Musk is leading efforts to make deep cuts in federal government spending, including staffing cuts at the FAA, and some critics are raising questions about conflicts of interest over his role overseeing government agencies that are supposed to be regulating his businesses.”
Bloomberg had a little more leaked inside detail, noting the partnership would “eventually” include 4,000 Starlink terminals and be deployed over the next 12 to 18 months. Follow up reporting from the Washington Post suggests there’s some consternation about Musk’s giant handout among FAA officials.
In a post to his right wing propaganda platform, Musk stated, without any sort of evidence, that the “Verizon system is not working and so is putting air travelers at serious risk.” Basically falsely claiming that Verizon might be killing U.S. air travelers:
I’d just like to pause for a moment to acknowledge that as somebody who has probably written more about Verizon than anybody alive, it takes a very specific type of shitty villain to have me backing Verizon.
Verizon signed up for Trump 2.0 eager to get a giant tax cut for doing nothing. And relentless attacks on organized labor. And the total evisceration of corporate oversight of whatever’s left of FCC consumer protection authority. And they’re keen to get their giant $20 billion merger with Frontier rubber stamped.
That’s a lot of potential money at stake, so I’m not sure Verizon will show any backbone and file suit here. But if they don’t, shareholders will certainly have the opportunity to sue. Knowing Verizon’s greasy lobbying and legal practices pretty intimately, it’s all a very leopards-eating-faces sort of affair.
But again, Musk stealing Verizon’s FAA contract is just one of countless conflicts of interest that arise with having an unelected bureaucrat illegally declaring how government should or shouldn’t function and illegally bypassing bidding processes. Not to mention the numerous privacy and national intelligence issues.
The FAA contract is certainly just the opening salvo for Musk favoritism. The U.S. government has already threatened to pull Ukraine’s access to Starlink unless they sign off on a mineral deal that would be beneficial to Tesla. You probably also missed that USAID officials were investigating Starlink‘s use in Ukraine right before Trump and Musk engaged in a rapid unscheduled disassembly of the agency.
It’s clear the Trump NTIA is also hoping to redirect some of the $42.5 billion in BEAD broadband infrastructure subsidies away from existing projects and toward Musk’s Starlink whenever possible. That’s not just bad due to corruption, but because it’s going to wind up redirecting a lot of taxpayer money away from small local businesses and popular community-owned broadband networks.
Starlink is a good option if you’re stuck in the middle of nowhere with nothing else. But “I didn’t do the reading” guys like Joe Rogan tend to think Starlink is akin to some kind of magic pixie dust you can just sprinkle around to fix everything.
Rank corruption aside, the GOP is genuinely convinced that Musk is an engineering super-genius who can fix government with a wave of his hand. They genuinely have no idea that this persona was a press-enabled mythology providing cover for a rank opportunist who takes credit for other peoples’ ideas, something the tech press only belatedly discovered during his bungled takeover of Twitter.
So they’re keen on throwing all of their eggs in the Elon Musk basket, fairly oblivious to the fact they’ve given absolute power to a conspiratorial oligarch who genuinely has no Earthly idea what he’s actually doing. So yeah, a lot of this is just corrupt cronyism pretty typical in an authoritarian kakistocracy. But a lot of it genuinely is being driven by rank delusion into Musk’s actual intellect and expertise, which is going to end extremely, extremely badly for absolutely everybody involved.
“They get the one starving kid in Sudan that isn’t going to have a USAID bottle, and they make everything DOGE has done about the starving kid in Sudan.” — a White House official.
I’ve been a USAID contractor for most of the last 20 years. Not a federal employee; a contractor. USAID does most of its work through contractors. I’ve been a field guy, working in different locations around the world.
If you’ve been following the news at all, you probably know that Trump and Musk have decided to destroy USAID. There’s been a firehose of disinformation and lies. It’s pretty depressing.
So here are a couple of true USAID stories — one political, one personal.
The political one first. I worked for years in the small former Soviet republic of Moldova.
Moldova happened to be one of the few parts of the old USSR suitable for producing wine. The other was Georgia, in the Caucasus.
