Katie Drummond: Fascinating. Well, let’s take a short break. When we return, we will resume where we leave it and talk about how worried Americans should really be about their privacy and about accessing their data. Welcome to Strange ValleyGlobal editorial director of I’M Wired, Katie Drummond. I am here with our Senior Security and Research Editor, Andrew Couts. Andrew, thanks again for being here.
Andrew Couts: Thanks for inviting me.
Katie Drummond: And let’s talk a little more about Doge and US privacy. So there has been, since in Wired we know very well, a ton of coverage about Doge and what they are doing within the federal government during these last weeks. A lot of swirl, a lot of chaos and a lot of concern, right? There is a lot of concern among journalists and among Americans more widely about Dege that has access to several government systems, which has access to data, access to confidential information about Americans. Can you explain to what type of information Doge could have access based on the agencies in which they are currently working within the federal government?
Andrew Couts: Therefore, they will essentially have access to everything, and they will know everywhere where you have lived, everywhere, exactly how much money earns, potentially what your tax statements are. They will have access to their medical history, probably how their networks are seen, how their social networks are, everywhere that has worked, potentially travel records.
Katie Drummond: There was a paragraph in the story that we published yesterday that I thought it was really impressive, and reads in just a few weeks, Dege employees have accessed the federal records of employees in the Office of Personnel Management, payment data of the payment of the payment of the payment of the payment of the payment of the Government in the Treasury Data Department. About student loan winners in the Department of Education, Information on Disaster Victims of FEMA and large amounts of employment and data related to the workplace in the Department of Labor. And continue from there. I mean, this is a radical effort to access and make a ton of really confidential information about Americans. Can you guide us through some different hypothetical scenarios? If Dege and Musk and President Trump and the White House get all these data, get all this access, what could they do with it?
Andrew Couts: One of the things that we think internally in Wired is a lot of modeling threats and I basically like what is the possibility of being the goal of some kind of attack? And in this case, we have to completely redefine how our models of threats are. And that is especially true if you are a vulnerable person. So, if you are trans, if you are an immigrant, if you are looking for an abortion, only to throw the most obvious examples. This information could be used to address you in one way or another, and we simply do not know how that information could be used. Historically, you will not think that a highly located government employee, such as Elon Musk as it is now, would tweet your bank records or your health records, and we could see that this happens now, if you are publicly critical of the Trump administration. Obviously, the application of the law, if the FBI will be able to use the large amounts of information they have in people to point to who they are going to point, and we simply do not know. We are only one month in this administration. We are already seeing radical repressions in immigration, and that will evolve. We are going to spend at least four years of this, and it is impossible for anyone to know if they will be a goal. So we simply do not know how the threat model looks in an environment in which anyone could become a political objective. And if we observe the authoritarian regimes, it will be used in all the different types of ways of chasing people. And these data could be manipulated to compensate for charges against people to accuse people of crimes they did not commit. For years, Wired has covered the best privacy practices, best security practices and many people simply say: “If you have nothing to hide, do not worry about that.” But now we do not know what you have to worry and we do not know what you should have hidden and the things you tried to hide or the things that were protected by government systems are now potentially exposed. And therefore, in reality, no one supposes what could happen and what could be the consequences.
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