Whistleblower claims ex-DOGE member says he took Social Security data to new job

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/03/10/social-security-data-breach-doge-2/

by raldi • 4 months ago

624 230 4 months ago

I 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-20260303-0014• 4 months 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• 4 months ago

I'm pretty sure you can adjust the logic from "no one else" to "very very very few" and the logic just works the same...

simonw• 4 months ago

Even in your twenties would you have then taken that data and attempted to share it with a future employee?

saalweachter7• 4 months ago

I 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.

JKCalhoun3• 4 months ago

And further, I would absolutely leverage it to get myself a job.

Oh, wait. No I would never have done that. That's just insane.

freejazz2• 4 months ago

How would you get it in the first place?

saalweachter7• 4 months ago

I mean, insider risk is insider risk.

In the DOGE case, they specifically broke all the controls that existed to manage insider risk and keep people from making copies like this, but (especially 20-30 years ago) I've been on plenty of networks that just had no concept of insider risk and everything was just open for anyone to access (or protected by shared passwords everyone knew).

sigmar• 4 months ago

It may not have been your intent, but this comment seems to downplay the crime here. It's a crime to take the data even if he wasn't shopping it around as alleged. and the fact that he was 'young and stupid' makes the circumstances of how this happened much more important for an investigation by the IG (ie why was an immature person given so much power?)

swasheck• 4 months ago

yeah. ignorantia juris non excusat applies to both the speed limit and passive data theft

rz2k• 4 months ago

I think it’s a great reaction to news stories to imagine how you could have made the same bad decisions. Furthermore this public confession of being able to imagine making bad decisions might encourage a similarly minded to 20-something to wonder why an older version of themself is so afraid of even having such a dataset. It might even prompt someone to destroy some long forgotten cache of data they exfiltrated a long time ago.

I don’t think there’s a risk that it will influence a rare person in power to enforce the rules to go lighter. I just think it encourages people to be less reckless with hoarding data who might otherwise put themselves in danger.

dspillett3• 4 months ago

zero desire to keep any copy of work code or other data on any personal device

Same. I won't even have Teams or Authenticator on my phone unlike most others here (though wrt Teams, that is at least as much about not wanting work to bother me as it is about the danger of data seepage). I need the authenticator to do the job, but I have an old factory-reset phone that has that (and, just in case, Teams) on it.

But when I was younger? I could totally imagine getting a big juicy dataset like that and wanting a copy for myself.

I'm pretty sure I never would have done. I've always resisted knowing credentials and personal information that aren't mine (so if anything untoward happens with/using that information there is no way it can be my fault/doing, as well as the less selfish reasons) despite people falling over themselves to do things like tell me their passwords & such when they were wanting some for of tech support.

But I think there is a different attitude to data risk in that age group today. They've grown up in a world where very little is really private, and every app and its dog has wanted their contact details and other information (and all too often information about their friends & family), do the idea that data is a free-for-all is dangerously normalised in their heads.

I find older people are similarly very lax with their own data, in fact often being rather too trusting of others generally, but not so much with other peoples. There are a lot more people who are appropriately careful (or even paranoid) in their 30s/40s/50s (I'm late 40s myself) - I think we are lucky to be in the middle, being exposed to information dangers enough to not have that “naivety or age” and not desensitised by having lax information security pushed at us from an early age.

GJim3• 4 months ago

But I think there is a different attitude to data risk in that age group today. They've grown up in a world where very little is really private, and every app and its dog has wanted their contact details and other information

Counterpoint from a UK/EU perspective.....

Anybody new being onboarded is given (company compulsory) GDPR training if their role involves any handling or processing of personal data whatsoever. Data security and privacy is being treated quite seriously here; though unfortunately not seriously enough IMO.

enoint3• 4 months ago

Check out FreeOTP if you want an alternative to Google Autheticator.

elicash2• 4 months ago

I don't think you deserve downvotes; I think it's totally plausible that some people would steal this data just to feel special.

