#Data administrators

[jorgenguldmann]

Data Stewards

The term data steward never resonated well with me; I prefer the terminology business data owners, as this term conveys a stronger sense of responsibility. The role should mandate authority and respect while it is there to safeguard the integrity and value of data. So, let’s dive into and define what data stewards are—individuals appointed to oversee the data quality for specific domains or…

[politijohn]

Source

[onlytiktoks]

[bringbreakables]

Not me making all my Venmo transactions and contacts private

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Ross Rosenfeld at New Republic:

As the old saying goes, there are three types of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics. Elon Musk has demonstrated mastery of all three, often simultaneously. Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency has made wild claims about the savings it has supposedly accrued during its blunt force takeover of government institutions, including the Office of Personnel Management, where Musk’s minions—some just recent high school grads—are wreaking havoc.

Before Trump took office, Musk promised to find $2 trillion in savings each year, despite the fact that discretionary spending totals only around $1.8 trillion. So far, no such savings—or anything close—has materialized, and no evidence of the massive waste and fraud Musk vowed to uncover has emerged. Instead, Musk and the Trump administration keep throwing out random figures that are misleading at best, and often downright lies. Their goal is not merely to apply a veneer of truth and legitimacy to their wholesale wreckage of the federal government, or to make it even more difficult for the fact-checking media to keep up with the Trump administration’s relentless, dizzying moves. It’s also a sleight of hand to make it appear as if it’s not corporate titans like Musk himself who are receiving sweetheart deals and robbing the American people blind, but “deep state” bureaucrats, DEI recipients, and African children. Though Musk alleges that the government is rife with incompetence, he and his DOGE team appear most incompetent of all, having created a website that was easily hacked last week. But that pales in comparison with the dubious statistics published on the site and spouted elsewhere by the administration. Some examples: DOGE posted claims of $16 billion in savings on Monday, half of which it said came from the elimination of a single contract for a diversity program at ICE. They were only off by a factor of over 1400, since the real savings from the canceled contract was no more than $5.5 million. As The New York Times pointed out, the contract they cited was actually for $8 million, not $8 billion—and $2.5 million of it has already been spent, and thus is unrecoverable. Even after the mistake was pointed out, DOGE continued to assert the $8 billion figure. The Times also noted, “A larger total savings number published on the site, $55 billion, lacked specific documentation.”

Not only was that $8 billion complete bunk; turns out, so were the next three highest “savings” claimed on the site. DOGE professed to find another $1.9 billion in savings from terminating three contracts for USAID, each for $655 million. But these contracts were what are known as Indefinite Delivery Vehicles, or IDVs. Such contracts allow the government to set spending limits but do not require it to meet those limits, meaning that it can cancel the contract at will. So far, the government had spent only $55 million of that $1.9 billion. It’s worth noting that spending on USAID—which Musk called “a criminal organization” and the Trump administration has unilaterally (and possibly illegally) shut down—is not wasted money, but brings tangible benefits, including providing HIV treatments in Africa, countering Russian propaganda, and aiding civilians devastated by war in Syria and Ukraine. It’s our best tool for soft power, burnishing America’s image around the world by providing material help where it’s need most. And despite Donald Trump’s claim that “billions of dollars have been stolen” by the organization, former USAID Administrator Andrew Natsios told 60 Minutes that it is “the most accountable aid agency in the world,” with 40 percent of the staff, he estimated, made up of lawyers and accountants tasked with watching every dollar. The administration has also made the suspect claim that millions of dead people are receiving Social Security benefits. Musk said it “might be the biggest fraud in history” even shared a graph on X purporting to show this, apparently believing that everyone at the Social Security Administration was so stupid as to not recognize that the agency was sending out more than 5 million checks to people past the age of 140. Yet the only fool in the equation was Musk. Neither he nor Trump, who repeated the claim, appear to understand that while there are millions of people still in the Social Security database because their deaths were never recorded, these people do not receive checks. A total of 89,000 people 99 years old and over receive checks, which, unsurprisingly, aligns remarkably well with the U.S. Census estimate that there are 85,000 people 100 and over in the country. Simply checking a list of Social Security check recipients would have cleared up the entire issue. Yet Musk was either too dumb or too lazy to do so. Or, perhaps more likely, he just didn’t care if it was true or not because it served his purposes.

