A complaint by the Social Security Administration's chief data officer alleges numbers, names, and other sensitive information were handled in a way that creates "enormous vulnerabilities."
A whistleblower has raised alarms about the security of sensitive Social Security Administration data, alleging that the federal government efficiency unit led by Elon Musk uploaded the personal information of hundreds of millions of Americans to a cloud server deemed high-risk by internal assessments.
In a complaint first reported by the New York Times Tuesday, Charles Borges, chief data officer at the Social Security Administration, claimed that staff from the Department of Government Efficiency – known as DOGE – created a live copy of the agency’s Numident database, which contains Social Security numbers, names, addresses, birth dates, and other personal details for nearly every citizen and resident of the US.
According to Borges, this data was transferred to a cloud environment accessible only to DOGE officials, without the independent oversight or security monitoring typically required for such sensitive information .
Borges’ complaint, filed with the help of the Government Accountability Project, does not allege that the database was actually breached, but warns that the move created “enormous vulnerabilities.” The Social Security Administration had previously assessed the project as “high risk” with the potential for “catastrophic impact” if the cloud server were compromised .
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