Hey everyone, welcome back to the Elon Musk Podcast.
I'm thrilled to share some exciting news with you over the
next two weeks. We're evolving.
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shaping our world. And with that, our show will
become Stage 0. You'll still get the latest
insights on Elon Musk, plus so much more.
So stay tuned for our official relaunch at stage 0 coming soon.
Now let's get into this episode. Hey I need up. 2nd.
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years even bigger together. There's a link in the show notes
just for you. Today's story brings together
Elon Musk, a federal agency, labor agency and a whistleblower
who says something went very wrong inside the US government's
computer systems. With the center of it is DOGE,
Department of Government Efficiency, a group created
under an executive order during the Trump administration and
staffed in part by people with very close ties to Elon Musk's
companies. Now, according to a sworn
affidavit, DOGE may have triggered a serious
cybersecurity breach inside the National Labor Relations Board,
and that breach could have exposed sensitive labor data to
foreign actors, including Russia.
Now, Daniel Berulis is an IT specialist at the NLRB.
That's the independent federal agency responsible for
investigating labor disputes and protecting workers rights.
It's not a high profile agency, but the data it holds is deeply
sensitive. Legal affidavits, union
strategies, internal business complaints and confidential
company information. Murulis says that.
After DOGE operatives. Were embedded at the agency.
They were given broad access to internal systems since they
insisted that their activity may not be tracked or logged,
something that raised immediate red flags with the agency.
And not long after that, he noticed something unusual.
There were massive spikes in outgoing data from the agency
servers, traffic that didn't follow any normal pattern.
He says the timing lined up exactly with Doge's access.
Then came the moment that pushed this from strange to serious a
login attempt from a Russian IP address.
The login use credentials linked to one of the new DOGE accounts
that have been created at the NLRB.
Baroulis doesn't know whether that login was successful, but
the fact that those credentials had already been used to try to
access the agency from Russia deeply concerned them.
Brulis began quietly gathering evidence, internal logs, traffic
records, access history. He eventually decided to come
forward. But just as he prepared to
disclose what he found to Congress, he says he was
threatened. He told his lawyer and later
federal officials that someone physically taped the note to his
front door. That note came with printed
photographs of him walking near his home.
He believes they were taken by a drone.
The note, he says, referenced his impending disclosure, though
he hasn't made it public. Now, he's now being represented
by Whistleblower Aid, a nonprofit legal group that sent
his sworn disclosure to the Senate Intelligence Committee.
The letter asked for an investigation by federal
cybersecurity agencies like the FBI and the Cybersecurity and
Infrastructure Security Agency or CISA.
Now the NLRB has publicly denied that DOGE ever had access to his
systems. That's a spokesperson said that
there was no breach and that their internal review found
nothing. But the White House told a
different story. Now this is from The Daily
Beast. They confirmed DOGE had access
to NLRB. They described it as part of a
coordinated months old effort to reduce waste and federal fraud
in the government. They didn't address the Russian
login or the data spikes though. This all comes during a legal
fight between the NLRB in Musk's own company, SpaceX.
The agency accused SpaceX of firing employees who criticized
Musk, and in response, SpaceX is challenging the
constitutionality of the agency itself.
Now, that case is still playing out in court, and if the court
sides with Musk, it could gut the NLR BS ability to enforce
labor laws across the country. That raises the question,
though, if DOGE, which is a Musk connected team, was inside the
NLRB during an active case involving Musk's company, what
were they doing there? Were they collecting data?
Did they access case files? And did any of that data make
its way into the wrong hands? Baroulis isn't making
assumptions about motives. He's sticking to what he saw
unauthorized access, unexplained data transfers, and a Russian
login attempt that used newly issued credentials.
And now he's asking Congress to step in.
No, no investigation has been publicly announced yet.
But if the facts hold up, this won't just be another whistle
blower or a bureaucratic dispute.
It'll be about who has access to federal systems and how easily
that access can be misused and sent to Russia.
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