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Whistleblower claims ex-DOGE member says he took Social Security data to new job
- samrus 7mo ago[flagged]
- mothballed 7mo agoIt's probably safe to assume any non-classified information you provide to the government is for sale on the dark web.
- JKCalhoun 7mo agoLike the stolen-art market, I wonder if anyone with a large zip file of fake data could sell it as the "DOGE files" and make mucho crypto.
- pixl97 7mo agoI mean, recently it's pretty safe to assume any classified information the government has is stored in a fucking bathroom and is for sale.
- cbradford 7mo ago[flagged]
- saalweachter 7mo agoI feel like when I was a twenty- something I would have been at risk of exfiltrating data like this not for any specific nefarious purpose or money-making scheme but just out of data hoarding. Anymore I have zero desire to keep any copy of work code or other data on any personal device. Nope, never gonna need it, don't want it, just a potential legal headache with no upside. But when I was younger? I could totally imagine getting a big juicy dataset like that and wanting a copy for myself. It'd make me feel special, having information no one else had.
- tw-20260303-001 7mo ago> having information no one else had A broken logic. Of course the people who you would have stolen the data from, had it. A question pops up, though... what's in your possession you should not be in the possession of.
- kreco 7mo agoI'm pretty sure you can adjust the logic from "no one else" to "very very very few" and the logic just works the same...
- tw-20260303-001 7mo agoYeah, I'm pretty sure.
- simonw 7mo agoEven in your twenties would you have then taken that data and attempted to share it with a future employee?
- saalweachter 7mo agoI don't think I would have offered to sell it or accepted an offer to buy it, but I think I could have easily been talked into sharing it, in a "I think my boss is a cool guy and I want him to like me and/or impress him" situation. I'm not doing anything wrong! It's not like I'm selling it! I'm just showing off the cool data no one else has! I'm saving the day, probably, by letting us solve a problem with my cool data that would be impossible otherwise.
- estearum 7mo agoThis is why we normally have hiring standards for USG. I had access to insane amounts of highly sensitive data as an early 20-y/o and never once felt inclined to share it or brag about it with anyone. Hiring processes around these roles should distinguish between past-me and past-you.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- KingOfCoders 7mo agoEx-employee alleges data copied to a flashdrive. Agency: "Social Security initially denied Borges’s allegations and said the data referenced in his complaint is stored in a secure environment walled-off from the internet." Ah walled of the internet, so no one can get there and copy the data to a flashdrive. Move on, move on! You can't make that up.
- doomboiardee 7mo agoThe only way someone could get that data is if they demanded physical access and fired anyone who stood in the way. An impossible task if you ask me!
- hotsauceror 7mo agoIf I recall, that was exactly what happened early on in DOGE's tenure. Senior personnel were explicitly directed to grant admin access to DOGE personnel, and auditing/logging were disabled. This was widely reported at the time. I don't remember whether there were threats of termination, but it would not surprise me.
- lelandbatey 7mo agoYes, that's the joke
- hotsauceror 7mo agoSorry. I started switching off of coffee this week...
- FireBeyond 7mo agoThe "fun" thing was when some agencies started then seeing access attempts from Russian IPs sometimes as soon as 15 minutes after this happened, using credentials that were valid and created by/for DOGE people...
- 7mo ago
- JKCalhoun 7mo agoAlso: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47327367#47327394 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47327367#47327394 And: https://archive.is/Mw5bh https://archive.is/Mw5bh
- lovich 7mo agooh lol, yet another article on this site flagged to death by the Muskites on this forum
- baggachipz 7mo ago[flagged]
- shadowgovt 7mo agoThis is probably a good time to mention that they court-martialed Chelsea Manning for exfiltrating Army documents. I have a sinking suspicion this engineer won't see the inside of a jail cell.
- throw4847285 7mo agoFraud as governance. Cool.
- jmyeet 7mo agoI've always wondered what the endgame of that farce was. Cost-cutting was clearly always a pretense and a bad one at that. There's made up claims about 300 year olds getting Social Security but I think this only proves that the SSA database was an explicit goal and that was cover. But why? The only conclusion I can come to is "stealing elections". I'll include this partial list I made of Republican voter suppression efforts going back decades [1]. I believe out there someone is collecting all this data into an AI model to predict how people will vote, something that Cambridge Analytica was a toy version of. But it goes beyond how people will vote but whether they will vote. Likewise, data will be constructed to strike off people from voter rolls if the system believes they won't vote how you want. We've seen efforts like this where similar-sounding names of felons in other states are used to strike off people from voter rolls. And that's a real problem because people might not know they're no longer registered to vote and in some states you have to register 30 or more days before the election. There is essentially infinite money available to fund Republicans stealing elections because it results in public funding cuts to give even more tax breaks to billionaires. You can't directly use the SSA databsae obviously so any effort must be small enough to not draw attention, involve part or all of the computing done overseas to avoid legal scrutiny and/or "washing" that data through data provider services. I would bet if you started exhaustively looking at various companies in or adjacent to these spaces, you'd find some pretty dodgy stuff. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47053453 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47053453
- estearum 7mo agoI think a lot of these people are literally dumb. Or so naive or Twitter-brained that they're effectively dumb. https://www.onthewing.org/user/Bonhoeffer%20-%20Theory%20of%20Stupidity.pdf https://www.onthewing.org/user/Bonhoeffer%20-%20Theory%20of%...
