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Some thoughts on the infamous OPM e-mail:
Whether the OPM e-mail asking federal employees to send a five bullet point list of what they achieved in the last week to a OPM e-mail address apparently controlled by Musk and/or @DOGE has turned into an even bigger scissor statement that is usual for US partisan politics. What is going on? (Well, it seems like it was an unconventional proof-of-liveness check on the federal employee base with no plan to read the responses, but I am more interested in the response)
First point - if this came from management, it would be a completely reasonable request. It would be odd if it came from senior management rather than your direct line manager (does a top executive have time to read all those replies?) but not necessarily irregular. It is the kind of thing I can absolutely imagine the CEO doing at a founder-mode startup with a few thousand employees. But it didn't come from management. It came from HR (literally, in the sense that the sender shows up as "HR" in Outlook, and in practice in that it came from OPM, which is effectively HR for the civilian federal government). Indeed, it came from an anonymous role account in HR. (Musk tweeted that the e-mails originated with him, but two courts have ruled, at Musk's request, that Musk is a notorious shitposter and it is legally unreasonable to take a Musk tweet seriously, so they are still legally anonymous)
If I received such an e-mail from HR in my day job at a bank (and I don't think any other large manager-mode organisation would be different), it would be unprofessional to do what the e-mail says and send a quick response cc my direct line manager. In a normal corporate (or, I assume, public sector) environment, you take at least some steps to make sure you don't accidentally become a patsy in someone else's political maneuver against your boss or department. So if I got such an e-mail, my immediate response would be to forward to my line manager* with a note saying something like "Not sure what is going on here - will hold off on replying until you are able to investigate" - and if I did eventually reply, I would agree the reponse with my manager. But the more likely outcome (unless senior management had been warned about the exercise beforehand) would be that the rapid large-scale escalation would lead to the head of the department sending an all-staff e-mail saying "Please don't respond until we have investigated what is going on here" and trying to get hold of someone in the CEO's office urgently. (And struggling to do so, because every senior manager in the organisation would be doing the same thing).
And this is just looking at the office politics perspective, From the infosec angle, this is worse. The e-mail said "don't send classified information", but if you work in a job where you are actually trying to keep secrets, there isn't a short, safe unclassified summary of what you did last week. I am not an expert on the US classification system, but I do know that producing an unclassified summary of classified information (including, for example, the classified information you worked on in the last week) is difficult work that only a few people in each department are qualified to do. The rule in corporate finance departments at banks (where almost all staff have access to market-moving non-public information such as upcoming mergers) and it is "Do not discuss live deals with anyone outside the department, even in general terms." For a corporate financier, sending a meaningful response to that e-mail would be a firing offence. The various department heads (including Trump's own political appointments like Kash Patel) in national security related departments who told their staff not to respond are doing the obviously correct thing.
tl;dr - the freakers-out are right - sending out an all-staff e-mail of this type from HR was irregular, and would have been massively disruptive to any large organisation other than a startup used to working around a hyperactive micromanaging founder-CEO.
* If the rumours are true that Musk is sending these e-mails from a jury-rigged server rather than an official secure US government system, then the e-mail would show up as external in Outlook, and my actual immediate response would be to report it to IT security as a possible phishing attack.
others mentioned , on twitter, that this selects for people who are the best at bullshitting.
how many people can the administration fire? i would like to see the TSA be trimmed, but I would not hold my breath on that.
Seems like a "bureaucracy not measured in bureaucrats" case. Trimming the TSA would just result in having longer waits at airports, as it's not like the TSA would relax its checks just because they are understaffed. You can't fight the bureaucracy ratchet in such a disorganised way - if you only reduce the number of bureaucrats, then the bureaucracy will clamour for more staff, whereas if you only reduce the number of tasks, then the bureaucracy will lobby for more tasks. Good luck telling the electorate that they should accept a 0.0001% greater rate of terrorism, anyway, when the next instance of aviation-related terrorism happens.
Public opinion is pretty firmly that the Thousands Standing Around/Theater Security Administration is a jobs program for Walmart rejects which doesn't actually stop any terrorist attacks, though.
Do you expect this to withstand the ensuing media blitz if 1. Trump downsizes the TSA, 2. a terrorist attack happens?
There are several interlocking factors that make any September 11 lookalike impossible, at least in a way that TSA checks can help to prevent.
Passenger agency. September 11 got 3/4 successes because every previous plane hijack had been to hold the passengers hostage, not to use the plane as a battering ram. This meant that in 3/4 cases the passengers didn't zerg-rush the terrorists. That's over now. Flight 93 will happen every single time. Indeed, this response is so ingrained that it goes off accidentally some amount of the time when somebody is misidentified as being a terrorist.
Plain-clothes police on board planes. Usually these guys mostly wind up having to prevent a would-be terrorist from being lynched, due to #1, but they do provide an added layer of protection.
Cockpit security doors. These do trade off "passenger is a terrorist" against "pilot is himself a terrorist", but "pilot is a terrorist" is specifically something that can't be stopped by the TSA checks; he doesn't need any unauthorised items to fly a plane into a building. This is basically a matter for background checks on pilots, and TTBOMK they do a decent job at weeding out terrorists (though a worse job at weeding out random suicides).
I can think of a single case, when the plane crashed next to where Les Miserables starts.
WP's list. There have been a few, even only counting full-sized jets.
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I thought the Malaysia one was considered probably a suicide now?
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