I notice that there is a significant usage of ambiguous terms going on in this NYT story about the resignation of the Social Security head in protest of DOGE. There is a very careful construction at work in deploying these terms in this way.
The resignation of Michelle King, the acting commissioner, is the latest abrupt departure of a senior federal official who refused to provide Mr. Musk’s lieutenants with access to closely held data. Mr. Musk’s team has been embedding with agencies across the federal government and seeking access to private data as part of what it has said is an effort to root out fraud and waste. [Emphasis added.]
"Private" data? It's clearly not private, because it is owned by the government. It is thus, to use another ambiguous term that is at least as just, public information.
But it isn't really public-public, just as it isn't really private-private. It's akin to the copies of your emails that Google or Yahoo owns, and which they can freely choose to share with the FBI if they are asked. They don't need your permission, and you have no legal expectation of privacy. Here, the government owns this copy of the information, which DOGE has lawful authority to access.
Which brings us to "breach."
“S.S.A. has comprehensive medical records of people who have applied for disability benefits,” said Nancy Altman, president of Social Security Works, a group that promotes the expansion of Social Security. “It has our bank information, our earnings records, the names and ages of our children, and much more.”
Warning about the risks of Mr. Musk's team accessing the data, Ms. Altman added, “There is no way to overstate how serious a breach this is.” [Emphasis added.]
It's not a "breach" in any normal sense of the term; it's just a government agency with oversight powers accessing the records of another agency over which it has oversight responsibilities. They're not stealing the information. They're not 'breaching security.' They are part of the security; this is their job.
Now the use of 'private' was in the Times' own voice; here they are simply quoting someone who said something they liked even better. It's misleading and without context, which makes it even better for them because the point of the article is to lead the reader in a particular direction.
4 comments:
The data are, however, personal, and that's at the heart of their beef, I think; NYT just likes, in keeping with its tabloid nature, the more hyped terms.
Regarding the fear of leaks of those data, so far, DOGE's leaks and breaches of DOGE's collections of data by outsiders (thus, breaches in its true meaning) are far outstripped by the IRS' own, deliberately done, leaks, by the SSA's cavalier handling of the data in its care, and by the the legions of hackers having their way with Federal government data ranging from personal to national security data. The Feds' ability to prevent those breaches is, so far, akin to a Thursday night hooker's ability to say no. DOGE has had zero leaks or breaches.
The risk is real, but these wet-behind-the-ears children on the DOGE's staff are better at electronic security than their long-established government counterparts, and they're better disciplined personally, too.
The press' artificial hyperventilating lends them no credibility in laying out the actual risks.
Eric Hines
Eric is correct. (I had to take data privacy training yearly in my previous IT job.) You have to distinguish between owning the information and being a custodian of it. The SSA, IRS, Google, and many other businesses all hold people's private information but they can only use it for purposes which they have disclosed and which are related to their operations, of which monitoring for fraudulent payments would certainly be a reasonable thing for the SSA to do. Merely the fact they are disclosing some information to DOGE doesn't mean DOGE gets all of it, either. There is some legitimate concern but it's way overblown.
The Google email thing is somewhat separate but again it's not that they own your emails. Their TOS are written to give them the authority to disclose them if they so chose upon request from LEOs. They could insist upon full-blown subpoenas but obviously don't in most cases.
"You have to distinguish between owning the information and being a custodian of it."
I think ownership is a model that we sometimes stretch a bit too far. Who owns my Social Security Number? Not me; I have a SSN, but I didn't create it or even want to create one for myself. The Social Security Administration clearly owns it if anyone can be said to 'own' such a thing at all. It's assigned to me, that's all.
Likewise the emails. It's not just that Google has custody of a copy of an email I sent on Gmail; they own the servers on which that copy is stored, so if anyone 'owns' the data it's the people who own the physical things that are the data that consists of that copy. I don't 'own' any part of it. I probably in some sense 'own' the ideas I wrote down, but not the copy of the data.
'Ownership of self' is another thing that I hear from especially libertarian but also right leaning thinkers. I have always objected to that idea. I don't want us to think of people as things that are subject to being owned, not even by themselves. Not to adopt Kant's position, but I prefer the concept he advances when he says that in his view 'everything shall have either a price or a dignity.' By this he meant that people shouldn't be thought of as things that can be bought and sold, owner or lent; they should be thought of as categorically different from other things, dignified in a way that the ordinary things of the world are not.
Ownership is a market analogy: the 'class' article mentions that the one class sincerely believes that the market is the best thing for everyone, and so tries to extend its forces analogically into the whole society. I don't think that analogy works very well sometimes.
Notice that they never say it was a shame Obama created the agency ten years ago.
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