[ajross]

I knew it. I was saying from the instant they started we'd have a scandal like this. Bunch of tech bros walking into the government with personal MBPs and administrative authority to demand data from anyone and everyone was a privacy crisis happening in real time.

Yet here on HN, what have we been arguing about? Big tech. Google and Meta have been allowed to become boogeymen in this community out of all proportion to the actual threat they posed[1].

While the actual boogeyman stealing our data to exploit in the market? It was us.

[1] I mean, lets be honest, while everyone has abstract complaints the truth is that they've actually been remarkably benign stewards of our data over the past 20 years. Much, much, MUCH more responsible than the glibertarian dude in the cubicle next to you, as it turns out.

[troyvit]

Yep, and we're only hearing about this because in this case there was a whistleblower. Call me cynical but I'm sure that there is plenty of data DOGE workers exfiltrated from SSA and other places that we'll never directly know about.

[enoint]

Posts predicting this were apparently flagged as "political". For example, Bruce Schneier's warning [0]. For a site called Hacker News, DOGE unfortunately attracted a different priority of notoriety than, say, the numerous merger and acquisition and VC maneuvers reaching the front page. If hacker punks nominally subvert the established order by flaunting laws and authorities, then DOGE was very much hacking. Tina Peters is an unsophisticated hacker punk, She doesn't live up to the social engineering chops of Kevin Mitnick, but her plan did involve a Geek Squad uniform. Legendary but too "political". Attracts too much noise, not enough signal. That's why you didn't see an elevation of the developed thoughts you're talking about.

Since the beginning of DOGE, it has not been especially bold to predict:

- DOGE will cost more than it saves. The seminal errors, mistaking $ millions for $ billions, world-write permissions on their Drupal site, etc. convinced us that we can't expect deliberate professionalism.

- The very first whistleblower, out of NTSB, convinced us that exfiltration was the goal. This is within the top 5 whistleblower stories here. The critical detail was their instruction that access logs be scrubbed.

- And the general public smelled it, too. No one doubts that threats against Tesla dealerships were civil libertarian radicals, not recently-fired USAID bean counters.

- When Peter Theil's FBI handler, Johnathan Buma, went whistleblower a few months into DOGE, it wasn't about Theil. He saw a Russian active measure influencing Musk's inner circle. One of Kash Patel's first acts as FBI director was to order Buma arrested.

So, the commentary worrying about "big tech" was commentary within Y Combinator's sphere.

[0] : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43035977

[GuinansEyebrows]

i dunno. NSA letters are a real thing and i have no reason to believe there's not at least some exfiltration of personal data from "big tech" to other actors.

[ajross]

> have no reason to believe there's not at least some exfiltration

Is it genuinely your opinion that that activity (just look at all the equivocation!) constitutes a risk at the same level as alleged by the linked article?

This is exactly what I'm talking about. HN has a tunnel vision disease on this subject. "Yes yes, DOGE bros stole the SSA database, but let's please talk about how awful Google is." It's clinical at this point.

[GuinansEyebrows]

yes, 641A being the prime example, but i suppose it depends on how wide a net you cast to define "risk". plus: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/03/targeted-advertising-g...

i'm not saying it's not like these big tech firms don't have their hands legally tied by NSA letters, but that's entirely divorced from whether i trust them to steward my data.

[ajross]

And I repeat: you are refusing to engage with the privacy crisis right in front of our eyes and insisting instead we treat with your personal crusade against a threat that is almost entirely theoretical. That's just not rational discourse, it's a vendetta. And you're hardly alone.

[GuinansEyebrows]

i don't understand your combative tone. i'm not for DOGE twerps stealing PII.