Go On, Give Random Kids Your Social Security Number
What could possibly go wrong?
The New York Post’s headline about this image claims, “Hackers play AI video…” The content of the article hedges: “It’s unclear whether hackers or another party was responsible for the prank.” It is an almost perfect allegory for the US government right now.
Certain ideologically-inclined folks are happy that the President of the United States has granted an (allegedly) illegal immigrant, Elon Musk, an extraordinary amount of influence over the Executive Branch, despite his very long history of (alleged) theft and fraud, and (not-at-all-alleged) incompetence.
Trump’s and Musk’s groupies seem pretty cool with the fact that the world’s (allegedly) richest man is about to expose every American citizen to a future of victimization, a world where fraud becomes the norm rather than a problem for some. It may have already happened and no one knows it yet. And as usual, the resident propaganda outlets are supplying their partisan followers with their opinions to prevent them from seeing this for the disaster it is likely to become.
Trump and Musk scams of the past have hurt plenty of people—Tesla owners and investors, small contractors, people trying to learn about real estate… the list could be a series of full-length volumes. But unlike those cases where the victims were foolish or unfortunate enough to associate with these two fraudsters, now the entire American citizenry is forced into the relationship.
This is what happens when you give substantial control of the largest government in the world to such people.
Perhaps the number sequence that is guarded more vigorously than any other by Americans is their social security number (SSN). That’s because its ability to be used as a tool for all kinds of misconduct is unrivaled. Even Fox News understands this. Sam Kosmas from Fox DC5 recently wrote:
Given how integral your Social Security number is to your life, it’s essential to keep it secure.
There are thousands upon thousands of websites and printed materials that provide detailed advice to citizens about protecting their SSN. But, what happens when the government itself exposes every American’s data to any number of scammers and other malcontents out there?
Well hold onto your hats, cowpokes. You just might be about to find out, care of the idiocy of DOGE.
PSA: Thanks for your info! If you are defrauded, call the organization that was established to combat this kind of thing—the CFPB… oh wait, we’re getting rid of that too. Too bad. Deal with it. Source: chron.com
Why the SSN matters
Created in 1936 initially as a means to track income for tax purposes, the SSN has, in the words of the US Government’s Social Security Administration (SSA), “come to be used as a nearly universal identifier.” As such, today one needs a SSN to get a job or housing, collect government benefits, open bank or credit accounts, file taxes, and use for identification, among many other necessary functions.
Leaking one’s SSN to ne’er-do-wells is so dangerous because the consequences may go unnoticed for years, and the abuses can be cumulative. Put differently, by the time the victim realizes he/she has been victimized, the damage is often catastrophic.
Correcting the issues is extremely challenging. While it is possible to change the number, it is exceedingly difficult to do. It all depends upon some government bureaucrat’s subjective decision as to whether the victim has sufficiently “attempted to fix problems resulting from the misuse but continues to be disadvantaged by using the original number.”
Changing the number may not fix things anyway, and could actually make them worse. As the SSA itself notes:
Keep in mind that a new number probably won't solve all your problems. This is because other governmental agencies (such as the IRS and state motor vehicle agencies) and private businesses (such as banks and credit reporting companies) will have records under your old number.
Basically, once your SSN is stolen you are looking at lifelong risk or possibly victimhood.
In the short term, when people’s SSNs are compromised they are stuck tackling each individual instance in which a fraud was perpetuated to try and get their fiscal lives back together. If that happens to you, get ready for a lot of hold time on the phone, and be grateful if you ever speak to a human at all (it’s more profitable to not solve your plebian problems).
Some estimate that it can take as long as 18 months to resolve everything—if you’re lucky enough to succeed at all—and the clock only begins after you become aware of the crime, not when it was first committed. Thus, 18 months might be little more than hopeless optimism. And none of this, of course, accounts for the psychological trauma involved, no matter what happens.
