Thread by @JuddLegum

1. BREAKING

Several Musk associates installed at OPM — including two recent high school graduates — have received unprecedented access to federal human resources databases containing sensitive personal information for millions of federal employees.

🧵

2. According to two members of OPM staff with direct knowledge, the Musk team running OPM can now extract information from databases that store medical histories, personally identifiable information, workplace evaluations, and other private data

muskwatch.com/p/musk-associa…

3. The staffers spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly and feared professional retaliation. Musk Watch also reviewed internal OPM correspondence confirming that expansive access to the database was provided to Musk associates.

4. Among those with unprecedented access is University of California Berkeley student Akash Bobba, a software engineer who graduated high school less than three years ago. He previously interned at Meta and Palantir, a technology firm chaired by Musk-ally Peter Thiel.

Edward Coristine, another 2022 high school graduate and former software engineering intern at Musk’s Neuralink, has also been given access to the databases.

Other Musk underlings embedded at OPM following President Donald Trump’s inauguration include:

Amanda Scales (xAI)
Brian Bjelde (SpaceX)
Riccardo Biasini (Boring Company)
Gavin Kliger

The arrangement presents acute privacy and security risks, one of the OPM staffers said.

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6. One of the OPM staffers received an email from the agency’s new leadership instructing them to give Musk’s team “access [to] the system as an admin user" and "code read and write permissions." The level of access is unprecedented.

muskwatch.com/p/musk-associa…

7. Among the databases Musk's team now controls:

USAJobs (Social Security numbers, home addresses, employment records of anyone who applies for a federal job)

EHRI (SS #, birthdate, salaries, addresses, job descriptions, disciplinary history of federal workers)

HI (Private health info)

8. A new server used to control these databases has been placed in a conference room that Musk’s team is using as a command center. An OPM staffer described the server as a piece of commercial hardware they believed was not obtained through the proper federal procurement process.

9. There are acute security risks. “China and Russia are literally trying to hack us every day and we just gave all this data over to somebody that's not been properly vetted,” an OPM staffers said. “It's not just Amanda Scales, it's all the [political appointees] in that office right now."

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