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.
i understand that he did the nazi salute, but it seems disingenuous and unnecessarily provocative to call elon musk a nazi
musk is a kleptocrat/plutocrat who did the nazi salute for the purposes of generating controversy. it seems obvious to me that he's more interested in securing the success of his ventures than anything resembling 20th century fascism.
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.
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.
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.
Yes. The whole idea is very flawed. It would be good if we got rid of it entirely but most people can't mentally/emotionally/financially handle that so we end up with a lot of bad compromises.
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.
We really do need a third founding, the failure here is so dramatic. We've had congress and the court acquiesce to near unlimited lawlessness from the president as he takes direct and total command of the government apparatus. We have a president saying "I have the right to do anything I want. I'm the president." We have a president saying that that he even has the right to force state governments to do what he wants, as the states are mere agents of the federal government.
There is no way out of this other than a dramatic restructuring of the relationships between the three branches and the relationship between the president and the executive branch. The system that we all claimed was a check against tyranny has utterly folded in mere months.
What I wouldn't give for dems actually saying what they will do if they ever recover power again. Because the Biden strategy of "just hope Trump and ascendant fascism fades away and we never have to talk about it again" has been a clear failure.
What if the ones who are currently in control all of branches of government, that are transforming the US into a totalitarian state, don't want any restructuring that would limit such a transformation? What then?
I don't know. The core hope is that the dems can re-establish control and use that power to restructure the government to prevent totalitarianism.
If they cannot re-establish control or choose to do nothing meaningful with temporary power such that we repeat this again in 2032, then the country either completes its collapse into totalitarianism for a generation (or more) or there is a violent uprising alongside mass death. I pray that we escape this without either of those things happening, but I'm also making plans to be able to permanently leave the country if need be.
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.
I 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.
> There is no reason why in a society which has reached the general level of wealth which ours has attained the first kind of security should not be guaranteed to all without endangering general freedom. .... There can be no doubt that some minimum of food, shelter, and clothing, sufficient to preserve health and the capacity to work, can be assured to everybody. ... Nor is there any reason why the state should not assist the individual in providing for those common hazards of life against which, because of their uncertainty, few individuals can make adequate provision. Where, as in the case of sickness and accident, neither the desire to avoid such calamities nor the efforts to overcome their consequences are as a rule weakened by the provision of assistance – where, in short, we deal with genuinely insurable risks – the case for the state’s helping to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance is very strong.
That doesn't read like support for universal government funded healthcare. He's talking insurance in the more traditional meaning of the word where it involves unexpected catastrophes as opposed to the weird modernism in healthcare where it means paying for things that are likely to happen (or even volunteered for).
Eg, that quote doesn't involve government covering medical costs for someone in their old age.
He might even have been excluding things like catching the flu, seeing the doctor and needing a week off work since he's talking about things people could not make adequate provisions for on their own.
Yeah, there are going to be differing interpreations of "common hazards of life" and "adequate provision". But it certainly sounds like he's advocating state-funded healthcare for e.g. cancer, which is very different to what many modern libertarians believe.
Maybe; he is advocating for a safety net. But I note he didn't say that either and, being an economist, he would probably have had the standard reservations - what exactly is the upper limit of care being provided to someone for "cancer"? It is very vague. If people still sometimes die of cancer when spending $X there is always room to spend $X+1 until the money runs out. No entity in existence can cover that sort of cost. If we lose the lighthouse of the free market pricing then it isn't at all clear how we'd work out what is reasonable.
The "genuinely insurable risks" and "few individuals can make adequate provision" comments he made in that quote are serious caveats on what he said. He clearly isn't advocating for what would be called universal state-funded healthcare in the modern context. He appears to be talking about a bare-bones public insurance scheme [0] for certain rare events where he didn't go into detail on what he thinks is reasonable to cover. I'd like it if everyone reverted to that sort of scheme, any English speaking country could get a tax break if they went back to that sort of system. The expectation would be that most people don't use it.
