There have to be GovCloud only LLMs just for this case.
I swear this government is headed by appointed nephews of appointed nephews.
I keep thinking back about that Chernobyl miniseries; head of the science department used to run a shoe factory. No one needs to be competent at their job anymore
The article says
> [ChatGPT] is blocked for other Department of Homeland Security staff. Gottumukkala “was granted permission to use ChatGPT with DHS controls in place,” adding that the use was “short-term and limited.”
He had a special exemption to use it as head of Cyber and still got flagged by cybersecurity checks. So obviously they don't think it's safe to use broadly.
They already have a deal with OpenAI to build a government focused one https://openai.com/global-affairs/introducing-chatgpt-gov/
> So obviously they don't think it's safe to use broadly.
More likely, everything gets added to the list because there shouldn't be false positives, it's worth investigating to make sure there isn't an adjacent gap in the security systems.
Somehow I think that the weak link in our government security is at the top - the President, his cabinet, and various heads of agencies. Because nobody questions what they're allowed to do, and so they're exempt from various common-sense security protocols. We already saw some pretty egregious security breaches from Pete Hegseth.
That's also the case in businesses. No one denies the CEO a security exemption.
I have never worked in a company where an obviously incorrect CEO-demanded security exemption (like this one) would have been allowed to pass. Professionalism, boards (with a mandatory employee member/representative, after some size) and ethics exist.
30 years in about 8 software companies, Northern Europe. Often startups. Between 4 to 600 people. When they grow large the work often turns boring, so it's time to find something smaller again.
Ah, Northern Europe is probably the difference. This passes all the time in the US. It's probably more common in non-tech companies, as well.
I used to work devops for a startup. The _only_ person who was exempted from 2-factor auth was the CEO. It's the perfect storm: a tech illiterate person with access to everything and the authority to exclude himself from anything he finds inconvenient.
Been there. The CEO of an internet security company was the one who clicked on the wrong email attachment and turned a virus loose.
I mean, I don't know if he had a security exemption, or if anyone who clicked on it would have infected us. But he was the weak link, at least in that instance.
whether he is personally and directly responsible for this specific incident, his leadership absolutely sets the tone for the rest of the federal government.
Cool story, but totally irrelevant to the article at hand. It's also pure speculation with no substantiation.
It goes back long before the current regime. People may remember a certain cabinet secretary who ran her own exchange server in the basement.
It’s always fascinating how massive corruption is “whatabout”’d because someone years ago did something stupid.
Do you mean now, or then?
Bad is still bad, no matter what the party doing it.
You mean like the whataboutism that the parent is responding to which is even less on topic than Hillary's email server?
> I swear this government is headed by appointed nephews of appointed nephews.
Don't forget the Large Adult Sons!
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-land-...
It's all part of the plan.
Make the government look so incompetent that it is a no brainer to let a private company (headed by your friends and family of course) to do the important jobs and siphon resources much more effectively.
Do remember that HBO Chernobyl is fiction, there was no shoe guy publicly drinking vodka irl
Yes in reality that guy was a machinist.
Guess what this administration would love to do with nuclear facilities...
Any time you have to include "competent" in a description of a job or related technology, that's a clue that it needs requisite oversight and (possibly exponetial) proportionate cost.
DEI in action (funny people thst voted for this were apparently anti-DEI and now they get 100% DEI)
there are, he was just too lazy to use them
Isn't using azure openai enough? I read their docs and they have self hosted instances for corporate data compliance.
Hey, working at a shoe factory is serious business. You have to be a real bootlicker to get ahead in a place like that.
The failsons of the king of the failsons
They say that most fascist governments fall apart because they actively despise competence, which it turns out you need if you are trying to run a country.
That’s because eventually reality catches up to you.
If the reality of a thing is in opposition to the regime’s wishes, you can’t just wish that away.
However, the regime will favor those who say “yes” over those who accept reality.
Competence gives way to ideology.
I once read an interesting book on the economy of Nazi Germany. There were a lot of smart CEOs and high ranking civil servants who perfectly predicted US industrial might.
> There have to be GovCloud only LLMs just for this case.
