According to a protected disclosure filed with the Office of Special Counsel, Borges told the Government Accountability Project that DOGE officials working at Social Security created a “live copy” of the country’s Social Security records in a separate cloud environment that sidestepped usual security checks.
The group says those lapses put the Social Security information of more than 300 million Americans at risk.
Instead of new SSNs, how about we maybe the number less risky in general?
It should never have served as a “secret”. Authenticating someone needs more than some account number. SSN should be more of a “username”, not a password.
It was never meant to part of any kind of database, but banks and businesses found a loophole to that a long ass time ago and now we’re here.
What do you think it’s meant for? It’s a perfect fit for any database that needs to uniquely identify a person.
The problem is using it as authorization without any other checks.