First, if you’ve used HN at any point since the Snowden leaks there has never been a shortage of outrage here.

Second, while that was a major topic in international news for years, it did at least stay in the national security space where access is restricted. A lot of the concerns around DOGE are because they bulled through all of the normal rules for who gets access to sensitive data and how it’s handled. Say what you will about the NSA, and many here have, they didn’t just hand out credentials to inexperienced people with a history of leaking data or condone use of personal computers for government work.

This is especially of concern if the reports of write access being used to push code changes or deploy monitoring keyloggers are true: do you really want to bet that the guys who made a .gov site world-writable couldn’t be compromised by a foreign intelligence agency? There are legitimate concerns about the level of process overhead in government IT but that doesn’t make the reasons for it go away.