To get an idea of how severe social security fraud can be, here is a partial list of documented reports of crimes associated with the use of illegally procured SSNs:
Obtain credit cards or loans — In 2023, 381,000 instances of fraudulent new credit card accounts were reported to the FTC;
Open a new bank account — In 2022, a single criminal ring defrauded banks of more than $2 million through accounts opened with children’s SSNs.
Get a fraudulent driver’s license — From 2021 to 2022, the instances of driver’s licenses fraudulently obtained with stolen SSNs increased by 42%.
Open a phone account — the total numbers are hard to pinpoint, but in 2022, over 6,000 TracFone customers became victims to scammers who bought new phones with stolen SSNs and left the victims with the bill. The criminals used the new numbers to bypass some victims’ two-factor authentication (2FA) and access their online accounts, leading to even more losses.
Receive medical care using the victim’s benefits — Back in 2015, it was calculated that victims of medical benefits theft paid an average of $13,500 in damages they did not cause. They “paid the healthcare provider, repaid the insurer for services obtained by the thief, or they engaged an identity service provider or legal counsel to help resolve the incident and prevent future fraud.” That was ten years ago. Aside from the victim having to pay back financial costs for procedures or medicines someone else received in their name, the victim faces potential denials of future medical services. The chance of a misdiagnosis also rises because the fraudster’s medical history may become intertwined with the victim’s.
The list goes on, and gets even worse—if you can imagine (such as committing crimes in the victim’s name or filing fraudulent tax returns)—but you get the general idea.
Destro, from GI Joe. Credit: G.I. Joe, A Real American Hero #49 (July, 1986), Marvel Comics, by Mike Zeck, (fair use)
What is DOGE?
Department Of Government Efficiency. That’s the meaning behind the acronym of the Trump-Musk scheme. Well, technically its full acronym is DOGESTO, but maybe that sounded too much like one of the villains in GI Joe, or not enough like the scammy name Musk wanted.
On the latter point, for anyone familiar with Elon Musk’s (alleged) criminal past, the use of DOGE here is — to put it mildly — a big middle finger to the law and the American people.
For the unaware, DOGE is also the name of a cryptocurrency that Musk tried hawking back in 2013. The whole thing smelled like an attempted pump-and-dump, though, like always, he evaded any prosecution. And, like most of the time, he failed at the scheme. Here is a summary:
Dogecoin is a cryptocurrency created in 2013, named after a Shiba Inu dog. Largely considered an unstable cryptocurrency because of a lack of caps on the number that can be produced, its highest valuation was 50 cents, until Musk got involved. Keith Johnson, a Dogecoin investor, filed a class-action suit last month against Musk, Tesla, and SpaceX. Johnson alleges that the defendants “are engaged in a crypto pyramid scheme (aka Ponzi scheme) by way of dogecoin cryptocurrency.” The lawsuit further states, “Defendants falsely and deceptively claim that dogecoin is a legitimate investment when it has no value at all.”
At the time of the filing of the lawsuit, the price of Dogecoin was just 7 cents. Musk claims, however, that he did not own any Dogecoin and never sold any. This is in direct conflict with his tweet on May 20, 2021, in which he wrote “Yeah, I haven’t & won’t sell Doge.” Regardless, Tesla began accepting Dogecoin for payment for some things in May 2022—a year before the lawsuit—and Musk announced on Twitter that SpaceX might also begin accepting it “one day.”
A key indicator of the ongoing scam that Dogecoin (allegedly) is is in its prospective resurgence following Musk’s infiltration into the US government (purely coincidental timing, no doubt). As one analyst claimed, “I think the next DOGE run will be fueled by Elon and D.O.G.E. department hype.”
Since 2021, the coin has largely been worthless, and so far remains so, trading at about 25 cents as of February 25. But don’t worry if you already bought some, it has been ‘invaluable’ all along.
Dogecoin is and has been worthless, unless you are delusional like the writer of the headlined piece shown above, published back in 2021. Source: dailydot.com
Anyway, what DOGE (the governmental entity) is purportedly tasked with is cutting any federal funds spent on poor people.
On waste. Not poor people. Waste.
