Might not be what you want but here’s what MAGA Marsh got for us
Watching Elon Musk and his band of young acolytes slash their way through the federal government, many observers have struggled to understand how such a small group could do so much damage in so little time.
The mistake is trying to situate Musk solely in the context of politics. He isn’t approaching this challenge like a budget-minded official. He’s approaching it like an engineer, exploiting vulnerabilities that are built into the nation’s technological systems, operating as what cybersecurity experts call an insider threat. We were warned about these vulnerabilities but no one listened, and the consequences — for the United States and the world — will be vast.
Insider threats have been around for a long time: the C.I.A. mole toiling quietly in the Soviet government office, the Boeing engineer who secretly ferried information about the space shuttle program to the Chinese government. Modern digital systems supercharge that threat by consolidating more and more information from many distinct realms.
That approach has delivered obvious benefits in terms of convenience, access, integration and speed. When the bipartisan Sept. 11 commission described how segmentation of information among agencies had stymied intelligence efforts, the solution was to create integrated systems for collecting and sharing huge troves of data.
Running integrated digital systems, however, requires endowing a few individuals with sweeping privileges. They’re the sysadmins, the systems administrators who manage the entire network, including its security. They have root privileges, the jargon for highest level of access. They get access to the God View, the name Uber gave its internal tool that allowed an outrageously large number of employees to see anyone’s Uber rides.
That’s why when Edward Snowden was at the N.S.A. he was able to take so much information, including extensive databases that had little to do with the particular operations he wanted to expose as a whistle-blower. He was a sysadmin, the guy standing watch against users who abuse their access, but who has broad leeway to exercise his own.
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.
Even Jefferson couldn’t have imagined a future in which the arsenal being deployed included centralized databases with comprehensive records on every citizen’s employment, finances, taxes and for some, even health status.
After a judge blocked a Trump executive order, Elon Musk shared a post with his more than 200 million followers on X that included the judge’s daughter’s name, photo and job, allegedly at the Department of Education. There’s no indication he got access to government databases about her, but how would we know if he had, or if he does so in the future?
Feel free to read the rest of the story
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/21/o...onal-data.html
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