At this point I think you can legally opt out of any type of data collection by the government like the Census. You're required by law to participate but they are also required by law to keep your information safe, that's no longer possible in this administration and there's plenty of relevant data to back it up.
this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2025
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I think we should be able to have a national class action against DOGE. 100% serious, all US citizens for sure, and anyone else with data in the Social Security database, should sue the individuals responsible for this.
Then we take the money and start a company that contracts out to the government to create a national digital ID system that is the most secure in the world, and allows for amazing anonymity.
It's times like this I wonder about the like/dislike paradigm I.E. "I like/dislike knowing this and/or appreciate the perceived reputability of the source" vs. "This is good news/I fucking hate this."
This one just got a "I fucking hate this" from me.
The votes on the posting itself should reflect if the content is worth your time. I'm not even American and I have a really bad feeling after reading the article, but it's better to know than being in the dark, and the article itself is full of details which make it pretty reasonable to believe it's the truth.
Mr Borges really brought the receipts on this one, and he is one of the heros of the american people that will probably pay dearly for his courage, and he still did what's right.
More of the first, but not exactly. It's "Other people should see and know about this too" and "This isn't worth anybody's time/is factually wrong and shouldn't have been posted."
Because that's what upvoting does, makes it higher in the page so more people are able to see it.
We‘re getting closer to a cyberpunk world every day
Once a nuke goes off in a major city, we are pretty much guaranteed it from what I understand about multiple cyberpunk-style worlds
the government may be responsible for reissuing every American a new Social Security number at great cost
Has this department made our government efficient yet?
Gee, who could've foreseen this happening after a gang of techbro goons forced their way in and opened backdoors on all those computers...
Forced their way in, were given the keys and explicit orders to take all the data and put it in massive back-door ridden places for themselves and Russia, potato, potahto
They (the DOGE bros, especially Elon) deserve prison time for their fuckery.
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I don't think it was a "random" cloud server at all. I think the people who bought the data already have it now.
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I’ve said for a while that the SSA should do basically this exact thing. In a more controlled manner, but still the same result. Announce something like “in two years, we’ll make our database public. Every single name, DOB, and SSN will be publicly searchable.
It sounds radical, but SSNs were never meant to be a secure form of ID. Old cards even said something like “do not use this as ID” on them. But organizations quickly latched onto it because they wanted to have a way to identify individuals with the same name and DOB. And SSNs were convenient because people already had them.
It would force organizations to develop their own way to ID people. It would be a huge step towards making an actual secure form of ID. And the warning time would give people enough time to design the new system and roll it out, while still giving a hard deadline for when it needs to be done.
There was a time when bank card number was practically all you needed to get someone's money.
I think Estonia's electronic IDs are the best, they have the government sign (sometimes provide, but generally just sign) your public key. It's both that the government doesn't have your private key and that it's immediately usable for many things. I don't know if they do, but one can also make ID cards (with a necessary chip inside, of course), where a private key can be written and used for signing operations, but not read back.
Modern technology allows so much goodness that politicians and corps have just started globally gaslighting us over what can be done and what can't. Stalling on technically easily solvable issues, so that it wouldn't come to real ones.
The simple act of comparing signatures meant that it was very difficult to randomly target people. We don't have anything like that today, like a key/token pair.
No, we don't need this at all. businesses need to be fined out of existence for using the ssn, and lenders should do due diligence without some imaginary score.
Exactly who I trust to create a logically organized database of all peoples within the United States. The current administration..
I don't love the idea of the Trump administration being in charge of creating a national ID system, but this maybe the best time to make one.
If Democrats proposed a national ID database the crazy 'FEMA is coming to round us up' republicans would freak out about it. As proven with Trump sending the national guard into D.C., as long as Trump does it they don't care.
I hate this is a good point
I dont have a problem with that, but what I will object to is the current regime making the replament ID system. 1) there is no way they would design it well or securely, smart people capable of building such a system are usually the first to bounce to another country as they will have the means to do so. 2) it would be too easy for them to lord the new ID over peoples heads (like they are with immigration status now) and impliment a social credit score like China does.
Your correct that SSNs should not be used as IDs, but getting the government to build a modern system for that opens too many avanues for abuse (especially with darth cheeto in charge).
this is a whole can of worms that you can look into but the entire western conception of the Chinese social credit system is essentially a myth propagated by western media outlets.
don’t get me wrong, the chinese government legislated local governors implement something vaguely similar to the financial credit system in the west but, as the law works in china, they all interpreted the order differently and it seems only the “good” parts get rolled out nationally.
situations similar to the western “social credit” myth existed for a brief time in a very small number of local pockets (think smaller divisions such as cities and towns), but they were quickly absconded and the architects of those systems punished, for essentially wasting government time and money.
note i’m definitely not a tankie fuck tankies but i also think if we’re gonna talk about china we don’t need to make shit up bc just like the US there is plenty of real shit to criticize. the “social credit” thing is a joke that westerners get made fun of internationally for believing, pretty much. it’s not remotely real, at least how you probably think of it.
realistically at this point you don’t have more or less rights or freedoms as a citizen of china or the united states. you’re pretty equally fucked either way now.
and impliment a social credit score like China does.
Honestly you don't need such an official system, and such a commercial system, as that network of data brokers and credit rating providers, already exists. So of that in particular I wouldn't be scared because it's not avoidable anyway. What's avoidable is government's ability to discriminate based on data. Think how.
I don't know much about it, but what did they change with the whole Real ID / star on Licenses and such. I believe the purpose was to make it so the IDs were to a minimum standard so they could be accepted in all 50 states. If they all had unique ID numbers (I don't know that they do) they could have just used those, or expanded on those and already have the ID system in place. To travel to another state and have a valid ID, I believe the cut off date is November of this year. (At least for my State, because my spouse doesn't drive and her ID she was told would no longer be valid post November if she doesn't go in and get it done)
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OP, please revise your title to match the article, it is currently misinformation.
The complaint is about where the oversight comes from. This is not some random cloud server.
“S.S.A. stores all personal data in secure environments that have robust safeguards in place to protect vital information,” he said. “The data referenced in the complaint is stored in a longstanding environment used by S.S.A. and walled off from the internet. High-level career S.S.A. officials have administrative access to this system with oversight by S.S.A.’s information security team.”
Don't you think after 5 months without oversight who exactly has access to that server that the difference between this and a random s3 bucket is nearly nil? But you are right, in the light of integrity the title should reflect the facts as they present themselves currently.
I do, yes, it's blazingly stupid and others have been jailed for less.
But I've noticed a number of misleading post titles recently, like the just today there was obe about a cyclist getting hit by a car when it was actually the cyclist turning into traffic. Tragic, but the title misleads. So I've started pointing them out.
Maybe I just long for the days when titles aren't rewritten to drive opinion and engagement (regardless of if I agree or disagree).
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DOGE employees should be executed by firing squad. In fact, we should bring back a whole bunch of capital punishments- hanging, beheading, drawing and quartering, burning at the stake; unless you meet the fascists at their level you’ll never scare them enough to keep their political views private. Like what happened to Mussolini was TOO GOOD for every single person involved in the executive branch right now.
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