Musk has such a super-awesome plan to make America great… er… efficient again, that the President has offered the American people—though, not the poor ones — a rebate of 20% of the savings DOGE creates. Let’s see, that is 20% of 75% of an invisible $55 billion… carry the one… 38 times 37%…
Ahh… who cares. Your bank accounts will be cleaned out by the time someone finds the receipts in Trump’s bathroom.
Seriously, though, the DOGE clan is going after grifters, so everyone should rejoice. In the eloquent words of the genius who created a neon sewer system clogged by not-self-driving Teslas with more than $52 million in public money:
we need to stop government spending like a drunken sailor on fraud & waste or America is gonna go bankrupt. That does mean a lot of grifters will lose their grift and complain loudly about it. Too bad. Deal with it.
That’s a curious statement coming from a guy whose wealth is dependent upon nearly $21 billion in US government subsidies since 2008. Some of those subsidies look like they paid for pretty fraudulent-looking stuff. By the way, is anyone here still waiting on your Tesla Roadster? It’s coming. Soon. Really.
Musk must mean the other grifters with different conflicts of interest.
It is also perfectly illustrative that the department literally named “government efficiency” spent $7 million of taxpayer money in its first week. Way to shore up that waste, kids.
The efficiency of the Las Vegas Loop cannot be overstated. Image credit: Adam Something via YouTube.
Foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child; The rod of discipline will remove it far from him.
— Proverbs 22:15
Speaking of kids…
Rest assured, DOGE is ready to slice the federal government apart until it is a lean, mean, wealthy-coddling machine. Run by children. Children who now have access to Americans’ most sensitive data.
Okay, technically they are not children, at least not by the legal definition that sets 18 as the age of majority. Nevertheless, they are all under 26 years old (except Musk, who is mentally even younger), and one is a literal teenager. Their identities have been confirmed by Musk himself.
These kids:
Many reading this essay would not let these 21st century Pinkies drive their car, let alone access their most sensitive personal data. Yet here we are.
One of the first sets of systems these boys gained access to was the U.S. Treasury’s payments systems, which contain:
personal information of millions of Americans who receive payments from the government, from tax refunds to Social Security checks.
An official from USAID stated:
It is not ridiculous to think they’d have bank-account and routing numbers for every single person in the United States.
It is bad enough that Musk himself has prized his fingers — which he, for some reason, finds fascinating — into these data and systems, but now he’s sharing access to them with people who probably think Twilight is a classic vampire movie.
Aside from the political nod by a President who shows little regard for security clearance vetting procedures, or law, it is unclear if Musk even has legal authority to access any of this stuff, let alone hand it out like candy from a windowless van at the playground. (To be fair to the President, locking nuclear secrets next to his shitter may have been championship-level security. Even Russian spies were probably like, “nah”).
Regarding the wisdom of Musk receiving access to sensitive information, CNN’s correspondent Kaitlan Collins asked: Did he pass a background check, do you know? White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s response summed up the strategy of this administration in her first three words:
I don’t know about the security clearance, but I can check.
See? All good.
Legal or not, there is no question that a guy who cheats at the video games he spends an awful lot of time sucking at has no business near the levers of power or critical data or a PS5 controller. (Okay, maybe not that much time. He pays people to play the boring parts).
Musk has a well-known propensity to act without thinking — probably because he is not especially bright. He shows an utter disregard for security practices. And he seems to have a drug problem, which might be because it is not a minority view that he is a terrible human being who doesn’t give a damn about anyone but himself.
Even his own AI says so.
Seriously, dude. You couldn’t even figure out how to rig that? But you want everyone’s personal data? If you made this story up and put it in a movie, no one would watch it because of its ridiculousness.
Musk’s little gang of Silver Spoons, who have little to no real-world experience in anything, let alone governing or security, are equally unfit to access such critical information. But go on, give them the passwords to the databases, what could go wrong?
The access by Musk’s DOGE team represents the widest-known compromise of federal government-held data by a private group of individuals — and little has gotten in their way.
— Zack Whittaker at Techcrunch
DOGE is making insecurity and criminality more efficient
Bruce Schneier, a security technologist and lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School, noted that the DOGE team has been accessing all this sensitive data through insecure means.