- mwigdahl 7mo agoI think it's simpler than that. I believe (as some others do) that DOGE was a useful piece of theater to distract the media while the Administration got down to business implementing a huge number of executive orders to roll back social protections and establish control over the civil service. This would have been a lot more controversial without Musk acting as a lightning rod for press coverage.
- lenerdenator 7mo agoCool. Investigate it. If they really did take data off a government system without permission, charge them with the most serious thing you can find in a district where they're likely to be convicted. Then send them to prison to delete years or decades off their lives. See if Musk was in any way involved, or acted with such reckless disregard for known security standards that he could be civilly or criminally liable. Do the same as above for him. The only way this stops is if consequences are introduced.
- voidUpdate 7mo agoIt would be lovely if they did that. I very much doubt it will happen in this administration, if at all
- Natfan 7mo agoexplain to me the incentives for the trump administration to do a complete 180 of crimes? why would they stop now?
- axus 7mo agoDistract from crimes of those currently in favor?
- lenerdenator 7mo agoRemoval of their personal freedom for months, years, or decades. Did this joker take things from a computer that they weren't supposed to while in a state that has laws against that sort of thing? If so, have a local prosecutor build up a case, and arrest and charge them. The Supremacy Clause should be tested in this way.
- pjc50 7mo agoFederal charging will be countermanded from the top, or pardoned. Got to wait at least four years.
- collingreen 7mo ago
- 5upplied_demand 7mo agoCan any of the administration's defenders explain to me how this is actually a good thing and not the exact thing people were warning about a year ago?
- antonymoose 7mo ago[flagged]
- superxpro12 7mo agoYou're right. This administration has done nothing but sit on it's laurels the past 2 years. I think given the performance of DOGE, the wars, the executive orders, the epstein files, we can make a SMALL logical stretch here and assume, FOR THE MOMENT, that this happened.
- antonymoose 7mo ago[flagged]
- BrokenCogs 7mo agoCan you give examples of a few allegation stories that have been later retracted, in relation to the current administration?
- sieep 7mo ago[flagged]
- 5upplied_demand 7mo agoNeither of these involved legal allegations later proving to be false, they were simple news story retractions (just like Fox News did Sunday with Trump's dignified transfer performance [0]). The topic at hand was a whistleblower report, which would have serious ramifications if proven false. It isn't apples-to-apples. [0] https://thehill.com/homenews/media/fox-news-donald-trump-dignified-transfer/ https://thehill.com/homenews/media/fox-news-donald-trump-dig...
- mrweasel 7mo agoWhat kind of job would you realistically take this data to? What company would even so much as look at data procured in this manor. I can think of one that's evil enough and probably have the protection of the US government, but it's not like they could acquire the data directly, if it was necessary.
- jeffwask 7mo agoAd Tech, I would bet its ad tech.
- Imustaskforhelp 7mo agoIf this goes within the Ad Tech industry and knowing how Ad tech industry is, I don't feel quite surprised if we might see foreign adversarial nation buying the Social Security data from Ad tech/ (this Doge person in general either directly or through multiple layers) even in secretive manner at this point. Either way this data is definitely going to spread behind closed doors.
- bpodgursky 7mo agoNobody in Ad Tech is going to risk jailtime for a slightly higher CPM.
- MeetingsBrowser 7mo agoI think you are more correct than you realize
- NickC25 7mo agoI disagree - it's 100% a factor of how much money you have to pay in legal fees. Zuck would be happy to take that data, and because he's worth a cool $350 billion, he'll do whatever the fuck he wants with that data, and we'll thank him by cutting his taxes. You think Donald Trump would put him in jail?
- bpodgursky 7mo ago
- thiago_fm 7mo agoAmericans are about to find out why data protection laws exist in the EU, and why even the government has to follow it. Nobody should have permission to query 70M Americans, it's a huge security flaw for the average citizen. But Pentagon has been doing this for a while a la Snowden, and the average american doesn't seem to be worried. With Snowden becoming a menace rather than a hero. Once private government data from Americans starts being heavily used to mess up elections, or even worse, persecute people with a different opinion than the ruling party... Americans will finally wake up that GDPR doesn't stiffle innovation, but rather protect its citizens from an evil actors. But it may be too late, like when NSDAP started chasing jews and migrants. There was nothing they could do other than to flee to survive.