The stats that Trump and Musk are spouting in order to justify draconian cuts are bogus.

[fo3lonewanderer]

This is fucking horrifying. Trump is literally trying to turn the US into an authoritarian black mirror-esque police state where there is no privacy, no rights, and AI can pick out anyone who might oppose the regime and track them down with our private information being funneled into it.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/technology/trump-palantir-data-americans.html

[alyfoxxxen]

NIH autism study will pull from private medical records : NPR

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

"Just when you thought it hit rock bottom..." as drawn by Edith Pritchett

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

February 18, 2025

Heather Cox Richardson

Feb 19, 2025

In a court filing last night, the Director of the Office of Administration in the Trump administration, Joshua Fisher, clarified the government position of billionaire Elon Musk. In a sworn declaration to the court, Fisher identified Musk as “a Senior Advisor to the President.” He explained: “In his role as a Senior Advisor to the President, Mr. Musk has no greater authority than other senior White House advisors. Like other senior White House advisors, Mr. Musk has no actual or formal authority to make government decisions himself. Mr. Musk can only advise the President and communicate the President’s directives.”

Fisher’s statement went on to say that Musk is neither an employee nor the service administrator—that is, the leader—of the Department of Government Efficiency.

The statement is in response to a lawsuit filed by 14 states—New Mexico, Arizona, Michigan, California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington—contending that Musk’s role is unconstitutional because he has such sweeping power in his role at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency that the Constitution requires that his position be confirmed by the Senate.

President Trump has routinely referred to Musk as DOGE’s leader, and the media routinely refer to “Elon Musk’s DOGE.” Musk has flooded his social media site with claims that DOGE is cutting programs that he claims are wasteful or fraudulent, although so far he has yet to provide any proof of his extravagant claims. In the early hours of Monday, he reposted a picture of a leaner, meaner version of himself dressed as a Roman gladiator with the caption: “I vowed to destroy the woke mind virus.” Musk added: “And I am.”

Beginning on Friday, the Trump administration began mass purges of federal government employees. As Hannah Natanson, Lisa Rein, and Emily Davies reported in the Washington Post, the firings were haphazard and riddled with errors, but apparently most of those firings were of employees in the probationary period of employment, typically the first year of service but a status that’s triggered by promotions and lateral transfers as well. About 20 FDA employees who review neurological and physical medical devices were fired, hampering the agency’s ability to evaluate the devices produced by Musk’s brain implant company Neuralink. Employment lawyers say the mass firings are illegal because they ignore employee protections.

Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is overseeing the case, had noted: "This is essentially a private citizen directing an organization that's not a federal agency that has access to the entire workings of the federal government to hire, fire, slash contracts, terminate programs, all without any congressional oversight." Now the Trump administration is attempting to protect Musk by saying he is simply an advisor.

Department of Justice lawyer Joshua Gardner told Chutkan that he could not independently confirm the firings of thousands of federal employees last week, prompting her to note that his ignorance seemed willful: "The firing of thousands of federal employees is not a small thing,” she said. “You haven't been able to learn if that's true?"

Peter Charalambous of ABC News noted that lawyers from the Department of Justice are also unable to explain what, exactly, DOGE is. They won’t say it’s an “agency,” which, as U.S. District Judge John Bates wrote, would be “subject to the Freedom of Information Act, the Privacy Act and the Administrative Procedures Act.” On Friday, Charalambous points out, when reporters asked senior advisor to the Treasury Department’s general counsel Christopher Healy, who runs DOGE, he answered: “I don’t know the answer to that.”

What is clear, though, is that the DOGE team is vacuuming up data from government agencies. It began its run shortly after Trump took office by accessing the Treasury Department payment system, prompting the resignation of career civil servant David Lebryk. Then on February 2 the DOGE people moved on to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) where they struggled with security officers trying to stop them from accessing classified information. By February 12 they were at the General Services Agency, which oversees the government’s real estate.

That pattern has continued. Over the weekend, Fatima Hussein of the Associated Press reported that DOGE was trying to get access to taxpayer data from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), specifically the Integrated Data Retrieval System that enables examinations of tax returns, deep troves of information about hundreds of millions of American citizens and businesses. Access to individuals’ bank account numbers and private information has, in the past, been tightly guarded. Indeed, compromising access to that information is a felony.

Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), the top Democrat on the Committee on Finance, and Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), the top Democrat on the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, wrote to Douglas O’Donnell, acting commissioner of the IRS, demanding information about DOGE’s access to taxpayer information and noting that the request for access raises “serious concerns that Elon Musk and his associates are seeking to weaponize government databases containing private bank records and other confidential information to target American citizens and businesses as part of a political agenda.”

DOGE worked over the weekend to get access to Social Security Administration databases as well. Amanda Becker of The 19th notes that these records contain information about individuals’ income, addresses, children, retirement benefits, and even medical records. Lisa Rein, Holly Bailey, Jeff Stein, and Jacob Bogage of the Washington Post reported that acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration Michelle King, who had been with the agency for decades before Trump elevated her to acting commissioner last month, resigned after a clash over access to the data.

Jason Koebler of 404 Media reported today that workers at the General Services Administration resigned in protest after Musk ally Thomas Shedd, who now runs the group of coders DOGE has embedded in that agency, requested access to “all components of the Notify[DOT]gov system.” That system is used to send mass text messages to the public. Information about it is highly sensitive and gives anyone with access “unilateral, private access to the personal data of members of the public,” according to Koebler. That includes not just names and phone numbers, but information about, for example, whether individuals are enrolled in public benefit programs that are based on financial status.

A White House spokesperson defended DOGE’s access to the IRS by saying that “waste, fraud, and abuse have been deeply entrenched in our broken system for far too long,” adding: “It takes direct access to the system to identify and fix it.” But DOGE has been unable to document what it claims are cost-saving measures. On Monday it listed what it said were $16 billion in canceled contracts, but Aatish Bhatia, Josh Katz, Margot Sanger-Katz, and Ethan Singer of the New York Times corrected the record, noting that a contract DOGE valued at $8 billion was actually closer to $8 million. Further, they noted, claims of $55 billion in savings lacked documentation.

Musk’s recent claims that the Social Security Administration is sending out payments to tens of millions of dead people more than 100 years old—a claim echoed by President Trump—were wrong: the software system defaults missing birthdates to more than 150 years ago and the Social Security Administration decided not to spend more than $9 million on upgrading its system to include death information. Right-wing podcaster Trish Regan warned DOGE that “it’s critical to present the math CORRECTLY” and noted: “Looks like the team got out over its skis on this one.”

Aside from the many legal problems with the argument that the opaque DOGE can alter programs established by Congress, and the problems with documenting its actual work, it is undeniable that Musk’s team has had access to a treasure trove of information about Americans and American businesses and the ways in which they interact with the government. This information can feed the AI projects that Musk envisions putting at the center of American life. It also opens the way for Musk and his cronies to weaponize private information against business competitors as well as political enemies.

In addition, it can also feed a larger technological project for controlling politics.

The story of how Cambridge Analytica used information harvested from about 87 million Facebook users to target political ads in 2016 is well known, but the misuse of data was back in the news earlier this month when Corey G. Johnson and Byard Duncan of ProPublica reported that the gun industry also shared data with Cambridge Analytica to influence the 2016 election.

Johnson and Duncan reported that after a spate of gun violence, including the attempted assassination of then-representative Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona and the mass shootings at Fort Hood in Texas, a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, and the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, had increased public pressure for commonsense gun safety legislation, the gun industry’s chief lobbying group, the National Shooting Sports Foundation, worked with gun makers and retailers to collect data on gun owners without their knowledge or consent. That data included names, ages, addresses, income, debts, religious affiliations, and even details like which charities people supported, shopping habits, and “whether they liked the work of the painter Thomas Kinkade and whether the underwear women had purchased was plus size or petite.”

Analysts ran that information through an algorithm that created a psychological profile of an individual to enable precise targeting of potential voters. Ads based on these profiles reached almost 378 million views on social media and sent more than 60 million visitors to the National Shooting Sports Foundation website. When Trump won in 2016, the NSSF took partial credit for the results. Not only was Trump in office, it reported, but also, “thanks in part to our efforts, there is a pro-gun majority in the U.S. House and Senate.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[karadin]

PROTEST AT THE US DEPARTMENT OF TREASURY TUES FEB 4 AT 5PM TO PROTEST THE TAKEOVER OF DATA AND PROCESSES BY ELON MUSK

[wherepond]

