Justin Ruddy

Technologist, father, husband; I play well with others but I'm also the kid your mama warned you about. Motorcycles, travel, freediving, motorsports, adventure

[Selene Mariposa @Selene_Mariposa]

The World Cup has turned America into a discovery channel for the rest of the world.

And they are not handling it well.
In the best possible way.

Here is what they are discovering:

Free public restrooms. Europeans pay every time.
Free water at every restaurant. Just appears.
Free refills. Coffee. Sodas. Iced tea. Unlimited.
Free chips and salsa before you even order.
Free warm bread with dinner.
Ice in drinks like civilized people.
Air conditioning everywhere. Not a moral debate. A fact.
Parking lots attached to the actual place you are going.
Drive throughs where the food comes to the car while you sit in it.
Ranch dressing by the gallon.
Tex-Mex that cannot be explained only experienced.
Dental care that actually works.
Buccee’s. There are no words for Buccee’s.

Then they found the grocery stores.

Five of them within one mile.
Each one the size of an aircraft hangar.
Burgers. Steaks. Brisket. Ribs. Pulled pork. Lamb. Veal. Every cut of every animal ever domesticated by human civilization available in one refrigerated aisle at ten in the morning on a Tuesday.

The Germans stood in the meat section for forty five minutes.
In silence.
Processing.

They finally understand why we do not have trains.

We have roads wide enough for the cars we actually drive.
Parking lots the size of small European countries.
Airports in every city worth visiting.

Why would we need trains.

The Germans are taking ranch home by the bottle.
The Dutch found queso and briefly lost the ability to speak.
The Japanese are photographing HEB like it is the Louvre.
The Czechs are weeping in West, Texas.

Welcome to America.
Everything is free, enormous, air conditioned, comes with chips, and has five grocery stores within a mile that will sell you any cut of any animal you have ever imagined.

Write that down. 🦋

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I have never been an FBI agent. Never conducted an investigation. Never worn a wire or served a warrant or spent a winter in a field office where the heating runs four hours behind the interrogation schedule. I was a congressional staffer. Then a political appointee. Then a different kind of political appointee. Then the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which is also a kind of political appointee, except the furniture is nicer and the jet is mine.

I run the building.

I would like to tell you about the jet.

It seats fourteen. It costs sixty million dollars. The interior was refurbished during the Bush administration and the procurement file describes the upholstery as "heritage cognac." I know this because I requested the file. Not for oversight purposes. I wanted to know the name of the color so I could describe it at dinner. Heritage cognac. It smells like a law firm that has never lost. I spend a lot of time in that smell now. I think it is the smell of having arrived somewhere that was never meant for you, and noticing that nobody has asked you to leave.

Washington to Philadelphia is a hundred and forty miles. Amtrak runs it for forty-nine dollars. I flew the Gulfstream on May 10th because Alexis wanted to see George Strait. The suite was thirty-five thousand. Maybe fifty. I don't track numbers below six figures. The flight crew stayed on past eleven. Overtime. Security too. Someone will calculate the cost per mile of flying a sixty-million-dollar aircraft to cover a distance shorter than most Uber rides. That someone will not be me. I was in the suite. The suite didn't have a calculator. It had George Strait.

The Bureau told reporters Alexis was "an invited guest of the performers." Representatives for George Strait and Chris Stapleton did not confirm this. They were never going to. But the FBI said it, and under my leadership, when the FBI says something, that is the evidentiary standard.

I run the building. The building said it. It's true.

Her protection detail is where the budget gets interesting.

Twenty-four-seven coverage. SWAT-certified agents. Field officers drawn from multiple Bureau offices nationwide. Two armored SUVs at minimum. Hair appointments. Musical appearances. A blowout in Nashville required four agents in a parking lot for ninety minutes. The annual cost is roughly one million dollars before overtime, vehicle maintenance, and incidentals. The Bureau cites "hundreds of credible violent death threats" as justification.

One person has been arrested. His name is Alden Welch Ruml, twenty-six, from Massachusetts. He sent emails. He faces five years.

