In the past week or so, the courts have begun to try to set some boundaries on the MuskāMillerāTrump administrationās early blitz of recklessness.
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This judicial review provides at least a small reprieve, hope that some of the administrationās most destructive impulses will be stopped. Or at least pared back. But even with the courts stepping up, and even with the reality of the administrationās ineptitude sinking in, this early MuskāMillerāTrump blitz remains veryāmaybe irreparablyādamaging. Of course, there are a lot of moles to whack: the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau are being dismantled at an alarming rate, and the court system is not known for being nimble. The administration is betting, perhaps rightly, that at least some of its thoughtless, lawless efforts will slip through the cracks.
But even if the courts caught them allāand even if every court facing each lawless escapade said, āNope, thatās not a thingāāstill the entire process would be doing serious damage to our institutions. Think of it as someone spoofing your identity and going on a shopping spree with your credit cards. Even if the goon gets caught, you still have to go store by store to argue that the fraudulent purchase wasnāt legitimate and hope the debt is forgiven. And all the while, perhaps long after all the debts are dealt with, the torrent of uncertainty kills your credit score.
We know. What we donāt know is why are all civil servants just rolling over, instead of applying simple sabotage.
Itās easy to volunteer other people, but these are civil servants who inherently believe in the rule of law by default. That programming in itself makes it hard to go against this lifelong belief in doing things by the book.
I hope they can do what they can to resist, but I also donāt believe this is on them either. If the former President in a position of power couldnāt put the brakes on this shit; if we as a society couldnāt put the brakes on this on November 5thā¦ Well, my expectations are very low. Things will have to come crashing down hard until the apathetic and ignorant wake up, I suspect.
Most simple sabotage is doing things EXACTLY by the bookā¦ Civil servants often take shortcuts to expedite things. They should take ZERO shortcuts.
Elon toadie asks for a set of creds. Demand Toadie get all appropriate forms completed, first, and then demand documented procedure for obtaining those creds are followed TO THE LETTER. No rush jobs. No prodding the ticket holder for updates. Just exactly like the book says to do it.
Just an example.
This is called āwork to ruleā and it is one of the most classic kinds of industrial action, pretty much one step short of a strike.
Itās also one of my favorites.
It also means risking their livelihood, which I expect in many cases is an even greater deterrent than an aversion to rule breaking.
Whose saying they are all rolling over?
Their actions? How else do websites vanish? Whiy arenāt we getting livetracks on Elonās location, or his toadies? Where are the server crashes?
Lmao, so you are asking āwhere are the server crashes,ā in the same statement acknowledging sites have been removed. How often do you see server crashes of things that have been deleted?
No, I mean crashes if the Whitehouse web sitesā¦ or breaking the auth systems for Trump officialsā¦ or delaying fleet vehicle reservations for motorcades so they come up short, or have to cancelā¦
The only way these things can happen so fast is by civil servants just doing what they are told.
I imagine a lot of people just donāt want to go to jail. Considering thereās substantial criminal penalties (for everyone thatās not a billionaire) to take out a website or anything else you mentioned - thatās my guess.
There are myriad ways to take something offline, which is easily plausible as an āoopsā moment. There are also myriad tarpits to send requests to.
My old job, if I wanted to totally de-rail a project? Iād push it over to the project management office, and then to the infosec office. Almost guaranteed, the project would fail, because of those two tarpits.
Get a special request? Schedule a meeting for 4 business days out. Spend 1/3 of the meeting catching up and socializing. Spend 1/3 pre-planning the next meeting. Spend 1/3 laying out all the issues needing to be solved, and ācircle backā when we get āscheduling lined upāā¦
And then it gets restored from backup 20 minutes later while you look incompetent to your peers and supervisors.
If you really want to take it down you need to be systematically deleting or corrupting backups for several months; then take it down.
That requires destruction of govt property (up to 20 years in jail).
Oh damnedā¦ for some reason the last 4 backups failedā¦ Crap.
Regardless, itās 20 minutes of outage. And sure, you look incompetent to your peers and supers, who hopefully, would be on your side, anyways. Or, they are Fascist Toadies, and itās best you look incompetent. How can someone incompetent sabotage anything?
No, it doesnāt. It requires a few days of not checking a misconfigured backup job. And the misconfiguration is just an āoopsā, easily explained away.
The same reason most of us decline our ample opportunities for sabotage every day. Someone else should do it.
Well, that changes, the more people do it. And I am not going to brag here about what Iāve done, but at least once a day, I do something to put a wrench in a cog.
How would sabotage help when destroying the government is Muskās and Trumpās goal?
It slows them down. Which is what we can hope for, until people get a bit more organized into other forms of resistance.