DHS removes all members of cyber security advisory boards, halts investigations
65 comments
·January 22, 2025arghandugh
formerly_proven
I'm inclined to write a Firefox addon that just replaces every headline out of the US with "Leopards Eating Faces official caught eating faces"
throwaway290
It's just the beginning. There's a good breakdown of what it would take to reduce the government by Musk's 2 trillion and it doesn't look very good (for US citizens). I mean he what, is going to cut SpaceX contracts? Please...
sneak
What has the federal government done for me lately?
Not a casual dismissal; I’m deadly serious. What is so bad about dismantling large chunks of the most useless, violent, criminal, and wasteful organization in the country?
JustFinishedBSG
It's absolutely impossible to answer you because the very premise of your question is made in bad faith. You wouldn't even need to think, by yourself, very long to get a long list of examples; the fact that you somehow can't means you don't want to and don't intend to.
saulrh
You didn't die of dysentery, for one.
throwaway346434
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9foi342LXQE comes to mind!
markdown
Or food poisoning from drinking milk.
sneak
I didn’t die of being trampled by unicorns either, but the topic is the cost-benefit ratio of the federal government.
Do you really believe that without central government that we will as a society wholly disregard the last thousand years of technological progress? How do the billion people in Europe do it?
Your argument reduces to the now-infamous “but who will build the roads?” We don’t need the military-industrial complex to put down ashphalt or produce safe food.
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DonHopkins
It put fraudulent get-rich-quick pyramid scheme scammers and Bitcoin Ponzi scheme shills like SBF in jail where they belong. Why, are you afraid of that happening to you too?
nxm
Perhaps someone came in and realized that this advisory board had 0 benefit and just a waste of tax payer money? If so, I’m all for getting rid of wasteful spending
phtrivier
The core tenet of Muskism, as described at length in Isaacson's bio is around those lines:
* question all the rules
* when in doubt, slash the rule, and see what happens
* if it's really bad without it, bring back the rule
* if you don't have to bring back 10% of the rules that you slashed, you haven't slashed enough yet
We're now entering the phase where everything is getting slashed.
At the level of a company, this can bring great efficiencies, and make reusable self-driving rockets.
Unfortunately, at the level of a Federal Government, it will bring lower taxes, but some of the 10% will end with coffins.
We'll watch from the other side of the Atlantic how the great libertarianism experiment goes for the US.
I expect both impressive improvements, and dramatic karmic irony.
tptacek
This is running here as a story about cybersecurity, but it's apparently every advisory committee at DHS; there were a bunch of them, mostly not about technology; for instance, the National Commercial Fishing Safety Advisory Committee.
ZeroGravitas
Maybe I've been burned lately and my faith in humanity is ebbing but I'm hoping the reference to that specific committee isn't about "government sounds stupid if you take it out of context, so it's good that we burn it all down"
The Coast Guard having a plan for when large fishing vessels get into trouble, and indeed a plan to stop them getting into trouble, seems like a good thing to me even if it's grouped somewhat incongruously under Department of Homeland Security.
edit: your other comment on this makes me think we are at the "letting commercial fisherman, and the coastguards trying to rescue them, drown to own the libs" stage, and my faith in humanity drops another notch.
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ggm
Can somebody give me a rational take on why? It feels immensely reactive. Salt Typhoon would seem to represent an active threat. Didn't DHS act quite.. conservatively?
A comment on the blusky thread went to "five eyes should stop sharing information" which I suspect won't happen, but I could see people thinking it should.
unsnap_biceps
When someone comes in to slash everything, they generally don't bother understanding what they are slashing. This is the same as when a company hires someone to come in and cut costs, generally everything, good or bad, gets cut. That's what's happening on the US federal level right now. Eventually some things will be picked back up when someone realizes that it wasn't a good idea to stop it, but most things are just going to be wasted effort.
beardyw
Chesterton's Fence
"There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it"
tptacek
I don't think Chesterton has much to say about DHS, which is relatively new.
JumpCrisscross
> Can somebody give me a rational take on why?
