DOGE Has The S.S. Number Of Every Person - Increasing The Likelihood Of Fraud

The following is just part of a post on MSNBC by Evelyn Danforth-Scott and Cody Venzke of the ACLU. It should worry you!

DOGE staffers uploaded the entire catalogue of Social Security numbers — as well as individuals’ full names, birth dates and addresses — to an unauthorized online storage system that bypassed the agency’s standard security and oversight protocols.

This scandal may lack the pizzazz of the personality-driven dramas that dominate our current political moment. But its implications are difficult to overstate. The consequences of Social Security number theft are devastating. Bad actors can use these stolen numbers to run up debts in their victims’ names, worm their way into bank accounts, steal government benefits and unlock even more private data. Social Security numbers are such a coveted tool for fraudsters that, according to one study, their presence in a cache of stolen data increases the odds of an identity theft attempt from a baseline risk of roughly 2% all the way to 97%.

The upshot is that DOGE’s actions — uploading every single Social Security number to an unauthorized storage environment, subject to unknown risk from unknown cybercriminals — put all of us at risk of significant financial crimes. Whistleblower Charles Borges, the Social Security Administration’s now-former chief data officer, described the potential consequences as “catastrophic.” And he predicted it could lead to the federal government being forced to reissue a new number to every single American — a measure that would inflict enormous costs and hassle on American households. According to Borges’ complaint, “one of his superiors noted that possibility, underscoring the risk to the public.”

The SSA whistleblower’s concerns are more than just theoretical. After DOGE staffers received access to sensitive data stored by the National Labor Relations Board, for example, another federal whistleblower reported repeated attempts from an IP address in Russia to break in using DOGE login credentials. In 2014, foreign adversaries successfully stole data stored by the Office of Personnel Management, a heist one House Republican-led report laid at the feet of OPM’s failure to “implement basic cyber hygiene.”

Worse, DOGE’s cavalier behavior at the SSA is not a one-off. It is part of a broader, administration-wide push to collect and consolidate Americans’ private data. . . .

We need laws that reflect the digital world as it exists today. Laws that let the federal government work efficiently and responsively, using the best information and tools that 2025 has to offer. And, most fundamentally, laws that take our privacy and security seriously through protections like meaningful limitations on how the government can consolidate various data sources; rigorous safeguards for cross-government data sharing; a full accounting of the way commercial data collection feeds governmental surveillance; and enforcement mechanisms with teeth.

DOGE mishandled your Social Security number. It mishandled everyone’s Social Security number. Let’s use this as a chance to finally drag data privacy laws into the 21st century.