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That’s why a team from Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency headed straight for O.P.M., dragging in sofa beds to sleep on so they could be there round the clock. O.P.M. is root access to the entire United States government.
With that kind of access, even a small team can search the entire government for employees whose job titles contain suggestions of wrongthink, or who might resist takeovers or wield bureaucratic tools to slow the pace of change.
In effect, this small DOGE crew has become sysadmins for the entire government. Soon after O.P.M., they descended on the Treasury Department, where every payment the government has made is stored: root access to the economy (including many companies that are direct competitors to those of Musk). Their efforts expanded recently to the I.R.S. and Social Security Administration, both of which hold extremely personal, sensitive information: root access to practically the entire American population.
The Atlantic reports that a former Tesla engineer appointed as the director of the Technology Transformation Services — a little-known entity that runs digital services for many parts of the government — has requested “privileged access” to 19 different I.T. systems reportedly without even completing a background check, making him less vetted than the person delivering pizza to that mine.
…All this has merged with and amplified another kind of insider threat brewing for decades on the political side: the expansion of unchecked executive power.
“With money we will get men, said Caesar, and with men we will get money,” Thomas Jefferson once wrote, to warn against the ways that what he called elective despotism can become a self-feeding cycle.
He had feared that an elected authoritarian would not just pulverize the institutions meant to limit his power, but take them over to wield as weapons, thus further entrenching himself. …”
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It’s not a choice between efficiency and manila folders in underground mines. There have been plenty of promising efforts to develop digital technologies that preserve our privacy while delivering its conveniences. They have names like zero-knowledge proofs, federated learning, differential privacy, secure enclaves, homomorphic encryption, but chances are you’ve never heard of any of them. In the rush to create newer, faster, more monetizable technologies — and to enable the kind of corporate empires whose chief executives stood beside Donald Trump at his inauguration — privacy and safety regulations seemed like a bore.
Now we are stuck with a system that offers equal efficiency to those who wish to exercise the legitimate functions of government and those who wish to dismantle it, or to weaponize it for their own ends. There doesn’t even seem to be a mechanism to learn who has gained access to what database with what privileges. Judges are asking and not always getting clear answers.
The only ones who know are the sysadmins, and they’re not saying.”