Kitty Drummund: Good attractive, we want to have a short break. When we come back, we want to choose a place to get out and talk about how Americans are concerned about their privacy and access to DOGE to their data. Welcome to Illegal valleyI am the director of the Wired World Editorial, Katie Demond. I am here with our senior editor of security and research, Andrew Coats. Andrew, thank you again for you.
Andrew Couts: Thank you for you.
Kitty Drummund: And let’s talk a little more about American DOGE and privacy. So, as we know very well in the Wired, there was a coverage of DOGE and what they do within the federal government over the past few weeks. Many rotations, the type of chaos and a lot of concern, are it right? There is a lot of concern among journalists and among Americans that there are more about DODE access to various government systems, access to data, access to sensitive information about Americans. Can you explain what kind of information can access to the agencies that are currently working within the federal government?
Andrew Couts: So they want to access everything, and they want to get wherever you live, wherever you bank, exactly how much money you get, they potentially know your tax return. They want to access your medical history, probably to what your networks look like, your social networks are potentially traveling wherever you work.
Kitty Drummund: There was a paragraph in the story that we published yesterday that I thought was really stunning, and only read in a few weeks, DOGE employees to federal staff records in the staff management office, government payment data in the Treasury Data section They have access to student loans recipients at the Ministry of Education, information about disaster victims in FEMA, and large quantities of employment and work -related data at the Ministry of Labor. And it continues. I mean this is a widespread effort to access and sort one tone of very sensitive information about Americans. Can you walk us through a few different hypothetical scenarios? If DOGE, Musk and President Trump and White House get all these data, what can they do with it?
Andrew Couts: One of the things we think about in the interior is a threat modeling, and what is basically what opportunity you want to target with any attack? And in this case, we must fully define how our threat models look like. And this is especially true if you are a vulnerable person. So if you are a transistor, if you are an immigrant, if you are looking for an abortion, just to pull out the most clear examples. This information can be used to target you in another way, and we just don’t know how to use this information. Historically, you do not want to think that a very suitable government employee, like Elvan Maskak, as it is now, will tweet your bank records or health records, and we can see that if you are very important, this Falls. From the Trump administration. Obviously, law enforcement, if the FBI can use the wide amount of information about people to target anyone who wants to target, and we just don’t know. We are just a month of this government. We are currently seeing widespread repression in immigration and this is evolving. We want to go through at least four years, and it is really impossible for anyone to know if they will be a goal. So we don’t just know that the threat model appears to be in an environment where anyone can potentially become a political goal. And if we look at authoritarian regimes, it is used in different ways of following people. And this data may be manipulated to manipulate charges against people to accuse people of crimes they have not committed. Wired for years the best privacy practices have covered the best security practices, and many people just say “If you have nothing to hide, don’t worry about it.” But now we don’t know what you have to worry about and we don’t know what you have to hide and the things you try to hide or the things protected by government systems are now potentially . And so he really guess what everyone happens and what the consequences can be.