One emailer. One million dollars a year. Four SWAT agents per errand. A quarter of a million dollars in federal protection per verified threat. For context: the average FBI field office spends less annually on its entire confidential human source program. Informants embedded inside drug cartels, counterterrorism cells, organized crime families — the people whose testimony sends other people to prison — cost the Bureau less to keep alive than it costs me to ensure my girlfriend arrives at a salon escorted by men trained to rappel from helicopters.

One of my officials suggested we conduct a formal threat assessment. A review. The kind of paperwork the Bureau has generated for seventy years whenever a protection decision requires justification. He had been with the Bureau for nineteen years. He asked in the hallway, in front of staff. I berated him. Not quietly. He stopped asking.

He stopped asking.

That phrase is going to recur in this document. I want you to notice it each time.

Now. Alexis Wilkins is a country singer. I should mention this. She has released eight singles and one EP titled *Grit*. She has zero chart appearances. Her most-streamed song has five hundred and two thousand lifetime plays on Spotify. Taylor Swift accumulates that figure in approximately eleven minutes. A full-time country music journalist at the industry's leading independent publication stated that he had never heard of Alexis Wilkins before I started dating her. She has no active tour. She has never headlined a festival. Rolling Stone cited a forty-eight percent increase in her streaming numbers after we became public, which the same journalist clarified was "a forty-eight percent increase from virtually nothing."

This is the person for whom the FBI fields a million-dollar annual protective detail.

I want you to hold those two facts together — the streaming numbers and the security budget — and understand that they do not represent a miscalculation. They represent a value system. Her protection is not proportional to the threat. Her protection is proportional to her proximity to me. That is the formula. Proximity to the Director equals resources from the Bureau. I have applied it consistently. I have applied it to everyone.

Which brings me to the people who are no longer here.

I have removed over fifty career officials since January. Twelve have filed suit. Marshall Yates — my Congressional liaison, formerly the director of something called the Election Integrity Network, which existed to challenge the 2020 results — personally called field offices to compile names. Everyone who worked a case involving the President. Six thousand names were requested by the White House. The acting director before me was asked who he voted for. When he started supporting the President. Whether the FBI had tried to "put the president in jail." He was told the President hasn't forgotten.

Three hundred counterterrorism and counterintelligence agents have been reassigned to immigration enforcement. The unit monitoring Iran — Iran, which operates proxy militias across four countries and maintains an active assassination program targeting American officials on American soil — was gutted. Six federal prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia have resigned or been pushed out rather than participate in the prosecution of the previous FBI Director, James Comey, whose crime was investigating the President and whose punishment is being investigated by the institution the President gave me as a gift.

I am prosecuting the last Director for doing his job. I am doing this from a fifty-thousand-dollar suite while a sixty-million-dollar aircraft idles on the tarmac outside.

Nobody in the building finds this ironic. The ones who would have found it ironic are gone. They stopped asking.

My Deputy Director is Dan Bongino. He has never worked a federal case. His career before this was conservative talk radio. He receives the President's Daily Brief every morning — CIA product, NSA intercepts, the full intelligence take of the United States government — and he obtained his SCI clearance after I waived his polygraph. The FBI's own guidelines state that polygraphs are a "preliminary employment requirement." My lawyers reclassified him as a Schedule C political appointee. Experts said that's not how the statute works. The experts are career officials. Career officials are the previous administration's furniture. I am redecorating.

Nikole Rucker is my personal assistant. She arrived at the Bureau on January 20th without a security clearance of any kind. She was physically escorted into the Director's suite because the door requires a clearance she did not possess. By February she was in London, seated across from a Western allied intelligence service, notebook open, pen moving. She used to work for Stephen Miller. The White House says she does not share operational details with him. I am told this is technically accurate in the way that most technically accurate statements are technically accurate.

The polygraphs are still running. Just not for my people. We administer them now to career staff. The questions have changed. We ask whether they've criticized me. Whether they've spoken to a reporter. Whether they've expressed doubt about the direction of the Bureau. The machine measures stress. Under my leadership, stress has been reclassified as disloyalty. Disloyalty as a security risk. A security risk as grounds for termination. Fifty people have traveled this chain. Twelve are suing. The rest stopped asking.

