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Whistleblower says DOGE officials copied Social Security numbers
- billy99k 1y agoIt'd hard to believe anything NPR reports about the current administration because they defunded them.
- seanicus 1y agoSame 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.
- jfengel 1y agoThat 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.
- billy99k 1y ago"punish your enemies, and then they can no longer be trusted when they say negative things about you." This was done to the Republicans for 4 years. I suppose he's just using the same strategy? NPR wouldn't report on things that would actually hurt the Biden administration, like the laptop, so why should I believe them now? I haven't trusted them for years...the fact that my tax dollars aren't paying for it anymore is only a bonus. This is why they can't be trusted: Non-biased reporting will report bad things about a politician they support, even if it helps the person they don't support. In addition to this, the actual article is a nothingburger. They moved secure information from one non-Internet connected server to another. If this is the standard for security reporting, the violations found during the 2020 election should have been front-page news for weeks...but they were strangely silent..............
- JohnTHaller 1y agoLink in case the pro-DOGE brigade brings it down: https://www.npr.org/2025/08/26/nx-s1-5517977/social-security-doge-privacy https://www.npr.org/2025/08/26/nx-s1-5517977/social-security...
- gnabgib 1y agoDiscussion (123 points, 16 hours ago, 54 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45026372 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45026372
- d--b 1y agoPerhaps it is time that the US stops relying on SSNs being “secret”…
- XorNot 1y agoED25519 keys being short and quick to generate makes this state of affairs infuriating whenever it turns up - SSNs, credit card numbers etc.
- emsign 1y agoDoesn'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 1y agoThey should be considered unique (public) usernames
- msgodel 1y agoMy understanding is that they're not even guaranteed to be unique.
- datadrivenangel 1y agoYup. They get reused, and people can get new ones or sometimes multiple at the same time...
- camillomiller 1y ago[flagged]
- freen 1y agoIn 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.
- jimkleiber 1y agoHard to make a lot of money when the government provides good services for free.
- freen 1y agoHard to have effectively indentured servitude if there’s a social safety net. Remember even Hayek advocated for universal, government funded healthcare! Ayn Rand was on social security!
- roenxi 1y agoI doubt you could source a quote for the Hayek point, but more interestingly Rand's taking social security doesn't sound like any sort of contradiction with her views or an extreme anti-welfare position. Just because a policy is a terrible idea doesn't mean people shouldn't take advantage of it while it is in force. As a hypothetical, if the government took everyone's houses away and lotteried them back out out I'd say that was a terrible policy. I'd still be happy enough to move in to somewhere if I won a house though, because although the policy is appalling I'd rather be an owner than a renter and there aren't paths to owning. Ditto, Ayn would probably have preferred that she wasn't taxed in the first place, but if they're going to give some of the money back she'd be stupid not to take it and there is no moral problem for her while taxes >= welfare receipts.
- themafia 1y agoMy 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.
- emsign 1y agoThis is a realistic concern. I can't understand why peopleare downvoting it.
- matheweis 1y agoThere are at least two reasons: First is Hanlon’s Razor; “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity”. It appears to be especially applicable here. Second is that this kind of information (with far richer data) is already accessible to and used by corporations at scale; think credit bureaus, background checkers, etc.
- aeve890 1y ago>First is Hanlon’s Razor Those "razors" (Occam's, Hanlon's, etc) are just heuristics, not axioms. At what point you're supposed to stop assuming root cause is just stupidity? given the priors one can perfectly asume malice right away.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- tyleo 1y agoI agree with Hanlon’s Razor to some extent but it does fail to provide accountability, “they aren’t cruel, just incompetent so the behavior is okay.”
- 0xy 1y agoCopied from one secure S3 bucket to another secure S3 bucket, both inaccessible from the internet, both on SSA infrastructure. What exactly is the problem?
- billy99k 1y agoIt'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 1y agoWrong political party involved in doing it?
- jackstraw42 1y agoSurely this is ragebait.
- saagarjha 1y agoThere 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.
- afavour 1y ago> 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.
- Cthulhu_ 1y agoIt may be secure enough for being on S3, but that's not the whole definition of secure for government / SSNs, where there's (presumably) sheaves of paperwork explaining what exactly the storage needs to conform to and, more importantly, what paperwork and procedures need to be in place.