Summary
Elon Musk and his “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) have been granted access to the U.S. Treasury’s federal payment system, raising concerns about security and misuse.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent approved the move after a top Treasury official was ousted for resisting.
Critics warn Musk could freeze payments to government programs or manipulate federal contracts.
The move coincides with DOGE’s takeover of the Office of Personnel Management.
Experts call it a dangerous power grab, as Musk holds no official government position.
So does everyone, thanks Equifax
Yup. My credit has been frozen since that hack.
Not mine. I live in a country that isn’t an absolute joke.
Must be nice
If it’s the UK, the government probably has assigned you a National Insurance number.
Yes, but apartheid boy has nothing to do with the UK.
He should have nothing to do with the UK, but he’s still sticking his fingers in British pies by petitioning for Tommy Robinson’s release and promoting Reform UK.
Stephen Christopher Yaxley-Lennon (the shite) will stay where he belongs regardless, and Reform will never be anything but a gammon minority party.
I hope it stays that way, but they are already pressuring everyone to move further right. I’m worried that the gammons will vote them in
Give it time. He’s already working on throwing the German election to literal nazis. Just wait till your next election.
The next UK election won’t be until after the next US election, so I’m not sure he’s going to actually be able to.
He’ll be gone by the time our next election comes around. That’s presuming, of course, that America will wake up during this presidency.
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I hope they have otherwise he’s not getting to get any employment.
Everyone has my social security number. It’s one of the stupidest security fails of all time that nobody seems to want to fix. And now there is an entire “credit protection” industry so it will remain that way.
What happens when we file our taxes? Will we even get our refunds?
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I kinda wish this were possible. I’ll pay my state, fuck the feds
Was just worrying about this with my spouse
Just to culture shock Americans: it’s not exactly the same but in Sweden our personal numbers are kept in the open. Even online. Searchable databases with names, phone numbers, addresses etc. It tells you if someone has a dog. It tells you if they have a car. Which car, even. Some tell you the income of the person you’re searching for. Sites even exist that could tell you if I’ve commited a crime. Some people think that’s unreasonable. Irresponsible even!
That said, as pertains to the article, the fact that he has that info seems pretty unreasonable and irresponsible.
At least in the past, you could use a person’s ssn to open credit cards, change utilities, and generally ruin someone’s life. Someone took out a credit card with my SSN when I was like 9 or 10 and it caused issues when I became an adult and tried to get a student loan for uni.
That is technically possible with our information too. It happens, but is bothersome. Taking out massive loans is possible too, with the right bank on the right day.
You’d need some way to verify the identity, but since such signatures are handled digitally through an app it’s just a good phishing call away really. You already have the phone number and the address if you have the personal identification number.
In the US, if you know someone’s address (which is trivially easy to find online) and their social security number, you can open credit cards online.
The number itself is considered secure, so knowledge of the number is assumed to be enough identity confirmation for most applications.Yeah, that is a problem of course. It’s not a very secure system.
It’s not that we don’t have all that info and more available, it’s that we want you to pay a data broker for it.
Some of this data, like commited crimes, is usually behind such a barrier here too. Though it is possible, even if a bit more complex, to get that info by yourself directly from the courts.
My USA town will let you look up your taxes with just your last name and first initial. You can find out what real estate and car someone owns with that. Dog license seems to be in a different system.
My salary is public information because I’m a public employee.
Why is Facebook 2auth reset harder, than stealing someones identity in US?
Because the social security number has become the default way to uniquely identify an individual in the US despite the fact that it was never intended for that function.
I get that, I just can’t comprehend, how you can do anything with it. In my country we have similar thing. We have “Birth number” and it is on every contract we sign. But just knowing it does jack shit. (But yeah, we also have identity card, and that changes number every renewal/loss)
More context:
For online sign you would need atleast 2 identifications (for example Identity cars and passport). And usualy thay make you come anyway to prove you’re you.
It is bafeling to me, that some peaple in US have no means of identification.
For a long time, many companies treated the SSN as a sort of secure password that only the individual would know. Some companies still do. Others, like schools and the military, just treated it like what it is. A unique id number. If you know name, address and SSN, it’s possible to do a lot of different things that can create headaches for the person who was targeted. New credit cards, bank accounts, loans, transferred utilities, rental agreements.
Elon Musk has to go.
Bruh who doesn’t at this point?
And it’s only a matter of time until until he boasts about it by posting someone’s SN during an petty online argument.
To be fair the social security number is not exactly the most secure thing in the world. More than likely there’s a lot of people who have your social security number and you don’t have any clue that they do.
That being said, I don’t understand why he’s being allowed this kind of access. Even with the Orange douchebag’s blessing, there should be other people minding the store. Shouldn’t there?
there should be other people minding the store. Shouldn’t there?
There was until they were removed and yes man installed
Didn’t Elon get hacked and his SS number leaked?
No, I’m not about to go search for that, but I’m pretty sure that happened, with the 23andme data breach…
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Was it eighty eight or neinty nein?
All of my data got breached multiple times going back to the dot-com bubble days, by Yahoo, the original 2015 OPM Beach and by two of the big credit bureaus for a start. If Musk has my social at this point it doesn’t matter.
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So cool. How do you come up with something that clever?
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Yes I’m bitter, and no my jokes aren’t funny but I don’t care.
Congratulations, you are ready to start a career in stand-up comedy!
(The former was why I quit doing standup, a lot of them never stop being bitter.)
Well, your in a topic thats clearly only about Americans, and you felt the need to yell “im not American this doesn’t affect me”, as if anyone cares.
No one cares if you’re not american. The topic doesn’t affect you by default.
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What indicates that it’s only about Americans
Aside from the headline, the very first sentence of the article.
The world’s richest man may now have access to the confidential personal information of every taxpayer in the United States
But we both know you’re just playing dumb and you obviously knew it from the headline, because you obviously didn’t bother to read the article.
And of course there’s the article summary in the body of the post that’s blatantly about the US.
c/news is generally for American news. c/worldnews is for everything else.
Yes, I know you don’t like that.
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See above, re: I know you don’t like that.
You have, as far as I can see it, three options: find your own server and make your own news community, accept that this is how it is and you have no way to change it even if you don’t like it, or whine about it.
You are choosing the third option for some reason. I’m not sure why.
Do someone about it instead of crying
We’re in a general news community on Lemmy.world.
You probably want !world@lemmy.world.
Back on Reddit, /r/news basically became about US news – I mean, it wasn’t a restriction to only be US, but it was just overwhelmed by US news – and so /r/worldnews was created in response, so that there was a subreddit that explicitly excluded US-specific news, so that it wouldn’t get flooded by it. !news@lemmy.world and !world@lemmy.world kinda parallels that relationship.
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If you think the US is going to annex Canada, you truly are a moron. I can only imagine the type of work you do. You can’t read, so that’s probably a problem for you first off.
I’m sure quite a few people have mine. SSN’s aren’t a secure thing at all. It should be updated.
You can get anyone’s SSN for $15 on the dark web. lol. The amount of leaks/hacks that have happened to all of the companies that require your SSN is insane.
You can get it on the clear web for about $20 completely legitimately. Background checks have been a thing forever and reveal basically everything.
Lmfao. There ya go. Even better.
Elon Musk and his “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE)
Is that seriously what it’s called? Elon Musk is producing enough cringe to power all of human civilization. I have no idea if this is the worst timeline or not, but it’s certainly the most embarrassing.