I run the building.

In February a New York Times reporter named Elizabeth Williamson published details about the protective detail. I opened a preliminary inquiry. Federal stalking charges. We searched our databases for her information. The Department of Justice reviewed the file, found no legal basis, and terminated the inquiry. Called it retaliation. The Times' executive editor called it "a blatant violation of Elizabeth's First Amendment rights."

I do not retaliate. I respond to threats. A journalist publishing accurate reporting about my personal use of public resources is, by my definition, a threat to operational security. My definitions are the ones that govern inside this building. I wrote the organizational chart. There is a framed copy on my wall. It has one name at the top.

The Atlantic published a separate story. Excessive drinking. Frequent absences. Staff forcing entry into my home because I could not be reached. I filed a two-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar defamation lawsuit. At my budget hearing, Senator Van Hollen cited the allegations under oath. I told him the only person slinging margaritas on the taxpayer dollar was him — in El Salvador, with a convicted gang-banging rapist. Fox News subsequently noted that public records do not support either characterization. But the line worked. That is the difference between evidence and performance. I have always understood which one this building rewards.

In 2023, before any of this, I said the following on national television: "Chris Wray doesn't need a government-funded G5 jet to go to vacation. Maybe we ground that plane."

I meant every word. We should have grounded his plane. So mine wouldn't invite the comparison.

I sell merchandise. "Fight with Kash." T-shirts, hats, a children's book. The profits go to a foundation I started. The brand benefits from my position as Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. This is not a conflict of interest. A conflict requires two competing interests. I have one interest. It has never been healthier.

I told the Senate that the FBI cannot meet its mission with a five-hundred-million-dollar cut. I requested twelve billion. Two billion more than last year. In the same period I spent a million on my girlfriend's security detail, fifty thousand on a concert suite, flew a sixty-million-dollar aircraft to cover a distance shorter than most commutes, waived background checks for three political appointees with no law enforcement experience, reassigned three hundred counterterrorism agents to check green cards, gutted the unit tracking Iran's assassination program, and opened a federal investigation into a newspaper reporter for the crime of publishing a newspaper.

I told Hannity: "We are going to protect not only me and my loved ones but every American that is threatened." I meant the first seven words. The rest was institutional boilerplate. The kind of thing you say when the camera is on and the sentence needs to land somewhere that sounds like it includes other people.

I run the building.

Now I want to tell you about the water.

The week before the concert I went to Pearl Harbor. The USS Arizona. A VIP snorkel. Nine hundred sailors and Marines are entombed in that hull. They have been there since 1941. The oil still leaks. It rises to the surface in small dark rainbows that break apart when you swim through them. The water was warm. Very clear. I could see the outline of the ship's superstructure below me, the geometry of a vessel that sank with its crew inside, and I remember the water temperature was perfect and the sun was on my back and my detail was on the shore and nobody in the water asked me to justify my presence above nine hundred dead.

Recreational swimming at the Arizona is prohibited. The National Park Service said they were not involved. The Navy could not identify who authorized the outing. The logistics were coordinated by military email. A former government diver spoke to reporters anonymously. He said the access was unusual. He said it raised safety and security concerns. He spoke anonymously, the article noted, "for fear of retribution."

A man who dives for the government is afraid to describe, on the record, how I swim.

That is the climate. That is the building I run. A nineteen-year veteran stopped asking. Fifty career officials stopped working here. Three hundred counterterrorism agents stopped tracking the people who want to kill Americans. Six prosecutors stopped prosecuting. A government diver stopped talking. A reporter found her name in a database. And the oil keeps leaking from the Arizona, eighty-four years after the hull settled, surfacing in thin iridescent films that nobody is assigned to monitor because I reassigned them.

I have never been an FBI agent. I have never conducted a federal investigation. I have never built a case or flipped a witness or spent a night in a surveillance van waiting for someone dangerous to make a mistake. But I have flown a sixty-million-dollar jet to a George Strait concert. I have watched the show from a suite that cost more than most Americans earn in a year. I have swum above nine hundred dead sailors in water so clear I could see their ship. And I have ensured, through the systematic removal of everyone who might object, that no one in the building will tell you any of this is wrong.