Trump unhinged

Trump hit with major lawsuit over Musk data breach

MeidasTouch host Ben Meiselas reports on a major lawsuit filed against the Trump administration for allowing Elon Musk to gain access to the Treasury Department payment systems.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Josh Marcus at The Independent:

The Trump administration is reportedly leaning on an Elon Musk-allied tech company to build wide-ranging data tools pooling government information on millions of Americans and immigrants alike. The campaign has raised alarms from critics that the company could be furthering Musk’s DOGE effort to vacuum up and potentially weaponize – or sell – mass amounts of sensitive personal data, particularly against vulnerable groups like immigrants and political dissidents. In March, the president signed an executive order dedicated to “stopping waste, fraud, and abuse by eliminating information silos,” a euphemism for pooling vast stores of data on Americans under the federal government.

To carry out the data effort, the administration has deepened the federal government’s longstanding partnership with Palantir, a tech firm specializing in building big data applications, which was co-founded by Silicon Valley investor, GOP donor, and JD Vance mentor Peter Thiel. Since Trump took office, the administration has reportedly spent more than $113 million with Palantir through new and existing contracts, while the company is slated to begin work on a new $795 million deal with the Defense Department. Palantir is reportedly working with the administration in the Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the Internal Revenue Service, according to The New York Times. Within these agencies, the firm is reportedly building tools to track the movement of migrants in real time and streamline all tax data. The company is also reportedly in talks about deploying its technology at the Social Security Administration and the Department of Education, both of which have been targets of DOGE, and which store sensitive information about Americans’ identities and finances. [...] The Trump administration has reportedly pursued a variety of efforts to use big data to support its priorities, including social media surveillance of immigrants to detect alleged pro-terror views, and American activists who disagree with Donald Trump’s views..

This is very disturbing: The Trump Regime is partnering up with Peter Thiel-founded Palantir to gather data on millions of Americans that could be used to target immigrants and dissidents of the 47 Regime.

See Also:

TNR: Trump Taps Palantir to Create Master Database on Every American

For Such A Time As This (Andra Watkins): Palantir, Project 2025, and State-Sanctioned Moral Values

[alyfoxxxen]

DOGE Is Planning a Hackathon at the IRS. It Wants Easier Access to Taxpayer Data | WIRED

[archives-of-iacon]

Administrative Update – Outreach Division

Following a regrettably public mishap involving an unfinished internal draft and an unsecured data-slate, the Archives of Iacon would like to formally inform all users that a cleared and intentional introduction post for the Archives’ Outreach Team (currently operating under the designation “C.O.G.S.”) has now been uploaded.

The contents of the post have been reviewed, redacted, un-redacted, rephrased, and ultimately approved following extensive consultation with the Senior Archivists Council and, with some internal reluctance, the acquisition of an official written endorsement from retired Optimus Prime concerning the acceptable usage of emojis in formal archival communications.

Users are reminded that C.O.G.S. is a junior-led initiative intended to promote greater public engagement with historical materials and foster cultural curiosity, particularly among younger Cybertronians. Any questions, comments, or unprompted warnings about “the state of modern data integrity” may be directed to the Outreach Team directly, as they have been advised to handle their own correspondence.

We thank our visitors for their patience and urge them to enjoy the new channel for as long as it remains intact.

—The Archives Administration

[blitzenwanderer]

I have not seen anyone talk about this order, which is alarming to me.

This order is making services that allow someone to send money from one place to another actively prompt for more identifiable info from the sender if it is being sent to one of the listed zip codes; i.e. SSN. This is under the illusion of stopping drug cartels sending money, but in reality it could out anyone still in the U.S. that has yet to be deported or arrested by ICE. It will just lead to more harassment and arrests of "gang members". Please spread the word that it is generally no longer safe to be sending money to these zip codes. I'm not sure which companies are having to comply, but I would assume all of them. The threat was that if they don't comply they will have their money sending service shut down in those zip codes.

[wherepond]

Trump unhinged

Musk's clueless job slashing backfires again; principled protest resignations stymie Trump's agenda

Rachel Maddow highlights another set of firings of critical federal employees by Elon Musk's staff that doesn't seem to understand the government they're butchering, this time the administration is frantically trying to re-enlist crucial USDA workers focused on bird flu.

And as Musk's team continues to grab for more of Americans' personal data stored in federal systems, another top administrator has resigned in protest. 

Psychopaths seek revenge