May 19, 2025 • 30 mins
In this episode of One Thing Trump Did, we look at how DOGE has been accessing the data of millions of Americans throughout the course of their audits of government agencies, and what they could be doing with it. Jeremy is joined by Dina Temple-Raston, host and managing editor of the Click Here podcast from Recorded Future News and PRX. #DOGE #Musk #cybersecurity #data #hackers #SocialSecurity #NSRB #CISA
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Welcome to One Thing Trump Did, available exclusively on the
Middle podcast feed. I'm Jeremy Hobson, and it can be
hard to keep up with everything coming out of the
Trump White House. So each week we try to pick
just one thing for this podcast and focus on it,
break it down in a nonpartisan way with someone who
knows what they are talking about. And our one thing
this week is DOGE, Elon Musk's baby, sort of government
(00:37):
agency that has managed to get the keys to a
lot of the government and a lot of our data
with a goal of rooting out waste and excess spending.
But what about that data? What does DOGE have and
what do they want with it? Joining me now is
journalist Dina Temple Rasten, host and managing editor of the
click Here podcast from Recorded Future News and PRX. Dina,
(00:58):
it is great to have you on One Trump Did.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
It's great to see you, Thanks very much so.
Speaker 1 (01:03):
Back in January, when President Trump created DOGE by executive order,
he said that the DOSEE teams would have quote full
and prompt access to all unclassified agency records, software systems,
and IT systems, and that it would have to adhere
to rigorous data protection standards. What do we know about
(01:24):
what is actually happening.
Speaker 2 (01:26):
Well, we know that as a general matter, rigorous data
protection standards take time. And from everyone we've talked to
who's been on the receiving end of DOGE stuff, they
have said that this is not a slow process. This
has been an incredibly quick process where they move fast.
Speaker 3 (01:43):
And break things.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
And so one of the things we know, for example,
because it was publicly announced, involves the IRS and ICE.
There's been all kinds of reporting about how DOGE basically
struck an agreement that allows IRS tax information to be
shared with Immigration and Custom Enforcement. And that's a major
shift because normally IRS data is protected under pretty strict
(02:07):
confidentiality rules. And it makes sense there's a lot of
personal information in there, not just what you make or
what your social Security check would be or what your.
Speaker 3 (02:16):
Social Security number is.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
That's the kind of stuff that you want held deer
and DOGE has actually been pawing through it struck this
agreement and basically said that the reason why they were
doing it was because they wanted to try and find
illegal immigrants, and some of these immigrants are actually paying
taxes and this is a way to chase them down.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
And what are the people who are against that saying
about why that's not a good idea to give them
the keys to the kingdom just to figure out whether
there's an illegal immigrant who is collecting something that they shouldn't.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
Be well, because they're not just collecting that, they may
be collecting your data or my data, and just traditionally
the information in the IRS when we get give them
our information, we've always been assured that that information would
be kept private and that the only people who would
be seeing those that information would be people who had
a right to see it or had a reason to
(03:11):
see it. And now it seems like all bets are off,
and you know, it's quite possible that by the time
this works its way through the courts, they're not going
to be able to use this information. But in the
meantime they're doing it.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
And that they here we've heard about these like kids
basically like right out of high school, right out of college.
That Elon Musk brought in is is this just like
a bunch of random people that really know their way
around a computer.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
So I know that the reporting has been they're all kids,
They're actually there are some like reasonable adults, you know,
who didn't graduate last December. There's actually somebody who graduated
last December who's doing this. But they're not just computer wizards.
They're also sort of Elon musk acolytes, right. They worked
for some of his different companies, And I think that
(04:01):
actually causes some consternation as well, because you wonder are
they there to just fix the government or are they
doing something that would say do Elon Musk's bidding instead?
Speaker 3 (04:14):
Well?
Speaker 1 (04:14):
And what are the agencies that they're going after or
that we know that they've gone after so far? You
mentioned IRS and the Immigration, Customs Enforcement, but it's also
like education, the General Services Administration. Where are they going now?
Speaker 2 (04:29):
We're not there's a difference between where they're going and
where they're taking information from. They're going everywhere, They're going everywhere,
but the taking of information is sort of what I
think is this next shoe that people have not been
focused on enough. Because we know about the cuts, we're
seeing them, we're hearing from the people who are being cuts,
But this information sort of vacuuming up or hoovering is
(04:51):
really what is I think the next step.
Speaker 3 (04:53):
And a really good example.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
Of that is you know NPR talked to a whistleblower,
and that whistleblower has now been more public since MPR
did that whistleblower from the National Labor Relations Board NLRB.
What's happening there? So apparently they saw a lot, a
huge volume, a huge spike of information coming out of
(05:16):
their network, and they claim that DOGE actually disabled some
of the monitoring tools that are in the system to
make sure that the right people are looking at information,
not just anybody willy nilly, that they apparently dismantled these
monitoring tools and took information out of the National Labor
Relations Board. Okay, why NLRB, Well, we don't have to
(05:39):
be too suspiciously minded to think that potentially it has
to do with Elon Musk, because the NLRB keeps very
sensitive files, things like complaints filed by workers against employers,
testimony from union leaders, detailed allegations against big companies, and
the happens to have multiple ongoing cases going against Elon
(06:03):
Musk companies like SpaceX and Tesla. So apparently this is
over alleged unfair labor practices, things like retaliation against employees
who are trying to organize. Now, why is that important? Well,
we don't know if the data was allegedly moved, the
data that was moved had to do with this, and
given the stakes and Musk's connection to DOGE, it's raising
(06:26):
a lot of eyebrows. I mean, why turn off a
monitoring software if that actually happened, that's alleged. Why would
you be doing that if you're actually taking information you're
allowed to have, as opposed to information that you're trying
to cover.
Speaker 1 (06:40):
Up, Especially when you talk about how you want to
be transparent in what you're doing, which they have said
that they want to do.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
Yeah, but there's nothing I don't think. I think it's
strains credulity that they are being transparent. I think it's
pretty clear they're not being transparent, or there's a different
there's a different definition of transparency here. Because you know,
they were supposed to be cutting what two trillion dollars
out of the budget there has been in the neighborhood.
(07:08):
We think of between one hundred and thirty and one
hundred and fifty billion that maybe has been cut. A
lot of that is just contracts that they canceled, so
and even that, you know that number supposedly is so transparent,
but when you take a look at it, some of
the contracts that he canceled have been started up again.
Speaker 3 (07:26):
So there's the transparency issue of this.
Speaker 2 (07:29):
It just isn't transparent. I don't think that they say it,
but I don't think anybody thinks this is transparent.
