Your Password Has Been Compromised…

… And so has your country. We’re often warned to never share our passwords. Well, they’ve been shared on our behalf. NYT (Gift Article): How Elon Musk Executed His Takeover of the Federal Bureaucracy. “Mr. Musk made clear that he saw the gutting of that bureaucracy as primarily a technology challenge. He told the party of around 20 that when he overhauled Twitter, the social media company that he bought in 2022 and later renamed X, the key was gaining access to the company’s servers. Wouldn’t it be great, Mr. Musk offered, if he could have access to the computers of the federal government? Just give him the passwords, he said jocularly, and he would make the government fit and trim.”

+ Meanwhile, Starlink poised to take over $2.4 billion contract to overhaul air traffic control communication.

+ “A federal judge struck down a memo sent by the Office of Personnel Management directing other federal agencies to conduct mass firings, saying that the memo was ‘illegal’ and should be ‘rescinded’ because OPM did not have the power to control hiring and firing in other agencies.” Stay tuned to find out if we still listen to what federal judges say about what’s illegal.

+ Susan Glasser in The New Yorker: Why Aren’t We in the Streets? “Last Friday night, minutes after President Donald Trump announced the firing of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and a purge of the military’s top lawyers, I received an e-mail from my cousin in Los Angeles. ‘Why are we not in the streets?’ she wrote. ‘The Germans even marched against Musk. The French would have barricaded every government building.’ All week long I’ve been thinking of that message, composed in the heat of the moment after an unprecedented event that already seems forgotten amid all the subsequent unprecedented events.”