The oil surfaces. It always surfaces. It has for eighty-four years.

I run the building. The building doesn't ask questions anymore.

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

At 9:15 this morning, a judge in Houston sentenced a nineteen-year-old girl named Destiny to eighteen months' probation and a felony record for stealing $87 from register 4 at a gas station.

I know this because my phone sent me a news alert. I read it at my desk. Then I put my phone down and opened the correction queue.

I process payroll corrections for National Staffing Solutions. We have 14,000 client employers. I have a dropdown menu with four options. Corrected. Disputed. Escalated. Closed. I select one. The ticket resolves. Last quarter I processed 2,300 corrections totaling $4.2 million in wages that employers took from workers and kept until someone filed a ticket.

There is no fifth option. There is no option for Charged.

That's a correction.

At 2:47 PM, a woman sat down at my desk. Her name is Maria in our system. She works the night shift at a warehouse. She has been logging 47 hours per week. She has been paid for 40. For 156 consecutive weeks. Three years. The system owes her $6,300.

She brought a notebook. A composition book. The cover was falling off. She had calculated her overtime by hand, every week, in pencil, because she did not trust the pay stubs. I looked at the numbers. Every line was correct. She had been doing the math in her head every Friday for two years before she started writing it down. Two years of arithmetic in her head while mopping floors at 3 AM because the company that owes her $6,300 rounds down and she wanted to be sure.

I scanned the notebook and attached it to the ticket. She asked what happens to the ticket. I told her it goes into the correction queue. She asked how long. I told her ninety days. She asked if she would get the money. I told her the employer would be notified.

She asked again. I did not have a different answer. She knew that. She asked anyway. I think she wanted me to hear myself say it twice.

I closed the ticket. I selected "Corrected" from the dropdown. The system auto-generated a thank you email. Her first name is misspelled in the email. It has been misspelled since intake. We correct wages. We do not correct names.

American employers steal $50 billion per year from their workers. I want you to sit with that number. The FBI says all robberies in America total $482 million. All burglaries: $3.4 billion. All larcenies: $5.4 billion. All motor vehicle thefts: $7.5 billion. Every piece of property stolen by every criminal in America totals $16.8 billion. Wage theft is three times that. I learned this at a compliance industry seminar in 2022. The slide was titled "Market Opportunity." The room had 340 people. Everybody wrote it down. Nobody left.

The Department of Labor has 611 investigators for 165 million workers. That is one investigator for every 278,000 workers. It is a 52-year staffing low. There were more investigators in 1973. Last year, the DOL recovered $259 million. That is 0.5% of what was taken. We call the 0.5% enforcement. We call the other 99.5% the correction window.

That's a correction.

The same week Destiny stole $87 from register 4, an employer in Houston withheld $340,000 in wages from 280 workers over two years. The Department of Labor assessed a civil penalty of $14,000. The employer paid it the way you pay a parking ticket. The employer is still operating. The employer does not have a record. Destiny will have hers when she is twenty-nine. She will have it when she is thirty-nine. She will carry it into every job interview for the rest of her life. The employer will carry a correction.

My daughter turned nineteen last month. I spent $87 on her birthday dinner. I was typing Maria's ticket number into the system when I thought about that and my hands stopped on the keyboard for a moment I cannot explain to you except to say that $87 is a very specific number when you have processed 11,400 corrections and not one of them has been referred for criminal prosecution. The category does not exist in my system. I have looked. There is Compliance Remediation. There is Classification Adjustment. There is Closed — No Further Action. There is no category called Theft.

I looked. It is not there.

That's a correction.

The correction queue closes tickets in ninety days. A closed ticket is not an open crime. The window closes the case before the worker opens one. Every quarter I present the metrics. The number of corrections is rising. We present this as improved compliance. The slide is green. Green means we are catching more theft. We are catching more theft because there is more theft. The slide does not show the second number. The slide is green because we designed the slide.

$87 is a felony. $6,300 is a ticket. $340,000 is a correction. $50 billion is a slide.

