Nathan Tankus has been writing some fascinating stuff lately about DOGE and the Treasury over at Notes on the Crisis. In one recent post, he discusses the sworn affirmation of the Deputy Commissioner of Transformation and Modernization at the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, Joseph Gioeli III. Mr. Gioeli is explaining how Marko Elez was mistakenly given read-write instead of read-only access to the SPS database. I read his statement and nodded along, thinking “yeah makes sense.” Nathan’s reaction was very different: “When I first read this paragraph, I laughed for about a minute straight in incredulity and disbelief,” he says. A very different reaction from mine! So I’ve been thinking about why Mr. Gioeli’s explanation seems credible to me.
In essence Mr. Gioeli says Mr. Elez was given read-write instead of read-only access to the database by mistake, and that once they recognized that, they did an investigation to verify that he hadn’t done anything untoward with that access. Nathan finds it hard to believe that this happened “accidentally,” on “just one system,” among other things. (You should really read his original post, it’s great.)
Obviously, I have no first-hand knowledge about any of this – only what I’ve read. But I can see how this could easily happen. To illustrate, I’ll tell you a (completely fictional) story….
ALICE: Uh, well, we’re supposed to go through the standard process…
CARL: Sorry, I missed what you were saying, I was distracted by this list I’m putting together of unproductive employees to fire on Monday.
ALICE: … Yes, I can give Bill access. It’ll take me about an hour to get it setup. I assume we’re talking about read-only access?
As you can probably surmise, the command that Alice ran actually gave Bill read-write access, even though she wanted it to be read-only. Something like the above is, to me, a perfectly plausible way you’d get into a situation that would be described exactly the way Mr. Gioeli did in his testimony: someone was accidentally given too much access on just one system. Things like this happen all the time when, for whatever urgent reason, people go outside the normal process. That fact is precisely why there is a normal process in the first place.
So now you can see how things could have gotten into a state similar to what Mr. Gioeli described. Alice was creating a local user account, something she never does, using low-level database tools that no one ever uses because the typical process is just to manage permissions through groups in the IDP [IDentity Provider], and couldn’t figure out the proper alchemical mixture of permissions flags (which are much, much more complicated than just “read-only” vs “read-write,” trust me). It is not at all hard for me to believe that Alice could have accidentally gotten the permissions wrong.
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