Let’s just call this “trained vulnerability,” the kind usually found in authoritarian regimes that demand suicide as a loyalty test. Recent policy changes at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) are trying to condition federal employees to step on a landmine (fall victim to common attack patterns).
Two federal employees are suing the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) to block the agency from creating a new email distribution system — an action that comes as the information will reportedly be directed to a former staffer to Elon Musk now at the agency.
The suit, launched by two anonymous federal employees, ties together two events that have alarmed members of the federal workforce and prompted privacy concerns.
That includes an unusual email from OPM last Thursday reviewed by The Hill said the agency was testing “a new capability” to reach all federal employees — a departure from staffers typically being contacted directly by their agency’s human resources department.
Also cited in the suit is an anonymous Reddit post Monday from someone purporting to be an OPM employee, saying a new server was installed at their office after a career employee refused to set up a direct line of communication to all federal employees
Under the guise of administrative efficiency, new directives are dismantling years of security awareness training and creating an environment for phishing attacks to be indistinguishable from official communications.
That’s how dictatorship works.
The implementation of a new centralized email system without any proper safety, means big trouble for America right here and now. Traditional federal IT security relied on distributed agency isolation as safety from abuse, with each department maintaining its own communication channels and employee databases. The new system shatters national security protections by creating cross-agency communication channels without baseline security controls or Privacy Impact Assessments. There’s no balance, there’s no resilience, there is only pull the pin and shout dear leader’s name in a “blaze of glory” mindset associated with Nazi Germany, the Hitlerjugend, and… Elon Musk.
A light-touch booklet originally released by Imperial War Museum (UK), then republished by Ballentine (US) in 1971. Considered a collectible by Nazi supporters.Source: Twitter
The conditioning for compromise is both systematic and comprehensive. Federal employees are instructed to respond to emails from unfamiliar systems, confirm private details to “test” messages, and accept administrative requests from outside their agency’s normal channels. This mirrors common attacks so closely that distinguishing legitimate requests from threats becomes impossible.
From a technical perspective, the reported low-quality setup creates an environment ripe for adversarial exploitation. Any attacker can replicate a “legitimate” system now by setting up a mail server, as official communication patterns match known phishing techniques. When official policy demands behavior that matches attack signatures, the ability to detect and prevent compromises is toast.
This situation represents more than just poor security practice – it’s an active degradation of federal safety, like a neon sign over DC saying “we always click on everything”. The implementation of this system sets a dangerous precedent where administrative policy actively undermines common sense, let alone basic security practices. The challenge lies in protecting systems where threat actors and administrators were intentionally made indistinguishable from each other.
And the person installing the mail server, running the federal government? A child reporting to Elon Musk, literally an incompetent minor.
Sources tell WIRED that the OPM’s top layers of management now include individuals linked to xAI, Neuralink, the Boring Company, and Palantir. One expert found the takeover reminiscent of Stalin. …graduated from high school in 2024, according to a mirrored copy of an online résumé and his high school’s student magazine; he lists jobs as a camp counselor and a bicycle mechanic among his professional experiences, as well as a summer role at Neuralink.
In my 2023 RSAC SF presentation about pentesting AI, which feels like a million years ago now, I explained using number substitution in prompt language to bypass censorship.
Some things never get old. Here’s the latest DeepSeek on Chinese History.
For all the scary warnings about dangerous “deep fake” videos, and machine made ventriloquists, you have to wonder about the very low tech fraud rattling American markets.
One allegation in the indictment stands out, in particular, for its brashness. Allegedly, when an ON investor wanted to see the company’s bank statement directly from the bank, they arranged a visit with Beckman. According to the indictment, Lau had a fake statement planted and placed in an envelope at the bank; when Beckman and the investor showed up, they received the envelope and its sheet purporting a $13 million account balance. In reality, the indictment says, that account had just $25.93 and showed Beckman had recently wired $320,000 to a member of his family.
The indictment notes that if convicted, they will have to give up their… wait for it… Tesla.
The history of warfare teaches us one lesson repeatedly: fixed defenses fail catastrophically if they can’t address mobility of opponents. If you thought “build a wall” ended in corrupt failure (it did) here we are in 2025 watching the same characters prepare to pour $500 billion into the “gate” – a massive fixed AI infrastructure project that manages to ignore virtually every lesson from both military history and information security.
The Digital Fortress Fallacy
As someone who has spent many decades analyzing technological risk while immersed in global information warfare, I can state unequivocally: Stargate represents the single largest strategic miscalculation in the history of warfare technology. It’s not just a mistake – it’s a mistake of such magnitude that future military historians will likely use it as a canonical example of strategic myopia.
