Comment by roenxi
3 days ago
I wouldn't dismiss the concerns; which seem reasonable. But the argument is pretty stupid.
None of the bureaucrats are elected, and this data has been gathered by the government to perform its functions. Insofar as Elon's team are pretty much just a couple of new bureaucrats bought in by Trump; they can use this data to streamline government. The office of president is pretty powerful; odds are he can appoint people to do work for him. It'd be crazy if he can't.
The problem is the government shouldn't be storing a whole bunch of sensitive data. It is like being shocked that someone in the NSA is actually looking at all the data they collect - there is a big problem there, but it is that they're collecting and storing the data. Obviously once they have it people will look at it. That is why it is being gathered and stored. It should be criminal to store on the grounds of privacy; but it isn't.
I'm not sure how it would be possible to run a functioning government without some departments storing some sensitive data.
"On the grounds of privacy it should be criminal for the agency authorised to fund medical treatments to store people's sensitive medical records related to treatments they pay for" sounds like a much less defensible proposition than "on the grounds of privacy it should be criminal for what is nominally the government's IT advice body to hire a bunch of script kiddies without proper vetting or any genuine auditing credentials to download said sensitive medical records, store them as insecurely as they like, cross reference them with whatever other sensitive data they find on the grounds that they might be able to use them to tweet dubious claims about waste"...
If people checking that the records make sense isn't kosher; why do they need to store those records? The government only really needs to hand out money and the technical details can happen somewhere else; sign them up for #n recurring payments, keep some anonymised aggregate stats and throw away the records. They can even keep their own records signed off by the government; we have the tech where none of this stuff needs to be stored centrally.
We can call anyone a script kiddie. I know some people who do data analysis for government health departments. Calling them a script kiddie wouldn't be respectful but they are youthful and do run scripts. The process appointing Musk is was more public and accountable than the one appointing my friends. Musk even gets public debate on the subject of whether hiring his people is a good idea or not. They're being very well vetted.
People are weird. I feel like a lot of ink gets spilled pointing out that one day the government will be controlled by people you don't like no matter who you are. But that argument doesn't seem to get through to all these people who panic every time it turns out that democracies don't always elect the same people with the same ideologies over and over. Government isn't trustworthy and people shouldn't be discovering that en masse in February 2025.
> If people checking that the records make sense isn't kosher; why do they need to store those records? The government only really needs to hand out money and the technical details can happen somewhere else; sign them up for #n recurring payments, keep some anonymised aggregate stats and throw away the records. They can even keep their own records signed off by the government; we have the tech where none of this stuff needs to be stored centrally.
I mean, even if it was as simple "$n recurring payments for $drug to $SSN over $period", that absolutely is sensitive private information, especially when linked to originally entirely separate but equally critical records about someone's employment by a body tasked with firing people...
It absolutely makes sense for records to be audited with great care by qualified people in an airgapped environment with anonymization by default, but that's not what's happening here, is it? It's like I'm actually pretty convinced that it's necessary for the state to be able to arrest and incarcerate people, but I'm not convinced that the "due process" bit doesn't matter or that untrained edgelords to be making the decisions on incarceration is fundamentally the same as having police, prosecution and a trial to lock people up. I don't think the answer to the fact I might not like every executive the electorate votes in (or every law that exists) is to defund police, I think the answer is to have due process, and not due process that is de facto abolished on the day a new executive assumes power. It's much the same with governments being able to store some data
> We can call anyone a script kiddie. I know some people who do data analysis for government health departments. Calling them a script kiddie wouldn't be respectful but they are youthful and do run scripts.
I think it's a pretty accurate description for a 19 year old whose short and undistinguished career history involves being fired from an internship at a cybersecurity firm for leaking its secrets to a competitor, and soliciting DDoS attacks on The Com.
Certainly better than "very well vetted".
I imagine young people you know that do data analysis for health departments have more auditing experience, fewer red flags, very carefully controlled access to data and senior people training them and checking their work. They would, I imagine, also be competent enough to be unlikely to confuse $8b and $8m when estimating cost savings...
> The problem is the government shouldn't be storing a whole bunch of sensitive data
Like tax returns? What legitimate need does management consultant have to see the individual tax returns of any person without any accountable transparency?
There is a pretty reasonable case for tax returns being public by default - I'd certainly like to know how much of the financial burden my fellow citizens are upholding. I bet I could spot a bunch of tax evaders right quick. Rather than asking why someone should be able to see them; I'd prefer to ask why I can't.
It gets back to this basic issue of what this data is that I don't want anyone to know but the government needs to have a permanent record of. The overlap of those two things should be tiny. If it is so terrible that Musk & team can't look at it, why is it OK to be recorded? It isn't like the security of these departments is expected to be that great; data leaks. All the data that a large organisation holds is likely to become public sooner or later even if that happens because it is sold on the darknet. And the employees that looks it it regularly are who-knows-who doing who-knows-what on a good day.