Summary
Edward Coristine, a 19-year-old DOGE staffer nicknamed “Big Balls,” reportedly provided tech support to the cybercrime group EGodly through his company DiamondCDN.
EGodly, known for online of hacking government emails and cyberstalking FBI agent, publicly thanked DiamondCDN for DDoS protection in 2023.
Coristine, now a senior adviser at the State Department and CISA, did not respond to requests for comment.
Critics, including former CISA deputy director Nitin Natarajan, expressed concern over Coristine’s recent ties to cybercriminals while holding government network access.
This might not be the biggest problem in this story but HOW CAN YOU BE A SENIOR ADVISOR AT THE STATE DEPARTMENT AT AGE 19
Especially when he is a low-level cybercriminal.
Well in fairness, he seems to have made several companies while in high school. He was probably the only employee, but admittedly I sure didn’t have that kind of giva shit in High School. And anyway, the range of experience or knowledge needed to be “senior” in tech is absurdly large. 4 years in the work force isn’t uncommon to get to senior. Just change jobs twice and demand a title bump each time… you go from engineer to mid-level, to senior. Other people retire at 60 as a senior engineer. It’s just a dumb title.
For anyone wanting to express their concerns, Edward.H.Coristine@doge.eop.gov erm71@who.eop.gov
Be sure to use a burner email and through TOR network. DO NOT USE YOUR REAL EMAIL!
Why does everything have to be so fucking stupid? Is it really not enough that we have to watch the destruction of democracy happen before our eyes? Must it really be carried out by a group named after an early 2010s internet meme featuring a Shiba Inu with bad grammar? Do we really have to read serious reporting about the criminal connections of a 19-year-old government employee called “Big Balls?”
I just never imagined the fall of American democracy would be so… inane.
Reality is exceptionally mundane. I watched contrapoints video about conspiracies last night, and I was struck over and over again by this idea. Reality is boring. Why did Elon Musk decide to surround himself with 19 year old boys in his little DOGE club? Because that’s exactly how he sees himself. He surrounds himself with very young, very online/techy men because he sees himself as a very young, very online /techy man. He sees himself as a popular frat boy. The outsider in politics. I guarantee you he tells them when he sleeps with someone. They absolutely have group chats where they all talk amongst themselves and include him the same way. He’s just a delusional divorced man who is almost universally hated by people who aren’t either literally paid to like him or incentivised to like him because of his politics and position of power.
There are literally millions of men like him in America alone. Most of them are his followers. Why does he have the position of power that he does? Cause he fucking paid for it. That’s all. It’s exceptionally boring. It’s melodrama in its finest. America dies not with a hammer blow but with the slow whistle of air leaving a bike tire. It’s anticlimactic. It’s mundane hollow reality. It’s a story told a thousand times before. Egotistic racist divorced man is promoted to management of an office. A few months later, after thoroughly ruining everything, the office is closed for good. Life is empty. The glory we were told was there never existed. The climactic final battle is largely fictional.
Resistance isn’t really about grand fights or sweeping upheaval. It’s about changing material conditions for people. Helping those who need it. Organizing communities and building solidarity. Sweeping upheaval comes as a consequence of those things, but isn’t itself a conscious focus. We remember revolutions for their sweeping upheavals, for their bloody final battles. But that wasn’t what people in those movements had been working for. We don’t talk about the growing class solidarity in the face of repeated violence from the ruling class over decades. The disillusionment people feel from their rights being lost. We ignore those things cause they don’t make good stories to tell in the moment. Resistance itself is (mostly) boring labor and nuisance civil disobedience.
Definitely some “peaked in high school” vibes lol
Ok, for real this just helped me make sense of a whole mess of stressful shit running through my brain today. Thank you.
It’s all part of it.
Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert.
When you complain about Big Balls at DOGE, it makes you sound ridiculous, which makes it easier to dismiss your concerns.
Yup. It’s the exact same reason that the KKK has ridiculous titles for its leaders like “grand wizard” and “grand dragon”. It’s an old playbook, but why fix it if it ain’t broke?