They’re copying data onto unprotected servers. They’re using it to train AIs. In some cases, they’re modifying government systems in ways that have not been tested. And all of this provides opportunities to our enemies…
The Treasury Department data includes details on the money the U.S. government pays to people. This is money that’s being paid to elected officials, to judges, to police officers, to CEOs. It’s very valuable data for coercive purposes…
I worry about the audit systems. We have comprehensive systems for recording what these systems do and what happens, and we use those audit records to go back and figure out what happened. If these audit systems have been compromised, and it’s likely they have, now an attacker can make undetectable changes in the system — and that is its own level of scariness.
DOGE is training AI on social security data, presumably under the guise of making the system more efficient. Though, knowing Musk, the real reason is likely that he is going to try and profit from it somehow. Weird how he hates people collecting far less intrusive information about himself, though.
In any case, as Brookings scholar Darrell West warns:
It is scary to use untested or poorly designed AI on government data sets not knowing how it makes decisions or where and how it was trained.
As has been demonstrated ad nauseum, using AI to make decisions that affect people’s lives is a recipe for disaster. Just ask:
almost all the customers of UnitedHealthcare;
businesses and employees misled in New York City;
tens of thousands of people erroneously targeted by the Dutch government;
thousands of people given dangerous medical advice;
women who applied for jobs at Amazon;
and on… and on… and on…
Richard Forno, assistant director of the Cybersecurity Institute at the University of Maryland, provided perhaps the most apt assessment of the idiocy of DOGE:
They’re kind of treating the federal government as a Silicon Valley garage startup. There’s apparently very little, if any, due diligence.
These are not partisan views. The Washington Examiner, a routinely right-leaning publication echoed similar concerns:
This affair raises basic questions about what Musk and his improvised DOGE understand about security and counterintelligence. Given the access to federal databases and internal information that DOGE is demanding, its personnel should be subject to usual security vetting. Musk is secretive about his organization, but the vetting of DOGE personnel appears to be rudimentary by normal federal standards to be charitable.
Lisa Murkowski, Republican Senator from Alaska posted on her Xitter account:
Efficiency in government should be a goal for every administration, agency, and federal employee. But how we achieve it also matters. By circumventing proper channels and procedures, and creating the potential to compromise the sensitive data of Americans, we create a tremendous amount of unnecessary anxiety. That is wrong. Good governance is based on trust, not fear.
Democratic Senator Brian Schatz from Hawaii told the media that other Republicans have voiced equally dark complaints, but are unwilling to say so publicly.
Ah, the courage of the alpha-male party.
Brace for impact!
Musk can’t even get a top security clearance in his own company, but somehow it is okay for him to obtain and delegate access to an enormous swath of Americans’ personal — and highly sensitive — data. Anyone who thinks this is a good idea is a criminal or a fool. You know, much like the composition of the current administration.
Compromised social security numbers are a disaster for the victims, a disaster that can dog them for years. In this age of completely unregulated data sharing among private parties, the danger level is already alarmingly high, as is keenly reflected in the rise of fraud statistics year-upon-year.
The government is the last bastion of defense because not only does it issue and store SSNs, but it uses them more than any other entity. Treating its departments and systems like a “Silicon Valley gar(b)age startup” will inevitably lead to some serious calamities.
Exactly how efficient do Musk or Trump fans suppose it will be should the US government ultimately have to reissue SSNs to all its citizens or develop a new system altogether? How many people will lose everything in the process? What about those government employees who turn Rosenberg after other deep states can easily obtain a treasure trove of information (a.k.a. leverage) about them?
While in the very long run burning down one’s house and building anew might lead to a better house — notwithstanding the objections of the insurance company, fire, and police departments — in the meantime, everyone who lived there will be without a roof, and many will die of exposure. Taking this approach with an entity as large and complex as the US government, whose job it is to protect a populace that is among the largest in the world, is stupid and dangerous.
But hey, at least they’re owning those libs.
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