The DOGE boys want that data, no matter what:
They came in aggressively, a former official who witnessed Elon Musk’s team take over the Social Security Administration said, demanding access to sensitive taxpayer data and refusing briefings on how the agency ensures the accuracy of its benefit systems. They recklessly exposed data in unsecured areas outside Social Security offices, the official said, potentially disclosing personally identifiable information on almost every American to people not authorized to see it.
And representatives sent by the U.S. DOGE Service refused to explain why they needed taxpayer information that is protected by law, the former official said. Despite their status as political appointees, the secretive members of the cost-cutting group overseen by Musk ignored the normal chain of command, instead communicating directly with DOGE.
These and other allegations are included in a sweeping declaration filed as part of a federal lawsuit Friday from Tiffany Flick, the agency’s acting chief of staff until she was forced out in mid-February.
[…]
Flick and acting commissioner Michelle King, another career leader, abruptly retired on Feb. 16 after resisting demands from DOGE to provide access to three massive databases containing sensitive taxpayer information. In their place, the White House elevated acting commissioner Leland Dudek, a mid-level data analyst who the career leaders believed had been improperly sharing information with DOGE. The career leaders had placed Dudek on paid leave and opened an investigation into his actions before he was promoted.
Dudek is now the acting Social Security administrator, eagerly doing Trump’s bidding.
But why are the DOGE boys doing what they’re doing? Well, I don’t want to go too far down any rabbit holes, but there may be a reason beyond the desire to simply destroy everyone, which I wrote about last week:
Tech reporter Kara Swisher appeared on The Focus Group podcast a week or so ago and had a very interesting theory about what’s actually going on. We all know that AI is where all the action has been for the last few years with the “Magnificent 7” Big Tech companies leading the impressive growth in the stock market. Swisher claimed that Musk has been behind on the AI boom, having had his partnership with Sam Altman of Open AI blow up over his desire to monetize the free service, and was almost certainly on a hunt for data to use for his own AI purposes. She said:
What Elon is after, from what I can guess, if I had to guess, is… He is behind. One of the big debates going on right now in AI is we’re running out of data. All the LLMs have sucked in all the data. Now they need more to have an advantage.
And so that means that all the LLMs have become a commodity because they’re all parsing the same information, right? That they’ve scraped everything they can. Government is the biggest trove of information on the planet. U.S. government is at this point, would be my guess, or China would be.
The only other country that has it all consolidated is China, because it’s a surveillance economy and it’s a communist country, and so they want great control over their citizens. Our government data is siloed all over the place. What if someone could bring it all together and then load it into an LLM? What if…
I dunno. But it sure seems weird that they were so intent upon getting the data even before they figured out what the agency or the system even does. Getting into the system was job one, nothing else mattered. Why?