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DOGE has 'god mode' access to government data

theatlantic.com

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Re: DOGE has 'god mode' access to government data

#361

Post by oblio »

grobbyy wrote: post #344
onemoresoop wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They will twist the narrative and not provide any evidence. I appreciate your request but please don’t be naive. Have you heard of trolling?

There is widespread fraud in the government. It needs to be addressed. There is widespread inefficiency too. I think the people in DOGE have the skills and access to address it. I have no evidence that they are doing so, and some evidence of widespread loyalty tests which, while not identical, remind me of how Stalin came to power. However, absence if evidence is not evidence of absence, and some evidence is not the…

> I think the people in DOGE have the skills

Do we know any of them? How many are accountants, auditors, etc, people with decades of experience with government affairs?

Re: DOGE has 'god mode' access to government data

#362

Post by dkjaudyeqooe »

scarab92 wrote: post #273
javcasas wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know why in Portugal they have 4 different ID numbers? It is like that to prevent the state from persecuting people on the base that it is hard for a branch of the government to figure out who is someone based on a number from a different branch. Do you know why they want to prevent the government from persecuting people? Because it has already happened, and the portuguese don't want it to happen again.

[flagged]

Musk is not in a position to identify waste and fraud.

What does he know of the genesis and status of these payments? Congress directs spending and oversees the administration, not the other way around.

Why does he have to finish in an arbitrary time frame?

This is all justification after the fact for those who support Musk/Trump unconditionally.

It's all fun and games until your Medicare/Social Security/Tax Refund or other legitimate payment gets cancelled arbitrarily, illegally and unconstitutionally.

Re: DOGE has 'god mode' access to government data

#363

Post by michaericalribo »

chatmasta wrote: post #356
dzdt wrote: post #320

Related to a comment on a now-flagged subthread: can anyone who believes that DOGE is uncovering fraud please post a reliable reference that gives a specific example of fraud uncovered by DOGE? To be clear, this should be a third-party analysis of some credibility, not DOGE's or Musk's twitter feed or "receipts" website which shows cancelled contracts with no clear link to fraudulent activity.

It’s marketed as “fraud, waste and abuse.” The top-line summaries are definitely consistent with “waste.” Probably some of them have more nuance when you dig deeper, but does anyone disagree that there is not waste in the government? Fraud and abuse are less clear. But it’s also difficult to ascertain the legitimacy of payments when they’re leaving treasury on checks with no memo or reference, and they’re compared to…

So, no third party source.

Re: DOGE has 'god mode' access to government data

#364

Post by wat10000 »

scarab92 wrote: post #46
unsnap_biceps wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

USAID was funding the StarLink deployment in Ukraine and was reexamining the deal[1], likely to try to negotiate a cheaper plan or to reduce the funding. My opinion is that it likely hit his ego a bit and it was a really sweet deal for StarLink, so losing out on it would suck. [1] https://www.newsweek.com/usaid-elon-musk-starlink-probe-ukra...

[flagged]

> it was so well known to have been a slush fund for Democrats

So well known by whom, and how? I never heard a peep about this until a few weeks ago, and all such claims seem to be coming from the same group of people with obvious ulterior motives.

Re: DOGE has 'god mode' access to government data

#365

Post by greenie_beans »

mrbigbob wrote: post #329
greenie_beans wrote: post #327

i hope they try to use cjis data bc it's taken me 6 months to build a system that is technically compliant and it still doesn't fully pass. they definitely will fail the data security policy requirements.

This isnt a dig at you but something i have noticed over the last few weeks. People keep saying X/Y wont be able to do something because of rules, laws, requirements and i have to keep reminding people rules/laws are only as good as those willing to enforce them

fair point! i guess it does sound like an inept democrat lol.

though you don't wanna fuck with the fbi https://le.fbi.gov/cjis-division/cjis-security-policy-resour...

Re: DOGE has 'god mode' access to government data

#366

Post by rdm_blackhole »

Etheryte wrote: post #242
willis936 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You personally are cool with me personally knowing your salary and where you live? Please just post that here right now.

That might sound incredibly foreign to you, but this is the norm in many Nordic countries, see Norway, Sweden and Finland, for a start. Tax returns for everyone are public, and so are addresses through a national registry.

Agreed.

As a foreigner who moved to Sweden, it was quite shocking first to see all this info displayed online for everyone to see but there are definitely some good sides and bad sides to it.

One of the good side is that, you can look at the people living in a given area and decided if this is the kind of neighborhood where you want to live. Lower (declared income) can have a correlation with crime so if you just want to have a quite life, you may want to select an era that has loads of working people with a higher than average income.

One bad side, some people have used it in the past to harass people, think ex-lovers and so on. There is a procedure in place where if you are afraid of being stalked you can ask for your information to be removed from these registries or at least be hidden from public view.

Re: DOGE has 'god mode' access to government data

#367

Post by wat10000 »

jpcom wrote: post #33
ksynwa wrote: post #3

What's Elon's beef with USAID? I would think he would go after something like food stamps first owing to his libertarian ethos. Maybe he sees USAID as a completely benevolent handout and a waste of money? I cannot begin to understand why.

Scenario: You give someone $40B to feed people, and $1B actually feeds them while $39B vanishes into overhead and ideological reprogramming. Then they tell you they need more. If this is success, what does failure look like?

> overhead and ideological reprogramming

I despair at the thought process that crams these two things together.

2.5% overhead would be really good. Most charities don’t come close.

“Ideological reprogramming,” whatever that actually means, would be completely different.

Re: DOGE has 'god mode' access to government data

#369

Post by miohtama »

dzdt wrote: post #320

Related to a comment on a now-flagged subthread: can anyone who believes that DOGE is uncovering fraud please post a reliable reference that gives a specific example of fraud uncovered by DOGE? To be clear, this should be a third-party analysis of some credibility, not DOGE's or Musk's twitter feed or "receipts" website which shows cancelled contracts with no clear link to fraudulent activity.

One month (2 weeks?) is too early to tell if something will be uncovered, so there are no examples yet.

Re: DOGE has 'god mode' access to government data

#370

Post by lowercased »

chatmasta wrote: post #356
dzdt wrote: post #320

Related to a comment on a now-flagged subthread: can anyone who believes that DOGE is uncovering fraud please post a reliable reference that gives a specific example of fraud uncovered by DOGE? To be clear, this should be a third-party analysis of some credibility, not DOGE's or Musk's twitter feed or "receipts" website which shows cancelled contracts with no clear link to fraudulent activity.

It’s marketed as “fraud, waste and abuse.” The top-line summaries are definitely consistent with “waste.” Probably some of them have more nuance when you dig deeper, but does anyone disagree that there is not waste in the government? Fraud and abuse are less clear. But it’s also difficult to ascertain the legitimacy of payments when they’re leaving treasury on checks with no memo or reference, and they’re compared to…

> However, it’s worrying that a system of age-based payouts has such uncertainty in its data.

The data itself may have to be interpreted, which I would classify as 'suboptimal', but seemingly 'normal' for most projects I work with. I often have to join together various tables, remembering to include or exclude specific data via conditional logic. The conditional logic may be context-dependent, and documenting those cases is really key. Why include/exclude specific subsets of data to answer questions XYZ? Have those criteria changed over the years (and if so, why?)

Looking at raw data tables it's often quite easy to come up with ways to show the data to support whatever case you're trying to make.

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