Tag Archives: Unite States

Raw Story: DOGE team using AI to scour personal data to root out Trump disloyalty: report

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Elon Musk’s team is using a custom version of his artificial intelligence chatbot Grok to scour the sensitive government data scooped up by the Department of Government Efficiency, raising serious concerns about privacy, conflicts of interest and national security.

The DOGE team is expanding use of the AI chatbot, three sources with knowledge of the matter told Reuters, but it’s not clear which specific data had been fed into the generative tool or how the custom system was set up, and five experts told the news organization that the arrangement may violate security and privacy laws.

“Given the scale of data that DOGE has amassed and given the numerous concerns of porting that data into software like Grok, this to me is about as serious a privacy threat as you get,” said Albert Fox Cahn, executive director of the nonprofit Surveillance Technology Oversight Project.

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“This gives the appearance that DOGE is pressuring agencies to use software to enrich Musk and xAI, and not to the benefit of the American people,” said Richard Painter, who served as ethics counsel to former president George W. Bush and a current University of Minnesota professor.

Two sources said DOGE staffers directed Department of Homeland Security officials to use Grok, although it hadn’t been approved for use in that agency, and the sources said the federal government would have to pay Musk’s organizations to use that AI tool, which Painter said could violate criminal conflict-of-interest statute.

“They were pushing it to be used across the department,” said one of the sources.

DOGE team using AI to scour personal data to root out Trump disloyalty: report

https://www.rawstory.com/doge-team-sensitive-private-data-2672192671

Alternet: More than revenge: Here’s why Trump is really targeting his own former officials | Opinion

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During President Donald Trump’s first three months in office, his administration has targeted dozens of former officials who criticized him or opposed his agenda.

In April 2025, Trump directed the Department of Justice to investigate two men who served in his first administration, Miles Taylor and Chris Krebs, because they spoke out against his policies and corrected his false claims about the 2020 election that he lost.

Further, Trump revoked the security clearances for advisers and retired generals who publicly criticized him during the 2024 election campaign.

On their face, such moves appear to be a coordinated campaign of personal retribution. But as political science scholars who study the origins of elected strongmen, we believe Trump’s use of the Justice Department to attack former officials who stood up to him isn’t just about revenge. It also deters current officials from defying Trump.

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But to carry out a power grab, incumbent leaders also need allies who will stay silent or, better yet, endorse their attempts to consolidate control.

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Recall that Trump only left office in January 2021 because key Republican officials defied his attempts to overturn an election he lost.

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In authoritarian contexts, loyalty is not an intrinsic quality. Authoritarian leaders do not necessarily select those with whom they have long work experience that leads to mutual trust.

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Instead, the challenge for authoritarian leaders is finding people to do their bidding. And the best people for this job are those who never would have earned their position in politics without the leader’s influence.

Unqualified appointees who can’t ascend to political power based on their merits have little choice but to stick with the leader. These people appear loyal, but only because their careers are tied to the leader staying in power.

www.alternet.org
More than revenge: Here’s why Trump is really targeting his own former officials | Opinion

https://www.alternet.org/trump-revenge-2672110754

The Register: DOGE worker’s old creds found exposed in infostealer malware dumps

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Developer and journalist Micah Lee reported last Thursday that he found a whopping 51 data breach records and four infostealer log dumps associated with DOGE employee Kyle Schutt on data breach tracking service Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) – which is unnerving as Schutt has access to sensitive government data at the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

As Lee pointed out, 51 breach records on HIBP is a lot, but excusable because while Schutt’s info was found in records associated with a 2013 Adobe breach, the 2016 LinkedIn breach, and Gravatar’s 2020 breach, none of those incidents involved Schutt’s personal machines.

What is attributable to a lapse of security hygiene, however, are the four infostealer logs that link to Schutt. Such logs contain usernames and passwords stolen by infostealer malware, suggesting one or more of Schutt’s computers were compromised at some point.

DOGE worker’s old creds found in malware data dumps
Infosec in brief: PLUS: Celsius scammer sent to slammer; Death-by-hacking victim warns you’re never safe; and more

https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/12/doge_cyber_experts_creds_found

Moneywise: Trump wants to ‘abolish’ the IRS and replace federal income tax revenue with tariffs on imports — how would such a move affect middle-class Americans?

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“Donald Trump announced the External Revenue Service, and his goal is very simple: to abolish the Internal Revenue Service and let all the outsiders pay,” U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told Fox News on Feb. 19. The idea is that once the budget is balanced, taxes will be waived for Americans earning less than $150,000 a year.

However, the flaw in this plan is that tariffs are not paid by “outsiders.” Rather, tariffs are a tax placed on imported goods and services.

“When the U.S. imposes tariffs on imports, businesses in the United States directly pay import taxes to the U.S. government on their purchases from abroad,” according to the Tax Foundation. During Trump’s first term, “the economic evidence shows American firms and consumers were hardest hit by the Trump tariffs.”

At the same time, it would be hard to replace the revenue collected from income taxes with revenue from the planned tariffs. According to a study by the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE), a non-partisan research group, the U.S. imported $3.1 trillion in goods in 2023 while raising about $2 trillion through individual and corporate income taxes.

This means it would be nearly impossible to replace income taxes with tariffs, since the tariff rate would have to be “implausibly high,” according to PIIE. The institute determined that even at a “revenue-maximizing tariff rate,” the U.S. could raise only a fraction of what it raises with income taxes.

Trump wants to ‘abolish’ the IRS and replace federal income tax revenue with tariffs on imports — how would such a move affect middle-class Americans?
Some suspect the president is “dismantling” the IRS for this reason.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/taxes/trump-wants-to-abolish-the-irs-and-replace-federal-income-tax-revenue-with-tariffs-on-imports-how-would-such-a-move-affect-middle-class-americans/ar-AA1Et0kV