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Zoe Schiffer: Perversion and Freaks, the new name of our podcast. And that’s, I mean, just going back to the red team, which is the work that’s usually done by the trust and safety team. And that difference-
Leah Weiger: We don’t have those anymore.
Zoe Schiffer: It’s not as big as it used to be. There’s not much work. So, yeah, I mean it’ll be interesting to see how that plays out. Obviously we talked inside Meta, with people this week who kind of caught up with the news with SI. The company has just laid off a large portion of its workforce. We’ve written about it. We’ve talked about that. And I reached out to people saying, “Okay, how’s it going now?” The hack was an excuse to talk to people and find out how they were doing. And they’d say, “I mean, as you’d expect, we’re being asked to do two jobs now instead of two.” So you can imagine how this is done.
Brian Barrett: We were also talking about AI regulation earlier and all this focus on national security and these high-level things, but again, not as much on consumer-facing products, which would be helpful to have at this moment as well if you would say kind of an office that takes care of consumers’ finances and protects that. We used to have one of those. Technically, I think we still do it, not really. So all of this broader deregulation comes at this moment where the tools that were once available are no longer available. These new tools are not infallible. We’ll see a lot of this.
Leah Weiger: Can we lead us to a topic that has nothing to do with artificial intelligence, guys?
Brian Barrett: please.
Zoe Schiffer: amazing. I didn’t know there was one, but yeah, go queen.
Brian Barrett: I also think we could probably try to find a way to connect it back together.
Zoe Schiffer: We can. We can.
Leah Weiger: No, definitely not. Okay, okay. This story is something we’ve been thinking about, covering, and looking at for a long time, but it’s all about The DOGE whistleblower who just filed a lawsuit against Elon Musk. This all really started last year. On April 14, 2025, Dan Perulis, an information technology employee with the National Labor Relations Board, NLRB, filed a whistleblower complaint with a massive claim. He said DOGE has hacked agency data and appears to be leaking it from the NLRB.
Archived audio: A whistleblower is coming forward with allegations that DOGE not only gained access to data from its agency, but also took a large amount of sensitive data with it. According to a disclosure shared with Congress, “about 10 gigabytes of data, the equivalent of an entire set of encyclopedias, would be worth if someone printed these files as printed documents.”
Leah Weiger: This was a huge claim, especially at the same time that you guys often remember, DOGE teams were firing federal employees and accessing sensitive data across the country. We were at the peak of this last year in April. Berulis came out publicly in an NPR article. His name was attached to it and he claimed a threatening note had been taped to his door and he was actually afraid to speak out. Going a bit further, Berulis has now filed a defamation suit in a D.C. court against Elon Musk. He said Musk made him a target for more violence by falsely stating that the whistleblower’s claim against DOGE was false. This is a really intense claim for a number of reasons, and what it all really comes down to is that last year Musk reshared an exposé from a right-wing influencer claiming that DOGE had been exonerated and that the whistleblower’s testimony was essentially fake. After that happened –