I hear Los Alamos labs has an LLM that makes ChatGPT look like a toy. And then there's Sentinel, which may be the same thing I'm not sure.
Check the engineering salaries between each organization and reconsider your claim.
And we all heard they reverse engineered alien anti gravity technology in the 80s.
This administration's op-sec has been consistently "barney fife" levels of incompetence.
Leave Fife out of it. His heart was in the right place, at least. Also, his boss made sure he was unarmed.
this administrations competence on anything and everything has been a kid eating glue
One of them has bragged about how difficult it is to identify a giraffe, but that he's done it three times
And probably also been asked to draw a clock at a certain time, too.
If it wasn't meant to be eaten, it shouldn't have tasted so good!
We should get their heads checked for crayons.
Pretty sure that's a feature, not a bug
Personally I believe this but it gets into conspiracy theory real quick. There are far simpler explanations.
Same, I want to believe that this is all a ruse and that the are smart and just really good at playing dumb, but there are just too MANY of them.
It's sycophancy plain and simple. Surround yourself with only yes-men, it ends up becoming less and less competent as the ones who stand up and say no are replaced.
Even if they know better, they can't do better because they know there is no loyalty to nay-sayers.
The main thing is that if you're a big enough entity, in favorable enough conditions, it's possible to make stupid decisions continuously and survive them for a very long time.
It's the "market can remain irrational..." problem.
The simpler explanation is that all the competent people saw what happened the first go around and want nothing to do with it. That leaves a detritus of sociopathic wannabes to select from for staff, all vying to mirror the behavioral profile of dear leader.
Incompetence and conspiracies go hand-in-hand.
Not really. It is far easier to explain incompetence in powerful positions than to explain competence on purpose in powerful positions - the latter is definitely a conspiracy, the former is not.
This administration’s incompetence allows their opponents to conspire much more effectively.
Quite often it is both.
It's not uncommon for incompetent people to be put in positions of power. Because they are incompetent, competent but malicious people take advantage of this and commit actual crimes.
This is where actual conspiracies show up. And that is the incompetent powerful people cover up said crime to avoid looking incompetent.
It is an extremely common pattern.
When Donald Trump saw the footage of the murder of Renee Good, he said "Oh". He didn't know what ICE were doing until then. He trusted his cabinet who were telling him they were getting illegal immigrants and left wing terrorists.
He also repeated the lies that she was a domestic terrorist etc. I don’t think we need credit trump with any moral fibre over this just yet…
No, he did not trust his cabinet at all, which is why he put a bunch of yes men in place to ensure they fucked up and did the dumbest thing.
DT has had a long history of operating like a mafia boss where the design of the people he chooses around him is to put scapegoats on when the criminal activities he's involved in is caught.
When I saw mention it was in context of a “contracting” type set of info / document I actually chuckled - I spent a decade in procurement and sales for high stakes contracts. Incompetent person has no idea how to manage a procurement and goes online. Basically this is a 2026 version of an inept executive bashing “what is an RFP” into a search engine from 2007.
The trick is how to weaponize the incompetence against them.
There at least one country that weaponised it against the US.
Russia
And when the CCP compromised the law enforcement portal for every American ISP, stealing info on 80% of Americans, including both the Kamala and Trump campaigns, under the previous admin it was rock solid op-sec, presumably.
Or when the previous admin leaked classified Iran attack plans from the Pentagon, so bad that they didn't even know whether they were hacked or not.
You can at least pretend to make a technical argument over a political one.
> CCP compromised the law enforcement portal for every American ISP
Isn’t that the fault of the ISPs, not the admin?
Nope. The breach was in law enforcement operated portals.
You're the one making a political argument by doing a whataboutism that attempts to negate the failings of this administration. Which you're not even doing correctly because by every measure the previous administration was drastically more competent by looking at the qualifications of the people who filled their posts.
Can you explain how leaking the phone metadata of 80% of Americans and compromising the integrity of the 2024 election campaign's private comms is better OpSec than a single leak?
It's the worst U.S. government leak of all time, by far.
It's been the same with every administration, unfortunately. It's just a side effect of such an unnecessarily big goverment.