Speaker 1 (07:35):
And so we know that they've taken some of this data.
We know that, as you say, NPR has a reporter
that they've turned off some of the monitoring of who
has access to the data. Do we know if anybody
in DOSE has taken the next step and actually done
anything with this data.
Speaker 2 (07:49):
We don't know. I mean, if there was a lot
of transparency, we would wouldn't way. So this gets back
to your other point. But we have no idea what
they're doing with this data, right, and we're One of
the other concerns that we had when we first started
reporting on this has to do with the fact that
some of in the early days of DOGE, people going
into these agencies, they were taking in their personal computers
(08:11):
and according to people that we spoke to, they were
changing code. Now, why is that a problem? Why not
update something? Why not have you know, siloed information be
less siloed? This is a very Silicon Valley way.
Speaker 3 (08:24):
Of looking at things.
Speaker 2 (08:25):
And the problem is that so many of the government
systems are built on really old code, something called cobol,
and because it's built on that old code, it's sort
of like a janga, right, You pull one little piece
of wood out and.
Speaker 3 (08:43):
It's sort of teetering.
Speaker 2 (08:43):
You pull out another teeter some more, and then you know,
you pull.
Speaker 3 (08:47):
Out the wrong one and the whole system fails.
Speaker 2 (08:49):
And so there's a real concern that they're messing with
code that they don't quite understand and could either be
putting back doors for adversaries into some of these systems
or worse kingdom. And if that sounds like a being alarmist,
let's go back to CrowdStrike. Remember CrowdStrike had one little
update that it put out earlier this year, and that
(09:10):
one little update managed to bluescreen you know, airplane reservation systems,
and it took a while. It was just one little
bit of code.
Speaker 1 (09:21):
So, as we've been doing these one thing Trump did
every week and different topics, one of the things that
has started to happen, and now we're several months into
the administration, is the courts have stepped in and they
have stopped certain things. The next week, we're talking about
what's happening with public broadcasting, and there's already the Corporation
for Public Broadcasting has already come in and said, you
(09:43):
are not allowed Donald Trump to fire these people on
our board. That's not legal. What about the legal stuff
here with DOGE and the collection of data. Is what
they're doing actually legal?
Speaker 3 (09:55):
We don't know.
Speaker 2 (09:56):
I mean, one of the things that we're seeing is
we're seeing judges, depending where they are, sort of putting
injunctions on this and saying you have to pause until
we can actually muddle through what you guys are doing.
But this is what's going on in the Supreme Court
right right now. When they talk about birthright citizenship, the
case is really not about birthright citizenship. It's whether or not,
you know, a judge at a lower level, a federal
(10:19):
judge can put an injunction that actually affects the entire country.
These are the sorts of things that they're testing legally.
And you know, it's a little frustrating for anybody who's
watching this because some of it just seems plainly unconstitutional
what they're doing. But the judicial system in this country
works a lot slower than you know, ninetyeos that are
(10:40):
signed in a single day, and so it also makes
us wonder, you know, if we haven't heard from the
courts yet, is what he's doing possibly legal? And maybe
everybody has said their hair is on fire for the
wrong reason. That's not what's going on here. It's just
the judicial system takes a lot more time to sort
of decide.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
Who are the powers that are suing and saying this
is not legal what you're doing.
Speaker 3 (11:05):
All kind of unions of lawyers.
Speaker 2 (11:07):
You know, we have the law firms that he went after.
They're suing. There are also agencies that are suing the
saying he can't summarily fire all these these workers without
you know, the USAID is suing, as you know, Radio
Free Europe is suing. Everybody is suing because technically, if
the Congress has actually allocated this money, Trump can't decide
(11:31):
to suddenly not spend it. And this is sort of
the base of the issue when it comes to all
these cutbacks.
Speaker 1 (11:37):
Right and when it comes to the data, if they've
got the data already in some of these cases, is
there any way to put that genie back in the bottle?
If a court comes out later and says you are
not allowed to take that data doge, But they already did.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
Well, if they extracted the data, it's one thing. If
they have actually just sort of like started to merge data,
it's not right. So and that's what's unclear about the
extraction of data and why it was worrisome when we
started hearing reports that they were actually turning off things
that would monitor what they were taking, because then we
just wouldn't know. I do think that the courts are
(12:14):
going to step in here. I think what's really going
on here. You know, everybody's talking about a constitutional crisis,
and technically what we've been saying within the click here
team is we're not going to call it a constitutional
crisis until it goes up to the Supreme Court. The
Supreme Court tells them to do something and they don't
do it, that's when we know, because we have an
appeal process, and they're going through the appeal process. And
(12:36):
this is you know, I used to live in New York.
This is an old Donald Trump trope, right that you
basically file a lawsuit right away to slow everything down
and hope that in fact, the people who were telling
you not to do what you want to do, get
bored and leave. And that's kind of what's happening here
on a really grand scale. He's trying to see just
(12:57):
how far he can push executive power and the courts.
I actually think he will listen to the courts when
the courts finally, you know, tell him you can or
can't do this. But the lower courts, this has been
an issue for a while. The lower coats tell him
to do something, he says, you don't have jurisdiction over me.
The Supreme Court does.
Speaker 1 (13:14):
But just to be clear, from what you're saying, it
sounds like if he's doing that, he's doing that in
a large part to help Elon Musk, who is the
one who wants this data.
Speaker 2 (13:26):
Yeah, we don't know that. Okay, there might be some
other reason that we don't We haven't clicked onto why
the NLRB's.
Speaker 3 (13:35):
Data was taken.
Speaker 2 (13:37):
But it doesn't take you know, a rocket science to
put together that he has a lot of cases in
front of the NLRB, and that's the data that we know,
according to a whistleblower, was actually taken. You know, it
could be competitive information too, right, it could be something
that's you know, Amazon is doing with its space ships,
(14:00):
with its you know, contracts, and Elon wants those contracts too,
but we don't know that for certain. All we can say, though,
is the people who are doing this work all in
some way, shape or form, have been acolytes or you know,
workers for Elon Musk, So you have to wonder, just
a normal human thing where their loyalties line.
Speaker 4 (14:25):
Well.
Speaker 1 (14:25):
Of course, this gets to the issue of the nation's
cybersecurity infrastructure. Dina is an expert on that, and we're
going to talk more about that in just a moment.
One Thing Trump Did with journalist Dina temple Rasten, we'll
be right back. Welcome back to One Thing Trump Did
(14:58):
exclusively on the Middle podcast feed. I'm Jeremy Hobson. This episode,
we're talking about concerns over how DOGE could be accessing
and using the data of millions of Americans and what
changes they're making to American cybersecurity. I'm joined by journalist
Tina Temple Raston, who also hosts a click here podcast
as well as the senior correspondent recorded Future News, Dina.
