alt Hacker NewsDOGE has 'god mode' access to government data
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At my first gig, I had "god" level access to our production database.
All I learned is that nobody should have this level of access unless it is some sort of temporary break glass situation. It is extremely dangerous and even experienced engineers can cause irreparable data loss or some other bad outcome. In our case, some engineer accidentally sent around 10,000 invoices to customers that shouldn't have gotten them.
There are far better data access patterns. In the case of US gov data, I don't see why the DOGE team would need anything more than a read replica to query. It could even be obfuscated in some way to protect citizens' identities.
Perhaps the whole situation will finally convince the "I don't mind, I have nothing to hide" crowd about the need to scrutinize & limit as much as reasonably possible the personal data collection and retention by government and other entities. What good are rules, statutes, checks & balances, passwords and ACLs, if at some point someone you don't like or trust can just come in "as a root" and circumvent everything?
IMHO it's a bit of a shame that the productivity and efficiency gains that computing and cybernetics can bring to complex systems -- including government -- are always tainted and currently championed by anti-social elites that use them to break apart these collective machines.
Bureaucracies are a common good, and it should be in everyone's interest to apply state-of-the-art system engineering to make them as valuable as currently possible.
Another very negative long-term effect of all of this is how is the government going to recruit talent in the future? How many people, who have good prospects elsewhere, are going to work for a government agency -- usually a lower pay -- to put up with shit like this that doesn't even happen in industry? Would you? Sure there are sometimes mass layoffs that are handled pretty badly in industry, but not these Gestapo-like purge tactics that are clearly designed that way to instill fear and loyalty.
What should happen, and nobody is talking about this, is the USA is severely downgraded in its overall credit rating due to an unhinged and ongoing "fire, aim, ready" self-audit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_governme...
> ‘GOD MODE’ ACCESS TO GOVERNMENT DATA
Isn't this title clickbait?
There's an implication this is access to all government data - but the article doesn't explicitly state that but would lead you to believe that.
Given that I highly doubt all government data is in a single data store ... this is probably more like - GOGE has access to all GSA contracts (just one department) ... which is way less sensationalized (and appropriate for a government agency looking review contracts for efficiency)
Note: I'm not taking a political stance on this.
Setting politics aside for a moment, I find it fascinating that an audit of this scale is taking place within the government. Has there ever been a historical precedent where an external agency thoroughly reviewed all departments, published its findings for the public, and then based decisions on that analysis?
Is it really possible to root out governmental fraud using this approach? Fraud and theft exist at every level of government, but if not through a drastic measure like this, what else can be done? Relying on the status quo, the courts, and current processes hasn’t yielded substantial results—if it had, corruption wouldn’t persist.
Still, I can appreciate the creativity here. Sometimes it takes an outsider to think differently.
That said, I’m not naive enough to assume this is done entirely in good faith. The prevailing opinion—both in this community and the media—seems largely negative; I’ve yet to see a single positive headline. Even so, I find it intriguing.
So here’s my question: if you were in charge of addressing this problem, how would you tackle it differently?
this is not good
I find it wild that apparently there is no law onto which government workers can cling to refuse these requests. Is it all just based on conventions, goodwill and culture?
Because there are bigger fish to fry, I think people don’t appreciate the sheer cost of the system rebuild that will be required for security reasons later.
There’s absolutely no telling what additional software has been installed alongside existing, or which systems have been modified that would require audit. Purging this will be an absolute fucking nightmare to the American taxpayer.
This may turn into one of the most significant IT incidents in world history.
So how is this any different from all the random employees who might have access to this data as part of their jobs? I would understand if there was this sort of scrutiny over every federal employee but as it stands I never know who has access to my data and if they can be trusted.
They will have had to impose this too.
The systems were built as separate systems to avoid (in a systems designers most fevered nightmares) a scenario like this.
The President is the head of the executive branch. If _anyone_ in the executive branch has access to information, it feels like the presidents office should too.
Why is this hard to accept?
Government should have access to its own data. Justice and Congress should have the same access for oversight. The only problem I see is personal data about non-government people is being exposed to the entire planet.
They should have developed good security practices first and maybe spent more than a week reviewing a plan, and not having a double standard about their own activities.