[0] Actual insurance, not this modern scheme of branding a welfare system as "insurance" to fake that it is financially responsible.
> what exactly is the upper limit of care being provided to someone for "cancer"? It is very vague.
It is light on detail but that feels tangential to me? Much like private insurance schemes, state healthcare systems necessarily have a limit on care/expense.
> He clearly isn't advocating for what would be called universal state-funded healthcare in the modern context ... He appears to be talking about ... certain rare events
He uses terms like "common hazards of life", "the case of sickness", and "comprehensive social insurance". I find it hard to believe this doesn't include assistance for the most common health issues like arthritis, diabetes, cancer, and so on.
We're talking about one vague paragraph in a book that was making a lot of heavy arguments against any level of government planning. It isn't at all clear he was talking about any of those specific things.
"common hazards of life against which, because of their uncertainty, few individuals can make adequate provision" does not technically include arthritis, diabetes, cancer and so on. Most people can make adequate provisions against those things. The median wage in the west is north of $50,000 - that is a huge amount of slack available for saving for the likelihood of sickness.
And insurance in that passage probably means actual insurance. The modern conception of universal government funded healthcare is a long way from that.
If you focus on specific phrases I'm certainly happy to admit it is a reasonable read. The issue is in context of the entire sentences and, indeed, the nature of the book itself it isn't the most likely meaning of the passage. He's not advocating for universal, government funded healthcare in the sense that it gets used in modern everyday conversation.
> 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.
Assuming that integrity and hypocrisy don't play any part in judging a person.
I don't recall the details of Ayn's moral arguments because they aren't of great interest to me, but there just isn't a fundamental inconsistency between campaigning against welfare and accepting welfare. There isn't any hypocrisy in pointing out that something creates horrible incentives, then doing what the incentives suggest. If anything it is a great show of consistency in belief.
The alternative position would be kinda crazy. It'd be pretty close to "The government has injured me and therefore I will make myself even worse off for no reason or gain to anyone!"
You have literally, repeatedly demonstrated you don’t understand what principles or integrity mean. Your “crazy” position is literally it. You are simply greedy: well if everyone else is doing it so should I. That is panic mode caused by a real trauma from scarcity. Or naivety. Or cringe apathy. Or mild sociopathy.
> You are simply greedy: well if everyone else is doing it so should I.
But that isn't hypocrisy. Ayn's philosophical position was comfortable with the idea that everyone is greedy and her moral arguments were rooted in the observation that people will generally do what they can. It isn't reasonable to call someone a hypocrite or lacking integrity if they lay out a high-integrity moral position then stick to it. It isn't even a fallacy as much as an argument-from-not-listening-to-what-she-said.
This isn't complicated. If you pay $100 in taxes to the government then draw $80 in cheques from the government it'd be a rare anti-tax argument that has a moral problem with the $80 part. Most would argue the number should be $100 and might make an argument that the $20 disappeared in beurecratic overheads.
You know last time I was laid off, and this time too actually, I haven't figured out where these social safety nets are. I could have really used it last time too, that was a significant struggle.
I don't think it's actually intended to be helpful and probably needs to go away.
Because they won't fund it properly, thats the plan, underfund things or reduce funding to make them break, then people will say to get rid of it entirely.
> 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."
It 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.
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.
"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..............
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.
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.
Is there talk about DOGE working to combine various government databases as a new data project for the government?
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i understand that he did the nazi salute, but it seems disingenuous and unnecessarily provocative to call elon musk a nazi
musk is a kleptocrat/plutocrat who did the nazi salute for the purposes of generating controversy. it seems obvious to me that he's more interested in securing the success of his ventures than anything resembling 20th century fascism.
If one wants to be called a nazi, one should not be surprised by their results.
If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck...
This is a realistic concern. I can't understand why peopleare downvoting it.
There 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.
>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.
I 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.”
