The Anonymous Data Problem DOGE Created (Second Request)

You mentioned this is just the political economy of D.C.

It strikes me as deeply wrong, right? Not only that the government is doing this misuse of the data, they're contracting with companies to enable them to do this improper use of the data.

Is that the right way to think about this? Does this all need to be essentially reassessed on what is allowed here? And I want to get into some of your specific recommendations, but like...

And I'm jumping the gun here.

You have very specific things, and I'm just like, how can we possibly fix this? So, but...

do we need to look at all elements here and just have a holistic reassessment of not just what the government's doing, but this entire ecosystem.

And, and also it's like, I, when I think about that, I'm, I'm listening to you tell this story.

It's okay.

You know, it's all the laws that enable us, surveillance right it's not just privacy laws all those special government laws that the government says oh well i'm allowed to i'm allowed to surveil you know fisa comes up and there's just so many laws like that that i can't keep track of or i i don't i'm not an expert in you you're the expert here where you know is it procurement is it national security is it you know, administrative are all of these laws need to kind of be reassessed on in terms of like how to actually solve this problem or can, can you really do it just through privacy?

That's a great question.

I think that I think that the high level issue that we're really getting at here is just accountability.

Like, yeah, this is sort of this seems normal as part of D.C., but I political economy.

But I think that Congress and the public have sort of allowed that to happen in bits and pieces as contractors take on more and more sensitive and important duties that really federal agencies and departments should be accountable for.

So I think if we were to sort of like reimagine, if a new Congress were to sort of reimagine what some of the contracting could look like, there would need to be more of a conversation about, you know, what is some of the most sensitive work that deals with the most sensitive data about Americans and people living here? And how does that accountability actually run upward to the federal government, rather than these private actors who are more of add or remove?

I want to push back a little bit, right? Because if you, again, you sort of have a little bit of a vision of the government going back to eventually being a good faith actor, which is admirable of you.

I applaud your optimism here.

However, Is it the lesson that the government really can't be trusted with this data ever? Because at some point you'll get another Trump and they'll do the same thing.

And so shouldn't the laws be, the government can't be trusted with this data, period.

And they need to delete it all.

And you can't have it internally.

You can't.

You know, certainly outside of any very small national security area, maybe you have an exception, a very small exception for certain national security things, and they can access the data.

And it has to be very specific, and it has to be approved by Congress and reviewed by Congress exactly what kind of data they're allowed to have.

And then...

It literally can't be in the hands of anyone else.