But:

1) That's why we have traditionally had the safeguards that we have had, to protect against this sort of crime, and

2) The allegation in this case is that he later approached coworkers to do something with this data, even if they ultimately didn't help him do it. So it doesn't appear to be hoarding just for the sake of it here.

saalweachter7• 4 months ago

I don't think you deserve downvotes

Speaking of things that have changed from my 20s, I also take internet points way less seriously than when I was sitting in a computer lab at 3am.

Now, I just double-check to make sure I didn't say anything I didn't want to and take it as a signal for how to be more clearly understood in the future; in this case a lot of people seemed to take what I wrote as a hypothesis about the motivation of the accused or a call for leniency, which wasn't what I was going for, but eh, live and learn.

Antibabelic• 4 months ago

So like Harold T. Martin who took 50 terabytes of data from the NSA because he was a data hoarder and was sentenced to nine years in prison?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_T._Martin

speefers• 4 months ago

"Martin reportedly stole the information simply by walking out of his various secure workplaces with it in his possession"

"secure" eh?

mothballed• 4 months ago

It's probably safe to assume any non-classified information you provide to the government is for sale on the dark web.

JKCalhoun3• 4 months ago

Like 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• 4 months ago

I mean, recently it's pretty safe to assume any classified information the government has is stored in a fucking bathroom and is for sale.

KingOfCoders• 4 months ago

Ex-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• 4 months ago

The 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!

hotsauceror2• 4 months ago

If 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.

wat100002• 4 months ago

While it's hard to overestimate the clownishness of this administration, I'd want to see the original wording of this denial before concluding that they said something that stupid, versus the author of this article paraphrasing it in a stupid manner. I'm not sure if this is what they're referring to, but the only response from the SSA that I found with a brief search doesn't say anything so foolish: https://dailycaller.com/2025/09/02/social-security-administr...

tw-20260303-0014• 4 months ago

Nothing nerve wrecking like that but come on. They claim "the information could not have been stolen because the security practices" but "evidence has been published online, is now available to anyone and therefore it is dangerous" is a clown situation. It doesn't matter how it happened, it happened. Them trying to dispute the method is a clown camp.

mrmanner• 4 months ago

I mean technically a flash drive could be "a secure environment walled-off from the internet"

NegativeLatency• 4 months ago

An intranet could be a secure environment walled off from the internet

croes2• 4 months ago

Technically they could claim it’s a backup

mcmcmc• 4 months ago

Hard disagree. How can it be “walled off” from the internet if it’s not connected? Despite the jokes, cutting access on its own is not the same as air gapping or a firewall. As soon as it’s plugged in there are zero controls.

hodgesrm• 4 months ago

You can't make that up.

Unfortunately it seems quite believable. This is the same outfit that fired a bunch of people responsible for overseeing the US Nuclear Arsenal. [0] The combination of arrogance and stupidity was breathtaking.

[0] https://thebulletin.org/2025/04/doges-staff-firing-fiasco-at...

tantalor3• 4 months ago

secure environment
copied to a flashdrive

Both of these cannot be true. A secure environment does not allow trivial data exfiltration over USB.

vntok2• 4 months ago

Maybe it wasn't trivial?

HillRat• 4 months ago

Contemporaneous reporting was that DOGE people demanded root-level access across multiple systems (disallowed by federal policy, so political appointees had to demand the access) and without background checks or onboarding, after which they extracted protected data and shoved it in some S3 buckets. Just blew a hole right through the entire federal data protection model; you can't plan for "the President orders everyone to ignore all privacy and security controls" as a threat model.

