Greetings. I am a voting constituent in rural west Texas.
Vittoria Elliott, Dhruv Mehrotra, Leah Feiger, and Tim Marchman of Wired reported that, “[a] 25-year-old engineer named Marko Elez, who previously worked for two Elon Musk companies [SpaceX and X], has direct access to Treasury Department systems responsible for nearly all payments made by the US government.”
According to the reporters, Elez apparently has the privileges to write code on the programs at the Bureau of Fiscal Service that control more than 20% of the U.S. economy, including government payments of veterans’ benefits, Social Security benefits, and veterans’ pay.
The admin privileges he has typically permit a user “to log in to servers through secure shell access, navigate the entire file system, change user permissions, and delete or modify critical files. That could allow someone to bypass the security measures of, and potentially cause irreversible changes to, the very systems they have access to.”
It’s also reported that Musk’s team intends to cut government workers and to use artificial intelligence, or AI, to make budget cuts and to find waste and abuse in the federal government.
One of their goals is to be able to access personal information to be used to root out whatever scenario they have in their heads. These guys operate under the belief they can do anything they can manage to do, contrary to laws or to personal privacy or the Constitution itself. Any objections or violations are simply bumps in the road that can be worked out.
They’re not going to stop. AI is going to run the government. And you personally are making yourselves obsolete with your inaction. If the goal is to destroy the government you’re a part of, congratulations. Good job.
P.S. History has shown that democracies don’t generally collapse at the hands of a military coup or an armed revolution. Rather, democracies break down gradually when public institutions and political norms are weakened from within, and people in positions of power make a choice to allow authoritarian figures to concentrate power.
Sound familiar? We’re seeing it happen on your watch.
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