[sigmar]

It may not have been your intent, but this comment seems to downplay the crime here. It's a crime to take the data even if he wasn't shopping it around as alleged. and the fact that he was 'young and stupid' makes the circumstances of how this happened much more important for an investigation by the IG (ie why was an immature person given so much power?)

[rz2k]

I think it’s a great reaction to news stories to imagine how you could have made the same bad decisions. Furthermore this public confession of being able to imagine making bad decisions might encourage a similarly minded to 20-something to wonder why an older version of themself is so afraid of even having such a dataset. It might even prompt someone to destroy some long forgotten cache of data they exfiltrated a long time ago.

I don’t think there’s a risk that it will influence a rare person in power to enforce the rules to go lighter. I just think it encourages people to be less reckless with hoarding data who might otherwise put themselves in danger.

[atmavatar]

Over and above the fact that everyone should already know that the SSN database is extremely sensitive, DOGE had to strong-arm people out of the way to gain access to it in the first place. Even a fresh twenty-something should have known better than to download the entire thing onto a flash drive and carry it around, let alone take it home with them, and especially not to share with a future employer.

The idea that could be done accidentally and innocently lacks any sort of credulity. It's so far out of the ordinary that I don't think applying Hanlon's Razor can be done in good faith.

[swasheck]

yeah. ignorantia juris non excusat applies to both the speed limit and passive data theft