(15:20):
If you google Trump and cybersecurity, one of the first
things that comes up is a guy named Christopher Krebs.
He was head of cybersecurity in the first Trump administration.
He got in trouble with the president for saying that
the twenty twenty election was the most secure election ever.
Trump did out like that. Now the Trump administration is
investigating him. What can you tell us about that and
(15:41):
how that intersects with Doge?
Speaker 2 (15:44):
Well, So what made him a target was basically sisa
At in the twenty twenty election was in charge of
election security, cybersecurity, Infrastructure and Security Agency oks very hard
to say, so basically he was in charge of election security.
For him to come out and say that it was
the most secure election ever, that was his job, right,
(16:05):
that was what he was supposed to be watching.
Speaker 3 (16:09):
And if it wasn't.
Speaker 2 (16:09):
Secure, he would have said as much, right, But it
was secure. So SISSA also does a lot of other
cybersecurity stuff. It does, you know, tries to or did
before Trump made some cuts, tried to flag misinformation campaigns
by the Russians, or disinformation campaigns by the Chinese, or
hacking into systems.
Speaker 3 (16:29):
By the Russians.
Speaker 2 (16:30):
This is what their job is to keep the infrastructure
in the United States safe. So like power grids, they
there's a kind of famous I guess in my world
there's a kind of famous Chinese hacking group called volt Typhoon.
Vult Typhoon has found its way into the infrastructure of telecoms,
infrastructure of electrical grids, and you wonder why is it there?
(16:54):
You know this is not for espionage. Why are they
sitting there? And the belief is from the FBI, from SISA,
from numerous organizations, is that basically an anticipation of some
sort of conflict between the US and China. They want
to be sitting in critical networks to be able to
do something, to be able to turn out the lights,
make communications more difficult, that sort of thing. Well, sissa's
(17:17):
job is to actually find that, work with the private
sector to make sure that bad actors aren't sitting in
their infrastructure, and to report on it. A lot of
that has been cut back as a result of the
Trump administration cuts. They say it's not important that SISS
has focused too much on misinformation and disinformation that they
(17:39):
believe SISSA basically is an arm to censor things, and
as a result, there's been these huge cutbacks.
Speaker 1 (17:47):
And Chris Krebs spoke at a cybersecurity conference in San Francisco,
saying that people should be outraged by these cuts.
Speaker 4 (17:54):
Let's listen, we are not moving forward. We have to
continue moving forward. We need more cyber command war fighters.
We need more folks at the NSA collecting intel. We
need more frontline defenders, threat hunters, red teamers, folks that
are just doing cisadmin the basics. We need more of that,
(18:15):
not less. So that's my pitch. Make siss A great again.
Speaker 1 (18:19):
What is he talking about, Dino? What should we know
about the cuts in particular beyond what you've just said
a moment ago.
Speaker 2 (18:26):
Well, so, there's something called red teams. For example, in
the cybersecurity world. These are basically people who are computer experts,
national security experts, who hunt in networks, critical networks, looking
for bad guys.
Speaker 3 (18:39):
They're called red teams.
Speaker 2 (18:41):
And they've cut back a lot of the funding for
red teams. There's also this huge list. This is really
inside cyber baseball, but there's this huge list called the
CVE list, which is basically these vulnerabilities that have been
found and identified that could be in networks. And SISA
for the longest time worked with Miter, another sort of
a think tank here in Washington, putting together a comprehensive list,
(19:03):
so if you found something in your network, you would
be able to sort of put it against the list
to know it's a known vulnerability. So for a while
they backtracked on this. The Trump administration decided that they
were going to cut that minor contract so there would
no longer be a giant list of vulnerabilities that people
could refer to. At the last minute, they.
Speaker 3 (19:24):
Found some money and started up again.
Speaker 2 (19:27):
But these are the sorts of cybersecurity, sort of just
basic hygiene things that we've been doing for some time now,
now that our adversaries are much better at hacking than
they used to be, and these are the things that
they're cutting back on.
Speaker 1 (19:41):
And in the same situation as with the DOGE cuts
in general and the data that's being collected. Are these
cuts to cybersecurity going to be challenged in the courts?
Speaker 2 (19:54):
I think they're trying to do it, but there's only
so much you can do right if you're cutting a Look,
they used a chainsaw and not a scalpel when they
were going through a lot of these different systems. You know,
we talked to somebody who was at the US Digital Service,
a little known agency that basically when DOGE became DOGE,
it took it over and the US Digital Service. Do
(20:17):
you remember Obamacare when.
Speaker 3 (20:18):
It basically blew up as soon as the.
Speaker 1 (20:20):
People tricked the website it didn't work.
Speaker 2 (20:22):
Right exactly, So the USDs was basically created to fix
these kinds of things like the website. The most recently,
most recent thing that they did was FASA, right, do
you remember just recently the student financial services website kind
of blew up. USDs is in charge of fixing that.
So we talked to somebody who basically worked on FASA
(20:45):
and other things for them, and she was saying that
they DOGE came in and spent fifteen minutes talking to
each employee and then just sort of did these huge cuts,
and eventually she resigned. She was kept, but eventually she
resign just because she didn't like what she was seeing
in terms of DOGE, you know, going in and changing
code and sort of acting like a bull in a
(21:07):
china shop and her and what she said to us
that actually really made sense to me was, you know,
if they were really trying to make this better and
more efficient, then they'd be careful about who they were firing.
She said, I'm you know, a lot of the technical
people that they fired are people who would prevent bad
things from happening, people who would help and make sure
(21:29):
that government websites are actually working. But they don't care
about that. They don't want people who actually understand how
this works. And her theory was because they're doing things
they shouldn't be doing, so they don't want people who say, hey,
you're not supposed to be doing that, so they cut them.
Speaker 1 (21:45):
So big picture, you know, we just had there was
a big power outage in Spain and there was a
question was this a hacking? You know, there have been
all the and by the way, companies around the world
are hacked all the time, and they do pay to
get out of those situations in many cases. Should we
be worried because of these cuts that the country is
(22:07):
at risk of a cyber attack, which could be in
some ways as dangerous as a physical attack.
Speaker 2 (22:13):
Yes, I mean that is the reason for being for
the click here podcast, is that cyber is no longer
a nice to know thing, it's a.
Speaker 3 (22:20):
Need to know thing.
Speaker 2 (22:21):
Before it used to be governments and big corporations that
got hacked.
Speaker 3 (22:25):
Now it's your city hall, it's your kids' school, it's
your insurer.
