John Z Black
Brunswick, ME • (207) 245-1010 • contact@johnzblack.com
The federal government holds your tax returns, Social Security earnings, immigration files, benefits history, and medical records. You didn’t opt into most of that. You can’t opt out. So when the question becomes “who’s accessing these systems, under what authority, and with what oversight,” that’s not a political question. It’s a data governance question.
And right now the answers are a mess.
Reporting from Wired and others describes DOGE personnel accessing systems at the SSA, Treasury, Education, and DHS without the normal audit logging, legal authorization, or access controls. Much of what’s known comes from leaks and court filings rather than official disclosure. That opacity alone is a failure. If you can’t say who accessed what and when, your controls are already broken.
Multiple federal courts have issued restraining orders. Court documents describe access granted without background checks, systems touched without audit trails, and senior agency officials being bypassed entirely.
Here’s the part that doesn’t get enough coverage. Forget intent for a second. Even if nobody meant to misuse the data, granting extraordinary system access to people who haven’t gone through normal security vetting creates gaps that foreign intelligence services can exploit. High-value insiders are high-value targets. That’s just how espionage works.
And there’s something worse than unauthorized access: unauthorized modification. Tax databases and benefit payment systems drive real financial and legal decisions. Changes to those records, accidental or deliberate, can have immediate consequences for actual people. The audit trail question matters for both.
The federal government holds data about you that you never consented to share and can’t remove. The protections are legal and institutional, not technical. And right now, some of those protections have demonstrably weakened. No court order un-rings that bell.