The Soviets, in their central planning way, decided that both Moldova and Georgia would produce wine — but Georgia would produce the good stuff, intended for export and for consumption by Soviet elites. Moldova would produce cheap sweet reds, which is what most Russians think wine is.
So for decades, Moldova produced bad wine and nothing but bad wine. But Russians liked it, so that was okay.
Then the USSR collapsed. And, well, Moldova continued to produce nasty cheap sweet reds, because that was all they could do. By the turn of the century, wine was Moldova’s single biggest cash export. And about 80% of that wine went straight to Russia.
This continued through the 1990s and into the early 2000s. Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin came to power in Russia. Back in 2003 or so, he wasn’t invading Russia’s neighbors… but he was already swinging a big stick in Russia’s “near abroad”, the former Soviet republics that he thought should still be under Russia’s thumb. Which absolutely included Moldova.
So whenever the Moldovan government annoyed or offended Putin… or whenever he just wanted to yank their chain… the Russian Ministry of Health would suddenly discover that there was a “problem” with Moldovan wine. And imports would be frozen until the “problem” could be resolved. Since wine was Moldova’s biggest export, and most wine went to Russia, this meant that Russia could inflict crippling damage on Moldova’s economy literally at will.
This went on for over a decade, with multiple Moldovan governments having to defer to Moscow rather than face crippling economic damage.
Enter USAID. Over a period of a dozen years or so, USAID funded several projects to restructure the Moldovan wine industry.
They brought in foreign instructors to teach modern methods. They worked with the wine-growers to develop training courses. They provided guarantees for loans so that farmers could buy new equipment. They helped Moldovan farmers get access to new varieties of grapes… you get the idea.
(By the by, the wine project was not my project. But it was literally up the street from my project. It was run by two people I know and deeply respect — one American, one Moldovan — so I had a ring-side seat for much of this.)
The big one was, they worked with the Moldovans on what we call market linkages. That is, they helped them connect to buyers and distributors in Europe, and figure out ways to sell into the EU. I say this was the big one, because on one hand the EU is the world’s largest market for wine! But on the other hand, exporting wine into the EU is really hard. There are a bunch of what we call NTBTs — “non-tariff barriers to trade”. For starters, your wine has to be guaranteed clean and safe according to the EU’s very high standards. That means it has to consistently pass a bunch of sanitary and health tests, and also your production methods have to be certified. Then there are a bunch more requirements about bottling, labelling and packaging.
The EU regulates the hell out of all that stuff. Like, the “TAVA” number? There’s a minimum font size for that. If you print it too small, it’ll be bounced right back to you. The glass of the bottle? Has to be a sort that EU recycling systems can deal with. The adhesive behind the label? It can be rejected for being too weak (labels fall off) or too strong (recycling system can’t remove it). There are dozens of things like that.
And then of course they had to do marketing. Nobody in Europe had heard of Moldovan wines! Buyers and distributors had to be talked into taking a chance on these new products. This meant the Moldovan exporters needed lines of credit to stay afloat. This in turn meant that Moldovan banks had to be talked into… you get the idea.
This whole effort took over a decade, from the early 2000s into the teens.
And in the end it was a huge damn success. With USAID help, the Moldovan wine industry was completely restructured. Moldova now exports about $150 million of wine per year, which is a lot for a small country — it’s over $50 per Moldovan. And it went from exporting around 80% of its wine to Russia, to around 15%. Most Moldovan wine (around 60%) now goes to the EU, with an increasing share going to Turkey and the Middle East.
(If you’re curious: their market niche is medium to high end vins du table. Not plonk, not fancy, just good midlist wines. I can personally recommend the dryer reds, which are often much better than you’d expect at their price point.)
Russia tried the “ooh we found a sanitary problem” trick one last time a few years ago. It fell completely flat. Putting aside that it was an obvious lie — if something is safe for the EU, believe me, it is safe for Russia — Moldovan wine exporters had now diversified their markets to the point that losing Russian sales was merely a nuisance. In fact, the attempt backfired: it encouraged the Moldovans to shift their exports even further away from Russia and towards the EU.
