Watergate inspired law to fight Doge

Katie Dramond: Against. Well, we will take a short break. When we go back, we will pick up the place where we stopped and talk about the actual interest of Americans about their privacy and access to their data. Welcome again to UncleNY Valley, I am a global editor -in -chief at Wired Katie Drummond. I am here with our main editor of security and investigations, Andrew Cots. Andrew, thank you again for being here.

Andrew Cots: Thanks for hosting me.

Katie Dramond: And let’s talk a little about Dog and the privacy of America. So there has been, as we know in WIRED well, a lot of coverage about Doge and what they are doing within the federal government over the past few weeks. A lot of vortex, a lot of chaos and a lot of anxiety, right? There is a lot of concern between journalists and Americans on a broader scale about access to various government systems, access to data, and access to sensitive information about Americans. Can you explain any kind of information that you can access based on the agencies they currently work within the federal government?

Andrew Cots: So they will have the possibility of access to everything mainly, and they will know everywhere you lived, everywhere you do the bank, exactly how much money you earn, and perhaps what your tax declarations are. They will have access to your medical history, probably what your networks look, and what your social networks look, everywhere you have worked, possible travel records.

Katie Dramond: There was a paragraph in the story that we published yesterday that I thought was really amazing, and I read in just a few weeks, DOGE employees reached the records of federal employees in the employee management office, government payment data in the Treasury Data Department on student loan recipients in the Ministry of Education, and information about Disaster victims in Fema and huge amounts of employment and data related to the workplace in the Ministry of Labor. It continues from there. I mean, this is a comprehensive endeavor to reach a truly sensitive information about Americans. Can you walk for us during some different virtual scenarios? If Dog, Musk, President Trump and the White House get all this data, get all this access, what can they do with it?

Andrew Cots: One of the things we think internally in WAID is a lot of threats, just what is the opportunity that will be targeted by any kind of attack? In this case, we have to redefine the shape of our threat models completely. This is especially true if you are a weak person. So if you are not transformed, if you are a migrant, if you are looking for miscarriage, just to get rid of the most obvious examples. This information can be used to target you in one way or another, and we do not know how this information can be used. Historically, you will not think that a high -design government employee, such as Elon Musk as it is now, will be fed from the Trump administration. It is clear that the application of the law, if the FBI is able to use the huge quantities of information they have on people to target those targeting it, and we do not know. We are only one month away from this administration. We already see a comprehensive campaign of immigration, and this will develop. We’ll go to at least four years of this, and it is really impossible for anyone to know if it will be a target. So we do not know what the threat model in an environment seems to be a political goal. If we look at authoritarian regimes, they will be used in all different types of ways to pursue people. These data may be manipulated to compensate for the charges against people for accusing people of crimes they have not committed. For years, WIRED covered best privacy practices, best security practices, and many people only say, “If you don’t have anything to hide, don’t worry about it.” But now we do not know what you should worry about and do not know what to hide it and the things that you tried to hide or that things protected by government systems have been exposed now. Thus, it is in fact guessing anyone who can happen and what are the consequences.