Inviting a reporter from the Atlantic to your signal chat where you coordinate military plans has nothing to do with government being too big
Are you sure? This guy didn't pass a counterintelligence polygraph. Like, the one that asks "are you sure you're not a spy?"
You have to actively maintain a state of ignorance to say this isn’t different. Go look at all of the public reporting starting in January about the way appointees in the Pentagon, DOGE, etc. blew through the normal policies and procedures controlling access, clearing people, or restricting sharing.
For example, this wasn’t just “oops, I used the wrong number” but Hegseth getting a custom line run into a secure facility so he could use a personal computer of unknown provenance and security:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/24/us/politics/hegseth-signa...
That’s one of the reasons why one of the first moves they made was to fire CISOs and the inspectors general who would normally be investigating serious policy violations.
This isn’t “big government”, it’s the attitude that the law is a tool used to hurt their opponents and help themselves but never the reverse.
You really think that every other administration has had this level of incompetence? The current bumbling and corruption is absolutely unparalleled.
It's bizarre that someone would choose to use the public, 4o bot over the ChatGPT Pro level bot available in the properly siloed and compliant Azure hosted ChatGPT already available to them at that time. The government can use segregated secure systems set up specifically for government use and sensitive documents.
It looks like he requested and got permission to work with "For Unofficial Use Only" documents on ChatGPT 4o - the bureaucracy allowed it - and nobody bothered to intervene. The incompetence and ignorance both are ridiculous.
Fortunately, nothing important was involved - it was "classified because everything gets classified" bureaucratic type classification, but if you're CISA leadership, you've gotta be on the ball, you can't do newbie bullshit like this.
> It's bizarre that someone would choose to use the public, 4o bot over the ChatGPT Pro level bot available in the properly siloed
You're assuming the planted lackey has any knowledge of these tools.
Or any reason to give a shit and use the less convenient tool.
I for one, after doing a bit of reserach, was shocked to find out the person in question is apparently completely unqualified for the job (if him pasting sensitive information into public ChatGPT didn't already make that abundantly clear). But the highlight from his Wikipedia page is this one:
>In December 2025, Politico reported that Gottumukkala had requested to see access to a controlled access program—an act that would require taking a polygraph—in June. Gottumukkala failed the polygraph in the final weeks of July. The Department of Homeland Security began investigating the circumstances surrounding the polygraph test the following month and suspended six career staffers, telling them that the polygraph did not need to be administered.[12]
So the guy failed a polygraph to access a highly controlled system full of confidential information, and the solution to that problem was to fire the people in charge of ensuring the system was secure.
We're speed running America into the ground and half the country is willfully ignorant to it happening.
Not defending the buy but completely might be inaccurate. He has a masters in comp sci eng. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madhu_Gottumukkala
I do realize this scholastic achievement is not indication he knows what he is doing.
Better to read the original story from Politico.
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/01/27/cisa-madhu-gottumuk...
Which had no discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46786672
O algorithm, algorithm! all men call thee fickle.
It’s absolutely necessary to have ChatGPT.com blocked from ITAR/EAR regulated organizations, such as aerospace, defense, etc. I’m really shocked this wasn’t already the case.
I agree....but ITAR and EAR can be super vauge especially in higher education.
"The report says Gottumukkala requested a special exemption to access ChatGPT, which is blocked for other Department of Homeland Security staff."
That they got this is shocking in itself.
Surely that must have been approved by the Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, his former boss back in SD.
Every cause that led to this event is, in itself, quite shocking.
I feel for my American friends, and hope they never again optimise their government for comedy value.
I really enjoyed unchecking all those cookie controls. Of the 1668 partner companies who are so interested in me, a good third have a "legitimate interest". With each wanting to drop several cookies, it seems odd that Privacy Badger only thinks there are 19 cookies to block. Could some of them be fakes - flooding the zone?
Damn. I forgot to read the article.
The same cookie can be shared with several partners or collected data can be passed to the partners.
It's not a cookie law — it's a privacy law about sharing personal data. When I know your SSN and email address, I might want to sell that pairing to 1668 companies and I have to get your "consent" for each.