JKCalhoun3• 4 months ago

Also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47327367#47327394

And: https://archive.is/Mw5bh

lovich3• 4 months ago

oh lol, yet another article on this site flagged to death by the Muskites on this forum

shadowgovt• 4 months ago

This 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• 4 months ago

Fraud as governance. Cool.

jmyeet• 4 months ago

I'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

estearum3• 4 months ago

I 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%...

mwigdahl• 4 months ago

I 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.

lenerdenator3• 4 months ago

Cool. 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• 4 months ago

It would be lovely if they did that. I very much doubt it will happen in this administration, if at all

Natfan• 4 months ago

explain to me the incentives for the trump administration to do a complete 180 of crimes? why would they stop now?

axus• 4 months ago

Distract from crimes of those currently in favor?

lenerdenator3• 4 months ago

Removal 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.

pjc502• 4 months ago

Federal charging will be countermanded from the top, or pardoned. Got to wait at least four years.

collingreen• 4 months ago

That doesn't mean don't file them. Don't allow evil deeds to be done merely by threat - force immoral people to take the immoral action in public if they want to behave that way.

lenerdenator3• 4 months ago

Then do state or local charges.

fallinghawks• 4 months ago

Unfortunately, consequences have been largely absent for anyone in this administration since the last time they were in power. That's part of why this round they've been flaunting it so egregiously.

5upplied_demand3• 4 months ago

Can 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?

everdrive• 4 months ago

No they cannot. They don't offer real arguments, they make pre-textual arguments and they bullshit. (bullshit in the formal Harry G. Frankfurt sense of the word.) If an argument they make suits them, they will stand by that argument. If an argument ends up not suiting them, they will readily discard and fabricate a different justification.

So many years of dealing with this administration, and people are still attempting to point our hypocrisy and hold people to standards with regard to principle, past statements, character, etc. None of it will work here.

5upplied_demand3• 4 months ago

I agree. I'm not trying to point out the hypocrisy, it is obvious to anyone watching. I am more interested in testing the limits of how people will justify actions to themselves and others. It is fascinating to see the twisting happen in real time.

paxys• 4 months ago

"Musk says he'll fix the corrupt Democrat-run government and reduce two trillion in spending and given his track record I have no reason not to believe him."

Real quote from a friend when this whole thing was going down.

askl• 4 months ago

Given his track record, spending should be at four trillion now, right?

raverbashing• 4 months ago

A young programmer asked if he should go work for DOGE, or whether it would end in disaster. I told him that it would at least be interesting, and that if he was worried it would end in disaster, that was all the more reason to take the job. Maybe he could help prevent that.

https://xcancel.com/paulg/status/1888555241055948981

I guess this aged like Windows Me

miltonlost2• 4 months ago

I'd switch friends.

glaslong• 4 months ago

Given his track record of raising ever more money on idealistic claims only to deliver less and less... I think he delivered exactly as expected

jimt1234• 4 months ago

Musk's goal was never to reduce government spending or waste. It was to get unrestrained access to government spending data to serve his own goals.

It's a conspiracy theory - I don't have any real evidence to support it, but I tend to believe it.

croes2• 4 months ago

What does he say now?

pjc502• 4 months ago

Americans love their conmen.

Sabinus3• 4 months ago

People can be wrong or caught up in a movement. That's fine.

It's the way they react when proven wrong that's the most relevant. What does your friend say when confronted with the reality of DOGE and the general amateurism and incompetence of the Trump admin?

pwillia72• 4 months ago

“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. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.” ― Jean-Paul Sartre

MathMonkeyMan• 4 months ago

Anyone know where I can buy/borrow an ebook version of "Anti-Semite and Jew: An Exploration of the Etiology of Hate"? Can't find it anywhere.

SV_BubbleTime4• 4 months ago

I’m not sure the unsanctioned actions of an individual are the best attack that someone could make on the Trump administration.

I don’t believe anyone here if they say that is honestly a standard that they held through previous administrations.

