Whistleblower says DOGE officials copied Social Security numbers

[themafia]

My deep suspicion, given some of the players involved in DOGE, is that most of this information is being exfiltrated for the purposes of training AI models. They'll likely be used for social and political manipulation of groups and possibly even individuals. There's a big market for "pre-crime" solutions which will also rely heavily on this type of data and are already being deployed by various state-level law enforcement agencies.

The coming of the "digital caste" society powered by "social credit" scores seems to be the end game. This is a battle of the rich and powerful against the average citizen and they want to reduce all of us back into fiefdom. We can no longer trust a large federal or even state government with these tools.

[xtiansimon]

Is there talk about DOGE working to combine various government databases as a new data project for the government?

[emsign]

This is a realistic concern. I can't understand why peopleare downvoting it.

[gnabgib]

Discussion (123 points, 16 hours ago, 54 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45026372

[JohnTHaller]

Link in case the pro-DOGE brigade brings it down: https://www.npr.org/2025/08/26/nx-s1-5517977/social-security...

[d--b]

Perhaps it is time that the US stops relying on SSNs being “secret”…

[emsign]

Doesn't change the fact that DOGE are criminal scumbags with root access who did illegal things nobody should ever do. It doesn't matter at all if SSNs were replaced by something decent when young naive and impressionable scumbags with root access and no morals whatsoever will simply steal the data anyway. Quite the contrary even, secure SSN as data loot is even more valuable to the thieves.

[2OEH8eoCRo0]

They should be considered unique (public) usernames

[XorNot]

ED25519 keys being short and quick to generate makes this state of affairs infuriating whenever it turns up - SSNs, credit card numbers etc.

[Cthulhu_]

The US top government is anarchy right now, descending into totalitarianism. Silver lining, this shit has highlighted how fragile the US democracy is and how easily the checks and balances fail if they're being ignored and there's no consequences for ignoring them. In a functioning democracy, none of this would have happened and the people that tried it removed from office and jailed.

All previous administrations have failed too, in that they didn't tighten up the loopholes. Probably because they feared they could be used against them.

[freen]

In order to make a government “small enough to down in a bathtub” you need to convince the general public that it is corrupt and incompetent, which has been the GOP play all along.

If your core argument about why you should govern is that government is the problem, is it any surprise that you sabotage any attempt at good governance?

Effective government is an existential risk for the GOP.

[0xy]

Copied from one secure S3 bucket to another secure S3 bucket, both inaccessible from the internet, both on SSA infrastructure.

What exactly is the problem?

[afavour]

> However, according to the complaint, the copied data had far fewer security measures in place to protect it than the SSA's standard protocols typically require.

> According to Andrea Meza, an attorney with the Government Accountability Project who represents Borges, the cloud environment appeared to be set up for DOGE-affiliated Social Security staffers, but it "lacks independent security, monitoring and oversight." She said Borges "has serious concerns about the vulnerability it causes for nearly every American's data."

Not all applications of "secure" are equal.

[saagarjha]

There are processes for copying data around. The person who works the front desk at Google doesn't have access to all of Gmail, for example.

[billy99k]

It's about as secure as you can get and there are still complaints about it.

All from the same people that said we had the most secure election in history in 2020 while ignoring the voting machine hacks at Defcon for the last decade.

[anonymousiam]

Wrong political party involved in doing it?

[billy99k]

It'd hard to believe anything NPR reports about the current administration because they defunded them.

[jfengel]

That seems to be a self-fulfilling strategy: punish your enemies, and then they can no longer be trusted when they say negative things about you.

[seanicus]

Same admin that opposes any real reporting on what they're doing except for entities that report glowingly on them. Trump Admin has loudly clashed with any and all legit journalistic entities (bad news: Newsnation and Zero Hedge are conservative hacks) so no reporting can be believed except ones approved by the state/Trump admin.