I'd like to see the same kind of scrutiny of private information handling by conventional government departments.

https://www.moneyness.ca/2024/07/your-finances-are-being-sno...

>472 different U.S. law enforcement agencies at the Federal, state, and local levels have the ability to directly query FinCEN's database of CTRs, suspicious activity reports, and more. This amounts to around 14,000 law enforcement officers who can search through the personal financial data of American citizens. In 2023, these 14,000 users conducted 2.3 million searches using FinCEN's query tool.

>FinCEN's data can also be downloaded in bulk form to the in-house servers of eleven different federal agencies, including the FBI, ICE, and the IRS. Bulk access (also known as Agency Integrated Access) means that the FBI, ICE, IRS, and eight other agencies don't need to use FinCEN's query tool. This bulk data can be access by another 35,000 agents. Alas, FinCEN doesn't track how many in-house searches were conducted by these agents in 2023, but I'd guess it's in the tens if not hundreds of millions.

Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46696654

> A member of the so-called “department of government efficiency” signed a secret data-sharing agreement with an unidentified political advocacy group whose stated aim was to find evidence of voter fraud and overturn election results in certain states.

How did they characterize that as government efficiency?