Katie Drumond: Drawn. Well, we will take a short break. As we return, we will choose where we leave and talk about Americans really should care about their privacy and about Doge accessing their data. Welcome back Strange valleyI am my global editor, Katie Drumond. I am here with our senior editor of security and investigation, Andrew Couts. Andrew, thank you again for being here.
Andrew Couts: Thanks for having me.
Katie Drumond: And let's speak a little wider about Doge and American privacy. Therefore, there is, as we know at Wired very well, many scope of insurance about Doge and what they are doing in the federal government in the past few weeks. Many vortices, lots of chaos and lots of concerns, right? There are many concerns between journalists and between Americans who are wider than Doge has access to different government systems, have access to data, access to sensitive information about people. America. Can you explain which type of information will be able to access based on the organs they are currently working in the federal government?
Andrew Couts: Therefore, they will have access to everything, and they will know everywhere you have lived, everywhere you bank, exactly the amount you earn, likely the tax amount of the tax What are you. They will have access to your medical history, how your network is like, what your social network looks like, everywhere you have worked, capable of traveling records .
Katie Drumond: There is a paragraph in the story that we published yesterday that I thought was really great, and it only read in just a few weeks, DOGE staff had accessed federal staff records at the office manager Human resources, payment data of the Government at the Ministry of Finance data on the recipient of the student borrow at the Ministry of Education, information about the disaster victim at Fema and the large number of jobs and data related to the place Working at the Ministry of Labor. And it continued from there. I mean, this is a deep effort to access and arrange a truly sensitive American information. Can you guide us through a few different hypothetical scenarios? If Doge and Musk and President Trump and the White House have all this data, get all this access, what can they do with it?
Andrew Couts: One of the things we think about the internal wired is a lot of threats and basically like what you will be targeted by any type of attack? And in this case, we have to completely redefine what our threat models look like. And that is especially true if you are a vulnerable person. So if you are a trans, if you are an immigrant, if you are looking for an abortion, only to remove the most obvious examples. This information can be used to target you in one way or another and we don't know how that information can be used. Historically, you will not think that a government employee has a high position, such as Elon Musk as it is now, will tweet your bank profile or your health records, and we can see That happens now, if you are very important of the Trump administration. It is clear that the law enforcement, if the FBI will be able to use a large amount of information they have on everyone to target anyone they will target and we don't know. We only one month in this government. We have seen persecutions sweeping into immigration, and that will develop. We will spend at least four years about this, and really cannot know whether they are the goal. Therefore, we do not know how the threat model looks like in an environment that anyone can become political targets. And if we look at the authoritarian regime, it will be used in all different types to track people. And that data can be manipulated to create allegations against people to accuse people of crimes they do not commit. For many years, Wired mentioned the best security activities, the best security practice and many people just said: “If you have nothing to hide, don't worry about that.” But now we don't know what you have to worry about and we don't know what you should hide and what you have tried to hide or what is protected by existing government systems is likely to be exposed. . And so that is really anyone who guesses what may happen and what the consequences may be.