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"Move Fast and Break Things" - A Very Stupid and Dangerous Idea [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2025-03-07

I worked as a software developer at major law firms during the last 25 years of my career with an emphasis on financial systems. I supervised several major upgrades from legacy systems and also with importing/exporting data when switching vendors. I wrote various utilities for data transformation and wrote multiple interfaces for existing systems to extend their capabilities. When reviewing older systems, you find a lot of dead ends such as reports or queries that were written under a specific set of circumstances, perhaps for a major client that was no longer a client or something that needed a specific answer during an emergency that had long since past. One of the ways we used to confirm that these sorts of items were no longer needed was to suspend access to them or shut down an underlying process. We would also alert the appropriate accounting departments that we were doing this sort of work so that they could be on the lookout for any degradations or omissions from their daily processes. If a task, report or process was still being used, temporarily shutting them down would be immediately noticed. If that happened, we would quickly restore its functionality. We were always very careful about this process and had a high degree of familiarity with these systems so it was rare that any of the processes we identified were actually still in use. It took a great deal of understanding on multiple fronts, not only having expertise with coding, it also required in depth understanding of hardware, database servers, file servers, networking and system security methods for me and the others that worked with me to successfully do the job in that realm.

At the risk of sounding like an old fart, I don’t think any of Elon’s gang of incel hacker boys have any idea how to navigate their way through government technology that is more likely to be way older than they are. All they really know how to do is make attempts to gain access, or use some type of intimidation tactics provided by Trump operatives to get there. These “boys” are the type people that have no idea of what they’ve gained access to and have no knowledge or respect for individual privacy or strategic sensitivity. Their goal is just to move fast and break in.

We may never actually find out how deeply these systems have been compromised and how much damage is permanent.



When and if this country ever returns to something that resembles sanity, I hope history will view it as the biggest act of espionage and thievery that was ever committed in plain sight.

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