For shits and giggles, I tried to go the path of “yeah but…” starting with his nickname. Surely he was named “big balls” a decade or so ago by other people, no he named himself. Surely his previous connections are just that, previous and years if not decades old, no, it’s 2 years, at most.
“Big Balls” is 19 y/o 🙄 at this point. He gave himself that name and has ties to unknown hackers. He has “senior advisor” status, filling a role, that should likely be filled by a bureaucrat accountant - as opposed to a kid whose resume is being a ‘techbro with hacker connections’ and programming knowledge.
I just have to curse here. Jesus fucking Christ! What the hell! Dummkopf, i’idiot, idiota, was zur holle, що в біса, що в біса
He probably took big risks in online video games because he paid for an ultra low latency connection.
Yeah it’s so sad Elon actually believes the fictional stereotype of the young gifted super hacker. Fully self taught, uber smart and able to hack anything in seconds. And when they get caught they don’t go to jail, the government hires them.
Except in real life those are just dumb fuck kids, calling themselves “Big Balls” and would never ever be hired by the government for IT related tasks. They only hire people with proper credentials, education and a clean sheet. You don’t put criminals in sensitive positions for a reason.
We used to call them script kiddies
Now they’re prompt kiddies
If I saw this as a plot of a Movie/TV show, I’d think it’s ridiculous and not watch it.
This is just bizzare and absurb, this simulation is broken.
This has the plot of a CBS show.
19 year old hacker kid gets contracted to work for the government because he’s “the best”
Except this is the real world where 19 year olds aren’t good at much of anything beyond learning that dating sucks and unlimited masturbating is fun.
Guarantee you this kid got hired because he can use ChatGPT to generate code that barely does what he wants.
Also guarantee you this kid is also the target of honeypot stings from every intelligence agency outside of America, plus maybe a few inside, and he will fall for it and divulge dangerous information.
Tin Cup was a good movie.
In hindsight Idiocracy seems prophetic.
Idiocracy gets the causes of its particular type of dystopia pretty catastrophically wrong, to the point of basically being inadvertently pro-eugenics (“society collapsed because stupid people wouldn’t stop breeding” implies that intelligence is exclusively tied to genetics, which is… a very bad take), but it sure seemed to be an indicator of just how brazenly dumb things could get.
I guess it should be viewed that way but I always took it to be that the parents didn’t value education and didn’t push it on their kids, rinse and repeat. They didn’t act like they weren’t teachable, it was like they looked down on smart people, as if it was a cultural value.
It wasnt that education was demonized, more that everything kept gradually declining in capability due to laziness, conformity, and lack of critical thinking.
One of my favorite documentaries.
Idiocracy is an optimistic projection…Think 1984 but stupider. Ie, like Russia in the 90s.
Try the future as a blend of Wall-E, The Matrix, Soylent Green, and Logan’s Run
It has to be this fucking stupid, because the weapon of choice against democracy is idiocracy.
Yeah, it seems like the original Nazis tried to present themselves as some form of sophisticated aristocracy. They wouldn’t have had some kid from the Hitler Youth Boy Scouts called “Big Balls” reporting to Goebbels.
Maybe, maybe not.
But you cannot deny Goebbels sounds like a noise made during oral sex. Or at least it is a request for it.
I have to say, Trump’s tactic of doing so many impeachable things so fast that nobody even tries to impeach him anymore is working stunningly well.
He will never have any consequences the Supreme Court has made sure of that.
I mean, it doesn’t help that literally everyone is cooperating. Not a single person has refused to leave their post, locked themselves in, thrown a punch, fought back, gotten arrested. Every federal worker “fired” has rolled over and taken it.
Americans are pussies. They have been telling themselves that their right to bear arms is enough, so they never bothered to learn actual resistance.
Their schools never taught anything about fascism except “we kicked their asses and saved Europe!” so the general population just aren’t capable of recognizing fascism on the rise.
Now that its here, they still think they can stop it by playing fair.
Pussies.
Implying that the “right to bear arms” crowd is the same as the “playing fair” crowd…?? Are you high or are you just that ignorant about US culture?
Every American i ever met in real life has been in favor of civilians owning guns. Maybe some of them wanted better restrictions, but i have never met an American that wanted to get rid of all guns.
Cool anecdote, love the sample size.