Link in case the pro-DOGE brigade brings it down: https://www.npr.org/2025/08/26/nx-s1-5517977/social-security...
Discussion (123 points, 16 hours ago, 54 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45026372
Perhaps it is time that the US stops relying on SSNs being “secret”…
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.
They should be considered unique (public) usernames
My understanding is that they're not even guaranteed to be unique.
Yup. They get reused, and people can get new ones or sometimes multiple at the same time...
Why? Are they stupid?
Yes. The whole idea is very flawed. It would be good if we got rid of it entirely but most people can't mentally/emotionally/financially handle that so we end up with a lot of bad compromises.
ED25519 keys being short and quick to generate makes this state of affairs infuriating whenever it turns up - SSNs, credit card numbers etc.
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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.
We really do need a third founding, the failure here is so dramatic. We've had congress and the court acquiesce to near unlimited lawlessness from the president as he takes direct and total command of the government apparatus. We have a president saying "I have the right to do anything I want. I'm the president." We have a president saying that that he even has the right to force state governments to do what he wants, as the states are mere agents of the federal government.
There is no way out of this other than a dramatic restructuring of the relationships between the three branches and the relationship between the president and the executive branch. The system that we all claimed was a check against tyranny has utterly folded in mere months.
What I wouldn't give for dems actually saying what they will do if they ever recover power again. Because the Biden strategy of "just hope Trump and ascendant fascism fades away and we never have to talk about it again" has been a clear failure.
What if the ones who are currently in control all of branches of government, that are transforming the US into a totalitarian state, don't want any restructuring that would limit such a transformation? What then?
I don't know. The core hope is that the dems can re-establish control and use that power to restructure the government to prevent totalitarianism.
If they cannot re-establish control or choose to do nothing meaningful with temporary power such that we repeat this again in 2032, then the country either completes its collapse into totalitarianism for a generation (or more) or there is a violent uprising alongside mass death. I pray that we escape this without either of those things happening, but I'm also making plans to be able to permanently leave the country if need be.
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.
Hard to make a lot of money when the government provides good services for free.
Hard 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!
I 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.
In "The Road to Serfdom":
> There is no reason why in a society which has reached the general level of wealth which ours has attained the first kind of security should not be guaranteed to all without endangering general freedom. .... There can be no doubt that some minimum of food, shelter, and clothing, sufficient to preserve health and the capacity to work, can be assured to everybody. ... Nor is there any reason why the state should not assist the individual in providing for those common hazards of life against which, because of their uncertainty, few individuals can make adequate provision. Where, as in the case of sickness and accident, neither the desire to avoid such calamities nor the efforts to overcome their consequences are as a rule weakened by the provision of assistance – where, in short, we deal with genuinely insurable risks – the case for the state’s helping to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance is very strong.
That doesn't read like support for universal government funded healthcare. He's talking insurance in the more traditional meaning of the word where it involves unexpected catastrophes as opposed to the weird modernism in healthcare where it means paying for things that are likely to happen (or even volunteered for).
Eg, that quote doesn't involve government covering medical costs for someone in their old age.
He might even have been excluding things like catching the flu, seeing the doctor and needing a week off work since he's talking about things people could not make adequate provisions for on their own.
Yeah, there are going to be differing interpreations of "common hazards of life" and "adequate provision". But it certainly sounds like he's advocating state-funded healthcare for e.g. cancer, which is very different to what many modern libertarians believe.
Maybe; he is advocating for a safety net. But I note he didn't say that either and, being an economist, he would probably have had the standard reservations - what exactly is the upper limit of care being provided to someone for "cancer"? It is very vague. If people still sometimes die of cancer when spending $X there is always room to spend $X+1 until the money runs out. No entity in existence can cover that sort of cost. If we lose the lighthouse of the free market pricing then it isn't at all clear how we'd work out what is reasonable.
