Can Americans demand a new SSN, now that the whole social security database was exfiltrated by Elon (via DOGE) and leaked to Cloudflare + an adocacy group seeking to overturn election results?
3mon 20h ago by lemmy.sdf.org/u/evenwicht in law_us@lemmy.sdf.org from lemmy.sdf.org
(ignore the above massive preview text if you are using the shitty stock Lemmy client)
The bombshell is that Elon exfiltrated the social security records of all Americans and shared it with Cloudflare, DOGE, and an outside advocacy group seeking to overturn election results.
The fuckup is not just SSNs (slave surveillance numbers), it’s the whole 9 yards:
“DOGE team members were given access to databases containing:
- Social Security numbers
- medical and mental health records
- bank and credit card information
- tax details
- work histories
- and home addresses for millions of Americans.”
I suppose getting a new SSN is futile, even if permitted, because all this data is aggregated into the data breach. So change your name, move your residence, new SSN, switch banks... fuck, just leave the country perhaps.
(edit) I accidentally updated an older version of my post and lost a paragraph where I conjectured that the databreach was legal since it only violates the 4th Amendment, which the US tends to brush aside as we know from the Snowden revelations. Hence the correction from @ReptilianCleric@lemmy.zip below. Sorry! No version control on Lemmy.
Oh, nothing about it was remotely legal. So, previous admin had formed a task force charged with auditing the government's networking equipment, basically. Cheetoh-faced McDictator comes in, they rename this taskforce DOGE, and tell em to do their thing. But their legal authority or mandate or whatever was never changed, and of course they took actions the executive branch legally isn't permitted to do. But the few people who challenged this were forced aside by the police, including at least one case where the people trying to stop shit called the pigs.
I think more likely the SSN becomes less valuable as an identification tool. For a lot of places, your phone number has already become the default qualifier, including in credit profiling. Everyone else is relying on phone companies to vet your identity.
Oh so....not our social security number? Or was that just a terribly placed joke?
Have you never heard SSNs called slave surveillance numbers? It’s the same thing. They are synonyms -- borne from the fact that what was originally simply intended as a primary key in the DB of one gov administration became a global identifier ripe for abuse.