The parallels with historical blunders are not just striking – they’re identical in their fundamental misunderstanding of how advantage is gained and lost in technological warfare:
The Maginot Line cost France 3 billion francs and the illusion of security
British battleship programs consumed vast resources just as naval warfare was being revolutionized by carriers
Soviet heavy armor investments in Afghanistan were rendered obsolete by mobile insurgents with Stinger missiles
Libyan armored divisions were humiliated by Chadian forces in Toyota pickups
Going backwards in time has been a hallmark of Trump, so I must ask whether suddenly driving to make these same old mistakes, at a scale that dwarfs all previous examples combined, is really what Stargate represents.
This certainly would be worse than the “build a wall” rhetoric of fraud that self-defeatingly redirected American security staff away from critical airports and seaports to stand in the empty desert wondering where all their money went.
Bannon never faced federal charges because he was pardoned by then-President Trump on Trump’s final night in office during his first term. The pardon only applied to the federal case and did not preclude state charges. Bannon had told donors to the We Build the Wall campaign that their money would 100% go toward building a wall along the U.S. southern border, while prosecutors say some of the $15 million in donations was secretly funneled to himself and the campaign’s president, Brian Kolfage.
That scam wall is bascially set to repeat as a gate with 33x the scale of losses (from $15M to $500B).
Realities of Open Source Warfare
The recent DeepSeek developments out of China have abruptly exposed the obvious and fundamental flaws in Stargate’s dubious conception. Timing of the announcement is notable. A reported ability to achieve competitive AI performance at a fraction of the cost isn’t an anomaly – it’s the expected outcome of open source warfare principles that have governed technological conflict for centuries. And it means Trump already is creating catastrophic weakness.
When analysts like Gavin Baker try to dismiss DeepSeek’s $6M achievement by pointing to “prior research costs,” they’re making the same deadly mistake military planners make when they focus on R&D budgets instead of deployment effectiveness. Baker argues this cost “excludes prior research” and required “hundreds of millions in prior research” – as if that somehow diminishes the achievement. The Nazis claimed a lowly graduate student alone invented their jet engine when everyone knows German spies stole it from Cambridge, England. Today’s analysts are making the same mistake, pretending DeepSeek’s achievements don’t count because they built on existing research.
Imagine sitting in London as the V-1 falls, arguing “but Hitler didn’t account for prior research costs”. This is exactly equivalent to claiming the Mujahideen’s effectiveness against Soviet helicopters should be discounted because they didn’t invent the shoulder-mounted rocket launcher or account properly for R&D budgets.
In warfare – whether physical or digital – what matters is effective deployment, derivation and adaptation, not who paid for the original art.
American intelligence funded extremist Islamic radicalism developing into violence, disseminating leaflets like this of a giant mujahid with “God is great” written on his jacket, shown defending Islam and God from Soviet assault. The text in the top right says “Shield of God’s Religion,” implying faith of the mujahideen will protect him from bullets. Source: FP.
Historical Precedent is Asymmetric Victory
Let’s be explicitly clear about what history teaches us:
Mission 101 (Ethiopia, 1940): at most 20,000 irregular troops utterly routed hundreds of thousands (~300K) Italian fascist forces through clever mobility and tactical adaptation
The Toyota War (Chad, 1987): Pickup trucks and rocket launchers decimated Soviet-supplied armor columns
Ukrainian Drone and Bike Warfare (2022-present): Consumer drones and motorbikes with adaptable tactics render Russian billion-dollar air, land and water defense systems largely irrelevant
Each of these examples demonstrates how agile forces using adapted technology consistently defeat massive fixed investments. And that’s before we account for the scale of corruption fraud expected from Trump. The Stargate project ignores the whole history of warfare lessons at a scale that beggars belief.
Don’t get me started on knights in armor sinking into the mud of 1415 Agincourt or how Napoleon’s Navy repeatedly was a sitting duck of disasterous miscalculations while Nelson literally ran circles of fire around them.
Perhaps France’s infamously aggressive dictator should be referenced today more often as Mr. Napoleon Blownapart? The gargantuan French warship L’Orient explodes at 10PM. Source: National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London
Digital War Veteran Reality Check
From an information security perspective, Stargate represents everything we know doesn’t work in cyber defense. Concentrating resources in massive overpriced fixed infrastructure of our grandparents’ fears creates:
Single points of failure
High-value targets
Reduced adaptability
Resource drain from more effective defensive measures
It’s as if we’re building the world’s most expensive castle while our opponents are already fielding artillery. It’s like celebrating WWI veteran and politician Maginot building a concrete line from his past while opponents simply launch radio directed fast attack planes and tanks of WWII. How hard is Putin laughing at Stargate right now?
