Over the weekend, Elon Musk looked into his followers on X. This is the platform that was spent on purchasing $44 billion. Federal employees asked if they should send an email to their team with a list of five things they accomplished this week. Yes votes totaled over 70%, followed by masks. Federal employees received an email from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) this weekend, requesting a weekly performance list by 11:59pm on Monday.
It matches with ” [President Donald Trump’s] Instructions, all federal employees will receive an email promptly requesting a request to understand what they did last week.
With millions of employees throughout the federal government, the email addresses and emails operated by Doge were leaked. As federal employees are threatened with losing their jobs, people on social media platforms like Reddit, Tiktok, Threads and Bluesky are urging each other to spam email addresses currently publicly available on Nonsense. Masu.
This is a common tactic for online resistance when something like a public comment or controversial form for email addresses comes out.
In one case, so many people sent the full script (repeated internet jokes) of “Beambooby” to Missouri's anti-trans “Snitch Form,” and the tip line was taken offline. People responded in a similar way to the Texas inbox, which tracks gender marker changes in driver licensing, as well as the Utah anti-trans bathroom complaint form.
This online vigilance can coalesce within a particular community, like the K-Pop fandom. In 2020, Dallas police demanded that police send them video of the illegal activities that have been taking place during the protest following the murder of George Floyd. Instead, fans of Korean superstars like BTS spammed the police station app with pointless fancam videos.
Trump detractors report that his administration has set up a dedicated email account to violate the president's executive order to dismantle his Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) program He has adopted these tactics since the first week of his term when he requested. Workers were threatened with inaccurate “adverse effects” when they withhold information about efforts to “blunt the connection” between the DEI initiative and government contracts.
OPM has been a longtime government agency, but these new, dedicated specific email addresses are new. Federal government employees first received their emails from OPM's HR email addresses in January and tested whether one email blast could be used to contact all government workers. The move sparked a class action lawsuit from two whistleblowers who claimed they were violating federal privacy laws to create this brand new email server without following established security measures.
These security protocols are for a reason. In 2015, OPM was hacked, impairing sensitive data from 21.5 million security clearance background checks. This included Social Security numbers for each of these individuals, as well as biometric data for 1.1 million people. Meanwhile, the Musk's Doge team has little resistance and is granted unprecedented power and widespread access to these government systems.
It is unclear how effectively Doge will be thwarted by this massive spam campaign. As normal people don't have .gov email addresses, it's possible that mask teams can filter their inboxes for government-only email addresses. Your inbox can collapse with the huge amount of email you receive. If Musk's Doge team uses physical servers, the amount of data it contains is finite.
These efforts can be wasted, but those who resist mask policies are not deterred. After all, it doesn't take long to copy and paste the full “bee movie” script into an email.