What Could Go Wrong? 😑

 NPR:

In a written complaint filed through the nonprofit Government Accountability Project, Charles Borges, the chief data officer at the Social Security Administration, claims that senior Trump appointees at the SSA who were recently part of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team made the copy in a way that "constitute[s] violations of laws, rules, and regulations, abuse of authority, gross mismanagement, and creation of a substantial and specific threat to public health and safety."

Borges says that career cybersecurity officials within the SSA described the decision to copy the data as "very high risk" and even discussed the possibility of having to reissue Social Security numbers to millions of Americans in the event the cloud server was breached.

The copy of the data appears to have been set up inside the SSA's existing cloud infrastructure, which operates on Amazon Web Services. However, according to the complaint, the copied data had far fewer security measures in place to protect it than the SSA's standard protocols typically require.

According to Andrea Meza, an attorney with the Government Accountability Project who represents Borges, the cloud environment appeared to be set up for DOGE-affiliated Social Security staffers, but it "lacks independent security, monitoring and oversight." She said Borges "has serious concerns about the vulnerability it causes for nearly every American's data."

Oh, I’m sorry, I buried the lede. The “copy” is:

...the Social Security numbers, names and birthdays of over 300 million Americans to a private section of the agency's cloud.

So my first question is:   WHY THE FUCK DOES ANYONE NEED A COPY OF THAT? My second question is: WHY ISN’T DOJ ON THIS LIKE WHITE ON RICE?

And then I imagine the shitstorm when SS sends out 300 million letters: “We’re sorry, but due to circumstances beyond our control, we’re going to have to issue you a new SS number. Be prepared to update all your records with all institutions that have your old numbers. Please stand by while we try to make this happen without fucking things up any worse. Thank you for your attention to this matter.”

Hopefully they have to do it before the midterms, so that everyone knows who to blame.