{"id":204909,"date":"2025-09-06T12:00:19","date_gmt":"2025-09-06T12:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/204909\/"},"modified":"2025-09-06T12:00:19","modified_gmt":"2025-09-06T12:00:19","slug":"doge-mishandled-your-social-security-data-heres-what-that-means","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/204909\/","title":{"rendered":"DOGE mishandled your Social Security data. Here\u2019s what that means."},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week, while many of us were enjoying the last days of summer, a whistleblower disclosed shocking details<\/a> indicating staffers with the so-called Department of Government Efficiency<\/a> have been messing with Americans\u2019 most sensitive data<\/a>. According to the whistleblower, DOGE staffers uploaded the entire catalogue of Social Security numbers<\/a> \u2014 as well as individuals\u2019 full names, birth dates and addresses \u2014 to an unauthorized online storage system that bypassed the agency\u2019s standard security and oversight protocols.<\/p>\n

This scandal may lack the pizzazz of the personality-driven dramas that dominate our current political moment. But its implications are difficult to overstate. The consequences of Social Security number theft are devastating. Bad actors can use these stolen numbers to run up debts in their victims\u2019 names, worm their way into bank accounts, steal government benefits and unlock even more private data. Social Security numbers are such a coveted tool for fraudsters that, according to one study<\/a>, their presence in a cache of stolen data increases the odds of an identity theft attempt from a baseline risk of roughly 2% all the way to 97%.<\/p>\n

Another federal whistleblower reported repeated attempts from an IP address in Russia to break in using DOGE login credentials.<\/p>\n

The upshot is that DOGE\u2019s actions \u2014 uploading every single Social Security number to an unauthorized storage environment, subject to unknown risk from unknown cybercriminals \u2014 put all of us at risk of significant financial crimes. Whistleblower Charles Borges, the Social Security Administration\u2019s now-former chief data officer, described the potential consequences as \u201ccatastrophic.\u201d And he predicted it could lead to the federal government being forced to reissue a new number to every single American \u2014 a measure that would inflict enormous costs and hassle on American households. According to Borges\u2019 complaint, \u201cone of his superiors noted that possibility, underscoring the risk to the public.\u201d<\/p>\n

The SSA whistleblower\u2019s concerns are more than just theoretical. After DOGE staffers received access to sensitive data<\/a> stored by the National Labor Relations Board, for example, another federal whistleblower reported repeated attempts<\/a> from an IP address in Russia to break in using DOGE login credentials. In 2014, foreign adversaries successfully stole data stored by the Office of Personnel Management, a heist one House Republican-led report<\/a> laid at the feet of OPM\u2019s failure to \u201cimplement basic cyber hygiene.\u201d<\/p>\n

Worse, DOGE\u2019s cavalier behavior at the SSA is not a one-off. It is part of a broader, administration-wide push to collect and consolidate Americans\u2019 private data. The federal government is trying to transfer Social Security information<\/a> to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, to allow ICE agents \u201cdirect access<\/a>\u201d to your Medicaid data, and to export taxpayer data<\/a> in bulk to the Department of Homeland Security. It\u2019s unclear what kinds of privacy and security protections are in place for any of these novel efforts.<\/p>\n

Inevitably, some will brush off this scandal. They\u2019ll dismiss those raising alarm bells as prim-lipped defenders of the broken, nonresponsive institutions that voters sent President Donald Trump back to Washington to fix. If this administration has a mandate to bring change, maybe that includes letting the DOGE whiz kids blast through standard data handling protocols so they can fix our federal bureaucracy.<\/p>\n

That narrative is wrong. Jeopardizing every single American\u2019s privacy is not a reasonable price to pay for the sake of moving fast and breaking things. That\u2019s why, as lawyers with the American Civil Liberties Union, we\u2019ve filed more than 40 freedom of information requests across the federal government to unearth how DOGE is handling sensitive data. And we sued the Social Security Administration earlier this year when it failed to disclose what DOGE has been up to.<\/p>\n

To truly protect Americans\u2019 private data, we need different laws on the books.<\/p>\n

This latest incident, however, does reinforce a valuable lesson: Our decades-old federal privacy laws have not kept pace with the many trends that have transformed our very online world into a playground for identity theft and privacy violations. Instead, we\u2019re stuck with outdated protections that, among other shortcomings, assume there will always be an adult in the room, rest on nonbinding and easily revokable agency guidance, and fail to address the vast quantities of our online data that federal agents routinely purchase<\/a>.<\/p>\n

These antiquated laws don\u2019t just underprotect individual privacy. They also hamper good-faith efforts to make the government work better. Laws passed in the 1970s or \u201980s simply do not reflect modern-day understandings of how data drives governmental services \u2014 leaving agencies that want to leverage data to improve federal programs to largely figure out for themselves how to safely collect, store and share Americans\u2019 sensitive information. The result is a maddening combination of vulnerability for individuals and sclerosis in government.<\/p>\n

There is a better way. To begin, Americans should demand far more transparency around what DOGE and the federal government are doing with our private data, including this administration\u2019s accelerated consolidation of data across agencies. But DOGE\u2019s reckless handling of our Social Security numbers also should be a wake-up call: To truly protect Americans\u2019 private data, we need different laws on the books.<\/p>\n

We need laws that reflect the digital world as it exists today. Laws that let the federal government work efficiently and responsively, using the best information and tools that 2025 has to offer. And, most fundamentally, laws that take our privacy and security seriously through protections like meaningful limitations on how the government can consolidate various data sources; rigorous safeguards for cross-government data sharing; a full accounting of the way commercial data collection feeds governmental surveillance; and enforcement mechanisms with teeth.<\/p>\n

So, DOGE mishandled your Social Security number. It mishandled everyone\u2019s Social Security number. Let\u2019s use this as a chance to finally drag data privacy laws into the 21st century.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Last week, while many of us were enjoying the last days of summer, a whistleblower disclosed shocking details…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":39578,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[64,255,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-204909","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-personal-finance","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-personal-finance","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-unitedstates","12":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115157245831425435","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204909","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=204909"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204909\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/39578"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=204909"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=204909"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=204909"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}