I think there are plenty of ways to criticize Trump without abandoning my own principles.

miltonlost2• 4 months ago

SO you're not defending the administration, you're just attacking everyone who does attack it. Nice.

red_hare• 4 months ago

That person's actions were only possible because the administration explicitly decided to put that much unchecked power into poorly vetted individuals.

caconym_• 4 months ago

The Trump administration is 100% responsible for setting up the conditions where this kind of breach is effectively inevitable. They created "DOGE", staffed it with (among other specimens) teenage hackers with established records of malfeasance and names like "Big Balls"---presumably without any serious attempt at checking backgrounds and/or responding appropriately to any findings---and (by many accounts I've seen) granted them the authority to demand root level access to government systems without auditable logging or any other record of their actions. There appears to have been effectively zero oversight within "DOGE" itself, and the organization evidently failed to accomplish its stated goals by an enormous margin. AFAIK The Trump administration never publicly acknowledged any of this or took any visible steps to investigate the allegations.

If I was aware of any remotely comparable precedent in any recent administration, I would certainly criticize them for it. But the "DOGE" episode was so far beyond the pale that I can't think of anything else like it.

hsuduebc23• 4 months ago

If you enable reckless behavior, you are even hyping it I believe you are responsible for this behavior too.

5upplied_demand3• 4 months ago

the best attack that someone could make on the Trump administration.

It doesn't need to be, nor should we measure things against eachother by their ability to be used as an attack. We should measure this on it's own, based on what has happened.

In this case, an agency created by the President's Executive Order, that reports directly to the President made significant personnel and security access changes. There have been many security issues coming from that new personnel and department. If this doesn't fall on the administration, what does?

mrweasel2• 4 months ago

What 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• 4 months ago

Ad Tech, I would bet its ad tech.

Imustaskforhelp2• 4 months ago

If 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.

bpodgursky2• 4 months ago

Nobody in Ad Tech is going to risk jailtime for a slightly higher CPM.

afinlayson• 4 months ago

My understanding is stats canada gets offered a lot of money for this data after being anonymized. A lot of employers might not ask questions if someone had really good data they could use to help market their product. Especially politically aligned think tanks

mrweasel2• 4 months ago

Maybe not under the current administration, but that's the kind of risk that could kill your company, if you got caught. It might be why I'm not rich, but that seems like a massively irresponsible risk to take.

afavour• 4 months ago

If I had to make a wild guess, xAI. The article states they took a job at a government contractor.

It’s interesting (horrifying) to think of the implications actually. People wouldn’t buy this data directly, it’s too obviously illegally procured. But laundered through an LLM to provide “insights” without citation? That’s plausible deniability.

hsuduebc23• 4 months ago

Also meta or any other data broker.

dmschulman• 4 months ago

In addition to all the other answers here, foreign governments would fall over themselves to get this kind of data.

esseph• 4 months ago

"What kind of job would you realistically take this data to?"

Banks

Sales/Marketing

Healthcare

Palantir

xAI

Any social security scammers

Etc.

enoint3• 4 months ago

You can’t just donate these tables to the Republican Party; they’re evidence. You need to repack them for deniability. These will be used to cross-check if voters can be ruled vaguely ineligible.

joquarky2• 4 months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction

thiago_fm• 4 months ago

Americans 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• 4 months ago

Unlikely. Also it doesn't work well where it needed in the EU.

vibe_assassin• 4 months ago

The 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.

philipov• 4 months ago

Who are you to quote laws to those carrying swords?

Imustaskforhelp2• 4 months ago

The pen is mightier than the sword if the sword is very short, and the pen is very sharp.

- Terry Pratchett

shimman• 4 months ago

Don't know why this is getting downvoted, it's well known that DOGE had goons to forcibly remove people that stood in their way.

cyberax• 4 months ago

Usually the opposition party, once it gains power.

pwillia72• 4 months ago

I mean enforcing the laws on the books would be a good start. Corruption quickly breeds more and more corruption if it isn't rooted out and punished. Everyone who isn't corrupt starts losing and the benefits of not being corrupt evaporate

Steuard• 4 months ago

In principle, flagrant abuse of the pardon power is blocked by Congress's ability to impeach and remove a President who engages in such abuse.