I eat lunch at my desk at 12:15 because the correction queue empties briefly when the East Coast offices close. I have eaten lunch at my desk for seven years. I have a lucite block on my desk that says Compliance Excellence. I received it in 2023. It is the only award I have ever received for anything.

It is heavier than it looks.

[Justin Ruddy @JustinRuddy]

Check out my latest article: When Every Developer Brings Their Own Team: Lessons From My First Hackathon https://t.co/4b6CIounvZ via @LinkedIn

[Ricardo @Ric_RTP]

Amazon just got caught running a secret price manipulation operation with Levi's, Home Depot, Walmart, and many more.

Every time you "comparison shopped" online, you were looking at prices that were already rigged.

Here's what happened:

Amazon would monitor prices on Walmart, Target, Best Buy, Home Depot, and Chewy in real time. The second a competitor listed a product cheaper than Amazon, they'd contact the brand directly and tell them to "fix it."

And the exact emails are now PUBLIC.

Amazon sent Levi's links to two Walmart listings with the subject line "styles of concern." They basically said the prices on Walmart are too low and we have a problem.

The next day, Levi's responded: "I talked to Walmart and they have partnered with us to take Easy Khaki Classic fit back up to ladder SPP price, $29.99 immediately."

Levi's literally called Walmart and told them to raise the price. Because Amazon told Levi's to make the call.

Walmart complied. Then Amazon matched the HIGHER price.

Both retailers ended up charging more. The customer paid extra. Nobody competed.

Same playbook with Hanes:

Amazon sent them links showing Target and Walmart prices were lower. Hanes confirmed they "reached out to Target and Walmart to have the prices increased."

Target increased the prices. Walmart increased the prices. Amazon kept their margins.

But it gets even worse...

Amazon told Allergan (the company that makes eye drops) that their product was "suppressed" on Amazon because it was cheaper on another site.

Allergan responded: "Walmart got their price back up to $16.99." Amazon then unsuppressed the listing.

They did this with pet treats on Chewy. Furniture on Home Depot. Products across dozens of categories spanning YEARS.

The mechanism is simple but terrifying:

If you're a brand and you sell cheaper on Walmart than on Amazon, Amazon suppresses your product, removes you from the Buy Box, buries you in search results, and effectively makes you invisible to 300 million customers.

Brands can't afford that. So they call Walmart and Target and say "raise your prices or we'll lose our Amazon listings."

Walmart and Target comply because they need the brand's products.

Amazon captures 40 cents of every dollar spent online in America. That gives them the leverage to set prices across THE ENTIRE internet. Not just their own platform.

So turns out, you were never comparison shopping.

You were looking at a coordinated price floor set by Amazon through backroom phone calls between brands and their competitors.

"Amazon is working to make your life more unaffordable."

3 separate antitrust trials are now scheduled for 2027. The FTC has its own case. 18 states plus the DOJ are piling on.

This is literally happening during the WORST affordability crisis in a generation. Groceries up 25% since 2020. Housing unaffordable. Wages flat.

And the largest ecommerce company on Earth has been secretly coordinating with brands to make sure you can't find a cheaper price ANYWHERE.

"Competition" in retail is just a fantasy.

[Justin Ruddy @JustinRuddy]

Check out my latest article: The Invisible Debt: Why "Cheap" Tokens Are Breaking Your AI Agents https://t.co/Ac8Qz5THXz via @LinkedIn

[Okanga AI @OkangaAI]

AI coding agents that dramatically reduces the token use, while maintaining the quality and accuracy of the code being written. If you are using tools such as Codex, Windsurf, or Claude Code, and are frustrated with cost and model usage limitations, contact us and we can help!

[Okanga AI @OkangaAI]

https://t.co/Y7U4vM5j86

[Paula Januszkiewicz @PaulaCqure]

The most dangerous threats are not always the invisible ones – but the gaps we choose to ignore. Most breaches start with simple identity and privilege mistakes.

On April 23, during the MVP Community Week Münster, I’ll deliver a workshop:

“Modern Cybersecurity Failures: Skills and Misconfigurations That Define the Battlefield.”

