Adding on to my previous post, about the lawsuit against Treasury for allowing DOGE free reign in sensitive systems, we’re now hearing that DOGE people are illegally accessing sensitive data at the Department of Education, and feeding it wholesale—without scrubbing it of identifying information—into a Microsoft Azure cloud-based AI tool of some kind.
In other words, sending all that confidential and protected data to an external data system outside of the control of the federal government.
Why should we stop the Russians and Chinese hacking our systems when Musk is putting the data out for easy access to anyone who promises to perform some gee wizbang tech voodoo on it? Now we can save them time by eliminating any federal protection.
Oh, but we’re told, these DOGE people are ’employees’ who have been properly vetted. That’s the same gotcha that I mentioned would happen to get around the court order in the lawsuit I covered.
But wait…there’s more.
The original lawsuit was about DOGE people _accessing_ data. But the court order allowed ‘read only’ access, which actually plays into the Trump/Musk minion hands.
How did this happen? Why did we allow this to continue even when there’s a court case to stop it?
Because we got caught up about the script kiddies changing the code, and we forgot that the real danger was them vacuuming up every bit of confidential data about all of us, and offloading it to an external cloud-based system. And we got so caught up in them mucking with such a key system in the Treasury, we neglected to extend that concern to all systems.
As for the employee-trick, what DOGE is doing is grossly illegal for _anyone_, even DOGE people masquerading as government employees. I have to wonder if these people realize that they could be liable for possible criminal penalties for their activities?
Oh right, Trump will just pardon the bunch.
The lawyers for Treasury system lawsuit need to either amend their complaint or expand it, or a new set of lawyers needs to make a broader lawsuit that would encompass all data systems in the federal government.
And next time…talk to the damn techs, first.