John Skiles Skinner

Oh dang, this is so far overdue but still so badly needed

Privacy was the norm at government agencies before Trump 2. It's hard to explain how hard Musk and DOGE busted through all the safeguards.

"'This is absolutely the worst-case scenario,' Borges told The Post. 'There could be one or a million copies of it, and we will never know now.'"

Whistleblower claims ex-DOGE member says he took Social Security data to new job The Social Security inspector general’s office is investigating allegations that the former DOGE engineer took sensitive data on a thumb drive in a major potential security breach, said people familia...

Events so far:

Whistleblower @chuckborges.bsky.social claims DOGE kids illegally copied your Social Security data

Tech bros at SSA deny it

Then they admit it

Another whistleblower claims DOGE kid took the data to a new job at a private company

Tech bros at SSA deny it

What's next?

Looks like the situation was even worse than @chuckborges.bsky.social knew

Holy shit - this would be very, very bad:
"The databases, called “Numident” and the “Master Death File,” include records for more than 500 million living and dead Americans, including Social Security numbers, places and dates of birth, citizenship, race and ethnicity, and parents’ names."

To destroy each government agency, Musk would install his people (covert DOGE) in top agency roles, then send in a non-covert DOGE team to "consult"

Together they would announce "DOGE and the agency have agreed to massive cuts"

But that's no agreement, it's just DOGE on both sides of the deal

When DOGE needed executive power it was USDS, a previously-excellent government tech shop that DOGE parasitized for this purpose. When it needed to avoid responsibility it was a vague "policy agenda" containing no real people.

So, one answer: DOGE is no one.

Another answer: DOGE is all the people who are refusing to answer questions about DOGE.

Slack messages between me and Thomas Shedd

I also directly demanded clarity, several times, on the role of DOGE and Elon Musk at GSA. But I just got the run-around, same as everyone else who asked.

‘Who Is DOGE?’ Has Become a Metaphysical Question The acting head of the General Services Administration says it has no DOGE team. It merely lists at least a half-dozen DOGE affiliates on payroll and has a section of its building for DOGE use only.

The executive order establishing DOGE directs a DOGE team to embed itself in each agency.

When directly asked who was on the DOGE team at GSA, acting administration Stephen Ehikian flatly claimed "There is no DOGE team inside of GSA"

So who were the kids sleeping in bunk beds at GSA headquarters?

When DOGE showed up to my agency, GSA, and started interrogating us, they first refused to identify themselves. Wouldn't even give their names.

This didn't work well for them, so they started saying whatever did work. The guy who interrogated me said he was GSA.

Good question here. I wish the strategic ambiguity of DOGE had been more widely reported, because that was the source of its power.

Now that DOGE bros are showing up in court, we'll see that intentional ambiguity stripped away and we'll find out who gets left holding the bag.

Seems like Woke 2 will pretty much have to be about restoring the rule of law, so

They might be realizing they are the fall guys

Yeah, I know what DEI is. It's like, girls who aren't into me, and like, gay stuff? And like, when people make me uncomfortable?You know. That whole bucket.

When they say "efficiency," "merit", "performance," or "excellence" they actually mean ideological conformity + random chance

Why *would* you say we trust the encryption in apps like Signal over a web page?

remember when the IRS put out a a free online tax filing system where you could just do your taxes through the IRS and it was actually well made and was pretty well recieved and then the tax filing industry and Republicans killed it and now you have to use TurboTax again

Obviously there's good reason for some of this data to exist (Medicaid must be administered somehow) and even for some of these data connections to exist (LexisNexis is a little too useful to say no to sometimes) but the sum total is against both the spirit and letter of the law

How ICE Uses AI to Automate Authoritarianism From the frontlines of ICE’s occupation of Minneapolis, Kairos Fellows senior campaigner Irna Landrum considers the use of AI in the immigration crackdown.

This excellent front-line account of ICE's "automated authoritarianism" by Minneapolis resident Irna Landrum carefully lays out other building blocks of this machine:

Private data like LexisNexis, DOGE's stolen data, Medicare and Medicaid, and state-level data like DMV records

There's nothing particularly magic about Palantir's software. It is simply the company that happens to have won some shady non-competitive contracts, presumably because of ideological alignment with the fascist project, so is now a central data hub for fascism.

Federal CIO tapped for dual-hatted role at GSA Greg Barbaccia will serve as the acting Technology Transformation Services director and senior advisor to the administrator at GSA, while its previous lead, Thomas Shedd, will remain with the agency i...

Then DOGE burst into the agency, bent on gathering as much data as possible. When we refused to hand over the keys, we were fired en masse.

Now a year later, the Tesla chump they got to fire us has himself been fired and directly replaced with a guy from Palantir:

I used to work in identity verification at Login.gov, leading an anti-fraud team. We held the Privacy Act sacrosanct, aware that the law really didn't have any teeth so it was up to our good faith and good judgement to uphold the law and protect Americans privacy.

This data consolidation is in flagrant violation of the Privacy Act of 1974, and the way ICE is using it for political and racial repression is the nightmare scenario of the people who drafted that law 5 decades ago.

"When she asked why they were taking her information, her video captured a masked agent responding, 'Cause we have a nice little database, and now you're considered a domestic terrorist.'"

I used to think Orwell was a dork to imagine someone like Winston, employed to minutely manipulate centuries-old history to decontextualize the state's current crimes. I assumed authoritarianism would just roll onward without being preoccupied by history. I was wrong.

The plaintiffs’ lawyers also asked Mr. Fox about some grants flagged in his original ChatGPT search, like one for a documentary about the 1873 massacre in Colfax, La., where dozens of Black men were murdered by a mob of former Confederates and Ku Klux Klan members. ChatGPT had deemed it “D.E.I.” Mr. Fox said he agreed. “Because it focuses on exclusively anti-Black violence, which is a race,” he said.

There's an obvious parallel between what's happening now with ICE and CBP to this racist violence of the 1870s, which led to a non-functioning electoral college in 1876. That's presumably what the current administration is hoping to do again.

An astonishingly literal example of racist discrimination. These people carefully set up a racism computer and pressed Go.

"Emulate Lisa Simpson" is a reasonable moral to extract from the Simpsons