"In the coming weeks, the team is expected to enter IT systems at the CDC and Federal Aviation Administration, and it already has done so at NASA"
If this isn't a glaring conflict of interest and corruption, I don't know what is.
European here, giving my two cents on how this looks from the other side of the Atlantic. Heh
In my country there are laws stopping agencies doing a simple SQL join between two databases, even within the same government agency. There is a separate agency that handles the requests when agencies want to join information.
I am not an expert in the matter. But my gut is telling me that our experiences with east Germany and Stasi left a scar.
It can quickly turn into a real nightmare, and there for there are check and balances to make it slow. It’s deliberate inefficiency.
Is there any reason this data shouldn't be public for everyone to read?
> “We’re operating believing our systems are completely bugged,” one person told us.
Doesn't everyone at work, any $WORK, do this? I do! I even type my thoughts "aloud" so to speak in order to help anyone viewing my sessions on replay.
Hear me out. Elon wants ultimate control over people’s lives and choices. Why he would want this is a psychological question about which we can only speculate. This is a change from (at least in appearance) his previous libertarian leanings. Whatever the case, this is the plan:
1) Acquire god mode access to government systems and citizens information (contacting, grants, spending, taxes, SSI benefits, you name it).
2) Add features to the Treasury Department’s software to allow him to, with extremely high granularity, control what payments go out. Friends can be rewarded, enemies punished. At first it will take the form of government entities he doesn’t like (USAID, for example). Next will be government opposition in our federal system, mostly blue cities and states with whom he disagrees. Next will be large private entities with whom he disagrees or are business competitors. Finally, individuals opposing him or the government will be personally targeted (for example, by not paying SSI benefits or paying out tax returns, perhaps extended to family members of the opposition, etc). These individual sanctions could extend to large geographic area he dislikes (all of coastal California, for example). He’s putting in place the tools to accomplish this right now as we speak.
3) Fire all bureaucratic opposition elements who might prevent this. Dress it up as a government efficiency measure if you like.
4) Eventually they will pressure large (and maybe small, too) private financial institutions to take part in this scheme (they may have already succeeded, see Citibank and NYC federal funding for migrants).
He’s putting in place the tools for total control by controlling access to money and resources. I don’t exactly know what he plans to do with them but I don’t want to find out given constant interaction with racists and neo nazis on his site.
Is this the sort of data that could be useful in training LLMs or in terms of demographic data that would be valuable to advertisers?
I hope they at least open the original documents to the American public, instead of posting on X. IMHO the public should have the rights to review and grill the officials about the spending.
If you think this data won’t be used to disenfranchise and target democratic voters and give the GOP perpetual rule, I have a bridge to sell you.
“Oh no! Big mistake we cancelled hundreds of thousands of people from voting just before the election! It just happens to be 99.9% Democrats in swing states who all happen to be marked as dead in all government systems!”
It will be similar to Cambridge Analytica - with all the US Government’s data on one side, this is a massive advantage for targeting even without direct cheating.
"Do I file my taxes this year or not? I had to sit and debate that."
good question
Are they really just going to use this to train AI models, to build the 'GrokGovAI' models?
I actually believe the executive branch should actually control the executive branch.
Move fast and break things meets root kernel access to government.
What could go wrong?
My two cents. God-mode privilege already existed before DOGE, someone else had (or still has) this privilege. Priority - How to limit power of such privilege in future.
A huge problem with this is that from all accounts, these engineers going in don't seem to have any accountability. No one knows who is in charge and making the decisions (presumably Musk though official statements say he's not the DOGE administrator, but no one knows who is), they come into offices like an FBI raid demanding access but won't give reasons, say who is in charge, what they are doing, or even their names.[0] Its much worse than an FBI raid, and reminiscent of Gestapo tactics.
So even if DOGE is benign (and I don't think they are, but lets assume for a moment), if something goes wrong, who is to blame? Where is the transparency they are expecting of government agencies?
Would you trust an outside team like that, say some brash McKinsley team of "experts", to come in and do whatever they want with your systems? What company would allow that?
Also turns out that they're making up shit. $8 billion "saved" was actually $8 million because they didn't do their homework.
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/02/doge-mu...