- betaby 7mo agoUnlikely. Also it doesn't work well where it needed in the EU.
- vibe_assassin 7mo agoThe US has laws to handle stuff like this. The real problem is that the pardon power is completely broken and it needs to be removed.
- wil421 7mo agoThe Feds love to wait. I doubt the next president will be as lenient with pardoning. Maybe there’s a market I can bet on pardoning.
- GJim 7mo agoMany of us would like you to be right about that. However, the people of the USA voted for Trump. Twice. I fear things have changed and Trump'ism is here to stay.
- rstuart4133 7mo ago> I fear things have changed and Trump'ism is here to stay. The first time they got Trump lite. They didn't like him, and ditched him after one term. The next president has the misfortune to get elected during a worldwide recession. They liked the recession even less than they liked Trump lite. So they re-elected Trump lite. But they've now found the person they re-elected was Trump heavy. He's doubled down on all the things they disliked about Trump lite, and will probably land them in a recession entirely of his own making. I'd be stunned if Trump heavy or anybody following in his footsteps won an election for a decade or two. Memories will have to fade.
- Spivak 7mo agoGuess we'll find out at the midterms if you're right, I certainly hope so. We're at the point where even the major policy differences between Democrats and Republicans are insubstantial compared to just getting people in office that aren't openly mustache twirlingly corrupt.
- saltyoldman 7mo ago
- gslin 7mo agohttps://ghostarchive.org/archive/F9qjY https://ghostarchive.org/archive/F9qjY
- gslin 7mo agoarchive: https://ghostarchive.org/archive/F9qjY https://ghostarchive.org/archive/F9qjY
- aestetix 7mo ago> The Post is not naming the former DOGE member or company because it has not independently confirmed the accusations in the complaint. Why not? Shouldn't the public be allowed to learn who all the DOGE employees were? Federal employees are public record, are they not?
- WarmWash 7mo agoThe public is...unintelligent, and generally incapable of differentiating between an accusation and a conviction.
- aestetix 7mo agoThere are two stories here. One is the alleged wrongdoing. The second is the fact that the Washington Post has a name of a former DOGE employee. I'm far more interested in the second story than the first.
- WarmWash 7mo agoAsking for a list of all DOGE employees is different than asking for the name of the single accused employee. It wouldn't make any sense for the media to publish a list of every DOGE employee in the context of this story.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- ajross 7mo agoRight, because indiscriminately hoovering data about people and their activities and affiliations for the benefit of someone else is clearly immoral. Oh, wait.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- jsbisviewtiful 7mo ago
- paxys 7mo ago[flagged]
- ajross 7mo agoI knew it. I was saying from the instant they started we'd have a scandal like this. Bunch of tech bros walking into the government with personal MBPs and administrative authority to demand data from anyone and everyone was a privacy crisis happening in real time. Yet here on HN, what have we been arguing about? Big tech. Google and Meta have been allowed to become boogeymen in this community out of all proportion to the actual threat they posed[1]. While the actual boogeyman stealing our data to exploit in the market? It was us. [1] I mean, lets be honest, while everyone has abstract complaints the truth is that they've actually been remarkably benign stewards of our data over the past 20 years. Much, much, MUCH more responsible than the glibertarian dude in the cubicle next to you, as it turns out.
- troyvit 7mo agoYep, and we're only hearing about this because in this case there was a whistleblower. Call me cynical but I'm sure that there is plenty of data DOGE workers exfiltrated from SSA and other places that we'll never directly know about.
- GuinansEyebrows 7mo agoi dunno. NSA letters are a real thing and i have no reason to believe there's not at least some exfiltration of personal data from "big tech" to other actors.
- ajross 7mo ago> have no reason to believe there's not at least some exfiltration Is it genuinely your opinion that that activity (just look at all the equivocation!) constitutes a risk at the same level as alleged by the linked article? This is exactly what I'm talking about. HN has a tunnel vision disease on this subject. "Yes yes, DOGE bros stole the SSA database, but let's please talk about how awful Google is." It's clinical at this point.
- GuinansEyebrows 7mo agoyes, 641A being the prime example, but i suppose it depends on how wide a net you cast to define "risk". plus: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/03/targeted-advertising-gives-your-location-government-just-ask-cbp https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/03/targeted-advertising-g... i'm not saying it's not like these big tech firms don't have their hands legally tied by NSA letters, but that's entirely divorced from whether i trust them to steward my data.
