A labor board worker received a threatening note after he became a whistleblower on the all-out raid of the agency by Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency,” during which Musk’s minions apparently stole a huge amount of sensitive information about workers and union organizers, a new bombshell NPR report finds.
The whistleblower, Daniel Berulis, works in the IT department for the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). He has raised alarm internally and externally, including to Congress, about DOGE’s infiltration into and extraction of huge amounts of sensitive information from the NLRB’s systems.
As soon as DOGE agents descended upon the agency in early March, Berulis and fellow NLRB employees noted concerning practices, with DOGE employees immediately demanding the highest level of access to the agency’s computer systems — which are normally highly safeguarded.
In a whistleblower disclosure filed with Congress and corroborated by internal documents, NPR reports, Berulis said that the DOGE employees first set up a process to hide their activities on the servers, rather than allowing account activity to be tracked. This alone is a “red flag,” cybersecurity experts said, and a technique mimicking what a malicious hacker may use when trying to infiltrate government systems.
Berulis noticed soon after the raid began that a DOGE engineer was working on a “backdoor” to the NLRB’s case management system, which would allow the rogue group to extract information surreptitiously. Then, he saw within the system’s metrics that there was a massive spike in data being extracted from the network and sent to an unknown location that could contain a huge amount of case information.
The IT worker first spoke out internally against the DOGE raid — but when he did, his attorney has said, someone taped a threatening note to his door that contained sensitive personal information about him, as well as pictures of him walking his dog that looked like they were taken by a drone. Whistleblowers have long faced threats to their personal safety, while recent high-profile cases of corporate whistleblowers have created a culture of fear around the practice.
Meanwhile, the information exfiltrated by DOGE includes a huge amount of sensitive information about American workers, including “ongoing contested labor cases, lists of union activists, internal case notes, personal information from Social Security numbers to home addresses, proprietary corporate data and more information that never gets published openly,” NPR wrote.
In other words, as labor experts said, DOGE may have gotten its hands on the names, addresses and Social Security numbers of labor organizers across the country — at a time when President Donald Trump and Republicans are preparing to majorly dismantle labor protections and attack workers’ rights, including unionization.
It also comes from rogue actors assembled by Musk — whose companies are involved in numerous labor disputes. This includes an alarming lawsuit, filed by SpaceX, challenging the constitutionality of the NLRB itself, which is the primary entity in the U.S. protecting workers from labor abuses.
Even if that data isn’t being actively used by Musk and his cronies, labor experts said that the fact that they can access it may have a chilling effect on the labor movement, just after it has seen a major resurgence in recent years.
“Just saying that they have access to the data is intimidating,” Kate Bronfenbrenner, the director of labor education research for Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations and co-director of the Worker Empowerment Research Network, told NPR. “People are going to go, ‘I’m not going to testify before the board because, you know, my employer might get access.’”
The extreme, malicious techniques used by DOGE to infiltrate the system, meanwhile, could also leave this data vulnerable to being seized by other bad faith actors. At one point just minutes after DOGE accessed the systems, for instance, employees noticed log-in attempts from an IP address located in Russia — attempts that used a newly-created DOGE account with the correct username and password.
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