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. We'll be broadening our focus to cover all the tech Titans 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.
Of your time. For the past four or five years, I've been bringing you in depth, no nonsense insights from the world of Elon Musk, but I need your help to keep the show alive and growing. If you love what you hear, consider supporting Stage 0 on [email protected]/stage 0 News. By joining our Patreon community, you'll get exclusive content and a chance to shape
future topics. Everyone has a voice, and your support goes directly into making this show absolutely better, and it helps me keep bringing you the content that you enjoy every single day. If you're getting value from Stage 0 News, becoming a patron is the best way to make sure this journey keeps going. So let's make the next five 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.
Hey, thank you so much for listening today. I really do. Appreciate your support. If you could take a second and hit the subscribe or the follow button on whatever podcast platform that you're listening on right now, I greatly appreciate it. It helps out the show tremendously and you'll never miss an episode. And each episode is about 10 minutes or less to get you caught up. Quickly and. Please, if you want to support the show even more, go to. Patreon dot.
Com slash. Stage 0. And please take care of yourselves and each other, and I'll see you tomorrow.