Behind the Efficiency Veil: Wired Exposes DOGE's Troubling Access to Data and Federal Information Systems
February 27, 2025
Privacy Plus+
Privacy, Technology and Perspective
This week, we’re highlighting Wired’s excellent coverage of the "Department of Governmental Efficiency" (DOGE)— the advisory body led by Elon Musk that has rapidly gained unprecedented access to federal IT systems despite its unofficial status.
We commend Wired’s reporting as a must-read, implicating the rule of law and the intersection of technology, data, privacy, and artificial intelligence:
https://www.wired.com/category/politics/
Though concerns abound in relation to DOGE's infiltration of government IT systems, one of the most troubling is the opacity surrounding the data and systems that the DOGE team have accessed, and how they are using and sharing that data. This opacity reportedly extends to algorithmic systems being developed, with Wired revealing DOGE's work on "software that automates the firing of government workers" without public disclosure of methodologies or oversight mechanisms.
Our Thoughts
Wired's continued reporting provides context for understanding the potential privacy violations, administrative procedure breaches, and unprecedented challenges to established legal frameworks governing federal information security. It also serves as an essential record for both present accountability and future historical understanding of this pivotal moment.
The 20th century provides numerous examples of how centralized information collection becomes a cornerstone of totalitarian control—from the meticulously maintained card catalogs of the East German Stasi to the Soviet Union's surveillance apparatus.
What distinguishes our current moment is the unprecedented scale, speed, and computational power available. The algorithmic systems reportedly being developed by DOGE for automated employment decisions represent a disturbing evolution: the outsourcing of human judgment to black-box systems.
History teaches us that the erosion of procedural safeguards rarely announces itself dramatically. Rather, it often arrives under the banner of efficiency, modernization, and streamlining—precisely the rhetorical framework surrounding DOGE's mission. The combination of opaque algorithmic systems, unprecedented data access, and limited accountability creates fertile ground for altering the relationship between citizens and the state through technological control – this is a recipe for authoritarianism. And we oppose every bit of it.
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Hosch & Morris, PLLC is a boutique law firm dedicated to data privacy and protection, cybersecurity, the Internet and technology. Open the Future℠.