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Some Computer Explanations

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I see Charlie Warzel and Chris Hays on Bluesky asking for help in understanding why some of us have our hair on fire about the Musk boys messing with the computers. And even some indications here at LGM that people don’t understand.

So let me give it a try. I don’t consider myself a computer person – I gave up coding a very long time ago and used it only to solve mathematical problems connected with chemistry, not the inner workings of the computers themselves. But I’ve worked with people who develop nuclear weapons codes and, having worked at Los Alamos, I would hear various things about how things can go wrong with computers and their codes. Plus there was security that I had to think about.

The computer programs the boys are dealing with are immense. They are most likely of the type known as “legacy codes.” That means that they are built on older codes, which are built on older codes, and so on, back to a beginning when the agencies got their first computers. That means that the people who tend them know things that you can’t learn in 24 hours. The only way you can learn them would be to apprentice to the people who tend them.

Legacy codes are like this well-known cartoon about the internet. Things are added, and older things may be modified. Peculiarities emerge in the interactions among the parts, sometimes to be removed, other times to be lived with. Every effort is taken to make the equivalent of the tiny peg in the cartoon as robust as possible. But as the pieces are added, it becomes more difficult to know where the pegs are. For those government computers, layers of security would be added on to take care of any possible openings that may have been missed. Every day, government computers are probed by many agents. ranging from the kids like these to the Chinese and Russian cybermilitary. The latter must be very active today.

The Musk boys have no idea where the pegs are. They could delete one inadvertently and bring the whole thing down. Or they could delete it deliberately.

They are said to be rewriting code. They can do that with “write” permission, but not with the lesser “read” permission. With “admin” permission, they can alter things about the code, like who is allowed to access it. To avoid mistakes when rewriting code, it is done on a computer that isn’t connected to anything, debug, check it several ways to make sure it does what you want it to do and no more, and after a great many checks, put it on the system. Remember the uproar when the Obamacare website didn’t work at first? They didn’t do enough checking before they put it up. This is worse.

The big things that can go wrong:

  • The system crashes
  • The system doesn’t crash, but doesn’t do things correctly
  • If the computer is connected to other computers, it messes them up
  • Holes are opened up that allow security breaches

The computers that the Musk boys have taken over contain enormous databases with information about individuals – Social Security numbers, addresses, personnel evaluations, security investigations, their Social Security payment history, much more. It’s been reported that the boys are downloading information to commercial servers. That opens the data to hacking. Deletion of data could mean people won’t get their Social Security checks.

Those payment computers are connected to other computers across the government that send them the information for payments. Those connections can be used to get into those other computers and mess with them. More innocently, code-writing on one computer can interfere with those connections.

Musk is himself a government contractor, so all this is very useful to his government-funded enterprises. Imagine having access to the computers that write your and your competitors’ checks! Plus he talks to Vladimir Putin regularly. There are probably lovely young woman spies waiting outside the Treasury building to tell the boys how smart and sexy they are.

I can imagine computer security people laying their heads down on their desks and crying. Musk attached some sort of email function that opened the system to whomever, and probably there are more openings by now. All sorts of actors could be rummaging around and leaving malware. I don’t know how this gets cleaned up, not to mention the databases that may be stolen. I hope there are backups in secure places.

Update: Maxwell Frost and other members of Congress are at the Treasury Department. A demonstration is planned there for this afternoon.

We are members of Congress at the Treasury Department. We want to be let in to provide oversight on behalf of our constituents. @jasmineforus.bsky.social @sethmagaziner.bsky.social— Maxwell Frost (@maxwellfrost.bsky.social) 2025-02-04T21:40:56.637Z

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