DOGE Balls

A black demon rises from the depths, the pig becomes man, and the House of the Usher of the Black Rod stands vacant. Yea, shalt thou apply by EOD on Sunday, March 2nd if thou possess “demonstrable strengths in leading, managing and developing a team of staff with a range of skills, including fostering diversity and inclusion” and woe betide them that possess not these strengths but pretend to the Black Rod withall, and forsooth.

What I’m saying is the signs and auguries are not great, tbh.

The black demon fish Elon Musk fastened to the executive branch and gave the clinically cringe-inducing name “U.S. DOGE Service” (3d10 psychic damage) is busy posing a threat and fucking up the government, but not the way Chuck D wanted. His gaggle of racists, edgelords, and cybercriminals finally managed to launch a website which Wired’s David Gilbert reports is primarily an ad for Musk’s Nazi message board. This morning Jason Koebler at 404 reported some more details about the doge dot gov site, including that it doesn’t appear to live on any government infrastructure and that the database it uses is open for anyone to write to. One of the records added by an external security researcher (cached here) was visible to me until at least noon eastern time on Friday. To be fair, according to Sam Curry the site appears to have been developed by DOGE staffer Kyle Schutt, who is also very busy trying to claw disaster grant money back from FEMA, so it probably took him a while to put a password on the publicly accessible db write endpoint. DOGE is also opening up public access to federal computer networks across the executive branch, including servers linked to the U.S. Treasury Department’s secure payment system and several national nuclear research labs.

Although it has lost some power lately, the myth of the “genius 10x computer programmer” still persists in American culture, and despite being the Dunning-Kruger poster boy for the last 25 years in a row it’s still Elon’s whole schtick. He doesn’t know anything about programming but if he has one talent (and, at most, he does) it’s a nose for a particular kind of financial leverage opportunity, like his purchase of Twitter in 2022 or this week’s offer to buy OpenAI for $97.4 billion. Here’s Matt Levine on why Musk would do such a thing:

Levine’s whole take on this situation is worth reading, because it requires a bit of explanation to really understand but it’s the best case study I’ve seen for the one thing that Elon is actually good at. So if you find yourself confused why this incredibly embarrassing apartheid dipshit is the richest human being in history, it’s because his One Weird Trick is very lucrative when backed by a sufficient emerald mine startup bankroll. Well, that and $20 billion in U.S. federal funding (so far). Currently his wealth is rooted almost entirely in heavily leveraged and wildly inflated shares of Tesla stock, which makes Tesla a soft target for either foreign corruption or anyone who’d like to register their discontent with Elon’s shadow executive branch. And indeed:

So do with that info what you will.

The whole intro today was gonna be about 19 year old DOGE staffer and all-time “this fuckin’ guy” Edward “Big Balls” Coristine but just thinking about him makes me start sweating blood, so very briefly: Bloomberg’s Jason Leopold, Margi Murphy, Sophie Alexander, Jake Bleiberg, and Anthony Cormier reported that Coristine “Was Fired By Cybersecurity Firm for Leaking Company Secrets.” Not great to be fired from your first ever tech job for leaking company secrets, right? But it turns out that the company he was fired from was a DDoS mitigation service founded by a guy with a history of running DDoS extortion schemes. Brian Krebs connected those dots, and also reported Coristine’s history in “the Com”, a network of cybercriminals that is home to some of the worst people you can imagine, like the child predators of 764. So Coristine was fired for being too crooked for cybercrime, and spent his free time looking for hacker tools in hacker chatrooms, where the other hackers didn’t even respect him. The Bloomberg team also reported that Coristine participated in Telegram channels dedicated to the anti-trans terrorist group Kiwifarms and the Musk Watch newsletter reported that Coristine ran a meme-hosting service called tesla dot sexy which offered custom URL redirects “including, ‘children-sex[dot]party,’ ‘child-porn[dot]store,’ ‘kkk-is-cool[dot]club,’” and, incredibly, some that were even worse than those.¹  

Edward Coristine is currently a “senior adviser” to the U.S. State Department and Department of Homeland Security. “The White House did not immediately respond, wrote Wired, “to questions about what level of clearance, if any, Coristine has and, if so, how it was granted.”

Today in Better News: Pete Hegseth just did the funniest thing. Google admits that gouda does not make up “50 to 60 percent of the world’s cheese consumption.” Glory Hole open again. Matthew Gault debunked the “$400 Million Armored Tesla Story.” We gotta try to only get mad about real things, ok? Speaking of which, Chris Geidner at Law Dork looked at whether the Trump administration is ignoring the courts, and so far the answer is still: not yet. Jonah Peretti has some new bullshit he wants to sell you. SNARF? Shut up, dude. For Emily Gould lore completists: “How I quit having a grudge against Lena Dunham.” Lindsey Adler on Jeremy Strong. Friend of Tabs and “Talladega Nights: The Play” impresario Matty Merritt has a new newsletter on “How to build a DIY theater empire out of everyone else's scraps.”

And Finally: “The Lorne Michaels Book-Event Thread Is the Reply-All Disaster We Need.”

Today’s Song: Jordana & TV Girl, “Better in the Dark”

Thanks for your patience this week, I had norovirus or, as they call it in Australia, ornorvirus. That’s a real bottom of the newsletter joke, I’m sorry. Have a loosie egg.

1  God help us this sentence is gonna get me so spam-filed today, apologies in advance.