The "genuinely insurable risks" and "few individuals can make adequate provision" comments he made in that quote are serious caveats on what he said. He clearly isn't advocating for what would be called universal state-funded healthcare in the modern context. He appears to be talking about a bare-bones public insurance scheme [0] for certain rare events where he didn't go into detail on what he thinks is reasonable to cover. I'd like it if everyone reverted to that sort of scheme, any English speaking country could get a tax break if they went back to that sort of system. The expectation would be that most people don't use it.
[0] Actual insurance, not this modern scheme of branding a welfare system as "insurance" to fake that it is financially responsible.
> what exactly is the upper limit of care being provided to someone for "cancer"? It is very vague.
It is light on detail but that feels tangential to me? Much like private insurance schemes, state healthcare systems necessarily have a limit on care/expense.
> He clearly isn't advocating for what would be called universal state-funded healthcare in the modern context ... He appears to be talking about ... certain rare events
He uses terms like "common hazards of life", "the case of sickness", and "comprehensive social insurance". I find it hard to believe this doesn't include assistance for the most common health issues like arthritis, diabetes, cancer, and so on.
We're talking about one vague paragraph in a book that was making a lot of heavy arguments against any level of government planning. It isn't at all clear he was talking about any of those specific things.
"common hazards of life against which, because of their uncertainty, few individuals can make adequate provision" does not technically include arthritis, diabetes, cancer and so on. Most people can make adequate provisions against those things. The median wage in the west is north of $50,000 - that is a huge amount of slack available for saving for the likelihood of sickness.
And insurance in that passage probably means actual insurance. The modern conception of universal government funded healthcare is a long way from that.
If you focus on specific phrases I'm certainly happy to admit it is a reasonable read. The issue is in context of the entire sentences and, indeed, the nature of the book itself it isn't the most likely meaning of the passage. He's not advocating for universal, government funded healthcare in the sense that it gets used in modern everyday conversation.
> 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.
Assuming that integrity and hypocrisy don't play any part in judging a person.
I don't recall the details of Ayn's moral arguments because they aren't of great interest to me, but there just isn't a fundamental inconsistency between campaigning against welfare and accepting welfare. There isn't any hypocrisy in pointing out that something creates horrible incentives, then doing what the incentives suggest. If anything it is a great show of consistency in belief.
The alternative position would be kinda crazy. It'd be pretty close to "The government has injured me and therefore I will make myself even worse off for no reason or gain to anyone!"
You have literally, repeatedly demonstrated you don’t understand what principles or integrity mean. Your “crazy” position is literally it. You are simply greedy: well if everyone else is doing it so should I. That is panic mode caused by a real trauma from scarcity. Or naivety. Or cringe apathy. Or mild sociopathy.
> You are simply greedy: well if everyone else is doing it so should I.
But that isn't hypocrisy. Ayn's philosophical position was comfortable with the idea that everyone is greedy and her moral arguments were rooted in the observation that people will generally do what they can. It isn't reasonable to call someone a hypocrite or lacking integrity if they lay out a high-integrity moral position then stick to it. It isn't even a fallacy as much as an argument-from-not-listening-to-what-she-said.
This isn't complicated. If you pay $100 in taxes to the government then draw $80 in cheques from the government it'd be a rare anti-tax argument that has a moral problem with the $80 part. Most would argue the number should be $100 and might make an argument that the $20 disappeared in beurecratic overheads.
Ayn Rand was a hypocrite and thus an idiot.
You know last time I was laid off, and this time too actually, I haven't figured out where these social safety nets are. I could have really used it last time too, that was a significant struggle.
I don't think it's actually intended to be helpful and probably needs to go away.
Because they won't fund it properly, thats the plan, underfund things or reduce funding to make them break, then people will say to get rid of it entirely.
When something pretty clearly isn't working I don't think the answer is more of it.
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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?
> 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.
It 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.
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.
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.
Wrong political party involved in doing it?
Surely this is ragebait.
It'd hard to believe anything NPR reports about the current administration because they defunded them.
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.
"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..............
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.