We’ll break down real attack paths used to bypass even mature security setups.

Free registration:
https://t.co/iV2tGnnZRS

#CyberSecurity #MVPWeek #MicrosoftMVP #CQURE

[Mark Slapinski @mark_slapinski]

The memes are ever so plentiful!

[Justin Ruddy @JustinRuddy]

Very Large Context Windows - Does Size Really Matter? https://t.co/Xko37BXTha

[Congresswoman Yassamin Ansari @RepYassAnsari]

I just conducted an unprompted, late night oversight visit at an ICE holding facility at the Mesa Gateway Airport with @RepGregStanton and @Rep_Grijalva. What we saw was shocking and sick.

Well over 240 detainees stacked like sardines in cells. People were sick and ICE was refusing medical care.

Here’s what happened.

[bonky @shesbonky]

you know i hate fresh air and sunshine, but this genius making a national parks pass sleeve to cover the Bloated-Cheeto In Chief image on the 2026 card is epic

if you're outdoorsy af you should totally buy this

[EMPR.media @EuromaidanPR]

Rave to "Chervona Kalyna".
French DJ David Guetta performed a remix of the Ukrainian song, performed by Andriy Khlyvnyuk, at one of the festivals.
He said: we already definitely know that we'll be playing in the summer of 2027 in Crimea.

[Joe Kent @joekent16jan19]

CALL TO ACTION:

Tell President Trump, your Congressional Rep, & your Senators that you don't support American boots on the ground in Iran.

White House Comment Line:
[phone]

Congress Switchboard:
[phone]

This is how We the People make our voices heard. 🇺🇸

[Stoned🍄Ape @StonedApe]

After popular demand
(3 people asked me nicely)
I have added this to Spotify
Link below 👇🏻

Gnome Sayin

[MAGA Cult Slayer🦅🇺🇸 @MAGACult2]

The Woke Farmer is a real one.

Please, please listen to this. It’s important.

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

We're restarting Three Mile Island to power Copilot.

Let me tell you why we're qualified.

In 2020, Russian intelligence hacked SolarWinds and rode the supply chain into 18,000 organizations. We were one of them. They used our systems to breach the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Pentagon.

I found out in a meeting about font choices for the new Outlook redesign.

Someone pinged the #incidents channel. I checked. 18,000 compromised organizations. I went back to the font meeting. We chose Aptos. That took four months. The Russians had been inside for nine.

We called it "a sophisticated nation-state attack."

Sophisticated means we didn't notice.

Nation-state means it's not our fault.

In 2021, Chinese hackers exploited four zero-day vulnerabilities in Exchange and breached 30,000 American organizations. Schools. Hospitals. Police departments. The entire email infrastructure of small towns in Ohio.

We called it "limited and targeted."

30,000 is a limit. Technically.

That same quarter we won a Cybersecurity Excellence Award. The trophy is in the lobby of Building 34 in Redmond. It's in a glass case next to a framed quote from Bill Gates about "Trustworthy Computing."

The glass case has a keycard lock.

The keycard system runs on Exchange.

In 2022, a group of teenagers breached our Azure DevOps environment and accessed the source code for Bing and Cortana. They did this from their bedrooms. They posted the screenshots on Telegram. One of them was seventeen.

Teenagers.

On Telegram.

From a bedroom in England.

We called it "a contained incident." We have an internal award for this kind of thing. "Security Resilience Recognition." It comes with a $500 gift card to the Microsoft Store and a LinkedIn badge. Twelve people got it that quarter. One of them wrote the code the teenagers stole.

In 2023, Chinese hackers stole one of our cryptographic signing keys — one of the actual skeleton keys to the kingdom — and used it to read the emails of the Secretary of Commerce, the U.S. Ambassador to China, and officials across multiple federal agencies. 60,000 State Department emails. They were inside for six weeks.

We didn't detect it.

A customer noticed.

They called us.

We checked.

They were right.

We sent them a thank-you email. From Exchange.

The U.S. Cyber Safety Review Board investigated. Thirty-four pages. "Cascade of avoidable errors." "Security culture inadequate and requires an overhaul." "Preventable and should never have occurred."