People were already careless with social media which was openly public. I imagine it’ll be worse with these LLMs for the average person.
This is the real risk I think. Currently there are no means to even pretend to get anything deleted from LLMs either.
Yeah and ultimately those tools will be used as advertising machines. You'll get hyper specific targeted ads.
I'm pretty pessimistic about the future with LLMs, but I can't see it being a net positive for humanity in the long run.
I would like to be able to say that it is uncommon, but based on what I am seeing in my neck of the woods, all sorts of, one would think, private information is ingested by various online llms. I would have been less annoyed with it had those been local deployments, but, uhhh, to say it is not a first choice is being over the top charitable with current corporates. And it is not even question of money! Some of those corps throw crazy money at it.
edit: Just in case, in the company I currently work at, compliance apparently signed off on this with only a rather slim type of data verbotten from upload.
Sounds about on par with what I would expect competence wise.
Hand-picked by Noem, so yeah.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madhu_Gottumukkala
> In April 2025, secretary of homeland security Kristi Noem named Gottumukkala as the deputy director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency; he began serving in the position on May 16. That month, Gottumukkala told personnel at the agency that much of its leadership was resigning and that he would serve as its acting director beginning on May 30.
> Gottumukkala had requested to see access to a controlled access program—an act that would require taking a polygraph
Are the US ok? It's 2026 not 1926
The polygraph is still used for security vetting, today. No word on whether they still read a lamb's entrails for portents or consult the dead with a Ouija board.
> No word on whether they still read a lamb's entrails for portents or consult the dead with a Ouija board.
Don’t give RFK Jr ideas.
These days I think that thing's main purpose is to bounce people who would otherwise request access that they don't really need. If it isn't worth sitting down for the machine you don't really need it.
> Gottumukkala failed the polygraph in the final weeks of July. The Department of Homeland Security began investigating the circumstances surrounding the polygraph test the following month and suspended six career staffers, telling them that the polygraph did not need to be administered.
This is pretty insane though.
The Feds love polygraphs. Still very much in active use.
It's actually a few minutes to 1929, so that checks out.
Feels like 1935
This is what you get when you prize personal loyalty over competence.
This issue is the one thing that gives me some hope that they can be ousted -- they are collectively too stupid and motivated only by their self interests to hold their power indefinitely.
Does anyone in this administration actually trusts each other’s personal loyalties? I wouldn’t.
Well they’re about to solve that by intentionally cramming it into grok instead
DOGE already extracted their data of interest, but no doubt they're hungry for more.
There’s always a buyer for this kind of data. I’m sure there is a lot of activity in those markets.
I wonder how far removed the interim director of the CISA is from any real world security. I bet they have not seen or solved any real security problems and merely are an executive looking over cybersec. This probably is another example of why you need rank and file security peeps into security leadership roles rather than some random exec.
the current united states government is staffed mostly with unserious people, or people who are serious about doing crimes against humanity. there's very little in between.
The vast majority of government staff are career professionals who know what they are doing, not political appointees who showed up in the past year.
I adore that this guy had security clearance and I doubt I'd clear that bar. Last time I looked at the interview there was a question:
> have you ever misused drugs?
and I doubt I'd be able to resist the response:
> of course not, I only use drugs properly.
also I wouldn't lie, because that's would undermine the purpose. Still sad I can't apply for SC jobs because I'm extremely patriotic and improving my nation is something that appeals.
You would not get a security clearance, and the admin would make a note on your IQ. The correct answer is simply
> no
and keep the rest of it in your head.
FWIW I have held a security clearance during my career, and telling them I smoked weed was not a dealbreaker. What they are ultimately looking for is reasons why you could be coerced into divulging classified information. If you owe money due to drugs/gambling, etc, that's where it becomes a dealbreaker.
The general rule is not to lie to them, because they will interview all your friends and someone somewhere will rat you out. It’s pointless to try to hide anything during these interviews, and, if you do it, then it’s a dealbreaker.