Investigations are annoying to people who were behind the President at his inauguration.
matwood
People voted for this and now act surprised.
sph
People voted for unrealistic pipe dreams. They often do, but happens in particular with reactionary and populist votes.
computerfriend
I'm not sure it's the same people.
ggm
AWS and starlink have exposure of risk. You would think DHS work here went to net beneficial outcomes for both of them, and the wider telco sector. (Assuming you meant the tech sector)
JumpCrisscross
> AWS and starlink have exposure of risk
What risk? There isn’t a consumer liability, and they can control the cybersecurity risk-reward balance they’re exposed to. From their perspective, oversight is the liability.
A good rule of thumb, at least for the next couple of months, is that any rules and regulations that have been criticised by the billionaires, banks or oil & gas industry are likely to be shredded. (The “deep state” stuff is mostly whoever has the king’s ear sort of politics. It’s unclear that had any influence here.)
Ekaros
There is two ways for efficiency, either wipe everything clean or well setup a committee to evaluate which committees can be eliminate. And usual joke in bureaucracy is that later one will discover that even more committees are actually needed.
So the knee jerk reaction of current administration is burning it to ground. Which could actually change something.
__loam
Slash and burn policies from a reactionary administration that doesn't and in fact refuses to think about the second and third order consequences of their decisions.
One of the reasons a lot of people are worried about this administration is the vibes based policy decisions they seem intent on making. Everything is haphazard, arbitrary and contradictory. Some of it comes down to personal grievance and some of it comes down to favors for people in the business sphere who chose to kowtow to this administration.
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sriram_malhar
Rational != principled.
ggm
Yes. I don't want to assume an adversarial posture on this, I'm mostly an outsider, observer. I probably can't understand nuances in US domestic politics (although i am opposed to this kind of semi random behaviour by institutions, I did not see this signalled in NOG lists and the like as coming down the pipe)
So I'm wondering if this is as simple as cost/benefit? Did somebody do the sums and decide the delivery was sub par for spend?
The alternatives are mostly very sad: they're fools. Replacing a process can be beneficial. There's usually overlap.
Eduard
https://www.nextgov.com/people/2025/01/trumps-dhs-pick-says-...
Current South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem wants CISA to be “refocused” on critical infrastructure and to no longer address mis- or disinformation efforts online.
So less/no fact checking, including Trump claims.
JumpCrisscross
Noem has practically zero influence over anything right now.
Her explanation, moreover, doesn’t make sense. The infrastructure advisory committees are also being disbanded.
duke_sam
Whatever problems or limitations the existing approach had dropping everything on the floor is one of the least helpful ways of trying to fix it (assuming good intent).
matwood
“They are never as dumb as I hoped they were, and I am never as smart as I thought I was.”
Basically nearly every person who goes into a new situation thinking only they can fix it.
leptons
"The same level of awareness that created a problem, cannot be used to fix it"
dkjaudyeqooe
You have to assume competence too. You may have good intent but that doesn't help if you don't really know what you are doing or are blinded by ideology or some wayward belief.
stouset
Which of the advisory boards do you think were run by incompetents or blind adherents to generally unpopular opinions?
Do you think it was half? More? Less?
polotics
Is this explainable in any way by the cost of running these boards? By the sound of it the cost-benefit of thwarting Salt Typhoon is probably not optimal at zero investment.
hbarka
The swiftness here really cements the notion of a useful idiot. Makes you wonder who crafted the details then the execution.
throwaway48476
It's strange to me how 'cyber security' went from 0days and spear phishing to misinformation on Twitter.
zapnuk
0day and spear phishing are about extracting/obtaining information. Misinformation and manipulation campaigns have the objective to ingest/manipulate information.
"Information security is the practice of protecting information by mitigating information risks." [1]
Not exactly rocket science.
zo1
First-pass guess is that it got "captured" by individuals that wanted to "take an equity and inclusion lens" on cybersecurity... and something something 2020 election interference. Those are the usual suspects when it comes to this sort of institutional rot.
defrost
Salt Typhoon isn't a misinformation campaign on X-itter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_Typhoon
This directive is shutting down a broad range of advisories under the DHS, perhaps you might like to read more in order to make a better informed comment.
fbfactchecker
[flagged]
The already highly compromised ideologues who seized control of the federal government are dismantling it because they said they would.
Every comment on this post is frighteningly uninformed about current events.