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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

#291

Post by tene80i »

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.

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No, the animosity is coming from the belligerent way DOGE is going about its work, and the lack of security clearance or any oversight of these people, some of whom are very inexperienced and some of whom have clear conflicts of interest, and the enormous power they are accumulating.

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

#292

Post by zimpenfish »

jokoon wrote: post #146
amriksohata wrote: post #127

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I'm worried that one of Musk friends might be a Chinese or Russian spy.

> I'm worried that one of Musk friends might be a Chinese or Russian spy.

Given Musk's ties to China and his overt friendship with Putin, I don't think there's a need for one of his friends to be a spy when he's right there with a glowing neon finger over his head.

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

#293

Post by ksynwa »

throwawaymaths wrote: post #23
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.

what's with people not having beef with USAID? It's done so many crazy and bad things, for example: USAID funded the hepatitis vaccination drive that the CIA used as a cover for espionage against the bin laden family, leading to polio outbreak in pakistan. https://pulitzercenter.org/stories/he-led-cia-bin-laden-and-... Distaste for USAID in any other time would be bipartisan; the Clinton Administration floated shutte…

I didn't bring this up because it would be controversial on this website. I think USAID is a tool for advancing US geopolitical interests aims first and foremost and I would like it to be abolished as well. But someone like Musk wanting it to be shuttered doesn't make sense because these organisation in one way or another advance the interests of US businesses and he would benefit from that as well.

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

#294

Post by trash_cat »

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.

While true, this is currently being debated if the access of public data should be reduced [0].

[0] https://lexing.network/swedens-latest-inquiry-into-protectin...

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

#295

Post by janice1999 »

karel-3d wrote: post #93

Honestly when DOGE was first announced, I thought it will be a tiny department that does almost nothing and produces recommendations and PDFs that nobody reads. I didn't expect this.

Read the Bufferfly Revolution by Curtis Yarvin (April, 2022)

> We’ve got to risk a full power start—a full reboot of the USG. We can only do this by giving absolute sovereignty to a single organization—with roughly the powers that the Allied occupation authorities held in Japan and Germany in the fall of 1945.

> Trump himself will not be the brain of this butterfly. He will not be the CEO. He will be the chairman of the board—he will select the CEO (an experienced executive). This process, which obviously has to be televised, will be complete by his inauguration—at which the transition to the next regime will start immediately.

https://graymirror.substack.com/p/the-butterfly-revolution

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

#296

Post by fifticon »

briandear wrote: post #219
maCDzP wrote: post #110

European here, giving my two cents on how this looks from the other side of the Atlantic. Heh In my country there are laws stopping agencies doing a simple SQL join between two databases, even within the same government agency. There is a separate agency that handles the requests when agencies want to join information. I am not an expert in the matter. But my gut is telling me that our experiences with east Germany a…

When it comes to government spending though, shouldn’t the public have a right to know precisely, with dollar-level accuracy what they are being asked to pay? As far as the experiences of the Stasi and previous German governments, it must not have too much of a scar: Germany still asks people to register their religion — ostensibly for tax purposes, but if I recall correctly, Germany had a problem in the past with ha…

a lot of countries already have this, and without handing e.g. Elon Musk the keys to the kingdom. America for example has this: https://www.foia.gov/

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

#297

Post by XorNot »

api wrote: post #272
maCDzP wrote: post #110

European here, giving my two cents on how this looks from the other side of the Atlantic. Heh In my country there are laws stopping agencies doing a simple SQL join between two databases, even within the same government agency. There is a separate agency that handles the requests when agencies want to join information. I am not an expert in the matter. But my gut is telling me that our experiences with east Germany a…

> check and balances to make it slow. It’s deliberate inefficiency. It’s an important thing about free countries that is seldom appreciated: aspects of their governments are designed to be tar pits, on purpose. It’s a way of restraining government. I have a personal saying that touches on something adjacent. “I like my politicians boring. Interesting government was a major cause of death in the twentieth century.” Wh…

It's worth noting all those regimes were really only streamlined at getting people killed one way or the other. Their internal history is always a story of wild incompetence and corner-cutting. The Nazis in particular got a lot of undue credit for effectiveness.

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

#298

Post by amarcheschi »

throwawaymaths wrote: post #23
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.

what's with people not having beef with USAID? It's done so many crazy and bad things, for example: USAID funded the hepatitis vaccination drive that the CIA used as a cover for espionage against the bin laden family, leading to polio outbreak in pakistan. https://pulitzercenter.org/stories/he-led-cia-bin-laden-and-... Distaste for USAID in any other time would be bipartisan; the Clinton Administration floated shutte…

I think that any sufficiently big organization has done bad things, this alone shouldn't be enough to close an agency.

However, I'm sure Cia has done, does, and will do much worse things than usaid

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

#300

Post by potato3732842 »

eecc wrote: post #201

IMHO it's a bit of a shame that the productivity and efficiency gains that computing and cybernetics can bring to complex systems -- including government -- are always tainted and currently championed by anti-social elites that use them to break apart these collective machines. Bureaucracies are a common good, and it should be in everyone's interest to apply state-of-the-art system engineering to make them as valuabl…

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