You can see an archived list of industrial security clearance decisions here [0] which is interesting, and occasionally entertaining, reading. "Drug involvement security concerns" usually involve either actively using drugs or, worse, lying to cover up drug use, both of which are viewed as security concerns and grounds for rejection.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20170218040331/http://www.dod.mi...
wait, so I can apply and be honest? Sick! I just poorly misassumed they had classicly archaic interpretations of drugs.
I don’t have a clearance so someone can correct me, I believe you still have to have not used drugs in the prior year.
>I don’t have a clearance so someone can correct me
Why would you give an answer when by your own statement, you're not knowledgeable? What a strange mindset.
>I believe you still have to have not used drugs in the prior year.
My own experience does not agree with this speculation.
Current use is still a problem AFAIK (not sure on weed).
That said I can confirm that a few years back a friend who had previously used/experimented with a wide variety of substances (EDM scene, psychs), had no trouble getting a clearance.
They disclosed all of it, said they weren't currently using it and wouldn't for as long as they were in the job role, passed the drug test, and that was fine.
That said, to add to the "lying is a bad idea" point: I believe some of their references were asked about if they'd ever known that friend to have a dependency + if they were aware of any current/very recent use.
OC had a point. If you take drugs in the way they are intended to be used, you can say no with a clear conscience. Whether the interviewer will accept that if they later find out you took drugs, I couldn't tell you.
It’s happening all across corporate too
It looke like he's unfit for the position, and was using ChatGPT to burnish his reports etc.
Hey dude. That's a thought. Get your AI to expand it into a full report and send it to my AI to summarize!
If I did this with a banal internal documentation at work I would be written up and maybe fired over breaking known policy. This administration is so ridiculously incompetent, and interim head of cyber security.. leaks. The onion wouldn't write this.
Can't be surprised when clowns clown.
"Information wants to be free". Government stooges help information with what it wants.
The second half of the quote: "but information also wants to be expensive"
I wonder how they could discern the upload of sensitive documents from non-sensitive ones
BTW, what's the current status on LLMs and confidential documents ? Which license from which suppliers are fine and which aren't ?
How is such a critical position filled with a foreign national?
He's a naturalized US citizen
Where does this "cybersecurity monitoring" take place? On OpenAIs side? Or some kind of monitoring tools on the devices themself?
In any enterprise, normal would be to have monitoring on all ingress and egress points from the network and on devices themselves. You can't only have monitoring on managed devices because someone might BYOD and plug in an unmanaged device/connect it to internal wifi etc.
You bring in vendors and they need guest wifi to give you a demo, you need to be able to give them something to connect to but you don't want that pipe to be unmonitored.
This is a "Cybersecurity chief" causing an intern-level IT incident.
In many industries, this would be a rapid incident at the company-level and also an immediate fireable offense and in some governments this would be a complete massive scandal + press conference broadcasted across the country.
Then again the CTO of Crowdstrike that had their anti-malware code update cause huge problems, is the same guy that was CTO of McAfee when their AV code update, caused huge problems.
The CTO created the update? Otherwise it's not the same situation
No but they could have easily created the culture that massively increased the probability of such mishaps... we have all seen how not OK work environment negatively affects deliveries right, or read about boeing fiasco(s).
Not an insider just to be clear here so maybe just really bad luck. But no benefit of doubt for the third strike.
I think he is real deal. I mean in reality he learned or knows very little about technical matters. No fraud needed.
My assumption is that it goes the other direction on a permanent basis.
Once again, if you or I did this, it's federal crime and federal time.
But when the chief does it, it's an oopsie poopsie "special exemption".
> Cybersecurity monitoring systems then reportedly flagged the uploads in early August. That triggered a DHS-led damage assessment to determine whether the information had been exposed.
So it means, a DLP solution, browsers trusting its CA and it silently handling HTTP in clear-text right?
Leaked is not the correct word here. Generally as it's used, it implies some intent to disclose, the information for it's own purposes. You would call a disclosure to the war thunder forums a leak, because the intent was to use that information to win an argument. You wouldn't call Leaving boxes of classified information in a wearhouse where you'd normally read them a leak. (At least not as a verb). Likewise you wouldn't call it a leak if you mistakenly abandoned them in a park.
