Be Prepared for Some Very Bad Things to Happen to the US Government

It's being reported by Wired and other sources that the team of young engineers under Elon Musk's direction now have full administrative-level access to the US Treasury Department's payment system, and have actually made changes to production systems.  

From Talking Points Memo:

Phrases like “freaking out” are, not surprisingly, used to describe the reaction of the engineers who were responsible for maintaining the code base until a week ago. The changes that have been made all seem to relate to creating new paths to block payments and possibly leave less visibility into what has been blocked. I want to emphasize that the described changes are not being tested in a dev environment (i.e., a not-live environment) but have already been pushed into production. This is code that appears to be mainly the work of Elez, who was first introduced to the system probably roughly a week ago and certainly not before the second Trump inauguration. The most recent information I have is that no payments have as yet been blocked and that the incumbent engineering team was able to convince Elez to push the code live to impact only a subset of the universe of payments the system controls. I have also heard no specific information about this access being used to drill down into the private financial or proprietary information of payment recipients, though it appears that the incumbent staff has only limited visibility into what Elez is doing with the access. They have, however, looked extensively into the categories and identity of payees to see how certain payments can be blocked.

Adding further anxiety about the stability of the system there is, I’m told, a long-scheduled migration scheduled to take place this weekend which could interact in unpredictable ways with the code changes already described.

I cannot stress how dangerously crazy this is. From a security point of view, it's appalling; they could, and may already have, downloaded personal and possibly classified information onto their own computers. But that aside, YOU DO NOT MAKE CHANGES TO THE PRODUCTION SERVERS OF COMPLEX FINANCIAL SYSTEMS WITHOUT EXTENSIVE PREPARATION AND TESTING.  

Sorry for shouting, but I speak from personal experience here. I worked for more than a decade at the Toronto Stock Exchange documenting their trading systems and saw the kind of testing that was necessary before patching or upgrading the Exchange's production network and servers. Access was tightly controlled and you did not (and in fact, could not) just walk in off the street and access those systems. 

In a same world, Musk and his entire team would be escorted out of the building in handcuffs, charged with multiple federal crimes, and taken straight to jail. And Trmup would be impeached for letting them proceed. 

I've seen very little mention of this in the mainstream press so far. I don't think they understand just how badly the government has been compromised. This is unquestionably the worst security breach in the history of the United States. And that may not be the worst of it.