Speaker 2 (22:29):
And the real concern is that they are cutting so
widely across SISSA, largely because you know you brought up
Chris Krebs before. I mean, SISSA is basically at the
center of this retribution campaign because of Chris Krebs, right,
and what he represented for SISSA. So they're cutting SISSA
like crazy, and the concern is that they're making us
(22:50):
more vulnerable. But even more than that, if they're going
into these systems, as we discussed earlier, they might be
putting vulnerabilities in not meaning to just do it. And
as we went through all the different names of the
people who are part of this Doge team, I think
they're about fifty people now who are part of it.
Speaker 3 (23:07):
Not all kids.
Speaker 2 (23:08):
But as we announce their names, how long do you
think it takes for Russia or China to find them,
get into their systems and see what they're talking about.
So we've made ourselves vulnerable across the board.
Speaker 1 (23:22):
And when you say across the board, does an individual
company or a state government or a city government do
they rely to some degree on SISSA to keep them
safe from cyber attack?
Speaker 3 (23:34):
Yes?
Speaker 2 (23:35):
Yes, not just not just because it's a sharing of information.
But you know, SISA has memorandums of understanding with other
agencies that within the United States that are looking for
adversaries all the time, and these are things that small
private companies don't have the bandwidth for. So SISSA is
sort of like an early warning system. It's the canary
(23:56):
in the coal mine that tells you, hey, people are
trying to get into, for example, your sector in the economy.
We've seen these kinds of you know, adversaries going in
this way. Check your router, check your patches, and it's
like an early warning system, and they're gutting it.
Speaker 1 (24:16):
So you mentioned a few times the difficulty of knowing
exactly what's going on with DOGE and the cuts. What
kind of transparency issues have you run into just while
trying to cover this topic.
Speaker 2 (24:31):
Well, they don't like to answer our questions. We know
that for certain because every time we do a door
story and we ask them.
Speaker 3 (24:37):
For a comment, we get no comment. They won't even respond.
Speaker 2 (24:41):
This is actually the Trump administration for the most part,
has not been responding round reporters ask for a response
at all.
Speaker 3 (24:47):
This is a definite you know mo for them.
Speaker 2 (24:51):
I think in terms of transparency, what we've been counting
on and what's really been working is that these government
workers who really feel they have a calling and a
mission by being a government worker, are coming out after
they're fired and actually talking about what they're seeing. That's
where we've gotten the most transparency, I think is not
(25:11):
from DOGE or the Trump administration, but from real life
people who see things that are alarming to them and
telling the world about them.
Speaker 1 (25:21):
So for our listeners, regular people, as they listen to
you talk about this, and you know, I'm thinking to myself, Oh,
I wonder what data they have of mind? Do they
have my Social Security number? Do they have my bank
account information? Do they have health information? What information do
they have? What should ordinary people do as they hear this?
Is there anything we can do to protect our data?
Speaker 2 (25:42):
Yes, there's just sort of general data hygiene, right that
you shouldn't use the same password all the time and
that sort of thing. So that's one thing of protecting
data from adversaries or from hackers. But when it comes
to protecting your government data, the problem is you kind
of signed up thinking it was.
Speaker 3 (25:59):
Going to be protected.
Speaker 2 (26:01):
When you fill out your IRS tax form every year,
you assume that that information is safe. When you have
fill out medical reports or have your doctor's medical you
have all your medical files.
Speaker 3 (26:16):
You assume those will be kept quiet. We don't know
that anymore.
Speaker 2 (26:21):
And that's the uncertainty that has come with this whole
doge push is we don't know who has what. And
in the past we kind of didn't think about it
very much. We knew the government center our information was
safe and that they would keep it siloed. And you know,
if you paid your taxes, Ice wouldn't.
Speaker 3 (26:41):
Know where you were. That's not what's going on anymore.
Speaker 1 (26:45):
I want to ask you one more thing, Dina, because
the world that you cover and cybersecurity can be very complicated.
I remember just as a host of sort of general
news programs like here and Now, just trying to find
somebody who could break it down in an easily understandable way,
but also knew what they were talking about was not
easy to do. What do you know about your audience
(27:07):
and like, are they cybersecurity professionals that are listening to
your podcast? Are there just regular folks who are listening
to your podcast about this young hackers? What do you have?
Speaker 2 (27:18):
Well? It's interesting because I think so. The podcast now
has been going for about three and a half years,
and I think what we saw is in the beginning
it was very much sort of Chief Information Security Officers
sis's we're talking to us, but.
Speaker 3 (27:34):
We're not a chat show. We're a narrative show.
Speaker 2 (27:37):
So we're sort of this American life meets cyber Yeah,
for exactly the reasons you say, we did this because
so much of it is so complicated. We want it
to be easy to understand for the average person, because
in the past only sisos need to know about it.
We think sisos started listening to us because we break
(27:57):
everything down and explain all these technical things, and we
gave them the vocabulary they needed to talk to. Their
CEOs had to talk to people in the C suite
who aren't techy, and we've seen our audience grow a
huge amount.
Speaker 3 (28:10):
We did five specials.
Speaker 2 (28:12):
With WNYC that went to one hundred and thirty five
stations across the country, and everybody said, oh, these will
be two technical nobody will like them, and people love
them because they weren't. I think it's kind of like
one of these things where you didn't need to know
about necessarily about the business section, of the newspaper.
Speaker 3 (28:28):
When you had a.
Speaker 2 (28:29):
Company that was paying you a pension, because you know
your pension was coming, you didn't have to invest in
iras or four oh one case. But once you had
to do that, you had to understand something about business.
Speaker 3 (28:42):
I think that's where cyber is right now.
Speaker 2 (28:44):
I think it People used to think it was something
that just technical people needed to know, but now it's
affecting all of us. And so we find that if
we explain these narrative stories with the main character, who
we call it spinach, we give you a little cybersecurity
spinach in there in a nice package. You barely taste
the spinach that we're going to be educating a whole
(29:06):
cohort of a general audience who needs to know about this.
Speaker 1 (29:10):
Well, we can hear that you are making the spinach
taste like ice cream, mint, chocolate chip, or pistachio. Dina
Temple Rasten a senior correspondent at Recorded Future News and
host of the click here podcast, available wherever you get
your podcast. Dina, thank you so much for coming on
the show, Thanks for having me, and thanks you for
listening to One Thing Trump Did. It was produced by
(29:30):
Harrison Patino Our next middle episode will be in your
podcast feed later this week. We're going to be asking
if not DEI, then what can be done to ensure
equal opportunity for all and to reckon with the past.
And if you like this podcast, please rate it wherever
you get your podcasts and write a review, a nice one.