That said, IIRC For Official Use Only is the lowest level of classification (note not classified) it's not even NOFORN. It's even multiple levels below Sensitive But Unclassified.
So, who cares?
Much more significant is he failed the SCI/full poly... that means you lied about something. Yes I know polys don't work, but the point of the poly is to try to ensure you've disclosed everything that could be used against you, which ideally means no one could flip you or manipulate you. The functional part is to determine if you have anxiety about things you might try to hide, because that fear can be used against you. No fear/anxiety, or nothing you're trying to hide means you're harder to manipulate.
That feels bad even ignoring the whole hostile spys kinda thing.
Chalaki
Well, at least there's gonna be a swift and appropriate punishment. LOL
From wikipedia:
He graduated from Andhra University with a bachelor of engineering in electronics and communication engineering, the University of Texas at Arlington with a master's degree in computer science engineering, the University of Dallas with a Master of Business Administration in engineering and technology management, and Dakota State University with a doctorate in information systems.
And he still manages to make a rookie mistake. Time to investigate Mr. Gottumukkala's credentials. I wouldn't be surprised if he's a fraud.
The meritocracy strikes again.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madhu_Gottumukkala
He was the 'CTO' of South Dakota and later the CIO/Commissioner of the South Dakota Bureau of Information and Telecommunications under governor Kristi Noem.
Edit: (From a European perspective) it seems like the southern states really took over the US establishment. I hadn't really grasped the level of it, before.
> Edit: (From a European perspective) it seems like the southern states really took over the US establishment. I hadn't really grasped the level of it, before.
It's good to know the Americans aren't the only ones who never look at maps outside their own country
South Dakota has a population of less than 1 million people and the complexity of a CTO job of a state like South Dakota would be quite low. It is < 0.3% of the US Population and likely has de minimis benefit programs.
South Dakota is in the northern portion. But to your statement, historically speaking the southern states after the civil war kept trucking along in terms of power and influence.
The Dakotas weren't really north/south in the Civil War context; only about 4k people lived there in 1860. It was largely empty land, and not a state until 1889.
That is one of the best comments I've seen on HN to date!
It seriously got me laughing. Thanks.
I am so happy that my embarrassing lack of geographical knowledge of the US states' internal geographies amused you. A good laugh is great for your health, I've heard.
At least I know where your country is located.
Now, let me quiz you on the geographical locations of French regions? Or perhaps Finnish regions, if that's something you work closer with, day-to-day?
;)
and which MTV reality show was this "cybersecurity chief" plucked from ?
Do they have Middle Age Grandpas on MTV nowadays?
I guess you kids have no idea who the Secretary of Transportation is
Sean Duffy was born in 1971. His oldest child is (or was) pregnant. He is literally a middle aged grandpa.
Do kids know what MTV is?
I’m a little surprised by the takes in the comments. Obviously, heads of departments or agencies, CEOs, or similar personnel are generally not in the same league as normal employees when it comes to compliance.
Productivity and efficiency are key for their work. I am sure there are lots of Sysadmins here, that had to disable security controls for a manager or had to configure something in a way to circumvent security controls from actually working. I have been in many situations where I have been asked by IT colleagues if doing something like that was fine, because an executive had to read a PowerPoint file NOW.
Sysadmins are afforded special leniency because of their demonstrated competence. Their leeway is earned. In this case, the "cyber security chief" has no proven skill other than absolute loyalty to his boss, which justified his skipping the usual vetting procedure.
Obviously those kinds of stories are common, but you can’t seriously be suggesting that it is a good or acceptable thing?
Execs are just as stupid as your average person and bypassing security controls for them puts an organization at an even greater risk due to the kinds of information they have access to. They just get away with it because they’re in charge.
Yes.
It touched a nerve because no one in the trump admin is qualified to do their job. There's a lot of corruption and a lot of people getting access to things they shouldn't due to their relationship and loyalty, not merit. There's a big difference from a sys admin having super user access and some random politically connected hack abusing their privilege.
DOGE/Musk, noem, Kash, hegseth, etc.