News/Commentary

Crude email sent to 13K federal employees: ‘Tired of working for a complete c*nt?’

January 31, 2025 | | Print Article

Some unknown rogue exploited a vulnerability in the federal government’s broadcast system to email a crude message to all 13,000 employees of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

“Aren’t you tired of working for a complete c–t?” the email read, according to independent journalist Ken Klippenstein.

Look:

The blame for this appears to be on the administration, or at least according to an anonymous NOAA employee who spoke with Klippenstein.

“Goes to show you how fast this [new broadcast system] was cobbled together – no security or screening on this address,” the employee said.

To test the system’s vulnerability, Klippenstein himself used the broadcast system to successfully email a link to his newsletter to all of the NOAA’s employees.

“The Trump administration’s changes to their communications system made it so literally anyone can blast messages out to the entire agency,” he subsequently noted in a tweet.

Look:

The new broadcast system is designed “to send important communications to ALL civilian federal employees from a single email address,” according to the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM).

The system has raised concerns about security.

“The Office of Personnel Management’s recent mass verification email to all civilian federal employees is raising concerns that the Trump administration circumvented longstanding procurement and cybersecurity laws to install an email system used to communicate widely with employees across the government,” Nextgov notes.

The first email was sent using the system last week. The email specifically told recipients that it was a “test of a new distribution and response list” and asked that they reply “YES” to it.

Instead many federal workers assumed the email was some sort of spam or scam and subsequently reported it to their superiors.

Days later on Monday, a group of unnamed federal employees filed a lawsuit accusing OPM of having violated the E-Government Act of 2002 by not doing its due diligence before launching the new broadcast system.

The federal employees also accused Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) boss Elon Musk of somehow being involved.

“The lawsuit references a Reddit post tied to a purported anonymous OPM employee, alleging that federal agencies were instructed to send employee information to OPM’s new Chief of Staff Amanda Scales, whose career history includes working for Musk’s company xAI,” according to Nextgov.

The corporate press has already seized on this connection to imply something sinister is afoot.

“Her placement in this key role, experts believe, seems part of a broader pattern of the traditionally apolitical OPM being converted to use as a political tool,” Wired magazine reported earlier this week.

But critics say this is nothing but a smear.

Melissa Chen, another independent journalist, notes in the thread below that, even assuming Scales was a political appointee, the Biden administration had far more political appointees in OPM:

Dovetailing back to the lawsuit, in fairness to the plaintiffs, a major OPM breach that occurred in 2015 exposed the personnel records of tens of millions of federal employees. The concern is that the same thing might happen again.

“It is deeply troubling to see what appears to be a complete disregard of information security and privacy practices as required by federal law, such as [the Federal Information Security Modernization Act of] 2014,” an anonymous former government official told Nextgov.

“The administration’s actions have the potential to leave government data vulnerable to exfiltration and compromise,” they further claimed.

Vivek Saxena
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