That's right. They want me to send my identity documents to some third world contractor to protect me from identity theft. Apparently they're doing this with many people... I'm supposed to be worried about the NSA? I'm not a Russian spy, and I'm no drug cartel leader. The cops and NSA don't give a shit about me. Nor DOGE, come to that.
This data breach from DOGE is worse in many ways. DOGE employees / contractors are have fewer scruples and guardrails. This data has been used primarily for Trump-and-Company's advantage. All to the detriment of American values, such as being for democracy and reasonable capitalism while standing against authoritarianism and kleptocracy.
The NSA's bulk metadata collection, while later found to violate FISA and likely unconstitutional, operated under a formal legal architecture: statutory authorization via Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act (from 2006 onward), FISA Court orders renewed approximately every 90 days, and at least nominal congressional oversight — though most members were kept uninformed of the program's scope until 2013.
https://www.npr.org/2026/01/23/nx-s1-5684185/doge-data-socia...
> The unnamed employees secretly conferred with a political advocacy group about a request to match Social Security data with state voter rolls to "find evidence of voter fraud and to overturn election results in certain States,"
https://www.npr.org/2026/01/23/nx-s1-5684185/doge-data-socia...
>[...] to "find evidence of voter fraud and to overturn election results in certain States,"
The actual election fraud allegations are probably spurious, but regardless we shouldn't be trying imply that intending to overturn elections in cases of fraud is bad in and of itself. The badness comes from inappropriate access to the data, not trying to find evidence of fraud.
But I'm not "apologizing" for them? I'm pushing back on OP's phrasing of "they did it with the intention of overturning elections". It's possible to push back on some person's criticism of [bad guy] without being accused of "apologizing" for [bad guy].
From my original comment:
>we shouldn't be trying imply that intending to overturn elections in cases of fraud is bad in and of itself
See also my sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46734439
Sounds like you agree with me, because you're still not objecting to my original premise of "we shouldn't be trying imply that intending to overturn elections in cases of fraud is bad in and of itself". You might think "bad faith partisan investigation" is bad, but not the act of trying to overturn elections itself.
I'm not sure how you reached that conclusion given what I wrote was:
>we shouldn't be trying imply that intending to overturn elections in cases of fraud is bad in and of itself
The only rational viewpoint is to assume everything this administration does is in bad faith, until proven otherwise.
Or we all so partisan now that we don't care about the evidence or the reality of the fraud?
But yes, yes we should have an impartial jury look for evidence of voter fraud.
It was also my understanding many DOGE employees were Department of Treasury agents.
How could anything else possibly have happened? These amateurs (at best) were given unfettered access to everything with no accountability or rules.
https://www.eff.org/files/2025/10/06/085-15_ex_o_berulis_4.1...
"Furthermore, on Monday, April 7, 2025, while my client and my team were preparing this disclosure, someone physically taped a threatening note to Mr. Berulis’ home door with photographs – taken via a drone – of him walking in his neighborhood"
jeffbee•2w ago