Zoe Schiffer: Deviations and Devils, the new name of our podcast. And this, I mean, just going back to red teaming, this is the work that a trust and security team typically does. And those teams-
Leah Fieger: Now we don’t have them.
Zoe Schiffer: They’re not as big as they used to be. There is not that much work there. So yeah, I mean, it’ll be interesting to see how it goes. Obviously within Meta, we’ve been talking this week to people who became aware of the news with SI. The company has recently laid off a large portion of the workforce. We have written about that. We have talked about that. And I asked people, “Well, how’s it going now?” The hack was kind of an excuse to talk to people, see how they were doing. And he says, “I mean, as you would expect, we’ve been asked to do two things now instead.” So you can imagine how it goes.
Brian Barrett: I also, we were talking earlier about AI regulation and there was so much emphasis on national security and these high-level things, but again, not so much on consumer-related products, which would be helpful if you had, say, some kind of bureau that would look after and protect consumer finances, which would also be helpful at this time. We used to have one of those. Technically, I guess we still do that, not really. So this broader regulation is coming at a time when tools that were once available are no longer available. These new devices are very accurate. We’re going to see a lot more of this.
Leah Fieger: Guys, can I bring us to a topic that has nothing to do with AI?
Brian Barrett: Please!
Zoe Schiffer: Very good. I didn’t know one existed, but yes, go away, queen.
Brian Barrett: Also, I think we could probably try to find a way to tie it back together.
Zoe Schiffer: we can. we can.
Leah Fieger: No,not at all. well ok. This story is something we’ve been thinking about, covering, watching for a long time, but it’s all about a DOGE whistleblower who recently filed a lawsuit against Elon Musk. It all really started last year. On April 14, 2025, Dan Berulis, an IT employee at the National Labor Relations Board, NLRB, filed a whistleblower complaint with massive claims. He said that DOGE has compromised the agency’s data and appears to be sneaking it out of the NLRB.
Archival Audio: A whistleblower is coming forward with claims that DOGE not only accessed data from his agency but also took away a substantial amount of sensitive data. According to a disclosure shared with Congress, “approximately 10 gigabytes of data, equivalent to an entire stack of encyclopedias if one printed these files as hard copy documents.”
Leah Fieger: This was a big claim, especially at the same time as you guys remember well, DOGE teams were firing federal employees and gaining access to sensitive data across the country. We were at its peak in April last year. Berulis went public in an NPR article. His name was added to it and he claimed that a threatening note was taped to his door and he was already afraid to speak out. Fast forward a bit, Berulis has now filed a defamation lawsuit against Elon Musk in a DC court. He said Musk made him the target of further violence by falsely implying that Berulis’ whistleblower claim against DOGE was fake. This is a really profound claim for many reasons and it all really boils down to Musk re-sharing a right-wing influencer’s revelations from last year that claimed that DOGE was sanctioned and that this whistleblower’s testimony was basically fake. After that what happened-
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