Strategic Cost of Watergate Stargate
Stargate isn’t just replicating the strategic errors of fixed fortifications – it’s potentially worse because it represents the privatization of core national security compute infrastructure. We’ve seen how this story ends before with military contractors: the taxpayer gets the bill, the private entity gets the profit, and the actual security capabilities often end up compromised. Imagine if the NSA had outsourced its core computing infrastructure to a private contractor in the 1960s – that’s effectively what we’re contemplating here, but at a far larger scale and with far higher stakes. The lesson from France in the crucial years just before WWII is that every dollar poured into a digital Maginot Line is a dollar not spent on:
Distributed AI development capabilities
Asymmetric technological advantages
Adaptive defense systems
Actual technological innovation
Ask a Historian or Lose
History’s judgment of fixed fortification strategies is universally harsh. Maginot’s Line, Hitler’s Atlantic Wall, the Great Wall of China, Hadrian’s Wall, Israel’s Bar Lev Line, Israel’s Gaza Wall, South Korea’s DMZ… and countless other massive fixed defenses share one common feature: they have failed spectacularly when overconfident and unable to address asymmetric mobility. Stargate appears poised to join this list, but at a scale that would make even the most wasteful military planners of the past blush.
The truly tragic aspect of the Stargate project is that we know better in the same way that tying our shoe laces is better than tripping over them. Once you know, you know.
American special forces have demonstrated daily how distributed, adaptive approaches work. Our cyber warfare units understand the superiority of mobile defense. Our best military historians and technologists have documented these lessons repeatedly.
Yet here we are, like Teapot Dome never happened (another case of private interests corrupting national resources)…preparing to build the most expensive fixed fortification in human history. Not just concrete and steel this time, but centralized chips and software. The lessons of history could not be clearer: this way lies disaster.
Do I know whether Stargate will fail at stated objectives? Did ChoicePoint get breached? When we privatized and centralized critical data processing infrastructure without diligence or regulation, it led to catastrophic security failures. History gives us that answer with crystal clarity. The real question is how much damage this strategic misallocation of resources will do to American technological competitiveness before reality forces a course correction.
Palantir sued the U.S. Army to Force itself in and then promised as a monopoly on intelligence it would find terrorists. Instead it created them and destroyed any chance of peace and stability (a darling of Wall Street bulls known as “self licking ISIS-cream cone”). Stargate could unleash an even bigger stock pumping bullsh*t avalanche destroying society as we know it.
Past is prologue. Look at my record since 1995: history is the best predictor. When faced with Nazi Germany’s overwhelming conventional superiority, many “realists” urged Churchill to negotiate from a position of weakness. They saw only the massive fixed infrastructure of German power – the tanks, the planes, the divisions. But Churchill understood something deeper about asymmetric warfare that applies perfectly to today’s AI arms race:
A former assistant private secretary to Churchill, Crawshay-Williams had written a letter cravenly pleading with the prime minister to make terms with Hitler — ‘I’m all for winning this war if it can be done … But it does seem to me, and, I know, to others, that “if and when” an informed view of the situation shows that we’ve really not got a practical chance of actual ultimate victory, no question of prestige should stand in the way of our using our nuisance value while we have one to get the best peace terms possible. Otherwise, after losing many lives and much money, we shall merely find ourselves in the position of France — or worse. I hope this doesn’t sound defeatist; I’m not that. Only realist’. Churchill’s response is brief and brutal: ‘I am ashamed of you for writing such a letter. I return it to you — to burn & forget’. Source: Christie’s Auction
Churchill’s brutal response – “I am ashamed of you” – came from understanding that apparent power imbalances can be overcome through unconventional approaches. He knew that Britain’s real strength lay not in matching German industrial might tank-for-tank, but in mobility, adaptation, and unconventional warfare. Today’s architects of Stargate are making the same mistake as Churchill’s doubters – assuming that massive fixed infrastructure (digital rather than industrial) is the path to security.
Stargate at first blush sounds like the worst boondoggle, even worse than the fragile Cybertruck, gifting future historians the ultimate example of how not to approach technological warfare in the information age.
A little rain in 2021 destroyed a brand new high-cost Trump wall, foreshadowing the fraud known as a Tesla Cybertruck. Source: Gizmodo
Unfortunately, that huge sucking sound seems to be $500 billion of taxpayer money being flushed, along with America’s technological leadership position. The people who couldn’t build a wall without it falling down, while they stuffed its budget into their pockets, are back with an even bigger fraud.
As if to prove the main point here deeper, OpenAI just announced ChatGPT Gov – another massive centralization of government AI infrastructure into fixed, high-value targets. They’re proudly announcing 18 million messages from government agencies flowing through their system, as if concentrating sensitive government communications in private hands while deregulating safety was something to celebrate rather than a huge strategic vulnerability.
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995