Our theme music was composed by Noah Haidu. I'm Jeremy Hobson,
(29:51):
talk to you soon.
Speaker 2 (30:02):
The still from the t
Welcome to One Thing Trump Did, available exclusively on the
Middle podcast feed. I'm Jeremy Hobson, and it can be
hard to keep up with everything coming out of the
Trump White House. So each week we try to pick
just one thing for this podcast and focus on it,
break it down in a nonpartisan way with someone who
knows what they are talking about. And our one thing
this week is DOGE, Elon Musk's baby, sort of government
(00:37):
agency that has managed to get the keys to a
lot of the government and a lot of our data
with a goal of rooting out waste and excess spending.
But what about that data? What does DOGE have and
what do they want with it? Joining me now is
journalist Dina Temple Rasten, host and managing editor of the
click Here podcast from Recorded Future News and PRX. Dina,
(00:58):
it is great to have you on One Trump Did.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
It's great to see you, Thanks very much so.
Speaker 1 (01:03):
Back in January, when President Trump created DOGE by executive order,
he said that the DOSEE teams would have quote full
and prompt access to all unclassified agency records, software systems,
and IT systems, and that it would have to adhere
to rigorous data protection standards. What do we know about
(01:24):
what is actually happening.
Speaker 2 (01:26):
Well, we know that as a general matter, rigorous data
protection standards take time. And from everyone we've talked to
who's been on the receiving end of DOGE stuff, they
have said that this is not a slow process. This
has been an incredibly quick process where they move fast.
Speaker 3 (01:43):
And break things.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
And so one of the things we know, for example,
because it was publicly announced, involves the IRS and ICE.
There's been all kinds of reporting about how DOGE basically
struck an agreement that allows IRS tax information to be
shared with Immigration and Custom Enforcement. And that's a major
shift because normally IRS data is protected under pretty strict
(02:07):
confidentiality rules. And it makes sense there's a lot of
personal information in there, not just what you make or
what your social Security check would be or what your.
Speaker 3 (02:16):
Social Security number is.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
That's the kind of stuff that you want held deer
and DOGE has actually been pawing through it struck this
agreement and basically said that the reason why they were
doing it was because they wanted to try and find
illegal immigrants, and some of these immigrants are actually paying
taxes and this is a way to chase them down.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
And what are the people who are against that saying
about why that's not a good idea to give them
the keys to the kingdom just to figure out whether
there's an illegal immigrant who is collecting something that they shouldn't.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
Be well, because they're not just collecting that, they may
be collecting your data or my data, and just traditionally
the information in the IRS when we get give them
our information, we've always been assured that that information would
be kept private and that the only people who would
be seeing those that information would be people who had
a right to see it or had a reason to
(03:11):
see it. And now it seems like all bets are off,
and you know, it's quite possible that by the time
this works its way through the courts, they're not going
to be able to use this information. But in the
meantime they're doing it.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
And that they here we've heard about these like kids
basically like right out of high school, right out of college.
That Elon Musk brought in is is this just like
a bunch of random people that really know their way
around a computer.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
So I know that the reporting has been they're all kids,
They're actually there are some like reasonable adults, you know,
who didn't graduate last December. There's actually somebody who graduated
last December who's doing this. But they're not just computer wizards.
They're also sort of Elon musk acolytes, right. They worked
for some of his different companies, And I think that
(04:01):
actually causes some consternation as well, because you wonder are
they there to just fix the government or are they
doing something that would say do Elon Musk's bidding instead?
Speaker 3 (04:14):
Well?
Speaker 1 (04:14):
And what are the agencies that they're going after or
that we know that they've gone after so far? You
mentioned IRS and the Immigration, Customs Enforcement, but it's also
like education, the General Services Administration. Where are they going now?
Speaker 2 (04:29):
We're not there's a difference between where they're going and
where they're taking information from. They're going everywhere, They're going everywhere,
but the taking of information is sort of what I
think is this next shoe that people have not been
focused on enough. Because we know about the cuts, we're
seeing them, we're hearing from the people who are being cuts,
But this information sort of vacuuming up or hoovering is
(04:51):
really what is I think the next step.
Speaker 3 (04:53):
And a really good example.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
Of that is you know NPR talked to a whistleblower,
and that whistleblower has now been more public since MPR
did that whistleblower from the National Labor Relations Board NLRB.
What's happening there? So apparently they saw a lot, a
huge volume, a huge spike of information coming out of
(05:16):
their network, and they claim that DOGE actually disabled some
of the monitoring tools that are in the system to
make sure that the right people are looking at information,
not just anybody willy nilly, that they apparently dismantled these
monitoring tools and took information out of the National Labor
Relations Board. Okay, why NLRB, Well, we don't have to
(05:39):
be too suspiciously minded to think that potentially it has
to do with Elon Musk, because the NLRB keeps very
sensitive files, things like complaints filed by workers against employers,
testimony from union leaders, detailed allegations against big companies, and
the happens to have multiple ongoing cases going against Elon
(06:03):
Musk companies like SpaceX and Tesla. So apparently this is
over alleged unfair labor practices, things like retaliation against employees
who are trying to organize. Now, why is that important? Well,
we don't know if the data was allegedly moved, the
data that was moved had to do with this, and
given the stakes and Musk's connection to DOGE, it's raising
(06:26):
a lot of eyebrows. I mean, why turn off a
monitoring software if that actually happened, that's alleged. Why would
you be doing that if you're actually taking information you're
allowed to have, as opposed to information that you're trying
to cover.
Speaker 1 (06:40):
Up, Especially when you talk about how you want to
be transparent in what you're doing, which they have said
that they want to do.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
Yeah, but there's nothing I don't think. I think it's
strains credulity that they are being transparent. I think it's
pretty clear they're not being transparent, or there's a different
there's a different definition of transparency here. Because you know,
they were supposed to be cutting what two trillion dollars
out of the budget there has been in the neighborhood.
(07:08):
We think of between one hundred and thirty and one
hundred and fifty billion that maybe has been cut. A
lot of that is just contracts that they canceled, so
and even that, you know that number supposedly is so transparent,
but when you take a look at it, some of
the contracts that he canceled have been started up again.
Speaker 3 (07:26):
So there's the transparency issue of this.
Speaker 2 (07:29):
It just isn't transparent. I don't think that they say it,
but I don't think anybody thinks this is transparent.
Speaker 1 (07:35):
And so we know that they've taken some of this data.
We know that, as you say, NPR has a reporter
that they've turned off some of the monitoring of who
has access to the data. Do we know if anybody
in DOSE has taken the next step and actually done
anything with this data.