So that’s the political story. Russia had Moldova on a choke chain. Over a dozen years or so, USAID patiently filed through that chain and broke Moldova loose. Soft power in action. It worked.
Nobody knows this story outside Moldova, of course.
Okay, that’s the political story. Here’s the personal one.
Some years ago, I moved with my family to a small country that was recovering from some very unpleasant history. They’d been under a brutal ethnically-based dictatorship for a while, and then there was a war. So, this was a poor country where many things didn’t work very well.
While we were there, my son suddenly fell ill. Very ill. Later we found out it was the very rapid onset of a severe bacterial infection. At the time all we knew was that in an hour or two he went from fine to running a super high fever and being unable to stand up. Basically he just… fell over.
Wham, emergency room. They diagnosed him correctly, thank God, and gave correct treatment: massive and ongoing doses of antibiotics. But he couldn’t move — he was desperately weak and barely conscious — and there was no question of taking him out of the country. We had to put him in the local hospital for a week, on an IV drip, until he was strong enough to come home.
If you’ve ever been in a hospital in a poor, post-war country… yeah at this point someone makes a dumb joke about the NHS or something. No. We’re talking regular blackouts, the electricity just randomly switching off. Rusting equipment, crumbling concrete, cracked windows. A dozen beds crammed into a room that should hold four or five. Everything worn and patched and held together with baling wire and hope.
We’re talking so poor that the hospital didn’t have basic supplies. Like, you would go into town and buy the kid’s medication, and then you’d also buy syringes for injections — because the hospital didn’t have syringes — and then you’d come back and give those thing to the nurse so that your kid could get his medication.
In the pediatric ward, they were packing the kids in two to a bed. Because they didn’t have a lot of rooms, and they didn’t have a lot of beds. And kids are small, yeah?
But there we were. So into the hospital he went. Here’s a photo:
— Take a moment and zoom in there. Red-white-and-blue sticker, there on the bed? It says “USAID: From The American People”.
Every hospital bed in that emergency room had been donated by USAID. I believe they were purchased secondhand in the United States, where they were old and obsolete. But in this country… well, they didn’t have enough beds, and the beds that they had were fifty years old. Except for those USAID beds. Those were (relatively) modern, light and adjustable but sturdy, and easily mobile. The hospital staff were using them to move kids around, and they were getting a lot of mileage from them.
And of course, every USAID bed had that sticker on it. And so did some other stuff. There was an oxygen system that a sick toddler was breathing from. USAID sticker. Couple of child-sized wheelchairs. USAID stickers. Secondhand American stuff — USAID was under orders to Buy American whenever possible — but just making a huge, huge difference here.
As I said, it was crowded in there. Lots of beds, lots of kids, lots of anxious parents. So we got to talking with the other parents, as one does. A couple of people had a little English. And so my wife mentioned that we were here working on a USAID project…
…and god damn that place lit up like an old time juke box. “USAID!” “USAID!” People were pointing at the stickers, smiling. “USAID!” “America, very good!” “Thank you!” “USA! USA!” “Thank you!”
This went on longer than most of us would find comfortable. When it finally settled down… actually, it never really did entirely settle down. For the whole time our son was there, we had people — parents, nurses, even the hospital janitor — smiling at us and saying “USAID!” “Very good!” “Thank you!”
I’m not prone to fits of patriotic fervor. But I’m not going to lie: right then it felt good to be American.
Anyway, USAID stories. I could go on at considerable length. This is my career, after all! I could tell more stories, or comment and gloss at greater length on these.
But this is long enough already. More some other time, perhaps.
Ooo meeting a Moldovan coworker later this year in Turkey, which is apparently now a major importer of their wine. Gonna have to get pissed on dry Moldovan reds! Then a döner.
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THREAD: A federal whistleblower just dropped one of the most disturbing cybersecurity disclosures I’ve ever read.He's saying DOGE came in, data went out, and Russians started attempting logins with new valid DOGE passwordsMedia's coverage wasn't detailed enough so I dug into his testimony:
