I'm wondering what process surrounded giving them sudo/admin privs. Like, which systems admin, what chain of command. It's not like there's a special white house decoder ring signal.

From 20,000ft it feels like a social engineering attack over a wall "because I said so" high.

Was there no M of N process step required? Are the barriers around data in government unenforceable, based on personal restraint only?

Or did they e.g. toss old boxes through single user, not require approval, use root privileges to reset a password or two then reboot into multi user and own an sql binding, or some other asinine approach?

This isn't asking right or wrong, it's asking what the human procedural steps were to doing this.

It's apparent that Musk has been given a directive by the president to get access to any and all information, and he's getting that access by firing anyone who refuses to give it to him. There's nothing anyone can do to stop that kind of clearance, no one has the authority.

The presidents authority to act is legally disputed. It would take a brave underling to say no, but senior staff would gave known how to push back. Still.. it feels like a very low process.

"The president said so" stamp on a sheet of paper?

DOGE doesnt need sudo, just a READ-only access to the the most recent (read: last month's) database backup is enough.

when I was a data analyst, I rarely connected to live production DB to do Exploratory data analysis (this is what DOGE is doing). Because running OLAP queries on live OLTP system is problematic.

But having my own instance of DB with a restored backup of data was more than enough for analysis:

  1. I could modify schema, create indexes to speed up my queries
  2. Could create materialized view to join bunch of dimension tables
  3. Could create temp tables for intermediary analysis steps, sumamries, etc etc.

If I were DOGE, I would just ask for a a yesterday's Backup database restored on a single server (isolated from PROD environment completely) and just would do all my analysis there

That's smart. A lot of places do cold or nearline storage offsite so i guess if it wasn't superenciphered (or, if you were given the key) it's lowish impact to clone from that.

Flagged of course . Bruce Schneier is one of the most respected cyber security experts in the world. But his opinion is no longer welcome on HN.