I think plenty of them recognize it, they just can’t organize by themselves. The seeds of distrust have been planted long ago, now they’re starting to give fruit.
You want to know what happens to people who fight back? Look at Vindman and Snowden and Manning (not saying the latter two did everything right, of course, but they put themselves on the line). Democrats did nothing for them. If no one fights for the people who fight back, why would they just throw everything away? No one wants to be a martyr. No one wants to be left out to dry.
We haven’t fought for the people who fight for democracy. How surprising is the consequence, really?
I’m sorry, what personal risk have you taken to stop Trump? You’re demanding that ordinary people put their lives and careers on the line but have you done so yourself? Did I miss an article where you chained yourself to the Whitehouse fence or something?
Well, there’s many in the US Parks and Forest Service who are taking a stand. You should check in on what they are doing. Some of it is, opaque. But, they are vocal about things being done.
That said, for plain old non-civil servants, the news is covering what we are doing to resist, a little. But there’s not much for the public to do, at this point. We don’t really start being needed until the jackboots show up. And right now, when they are, people are doing things like building reporting systems to give location and activity info on federal operations, people are doing the Know Your Rights campaigns in immigrant communities, and people are funneling reproductive health meds to where they need to go.
Most civil servants are just rolling over, and quitting, or just doing what they are told.
But there’s not much for the public to do, at this point.
Bullshit. Go chain yourself to a fence at the Whitehouse. Get arrested for it. Or… Are you saying it’s not worth the risk? The risk you’re asking others to take?
Purposefully getting arrested does nothing except take you out of the fight, and discourages.others.
So, you want people to do things that demoralize the working class?
And frankly, you don’t know what I’m doing.
Purposefully getting arrested does nothing except take you out of the fight, and discourages.others.
And that’s all that non-organized protest will ever achieve. People are asking individuals to “stand up” like it would accomplish anything and all it would likely do is destroy some rando’s career or end with them in legal trouble that they can’t afford.
Not my country, friend
How convenient and easy for you to criticize then.
And what do you want non-americans to do… exactly?
Thanks to you all I’m sitting here in my non-american country worrying about a potential world war. Though at least I’m trying towards increasing support for Americans refugees fleeing the fascist regime
And what do you want non-americans to do… exactly?
The same thing you’re asking Americans to do. You can (still for now) come to the US and do whatever it is you think “they” should be doing.
Or is that too much of an ask for you but not for some guy who’s been working in the forest service for 15 years?
It’s so easy to be an armchair quarterback. These civil servants are normal people. They’re not organized. They have families they need to feed. And all the Europeans are coming in here calling them cowards because they won’t risk their lives in a futile effort to make a difference?
Americans if you don’t live in the US: if you don’t like it, go back to your country! How dare you come here and criticize us while enjoying the lifestyle America affords you!
Americans if you don’t live in the US: If you don’t live here, shut up- you have no right to criticize because you have nothing at stake! How dare you sit there on your high horse and claim to know better?
I’m starting to think Americans just can’t handle criticism, regardless of where it’s coming from.
Sounds like you’re not a fan of criticism either. Perhaps you should consider the plank in your own eye?
Than shut up.
*then
Go back to Reddit
That’s not how this works.
A bunch of DoJ lawyers quit rather than not prosecute Adams.
I doubt that it will stop the fascists if the good guys quit though.
Agreed; but, to be fair, “leave their post” was one of the things the person
homesweethomeMrLwas responding to said absolutely no one was apparently doing.It was “refuse to leave their post” ;)
Ah! Right you are; I misread.
I mean, if democrats controlled the house he would be getting impeached, it’s not the volume or quality of the crimes, it’s the fact Republicans don’t care.
As if impeachment would do anything. He was impeached twice in his last presidency and it didn’t do shit.
When you pack the courts with Trump supporters there are no consequences.
We call it Three Stooges Syndrome
I don’t know if anyone is trying but someone in Congress should keep a running list of impeachable offenses and keep filing the full list every week until they have enough votes from more moderate Republicans. Sooner or later he will piss off enough of Congress.
It worked once. Why not twice. Why stop when no one is stopping you?
https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/the-complete-listing-atrocities-1-1-056
It’s the gish gallop of presidencies.
