A whistleblower, Charles Borges, the chief data officer at the Social Security Administration (SSA), says former employees of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team made the copy in a way that “constitute[s] violations of laws, rules, and regulations, abuse of authority, gross mismanagement, and creation of a substantial and specific threat to public health and safety,” reports NPR:
Borges says that career cybersecurity officials within the SSA described the decision to copy the data as “very high risk” and even discussed the possibility of having to reissue Social Security numbers to millions of Americans in the event the cloud server was breached.
The copy of the data appears to have been set up inside the SSA’s existing cloud infrastructure, which operates on Amazon Web Services. However, according to the complaint, the copied data had far fewer security measures in place to protect it than the SSA’s standard protocols typically require.
According to Andrea Meza, an attorney with the Government Accountability Project who represents Borges, the cloud environment appeared to be set up for DOGE-affiliated Social Security staffers, but it “lacks independent security, monitoring and oversight.” She said Borges “has serious concerns about the vulnerability it causes for nearly every American’s data.”
(Source: NPR)