The Watergate-Inspired Law That’s Being Used to Fight DOGE

Katie Drummond: Interesting. Ok, we’re going to take a short break. When we come back, we are going to pick up where we left and Americans will talk about their privacy and how to access their data in Dog. Welcome back Uncanny valleyI am Katie Drammond, director of the global editor of the wired. I’m here with our senior editor, Andrew Cuts for security and investigation. Andrew, thank you again for being here.

Andrew Couts: Thanks for having me.

Katie Drummond: And let’s talk about Dogs and American privacy. So there is, as we know very well in the wired, one ton of coverage about Daisy and what they are doing inside the federal government over the past few weeks. Lots of whirlwind, many types of chaos and lots of concern, isn’t it? There is more widespread concern about journalists and Americans having access to various government systems, having data access, sensitive information about Americans. Can you explain the potential access to the Dog on the basis of the agencies that are currently working inside the federal government?

Andrew Couts: So they are basically going to get access to everything and wherever they live, wherever you have made a bank, you will know exactly how much money you have earned, perhaps they will know what your tax returns are. They are about to get access to your treatment history, probably what your network looks like, how your social networks look, wherever you have worked, the records of possible travel.

Katie Drummond: There was a paragraph in the story that we published yesterday that I thought it was really stunning, and it was just a few weeks, staff in Dogs accessed the Federal employees in the Treasury Department Department to pay federal employees’ records in the education department, Loan recipient, Fema disaster damage. And information related to large amounts of employment and workplace-related information in the labor department. And it goes from there. I mean, this is an obvious attempt to actually access sensitive information about Americans. Can you go through the scenes of some of our different assumptions? If Dog and Kasturi and President Trump and the White House get all these data, get all this access, what can they do with it?

Andrew Couts: One of the things we think internally in the ward is the threat modeling and basically what is the opportunity to be targeted by any type of attack? And in this case, we need to fully define our threat models. And this is especially true if you are a weak person. So if you are in Trans, if you are immigrant, if you are looking for an abortion, only to throw the most obvious examples. This information can be used to target you the same or differently and we do not know how the information can be used. ICally, you do not think that a high-ranking government employee like he will tweet your banking records or your health records as he is now, and we can now see if you are publicly criticized if you are publicly criticized by the Trump administration. Obviously law enforcement, if the FBI is going to notice if they are about to notice, they are able to use plenty of information they have to target them, and we just don’t know. We are just a month of this administration. We are already watching the jerk crackdown about immigration and it is about to develop. We’re going through at least four years of this, and it is really impossible for anyone to be a goal. So we don’t just know how the threat model looks in an environment where one can become a possible political goal. And if we look at the authoritarian governance system it will be used in different ways to follow people. And those data can be tried to complain against people to complain of crimes against people that they have not committed. Over the years, wired is the best privacy practice, the best security practices and lots of people simply say, “If you don’t have anything to hide, don’t worry about it.” But now we don’t know what you need to be worried about and we don’t know what you should hide and the things you tried to hide or the government systems are now possiblely exposed. And so it really guess what could be what could be and what could be the consequences.