In practice, that has always been an ineffective threat against Presidents who are within days of leaving office anyway. And more importantly, the framers of the Constitution seemed to have entirely failed to imagine a party like today's Republicans who value strict personal loyalty to the President over every other principle of government.

kjkjadksj2• 4 months ago

I wonder how anomalous this presidency really is. Trump is not the first strong man bullheaded president who engaged in cronyism and systemic corruption. Most people don’t know the history of presidents though especially from centuries past. Maybe this broken state of the office we observe today has always been a viable option for people who payed attention enough to see it and are also evil enough to use it. Maybe this power has been specifically maintained intentionally for some time. Like a big open secret for those tasked with approving laws.

wil4213• 4 months ago

The 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.

GJim3• 4 months ago

Many 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.

saltyoldman2• 4 months ago

I would have LOVED to have a Polymarket bet when Biden said he will NOT Pardon his son.

gslin2• 4 months ago

https://ghostarchive.org/archive/F9qjY

gslin2• 4 months ago

archive: https://ghostarchive.org/archive/F9qjY

aestetix3• 4 months 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?

WarmWash2• 4 months ago

The public is...unintelligent, and generally incapable of differentiating between an accusation and a conviction.

aestetix3• 4 months ago

There 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.

jsbisviewtiful• 4 months ago

Not like the current admin and AI companies are helping with that at all. Also, anyone in that department has brought great harm to the entire country and their employment should be public knowledge.

tastyface• 4 months ago

Every DOGE member is complicit, and every single name should be published. They knew what they were getting into.

ZeroGravitas2• 4 months ago

Something DOGE relied on when publicizing all those 300 year old people claiming benefits.

Who turned out not to exist.

Or when they put loshed that website full of their savings.

Which turned out not to exist.

mistrial9• 4 months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_of_the_Department_of_G...

aestetix3• 4 months ago

Oh wow! I hadn't seen that. That's really great! All of them should be listed there, and should have been public all along.

NicuCalcea• 4 months ago

They're not naming them because they haven't been able to confirm the wrongdoing, not because they can't publish the names of DOGE employees.

paul7986• 4 months ago

DOGE was headhunting me late July through end of December.

Their recruiters are all anonymous when they reach out as they do not provide their names. I constantly questioned to myself and them directly if they were legit even if their email address showed as RecruitingUSDS@doge.eop.gov (their public email address seen on USDS). The first recruiter I demanded a video call with and asked him to bob and weave his head (lol). He never gave me his last name (all his emails came from that public address and they signed their emails with first name only) but I found him on Linkedin. He was late 20s to late 30s. From there I was asked to do/turned in a case study and after the govt shutdown I was invited to interview with a DOGE employee whom then her email showed her full name. I didnt make it past her as there was another step in their process which is an in person interview at USDS's office or within another govt agency DOGE working at.

charcircuit3• 4 months ago

Such information would purely be used for harassment.

ipython4• 4 months ago

This admin has no problems doxxing people for harassment, listing their personal home address on official social media posts: https://x.com/dhsgov/status/1912567112733753563?s=46. So why the double standard?

kbos87• 4 months ago

It’s an allegation, and the names of alleged perpetrators of crimes are rarely protected like this. Certainly feels like special treatment.

ipython4• 4 months ago

Typically you prevent publishing the names of minors accused of a crime /s

That said there is a list by propublica: https://projects.propublica.org/elon-musk-doge-tracker/

estimator7292• 4 months ago

Because in a civilized society, everyone is presumed innocent until proven guilty and the accused are given some level of privacy until that happens.

withinboredom• 4 months ago

Say who? Literally the entire news media loves airing trials before they're proven innocent or guilty.

batch12• 4 months ago

Someone should tell that to the people who publish the gas station mugshot magazines.

sylos• 4 months ago

We no longer live in a civilized society

lazyasciiart• 4 months ago

But we are in the USA, where the majority of convicted criminals were never proven guilty because the system relies on coercing them into not going to trial.

joquarky2• 4 months ago

Civilized societies don't shut down the paths for people to air their grievances.

pstuart2• 4 months ago

"civilized" implies that everybody is playing by the rules. Those clowns were not playing by the rules.

starkparker• 4 months ago

If the Post named you as someone who did something, and you didn't do that thing, and that thing harmed you in some way, you would sue them. That would cost the Post money, and they obviously don't want to spend money on anything that their staff does.

ajross4• 4 months ago

I 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• 4 months ago

Yep, 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.