Speaker 2 (07:49):
We don't know. I mean, if there was a lot
of transparency, we would wouldn't way. So this gets back
to your other point. But we have no idea what
they're doing with this data, right, and we're One of
the other concerns that we had when we first started
reporting on this has to do with the fact that
some of in the early days of DOGE, people going
into these agencies, they were taking in their personal computers
(08:11):
and according to people that we spoke to, they were
changing code. Now, why is that a problem? Why not
update something? Why not have you know, siloed information be
less siloed? This is a very Silicon Valley way.
Speaker 3 (08:24):
Of looking at things.
Speaker 2 (08:25):
And the problem is that so many of the government
systems are built on really old code, something called cobol,
and because it's built on that old code, it's sort
of like a janga, right, You pull one little piece
of wood out and.
Speaker 3 (08:43):
It's sort of teetering.
Speaker 2 (08:43):
You pull out another teeter some more, and then you know,
you pull.
Speaker 3 (08:47):
Out the wrong one and the whole system fails.
Speaker 2 (08:49):
And so there's a real concern that they're messing with
code that they don't quite understand and could either be
putting back doors for adversaries into some of these systems
or worse kingdom. And if that sounds like a being alarmist,
let's go back to CrowdStrike. Remember CrowdStrike had one little
update that it put out earlier this year, and that
(09:10):
one little update managed to bluescreen you know, airplane reservation systems,
and it took a while. It was just one little
bit of code.
Speaker 1 (09:21):
So, as we've been doing these one thing Trump did
every week and different topics, one of the things that
has started to happen, and now we're several months into
the administration, is the courts have stepped in and they
have stopped certain things. The next week, we're talking about
what's happening with public broadcasting, and there's already the Corporation
for Public Broadcasting has already come in and said, you
(09:43):
are not allowed Donald Trump to fire these people on
our board. That's not legal. What about the legal stuff
here with DOGE and the collection of data. Is what
they're doing actually legal?
Speaker 3 (09:55):
We don't know.
Speaker 2 (09:56):
I mean, one of the things that we're seeing is
we're seeing judges, depending where they are, sort of putting
injunctions on this and saying you have to pause until
we can actually muddle through what you guys are doing.
But this is what's going on in the Supreme Court
right right now. When they talk about birthright citizenship, the
case is really not about birthright citizenship. It's whether or not,
you know, a judge at a lower level, a federal
(10:19):
judge can put an injunction that actually affects the entire country.
These are the sorts of things that they're testing legally.
And you know, it's a little frustrating for anybody who's
watching this because some of it just seems plainly unconstitutional
what they're doing. But the judicial system in this country
works a lot slower than you know, ninetyeos that are
(10:40):
signed in a single day, and so it also makes
us wonder, you know, if we haven't heard from the
courts yet, is what he's doing possibly legal? And maybe
everybody has said their hair is on fire for the
wrong reason. That's not what's going on here. It's just
the judicial system takes a lot more time to sort
of decide.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
Who are the powers that are suing and saying this
is not legal what you're doing.
Speaker 3 (11:05):
All kind of unions of lawyers.
Speaker 2 (11:07):
You know, we have the law firms that he went after.
They're suing. There are also agencies that are suing the
saying he can't summarily fire all these these workers without
you know, the USAID is suing, as you know, Radio
Free Europe is suing. Everybody is suing because technically, if
the Congress has actually allocated this money, Trump can't decide
(11:31):
to suddenly not spend it. And this is sort of
the base of the issue when it comes to all
these cutbacks.
Speaker 1 (11:37):
Right and when it comes to the data, if they've
got the data already in some of these cases, is
there any way to put that genie back in the bottle?
If a court comes out later and says you are
not allowed to take that data doge, But they already did.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
Well, if they extracted the data, it's one thing. If
they have actually just sort of like started to merge data,
it's not right. So and that's what's unclear about the
extraction of data and why it was worrisome when we
started hearing reports that they were actually turning off things
that would monitor what they were taking, because then we
just wouldn't know. I do think that the courts are
(12:14):
going to step in here. I think what's really going
on here. You know, everybody's talking about a constitutional crisis,
and technically what we've been saying within the click here
team is we're not going to call it a constitutional
crisis until it goes up to the Supreme Court. The
Supreme Court tells them to do something and they don't
do it, that's when we know, because we have an
appeal process, and they're going through the appeal process. And
(12:36):
this is you know, I used to live in New York.
This is an old Donald Trump trope, right that you
basically file a lawsuit right away to slow everything down
and hope that in fact, the people who were telling
you not to do what you want to do, get
bored and leave. And that's kind of what's happening here
on a really grand scale. He's trying to see just
(12:57):
how far he can push executive power and the courts.
I actually think he will listen to the courts when
the courts finally, you know, tell him you can or
can't do this. But the lower courts, this has been
an issue for a while. The lower coats tell him
to do something, he says, you don't have jurisdiction over me.
The Supreme Court does.
Speaker 1 (13:14):
But just to be clear, from what you're saying, it
sounds like if he's doing that, he's doing that in
a large part to help Elon Musk, who is the
one who wants this data.
Speaker 2 (13:26):
Yeah, we don't know that. Okay, there might be some
other reason that we don't We haven't clicked onto why
the NLRB's.
Speaker 3 (13:35):
Data was taken.
Speaker 2 (13:37):
But it doesn't take you know, a rocket science to
put together that he has a lot of cases in
front of the NLRB, and that's the data that we know,
according to a whistleblower, was actually taken. You know, it
could be competitive information too, right, it could be something
that's you know, Amazon is doing with its space ships,
(14:00):
with its you know, contracts, and Elon wants those contracts too,
but we don't know that for certain. All we can say, though,
is the people who are doing this work all in
some way, shape or form, have been acolytes or you know,
workers for Elon Musk, So you have to wonder, just
a normal human thing where their loyalties line.
Speaker 4 (14:25):
Well.
Speaker 1 (14:25):
Of course, this gets to the issue of the nation's
cybersecurity infrastructure. Dina is an expert on that, and we're
going to talk more about that in just a moment.
One Thing Trump Did with journalist Dina temple Rasten, we'll
be right back. Welcome back to One Thing Trump Did
(14:58):
exclusively on the Middle podcast feed. I'm Jeremy Hobson. This episode,
we're talking about concerns over how DOGE could be accessing
and using the data of millions of Americans and what
changes they're making to American cybersecurity. I'm joined by journalist
Tina Temple Raston, who also hosts a click here podcast
as well as the senior correspondent recorded Future News, Dina.
(15:20):
If you google Trump and cybersecurity, one of the first
things that comes up is a guy named Christopher Krebs.
