I wrote about Elon’s Big Data Dream a month ago, discussing the idea that AI is a data suck and these programs are running out of it. The U.S. Government is a major depository of a whole lot of it that up until now has not been accessible to anyone who is unauthorized to have it, and was kept in small discrete chunks.
Well, it looks like Elon’s bringing it all together. The NY Times reports:
The federal government knows your mother’s maiden name and your bank account number. The student debt you hold. Your disability status. The company that employs you and the wages you earn there. And that’s just a start.
These intimate details about the personal lives of people who live in the United States are held in disconnected data systems across the federal government — some at the Treasury, some at the Social Security Administration and some at the Department of Education, among other agencies.
The Trump administration is now trying to connect the dots of that disparate information. Last month, President Trump signed an executive order calling for the “consolidation” of these segregated records, raising the prospect of creating a kind of data trove about Americans that the government has never had before, and that members of the president’s own party have historically opposed.
The effort is being driven by Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, and his lieutenants with the Department of Government Efficiency, who have sought access to dozens of databases as they have swept through agencies across the federal government. Along the way, they have elbowed past the objections of career staff, data security protocols, national security experts and legal privacy protections.
Musk doesn’t care about privacy or security. In fact, security is probably the last thing he wants since he wants to be able to access this information for his own purposes.
This is a major threat to our personal and national security and nobody’s doing anything to stop it. In fact, it’s probably too late already.
Meanwhile, Musk is convinced that undocumented immigrants are fraudulently ripping off the government by the trillions and wants to use this data to stop them. That’s going to create a monumental mess with a lot of people being illegally and unfairly targeted:
“The data is not fit for the purpose that you’re trying to use it for,” said Ms. Olson, the executive director of the Center for Taxpayer Rights, which is also suing the government. “And you’ll get wrong results, and there’s consequences to those wrong results.”
People could be cut off from benefits or identified for deportation for suspicious indicators that have benign explanations. However, Mr. Musk has shown little interest in the details of those explanations. He has repeatedly misrepresented data about dead people and immigrants receiving Social Security. He has suggested something nefarious must explain a surge in tax credits that can be traced to expansions of the child tax credit and pandemic relief.
What happens if a family claiming a tax credit for the first time is flagged for fraud — and has their Medicaid cut off, too?“What will their resolution process be? Will they act first and deal with the fallout later?” said Elizabeth Laird with the Center for Democracy and Technology. “People who maybe are like, ‘Well, I got notified my data was breached 10 years ago and I’ve been fine’ — I don’t think they’ve been subjected to what we may see this used for.”
Maybe it’s not such a great idea to give a wealthy, paranoid, internet troll unfettered access to the federal government’s inner workings. Just a thought.