Hello, democracy lovers! Please join me on America Unhinged at 8pm Eastern on Thursday, March 6, where I will be talking with hosts Francesca Fiorentini and Wajahat Ali about DOGE’s slash-and-burn march through the federal government, what it means for the American people if we don’t stop it, and how we can do that. I… Read More: Live Thu, Mar 6 on “America Unhinged”, plus Stand Up… »
GSA fires 18F, More Perfect Union releases video interview about VA infosec firing, AP video interview about VA firing published by Newsweek, NextGov/FCW writes about VA.gov migration project damaged by USDS hosage, USDS group resignation reported by NPR, and a bunch of other links.
If you can make it go from taking 30 seconds to 30 minutes for a bad actor to find something private about you online, you’ll dramatically decrease the number of people willing to go through the effort. Think of it like putting an alarm-system sign on your lawn to encourage burglars to skip your house.
I’m trying to use my blog here as a kind of time capsule of the work I’ve been doing to fight DOGE and Trump since I went public with it on February 14, so just for the record, I want to capture here the original Mastodon and LinkedIn postings that got people to start paying… Read More: The Mastodon and LinkedIn postings that started it all »
I did a brief press appearance on CNN this afternoon to talk about my firing from the VA and what that means for VA.gov cybersecurity. Here’s the video, with a transcript below it. Transcript Jessica Dean: A warning from a fired cybersecurity official for the department of veterans affairs. He sounded the alarm, saying sensitive… Read More: Feb. 26 live CNN interview about VA.gov cybersecurity »
We built something that made VA.gov much better, and DOGE destroyed it without understanding or caring about what they were doing.
The big news today is 21 USDSers resigned as a group rather than helping DOGE. I wasn’t part of that group, but I 100% support what they’re doing.
In other news, I’m in the news all over the place, and there’s more coming. Read the post for the details.
Author Lily Hay Newman does an incredible job capturing the high stakes of compromising the security of VA.gov.
I wrote a self-service way for my family to tell my computer to stop hogging all the download bandwidth so they can do their online meetings or gaming.
By the time they’re talking to you to record the soundbite, they already know what they want you to say, they just need to get you on camera saying it. There are some amusing aspects to how this played out in this case.