From COBOL to chaos: Elon Musk, DOGE, and the Evil Housekeeper Problem

"the Evil Housekeeper Problem... a principle of computer security ... once someone is in your hotel room with your laptop... the intruder has physical access, you are in much more trouble".

Applying this to "the wrecking ball that is Elon Musk and President Trump’s DOGE... What happens if someone comes in and tells you that you’ll be fired unless you reveal the authenticator code... sign off on a code change, or turn over your... card used to access facilities... [or] your name will otherwise be published in an online list of traitors?... It’s incredibly hard to protect a system from ... the evil housekeeper from DOGE—who has made their way inside and wants to wreck it...".

While "Government is built to be stable", that stability "isn’t actually about the technology used; it’s about the people using it".

Most government IT is pretty crap, but modernising them is usually too risky and/or expensive to be worth it... until they become political. "During the pandemic... Teams were parachuted in... rules and procedures were reassessed and relaxed". But that's an exception: "rules and procedures ... makes it very, very hard to change government technology. But ... changes might break those systems and government doesn’t work without them... sometimes the risk of things breaking is just too high".

But those rules are "only as good as the people who oversee and enforce them... if anyone comes in and breaks those rules on purpose—without fear of consequence—there are few practical or technical guardrails to prevent it... technical measures can be circumvented by coercion at the hands of the evil housekeeper... we should plan for the worst".