Subject: The security threat of the MuskRats
https://www.progresspond.com/2...
As the New York Times reports, Interior’s chief information officer and chief information security officer strongly objected when DOGE officials Stephanie Holmes and Katrine Trampe entered the building over the weekend and demanded unfettered access to “a payroll system that processes salaries for about 276,000 federal employees across dozens of agencies.”

They had a plethora of concerns. The first was that no one at the Interior Department, including themselves, had the kind of global administrative access that Holmes and Trampe were demanding. The second was that having that kind of access would open Holmes and Trampe up as targets of terroristic cyberattacks or other malicious hacks. The third was that granting (or just having) that kind of access could violate the Privacy Act and be a prosecutable offense. The fourth was that it would allow them “to make changes to employment status, compensation level, health benefits and more — with no additional oversight or approval required.” The fifth was that any kind of administrative access to the payroll system “typically requires training and certification” and that “without formal qualifications, the Department may experience significant failure because of operator error.”

These concerns were drafted up in a memo on Friday.

On Friday, the federal employees asked the DOGE workers to give the memo to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum for his signature, thus taking on the legal responsibility for those risks, the two people said. Mr. Burgum never signed the memo. Tyler Hassan, a former DOGE employee who was recently named as the Interior Department’s acting assistant secretary of policy, management and budget, then placed the agency’s chief information officer, and chief information security officer on administrative leave, and placed them under investigation for their “workplace behavior,” the two people said.

These security officers’ “workplace behavior” really consisted of trying to follow the law and protect the security of the system they are/were in charge of safeguarding. Their failure to just obediently follow orders from DOGE randos who showed up at their door making crazy and dangerous demands has led to them being put on administrative leave.