I have a feeling Big Balls actually has teeny-tiny balls.
He’s so young I don’t think they’ve dropped yet.
every time I hear big balls I just imagine big head from silicon valley
Idiocracy was way too optimistic about the future.
It’s going to be more like Back to the Future 2 but Biff is Trump
Biff IS Trump, that’s who they based the character on
I didn’t know that but it’s obvious now you point it out.
The president in Idiocracy was willing to listen to someone else… so yeah. Definitely way too optimistic.
Except we have the phrase “young people just know tech better than everyone else!” instead of: “Brawndo has what plants crave!” and we have the supposed “genius” (lol) fElon waving around a gigantic shiny chainsaw instead of Camacho’s gun…
How much did he sell U.S. secrets for?
The Orange Turd and his buddy Elon are running a criminal operation so sounds about right.
I was gonna say. The past tense “provided” is a bit misleading when he’s still doing it.
In a June 2022 message, an executive of the firm in question, Path Network, said that Coristine had been terminated for leaking internal information to competitors. They added that this was unacceptable and noted that the company had zero tolerance for it.
A spokesperson for the cybersecurity firm also said on Thursday that Coristine’s brief contract with the company was terminated after an internal investigation concluded. This was to look into the leaking of proprietary company information during the teen’s tenure at the Arizona-based hosting and data-security firm, according to Yahoo News.
Weeks after his termination, Coristine wrote in a Discord post in 2022 that he had retained access to the cybersecurity firm’s computers. The teen said he had the opportunity to wipe Path Network’s customer-supporting servers if he wanted to, but he did not, saying he never exploited his access.
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/02/teen-on-musks-doge-team-graduated-from-the-com/
Wired reported this week that a 19-year-old working for Elon Musk‘s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was given access to sensitive US government systems even though his past association with cybercrime communities should have precluded him from gaining the necessary security clearances to do so. As today’s story explores, the DOGE teen is a former denizen of ‘The Com,’ an archipelago of Discord and Telegram chat channels that function as a kind of distributed cybercriminal social network for facilitating instant collaboration.
One does kind of get the feeling that perhaps Big Balls could have done with a bit more vetting.
EDIT:
Also, there’s his grandfather:
https://www.jacobsilverman.com/p/prominent-doge-staffer-is-grandson
In 1980, KGB officer Valery Fedorovich Martynov was sent to the US to serve undercover at the Soviet Embassy in Washington, DC. He was a Line X officer, part of a technical espionage division. Martynov had a wife and two young children, and they enjoyed traveling to cities on the eastern seaboard and enjoying life in what was one of the KGB’s most desirable postings.
What the ‘trump salute’ wasn’t enough?
Not even surprised. DOGE had the US government fire a bunch of cyber security staff and they’re also no longer monitoring for cyber threats coming out of Russia. I have no doubt at all that we will find out at some point that Russia has had virtually unrestricted access to US government networks. This is all very intentional.
Why are there no photos of big balls?
Trying googling for “photos of big balls” and get back to us.
There’ll be lots of “big balls” with the RFK Jr endorsed mumps epidemic.
Why does it only affect one testicle??
Asking the important questions!!
I know it’s off topic but now I’m super curious. How does it know which one to pick?
A bonus?
Its impacts fertility. So, hopefully, the idiots don’t reproduce, too much, or too often.
In The Handmaids Tale, it’s the men who are infertile, not the women. They won’t just take their inability to reproduce sitting down.
it’s the men who are infertile, not the women.
Well, it’s that way in reality now also. Over 50% of men worldwide have serious fertility issues now.
Sure, why not?
I mean, “we” let an unvetted, unelected supposed “genius” run this operation called “doge”, so of course, why wouldn’t unvetted teenagers with no security clearance and no relevant experience (because, how the fuck could you have enough relevant experience as a fucking TEENAGER - fucking car rental places even know this much) be involved?
I’m fairly certain no one else calls him ‘Big Balls’ - I think that’s just what he calls himself. And I’m pretty certain that the only reason to have big balls is if you’re not getting any.
That merit, though.
Doesn’t the name just say it all?