He was head of cybersecurity in the first Trump administration.
He got in trouble with the president for saying that
the twenty twenty election was the most secure election ever.
Trump did out like that. Now the Trump administration is
investigating him. What can you tell us about that and
(15:41):
how that intersects with Doge?
Speaker 2 (15:44):
Well, So what made him a target was basically sisa
At in the twenty twenty election was in charge of
election security, cybersecurity, Infrastructure and Security Agency oks very hard
to say, so basically he was in charge of election security.
For him to come out and say that it was
the most secure election ever, that was his job, right,
(16:05):
that was what he was supposed to be watching.
Speaker 3 (16:09):
And if it wasn't.
Speaker 2 (16:09):
Secure, he would have said as much, right, But it
was secure. So SISSA also does a lot of other
cybersecurity stuff. It does, you know, tries to or did
before Trump made some cuts, tried to flag misinformation campaigns
by the Russians, or disinformation campaigns by the Chinese, or
hacking into systems.
Speaker 3 (16:29):
By the Russians.
Speaker 2 (16:30):
This is what their job is to keep the infrastructure
in the United States safe. So like power grids, they
there's a kind of famous I guess in my world
there's a kind of famous Chinese hacking group called volt Typhoon.
Vult Typhoon has found its way into the infrastructure of telecoms,
infrastructure of electrical grids, and you wonder why is it there?
(16:54):
You know this is not for espionage. Why are they
sitting there? And the belief is from the FBI, from SISA,
from numerous organizations, is that basically an anticipation of some
sort of conflict between the US and China. They want
to be sitting in critical networks to be able to
do something, to be able to turn out the lights,
make communications more difficult, that sort of thing. Well, sissa's
(17:17):
job is to actually find that, work with the private
sector to make sure that bad actors aren't sitting in
their infrastructure, and to report on it. A lot of
that has been cut back as a result of the
Trump administration cuts. They say it's not important that SISS
has focused too much on misinformation and disinformation that they
(17:39):
believe SISSA basically is an arm to censor things, and
as a result, there's been these huge cutbacks.
Speaker 1 (17:47):
And Chris Krebs spoke at a cybersecurity conference in San Francisco,
saying that people should be outraged by these cuts.
Speaker 4 (17:54):
Let's listen, we are not moving forward. We have to
continue moving forward. We need more cyber command war fighters.
We need more folks at the NSA collecting intel. We
need more frontline defenders, threat hunters, red teamers, folks that
are just doing cisadmin the basics. We need more of that,
(18:15):
not less. So that's my pitch. Make siss A great again.
Speaker 1 (18:19):
What is he talking about, Dino? What should we know
about the cuts in particular beyond what you've just said
a moment ago.
Speaker 2 (18:26):
Well, so, there's something called red teams. For example, in
the cybersecurity world. These are basically people who are computer experts,
national security experts, who hunt in networks, critical networks, looking
for bad guys.
Speaker 3 (18:39):
They're called red teams.
Speaker 2 (18:41):
And they've cut back a lot of the funding for
red teams. There's also this huge list. This is really
inside cyber baseball, but there's this huge list called the
CVE list, which is basically these vulnerabilities that have been
found and identified that could be in networks. And SISA
for the longest time worked with Miter, another sort of
a think tank here in Washington, putting together a comprehensive list,
(19:03):
so if you found something in your network, you would
be able to sort of put it against the list
to know it's a known vulnerability. So for a while
they backtracked on this. The Trump administration decided that they
were going to cut that minor contract so there would
no longer be a giant list of vulnerabilities that people
could refer to. At the last minute, they.
Speaker 3 (19:24):
Found some money and started up again.
Speaker 2 (19:27):
But these are the sorts of cybersecurity, sort of just
basic hygiene things that we've been doing for some time now,
now that our adversaries are much better at hacking than
they used to be, and these are the things that
they're cutting back on.
Speaker 1 (19:41):
And in the same situation as with the DOGE cuts
in general and the data that's being collected. Are these
cuts to cybersecurity going to be challenged in the courts?
Speaker 2 (19:54):
I think they're trying to do it, but there's only
so much you can do right if you're cutting a Look,
they used a chainsaw and not a scalpel when they
were going through a lot of these different systems. You know,
we talked to somebody who was at the US Digital Service,
a little known agency that basically when DOGE became DOGE,
it took it over and the US Digital Service. Do
(20:17):
you remember Obamacare when.
Speaker 3 (20:18):
It basically blew up as soon as the.
Speaker 1 (20:20):
People tricked the website it didn't work.
Speaker 2 (20:22):
Right exactly, So the USDs was basically created to fix
these kinds of things like the website. The most recently,
most recent thing that they did was FASA, right, do
you remember just recently the student financial services website kind
of blew up. USDs is in charge of fixing that.
So we talked to somebody who basically worked on FASA
(20:45):
and other things for them, and she was saying that
they DOGE came in and spent fifteen minutes talking to
each employee and then just sort of did these huge cuts,
and eventually she resigned. She was kept, but eventually she
resign just because she didn't like what she was seeing
in terms of DOGE, you know, going in and changing
code and sort of acting like a bull in a
(21:07):
china shop and her and what she said to us
that actually really made sense to me was, you know,
if they were really trying to make this better and
more efficient, then they'd be careful about who they were firing.
She said, I'm you know, a lot of the technical
people that they fired are people who would prevent bad
things from happening, people who would help and make sure
(21:29):
that government websites are actually working. But they don't care
about that. They don't want people who actually understand how
this works. And her theory was because they're doing things
they shouldn't be doing, so they don't want people who say, hey,
you're not supposed to be doing that, so they cut them.
Speaker 1 (21:45):
So big picture, you know, we just had there was
a big power outage in Spain and there was a
question was this a hacking? You know, there have been
all the and by the way, companies around the world
are hacked all the time, and they do pay to
get out of those situations in many cases. Should we
be worried because of these cuts that the country is
(22:07):
at risk of a cyber attack, which could be in
some ways as dangerous as a physical attack.
Speaker 2 (22:13):
Yes, I mean that is the reason for being for
the click here podcast, is that cyber is no longer
a nice to know thing, it's a.
Speaker 3 (22:20):
Need to know thing.
Speaker 2 (22:21):
Before it used to be governments and big corporations that
got hacked.
Speaker 3 (22:25):
Now it's your city hall, it's your kids' school, it's
your insurer.