I printed the report. I highlighted the word "preventable." I put it in the same drawer as my Q3 performance review, which said I "exceeded expectations."

Same quarter.

Same company.

In January 2024, Russian intelligence hacked the personal email accounts of our senior leadership. The method was password spraying. The entry point was a legacy test account.

Without multi-factor authentication.

A test account.

Without MFA.

At the company that sells MFA.

To the government.

That it told to enable MFA.

In a security advisory.

That we wrote.

Someone asked how this happened. I said it was "a legacy configuration artifact from a prior authentication framework." That's nineteen words for "nobody turned it on." He asked who was responsible. I said the account "predated current ownership structures." That's five words for "we don't know."

He looked like he had more questions.

I scheduled him for a "career trajectory alignment session."

He works in compliance now. Compliance is where we put the people who ask questions we don't want answered. It has a very high headcount. It shares a floor with Legal, which is where we put the people who answer questions we wish nobody asked.

Meanwhile, federal reviewers examining our government cloud described our internal architecture as "spaghetti pies." They flagged that we were missing basic encryption documentation for Exchange Online.

Exchange.

The product we've shipped for thirty years.

We didn't have the diagram that shows how it encrypts your email.

Nobody asked for it until someone asked for it.

Then we couldn't find it.

Then we looked in SharePoint. SharePoint said the file existed. SharePoint was wrong. This surprised nobody.

The reviewers called our government cloud "a pile of shit."

Direct quote. In writing. To each other.

They approved it for the nation's most sensitive data anyway.

The Justice Department helped push it through. Then two of the people who helped approve it came to work for us. Our former DOJ liaison is now on our government strategy team. The ex-Deputy Attorney General is our president.

That's not a revolving door.

That's a recruitment pipeline.

We hired the people who grade our homework. Now nobody grades our homework.

FedRAMP's budget just got slashed to $10 million. That's less than what we spent on the catering contract for Build 2025. Fewer reviewers. Fewer questions.

So.

Here is what I know about the company that's going to operate nuclear reactors. Twenty-year deal. $16 billion. The site of the worst nuclear accident in American history.

We can't secure email. We can't detect our own cryptographic keys being stolen. We can't stop teenagers in a bedroom in England from downloading our source code on Telegram. We can't remember to enable the security feature we sell to everyone else.

Our internal architecture is spaghetti pies.

Our government cloud is a pile of shit.

Our security culture requires an overhaul.

And now we're restarting Three Mile Island. To power Copilot. Which costs $30 per seat per month. Usage rates at most companies are in the single digits. But the servers still run. The GPUs still spin. The meter doesn't care if anyone's prompting.

So we need more power. Not a little more. Not solar-panel more. Not wind-farm more.

Nuclear reactor more.

A junior engineer asked if we'd considered making the software more efficient instead of building a nuclear plant.

I said that was "a pre-scale optimization mindset."

She asked what that meant.

She's in documentation now.

Documentation is next to Compliance.

Satya will present this at the next earnings call. The slide will say "Responsible AI" in the Aptos font we spent four months choosing while the Russians were inside. The analysts will nod. The stock will move. Nobody will ask about the spaghetti pies.

Because we've rebranded all of it.

"Cascade of avoidable errors" is now "security journey."

"Pile of shit" is now "FedRAMP High authorized."

A teenager on Telegram is now "external security researcher."

A nuclear meltdown site is now "clean energy campus."

The keycard still runs on Exchange.

The padlock emoji in #incidents is still on fire.

I don't know how our encryption works. I've been here nine years. Nobody's seen the diagram.

I don't know how a nuclear reactor works.

But I know the graph goes up and to the right.

[Jason Kint @jason_kint]

Let the work speak for itself. 60 Minutes was strong tonight. Pelley had a fast turn on Iran. But watch 2nd segment, at least this 110s where a federal Judge speaks truth to power calling out AG and DepAG for failure to stand up to dangerous rhetoric.

[Justin Ruddy @JustinRuddy]

@Hey_Aivetra Drive