GuinansEyebrows5• 4 months ago

i 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.

ajross4• 4 months 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.

enoint3• 4 months ago

Posts predicting this were apparently flagged as "political". For example, Bruce Schneier's warning [0]. For a site called Hacker News, DOGE unfortunately attracted a different priority of notoriety than, say, the numerous merger and acquisition and VC maneuvers reaching the front page. If hacker punks nominally subvert the established order by flaunting laws and authorities, then DOGE was very much hacking. Tina Peters is an unsophisticated hacker punk, She doesn't live up to the social engineering chops of Kevin Mitnick, but her plan did involve a Geek Squad uniform. Legendary but too "political". Attracts too much noise, not enough signal. That's why you didn't see an elevation of the developed thoughts you're talking about.

Since the beginning of DOGE, it has not been especially bold to predict:

- DOGE will cost more than it saves. The seminal errors, mistaking $ millions for $ billions, world-write permissions on their Drupal site, etc. convinced us that we can't expect deliberate professionalism.

- The very first whistleblower, out of NTSB, convinced us that exfiltration was the goal. This is within the top 5 whistleblower stories here. The critical detail was their instruction that access logs be scrubbed.

- And the general public smelled it, too. No one doubts that threats against Tesla dealerships were civil libertarian radicals, not recently-fired USAID bean counters.

- When Peter Theil's FBI handler, Johnathan Buma, went whistleblower a few months into DOGE, it wasn't about Theil. He saw a Russian active measure influencing Musk's inner circle. One of Kash Patel's first acts as FBI director was to order Buma arrested.

So, the commentary worrying about "big tech" was commentary within Y Combinator's sphere.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43035977

ChrisArchitect• 4 months ago

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47327367

scroot• 4 months ago

This 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

adamors• 4 months ago

He 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.

Linkd• 4 months ago

Exactly. By repeatedly saying "the definition is exactly what the EO said," he’s essentially deflecting responsibility and shifting the accountability upstream.

helpfulclippy• 4 months ago

What 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.

Henchman212• 4 months ago

Its almost like the worst people among us have discovered that in high-trust societies if you have no morals you can engage in any behavior you wish.

watwut• 4 months ago

A little later, he explicitely says that documentary about WWII jewish female slaves is "inherently discriminatory" because it "amplifies marginalized voices".

Imo, he knew exactly what he means. Imo, he was told by a layer that is better to look like idiot then say what it means to him.

pstuart2• 4 months ago

I think it's both. The Right excels at grooming and propaganda and has effectively trained its flock that DEI is Affirmative Action v2, and that its goal is to take away jobs from white people who are the ones that deserve them, because white.

glitchc• 4 months ago

Society can only support so many sociopaths (~ 1 in 5) before it starts to collapse. We may have reached the tipping point.

neonate• 4 months ago

https://archive.is/Mw5bh

himata4113• 4 months ago

looking at 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• 4 months ago

Makes 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• 4 months ago

Also 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-sta...

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/06/07/starlin...

[3] https://www.wired.com/story/white-house-starlink-wifi/

DominoTree• 4 months 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

wil4213• 4 months ago

The 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• 4 months ago

They 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

lII1lIlI11ll• 4 months ago

The intelligence agencies should already have taps into Starlink and should be able see the data.

By "data" you mean seemingly random stream of 0s and 1s of bunch of TLS channels?

ydlr• 4 months ago

The films upset over Clinton's personal email address must have had their heads explode over this!

EchoReflection• 4 months 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 ↑ 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-...

"this too shall pass"

greatgib• 4 months ago

If 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.

Whistleblower claims ex-DOGE member says he took Social Security data to new job

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