Speaker 2 (22:29):
And the real concern is that they are cutting so
widely across SISSA, largely because you know you brought up
Chris Krebs before. I mean, SISSA is basically at the
center of this retribution campaign because of Chris Krebs, right,
and what he represented for SISSA. So they're cutting SISSA
like crazy, and the concern is that they're making us
(22:50):
more vulnerable. But even more than that, if they're going
into these systems, as we discussed earlier, they might be
putting vulnerabilities in not meaning to just do it. And
as we went through all the different names of the
people who are part of this Doge team, I think
they're about fifty people now who are part of it.
Speaker 3 (23:07):
Not all kids.
Speaker 2 (23:08):
But as we announce their names, how long do you
think it takes for Russia or China to find them,
get into their systems and see what they're talking about.
So we've made ourselves vulnerable across the board.
Speaker 1 (23:22):
And when you say across the board, does an individual
company or a state government or a city government do
they rely to some degree on SISSA to keep them
safe from cyber attack?
Speaker 3 (23:34):
Yes?
Speaker 2 (23:35):
Yes, not just not just because it's a sharing of information.
But you know, SISA has memorandums of understanding with other
agencies that within the United States that are looking for
adversaries all the time, and these are things that small
private companies don't have the bandwidth for. So SISSA is
sort of like an early warning system. It's the canary
(23:56):
in the coal mine that tells you, hey, people are
trying to get into, for example, your sector in the economy.
We've seen these kinds of you know, adversaries going in
this way. Check your router, check your patches, and it's
like an early warning system, and they're gutting it.
Speaker 1 (24:16):
So you mentioned a few times the difficulty of knowing
exactly what's going on with DOGE and the cuts. What
kind of transparency issues have you run into just while
trying to cover this topic.
Speaker 2 (24:31):
Well, they don't like to answer our questions. We know
that for certain because every time we do a door
story and we ask them.
Speaker 3 (24:37):
For a comment, we get no comment. They won't even respond.
Speaker 2 (24:41):
This is actually the Trump administration for the most part,
has not been responding round reporters ask for a response
at all.
Speaker 3 (24:47):
This is a definite you know mo for them.
Speaker 2 (24:51):
I think in terms of transparency, what we've been counting
on and what's really been working is that these government
workers who really feel they have a calling and a
mission by being a government worker, are coming out after
they're fired and actually talking about what they're seeing. That's
where we've gotten the most transparency, I think is not
(25:11):
from DOGE or the Trump administration, but from real life
people who see things that are alarming to them and
telling the world about them.
Speaker 1 (25:21):
So for our listeners, regular people, as they listen to
you talk about this, and you know, I'm thinking to myself, Oh,
I wonder what data they have of mind? Do they
have my Social Security number? Do they have my bank
account information? Do they have health information? What information do
they have? What should ordinary people do as they hear this?
Is there anything we can do to protect our data?
Speaker 2 (25:42):
Yes, there's just sort of general data hygiene, right that
you shouldn't use the same password all the time and
that sort of thing. So that's one thing of protecting
data from adversaries or from hackers. But when it comes
to protecting your government data, the problem is you kind
of signed up thinking it was.
Speaker 3 (25:59):
Going to be protected.
Speaker 2 (26:01):
When you fill out your IRS tax form every year,
you assume that that information is safe. When you have
fill out medical reports or have your doctor's medical you
have all your medical files.
Speaker 3 (26:16):
You assume those will be kept quiet. We don't know
that anymore.
Speaker 2 (26:21):
And that's the uncertainty that has come with this whole
doge push is we don't know who has what. And
in the past we kind of didn't think about it
very much. We knew the government center our information was
safe and that they would keep it siloed. And you know,
if you paid your taxes, Ice wouldn't.
Speaker 3 (26:41):
Know where you were. That's not what's going on anymore.
Speaker 1 (26:45):
I want to ask you one more thing, Dina, because
the world that you cover and cybersecurity can be very complicated.
I remember just as a host of sort of general
news programs like here and Now, just trying to find
somebody who could break it down in an easily understandable way,
but also knew what they were talking about was not
easy to do. What do you know about your audience
(27:07):
and like, are they cybersecurity professionals that are listening to
your podcast? Are there just regular folks who are listening
to your podcast about this young hackers? What do you have?
Speaker 2 (27:18):
Well? It's interesting because I think so. The podcast now
has been going for about three and a half years,
and I think what we saw is in the beginning
it was very much sort of Chief Information Security Officers
sis's we're talking to us, but.
Speaker 3 (27:34):
We're not a chat show. We're a narrative show.
Speaker 2 (27:37):
So we're sort of this American life meets cyber Yeah,
for exactly the reasons you say, we did this because
so much of it is so complicated. We want it
to be easy to understand for the average person, because
in the past only sisos need to know about it.
We think sisos started listening to us because we break
(27:57):
everything down and explain all these technical things, and we
gave them the vocabulary they needed to talk to. Their
CEOs had to talk to people in the C suite
who aren't techy, and we've seen our audience grow a
huge amount.
Speaker 3 (28:10):
We did five specials.
Speaker 2 (28:12):
With WNYC that went to one hundred and thirty five
stations across the country, and everybody said, oh, these will
be two technical nobody will like them, and people love
them because they weren't. I think it's kind of like
one of these things where you didn't need to know
about necessarily about the business section, of the newspaper.
Speaker 3 (28:28):
When you had a.
Speaker 2 (28:29):
Company that was paying you a pension, because you know
your pension was coming, you didn't have to invest in
iras or four oh one case. But once you had
to do that, you had to understand something about business.
Speaker 3 (28:42):
I think that's where cyber is right now.
Speaker 2 (28:44):
I think it People used to think it was something
that just technical people needed to know, but now it's
affecting all of us. And so we find that if
we explain these narrative stories with the main character, who
we call it spinach, we give you a little cybersecurity
spinach in there in a nice package. You barely taste
the spinach that we're going to be educating a whole
(29:06):
cohort of a general audience who needs to know about this.
Speaker 1 (29:10):
Well, we can hear that you are making the spinach
taste like ice cream, mint, chocolate chip, or pistachio. Dina
Temple Rasten a senior correspondent at Recorded Future News and
host of the click here podcast, available wherever you get
your podcast. Dina, thank you so much for coming on
the show, Thanks for having me, and thanks you for
listening to One Thing Trump Did. It was produced by
(29:30):
Harrison Patino Our next middle episode will be in your
podcast feed later this week. We're going to be asking
if not DEI, then what can be done to ensure
equal opportunity for all and to reckon with the past.
And if you like this podcast, please rate it wherever
you get your podcasts and write a review, a nice one.
Our theme music was composed by Noah Haidu. I'm Jeremy Hobson,
(29:51):
talk to you soon.
Speaker 2 (30:02):
The still from the t
Host
Jeremy Hobson
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