This industry is full of wildly talented and criminally underemployed people who would capably occupy highly visible roles with integrity and insight.

And this is likely just the beginning.

So if you're someone in government, tech, immigration, etc and you want to talk about what you're seeing, you can find me on Signal at Vittoria89.82. We can speak anonymously.

That means combining SSA data with all this other data could lead to inaccuracies about who is a citizen and who isn't. Without proper cleaning and oversight people could be denied the right to work or vote based on bad data, according to experts I spoke to.

And that's just the first issue. SSA data was never collected to be used for citizenship verification. SSN's are issued to people who legally work and live in the US, so if you say, naturalize after being here legally, SSA isn't going to record that change, because your SSN will stay the same.

SSA finally issued a SORN for what it was already doing. But here's the thing: "If the government starts using the database and does not put out the appropriate disclosure and then later does put out that appropriate disclosure, they still have violated the law," @adamdschwartz.bsky.social

This was a BIG deal, particularly because you can't just share data across agencies. The Privacy Act of 1974 requires that if data is going to be shared between agencies and/or used for purposes other than what it was collected for the government has to put out a System of Record Notice (SORN)

In April @makenakelly.bsky.social and I reported that DOGE + DHS were pulling together a master database, combining data from multiple government agencies, including the IRS, SSA, DHS, and state voting data, likely housed in the USCIS SAVE database

www.wired.com/story/doge-c...

Publicly messaged something entirely different. It’s common that journalists will “save” good info for a book, but this never sat right with me.