The goal is to reduce government spending by $2 Trillion in 4 years. If you want to see how this is going: https://polymarket.com/doge
Why is this a bad thing if their job is to audit budget and spending? The article also does not go into technical details on what this supposed god mode actually is.
Putting aside the whole idea that Elon "bought" his way into this position, it's crazy this is the path that Trump is taking. He has a house and a senate that would likely happily cut all these programs, and it could be done legally and without all this mess. Why let Elon run roughshod over the government?
Honestly when DOGE was first announced, I thought it will be a tiny department that does almost nothing and produces recommendations and PDFs that nobody reads. I didn't expect this.
The difference between DOGE and previous overreaches of power like the Department of Homeland Security is the attack on the truth.
What do I mean by that? Well, during the previous political era (loosely 9/11 through the COVID-19 pandemic), when intellectuals spoke truth to power, power listened.
So people like us could voice our opinions on constitutionality, historical precedent, etc, and eventually our points made their way up through the news cycle and someone in a position of power would validate our concerns.
Whereas today, people like Elon Musk belittle academic arguments as nonconstructive because they haven't made us money and we aren't rich. So obviously we're wrong.
This wasn't always the case. Some billionaires could be very stubborn, but at their core, they still held themselves to a higher standard, a geek ethos. It mattered what academics thought.
I can't believe I'm saying this, but I side with Bill Gates on this.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/27/bill-gates-e...
Imagine: if you dunk on Elon on Twitter now he could get mad and post your tax return in the replies
Well, it is a government agency tasked with audits. Why shouldn't it have root access?
> No good reason or case can be made for one person or entity to have this scope of access to this many government agencies containing this much sensitive information.
The president should obviously have this level of access.
Federal level government is not a startup
Breaking things will destroy lives if not literally kill people
If it was this "easy" someone would have made a proposal years ago even if it was turned down
And Congress, not ANY President controls spending
We do not elect Kings in this country, there was an entire very brutal war to make it that way
This data is going to leak if it's not copied already into insecure sources and every foreign adversary is going to have it
Cannot be undone
And there should be investigations and prosecutions for this to prevent it ever happening again by ANY President
i hope they try to use cjis data bc it's taken me 6 months to build a system that is technically compliant and it still doesn't fully pass. they definitely will fail the data security policy requirements.
Trump/Musk are using "corruption/fraud" as a lie to remake the government in their image (or Project2025's image), in the same way that Bush used WMDs as a lie to invade Iraq.
Where's the evidence of widespread corruption? If there really was corruption and fraud, then we'd be hearing of people being investigated and/or charged with breaking the law, not randomly fired or fired for ideological/loyalty/retribution reasons.
People did not vote to give Elon Musk absolute, unaccountable access to the most sensitive machineries of government.
They've fired and hobbled all of the inspectors general and parties that are supposed to monitor and hold them accountable. This is nothing short of a security nightmare and insider threat of the highest degree.
Which cloud provider is DOGE using?
This reminds me of that scene in Don't Look Up where the planet puts all of their hopes in an eclectic oligarch's dumb plan to blow up the asteroid about to obliterate the planet, and it fails miserably. There is no chance any of this bodes well for many people not directly standing to profit directly from this pillaging of the federal government, and I'm not sure there is a way to recover from whatever is being done here. GG, I guess.
Having access to the data scares me less than the utter ineptitude demonstrated in presenting “findings”. Findings in quotes because if I used that level of analytical rigour I’d be instantly fired, probably out of a cannon into the sun.
Why not just say they have root access? 'god mode' is a ridiculous expression and just obscures the truth.
I get that some people need information dumbed down but this is pathetic.I think over half of this article is wildly speculative hyperbole. "Here is a list of things we can imagine that DOGE might do with this data: 1. Invent super solider zombies. 2. Blackmail you (you specifically are at risk here) 3. Sell all the data to China who will work with Israel and Mexico to conquer America
You should be extremely worried! Run in Fear of what might come to pass!" because some guy filled out a request to have admin access to some government data stores. Ridiculous. Between United, BCBS, and existing Chinese infiltrations into OPM and telcos your data is already compromised by real / confirmed bad actors. This is disappointing click bait from the Atlantic and their editors should be ashamed of its publication.
It will all land in Moscow. Or Beijing. Have fun.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250220063358/https://www.theat...
https://archive.ph/Oa42l