A Clear And Present Danger -- Digby

[erronis]

https://digbysblog.net/2025/04/09/a-clear-and-present-danger-2/

I wrote about Elon’s Big Data Dream a month ago, discussing the idea that AI is a data suck and these programs are running out of it. The U.S. Government is a major depository of a whole lot of it that up until now has not been accessible to anyone who is unauthorized to have it, and was kept in small discrete chunks.

Well, it looks like Elon’s bringing it all together. The NY Times reports:

The federal government knows your mother’s maiden name and your bank account number. The student debt you hold. Your disability status. The company that employs you and the wages you earn there. And that’s just a start.

These intimate details about the personal lives of people who live in the United States are held in disconnected data systems across the federal government — some at the Treasury, some at the Social Security Administration and some at the Department of Education, among other agencies.

The Trump administration is now trying to connect the dots of that disparate information. Last month, President Trump signed an executive order calling for the “consolidation” of these segregated records, raising the prospect of creating a kind of data trove about Americans that the government has never had before, and that members of the president’s own party have historically opposed.

The effort is being driven by Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, and his lieutenants with the Department of Government Efficiency, who have sought access to dozens of databases as they have swept through agencies across the federal government. Along the way, they have elbowed past the objections of career staff, data security protocols, national security experts and legal privacy protections.

Musk doesn’t care about privacy or security. In fact, security is probably the last thing he wants since he wants to be able to access this information for his own purposes.

This is a major threat to our personal and national security and nobody’s doing anything to stop it. In fact, it’s probably too late already.

. . .

[Irish_Dem]

1. The best way to keep secrets secret is to compartmentalize them.

Everyone is on a total need to know basis.

Once you let everyone in the info loop, it is no longer confidential.

[erronis]

2. And that's exactly what putin/musk are doing - grabbing all information from as many sources

as they can. From different "compartments".

I'm guessing that on day 1 of the doge kids breaking in to various federal systems, the contents of the databases were transmitted to an off-shore data warehouse. Where it can be meticulously analyzed for how best to complete the destruction of the US "democratic experiment."

[Irish_Dem]

3. And sold to scammers who will have all the information they need to rob everyone.

DOGE was making money hand over fist from day one selling this data.

Yes our enemies also will have it.