- ChrisArchitect 7mo agoPreviously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47327367 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47327367
- mnmnmn 7mo ago[dead]
- scroot 7mo agoThis comes on the heels of the AHA and other parties in the suit against the government posting the video depositions of some of the DOGE people to youtube [1], which are fascinating to watch. Justin Fox not being able to say what DEI is really tells you everything you need to know about how grants were cancelled. [1] https://www.youtube.com/@historiansorg https://www.youtube.com/@historiansorg
- adamors 7mo agoHe says it just fine. It's about "females" and "elevating the voices of marginalised groups" that he thinks is clearly "discriminatory". Don't think for a second that these people are dumb, they knowingly support this, just refuse to incriminate themselves further in front of people who can hold them accountable. It's no accident that he tries to sound like Musk.
- helpfulclippy 7mo agoWhat I hate about it is that I listen to that and hear not so much actual brazen idiocy, as yet another example of flaws in an obviously defective process being exploited to deflect accountability. The meta for depositions at this point is such that the ideal witness is a lot like someone who has just experienced severe head trauma. They can sound insane, idiotic, clueless, lazy, forgetful, obtuse, anything in the world except liable.
- 7mo ago
- glitchc 7mo agoSociety can only support so many sociopaths (~ 1 in 5) before it starts to collapse. We may have reached the tipping point.
- neonate 7mo agohttps://archive.is/Mw5bh https://archive.is/Mw5bh
- bitroughj 7mo ago[flagged]
- himata4113 7mo agolooking at https://doge.gov https://doge.gov seems to be defunct for around 7 months now? Also a little bit of review made me learn that doge.gov/spend is wrong lol.
- rglover 7mo agoMakes sense. IMO it was always a wank operating as a smoke screen while access was given to private parties that couldn't get it through legal/traditional means. This story increases the probability quite a bit.
- lateforwork 7mo agoAlso relevant: The DOGE team set up a Starlink satellite at the White House [1]. DOGE staff installed the terminal on the Eisenhower Executive Office Building roof in February 2025 without notifying White House communications or cybersecurity teams, ignoring their prior warnings [2]. The resulting "Starlink Guest" Wi-Fi used only a password—no usernames or two-factor authentication—unlike standard networks requiring full VPN tunneling and device logging. This allowed devices to evade monitoring, transmit untracked data outside secure channels, and potentially enable leaks or hacks, as noted by former officials and experts like ex-NSA hacker Jake Williams. A confrontation ensued with Secret Service when DOGE accessed the roof unannounced [3]. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/17/us/politics/elon-musk-starlink-white-house.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/17/us/politics/elon-musk-sta... [2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/06/07/starlink-white-house-security-doge-musk/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/06/07/starlin... [3] https://www.wired.com/story/white-house-starlink-wifi/ https://www.wired.com/story/white-house-starlink-wifi/
- DominoTree 7mo ago> This allowed devices to evade monitoring, transmit untracked data outside secure channels, and potentially enable leaks or hacks Pretty sure that was the point
- wil421 7mo agoThe intelligence agencies should already have taps into Starlink and should be able see the data. Whether do anything is another story. Or Starlink uses an encryption scheme somewhere in the network only the big boys can break.
- halJordan 7mo agoThey don't "just have taps" in whatever isp you come across. And they certainly, and i cannot be clear enough on this, they don't just spy on Americans. It's literally the one thing they expressly forbidden from doing
- 7mo ago
- EchoReflection 7mo ago-Overall, we rate the New York Times Left-Center biased based on wording and story selection that moderately favors the left. - Overall, we rate The Washington Post as Left-Center biased based on editorial positions that moderately favor the left. Due to a few failed fact checks, they earn a Mostly Factual rating. - Wired: These media sources have a slight to moderate liberal bias. They often publish factual information that utilizes loaded words (wording that attempts to influence an audience by using appeal to emotion or stereotypes) to favor liberal causes. These sources are generally trustworthy for information but may require further investigation. https://youtu.be/tRq-vVptMOk?si=t6xzvtqdhOZm80un https://youtu.be/tRq-vVptMOk?si=t6xzvtqdhOZm80un ↑ Victor Davis Hanson: The Left’s Rage is a Symptom of a Movement in Decline https://profrjstarr.com/the-psychology-of-us/the-need-to-be-offended-a-psychological-look-at-outrage-culture https://profrjstarr.com/the-psychology-of-us/the-need-to-be-... "this too shall pass"
- greatgib 7mo agoIf we need to sum up the state of gov now I would pick the following quote: He told another colleague, who refused to help him upload the data because of legal concerns, that he expected to receive a presidential pardon if his actions were deemed to be illegal, according to the complaint.