Latest / Elon Musk Podcast / EXCLUSIVE BREAKING: Elon's DOGE Blamed for Russian Security Breach

Transcript

EXCLUSIVE BREAKING: Elon's DOGE Blamed for Russian Security Breach · Elon Musk Podcast

• 0:01
  Hey everyone, welcome back to the Elon Musk Podcast.
• 0:05
  I'm thrilled to share some exciting news with you over the
• 0:08
  next two weeks. We're evolving.
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  shaping our world. And with that, our show will
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  So stay tuned for our official relaunch at stage 0 coming soon.
• 0:28
  Now let's get into this episode. Hey I need up. 2nd.
• 0:32
  Of your time. For the past four or five years,
• 0:35
  I've been bringing you in depth, no nonsense insights from the
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  world of Elon Musk, but I need your help to keep the show alive
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  this journey keeps going. So let's make the next five
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  years even bigger together. There's a link in the show notes
• 1:23
  just for you. Today's story brings together
• 1:29
  Elon Musk, a federal agency, labor agency and a whistleblower
• 1:34
  who says something went very wrong inside the US government's
• 1:38
  computer systems. With the center of it is DOGE,
• 1:42
  Department of Government Efficiency, a group created
• 1:45
  under an executive order during the Trump administration and
• 1:48
  staffed in part by people with very close ties to Elon Musk's
• 1:53
  companies. Now, according to a sworn
• 1:56
  affidavit, DOGE may have triggered a serious
• 1:59
  cybersecurity breach inside the National Labor Relations Board,
• 2:04
  and that breach could have exposed sensitive labor data to
• 2:08
  foreign actors, including Russia.
• 2:11
  Now, Daniel Berulis is an IT specialist at the NLRB.
• 2:17
  That's the independent federal agency responsible for
• 2:20
  investigating labor disputes and protecting workers rights.
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  It's not a high profile agency, but the data it holds is deeply
• 2:28
  sensitive. Legal affidavits, union
• 2:31
  strategies, internal business complaints and confidential
• 2:34
  company information. Murulis says that.
• 2:37
  After DOGE operatives. Were embedded at the agency.
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  They were given broad access to internal systems since they
• 2:43
  insisted that their activity may not be tracked or logged,
• 2:47
  something that raised immediate red flags with the agency.
• 2:51
  And not long after that, he noticed something unusual.
• 2:54
  There were massive spikes in outgoing data from the agency
• 2:57
  servers, traffic that didn't follow any normal pattern.
• 3:01
  He says the timing lined up exactly with Doge's access.
• 3:05
  Then came the moment that pushed this from strange to serious a
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  login attempt from a Russian IP address.
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  The login use credentials linked to one of the new DOGE accounts
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  that have been created at the NLRB.
• 3:20
  Baroulis doesn't know whether that login was successful, but
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  the fact that those credentials had already been used to try to
• 3:26
  access the agency from Russia deeply concerned them.
• 3:32
  Brulis began quietly gathering evidence, internal logs, traffic
• 3:37
  records, access history. He eventually decided to come
• 3:40
  forward. But just as he prepared to
• 3:42
  disclose what he found to Congress, he says he was
• 3:45
  threatened. He told his lawyer and later
• 3:48
  federal officials that someone physically taped the note to his
• 3:52
  front door. That note came with printed
• 3:54
  photographs of him walking near his home.
• 3:57
  He believes they were taken by a drone.
• 4:00
  The note, he says, referenced his impending disclosure, though
• 4:04
  he hasn't made it public. Now, he's now being represented
• 4:09
  by Whistleblower Aid, a nonprofit legal group that sent
• 4:13
  his sworn disclosure to the Senate Intelligence Committee.
• 4:16
  The letter asked for an investigation by federal
• 4:18
  cybersecurity agencies like the FBI and the Cybersecurity and
• 4:22
  Infrastructure Security Agency or CISA.
• 4:25
  Now the NLRB has publicly denied that DOGE ever had access to his
• 4:30
  systems. That's a spokesperson said that
• 4:33
  there was no breach and that their internal review found
• 4:35
  nothing. But the White House told a
• 4:37
  different story. Now this is from The Daily
• 4:40
  Beast. They confirmed DOGE had access
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  to NLRB. They described it as part of a
• 4:45
  coordinated months old effort to reduce waste and federal fraud
• 4:49
  in the government. They didn't address the Russian
• 4:52
  login or the data spikes though. This all comes during a legal
• 4:55
  fight between the NLRB in Musk's own company, SpaceX.
• 5:00
  The agency accused SpaceX of firing employees who criticized
• 5:03
  Musk, and in response, SpaceX is challenging the
• 5:06
  constitutionality of the agency itself.
• 5:09
  Now, that case is still playing out in court, and if the court
• 5:12
  sides with Musk, it could gut the NLR BS ability to enforce
• 5:16
  labor laws across the country. That raises the question,
• 5:21
  though, if DOGE, which is a Musk connected team, was inside the
• 5:26
  NLRB during an active case involving Musk's company, what
• 5:31
  were they doing there? Were they collecting data?
• 5:34
  Did they access case files? And did any of that data make
• 5:37
  its way into the wrong hands? Baroulis isn't making
• 5:40
  assumptions about motives. He's sticking to what he saw
• 5:44
  unauthorized access, unexplained data transfers, and a Russian
• 5:48
  login attempt that used newly issued credentials.
• 5:52
  And now he's asking Congress to step in.
• 5:56
  No, no investigation has been publicly announced yet.
• 5:59
  But if the facts hold up, this won't just be another whistle
• 6:03
  blower or a bureaucratic dispute.
• 6:06
  It'll be about who has access to federal systems and how easily
• 6:10
  that access can be misused and sent to Russia.
• 6:19
  Hey, thank you so much for listening today.
• 6:21
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