Summary

Elon Musk has requested access to the IRS’s Integrated Data Retrieval System, which contains personal tax information for millions of Americans.

The request has not yet been granted but has raised alarm among privacy experts and government officials.

Critics fear Musk could misuse the data, especially given his existing federal contracts. The IRS is considering a memorandum to permit access, despite strict rules against unauthorized viewing.

A federal judge has already blocked DOGE from accessing Treasury data, but other agencies remain vulnerable.

  • @Alteon
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    385 days ago

    They are worming their way through the various departments looking for something…dirt on their opponents?

    • ThePowerOfGeek
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      English
      515 days ago

      Probably dirt on everyone. And just to farm for their own purposes. Collate all the federal data, pump it into his grok LLM, and try to create his own file on every consumer.

      • @einlander
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        275 days ago

        AI generated dossiers, terrifying. Imagine all the crimes the AI can hallucinate a person did. And with generative audiovisual AI can manufacturer the evidence.

        • @rottingleaf
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          05 days ago

          I don’t think it’s about that, even Musk isn’t this dumb. It’s about AI-generated individual profiles for propaganda and surveillance. One can play a person having studied them well enough. And turns out that of this LLMs are capable.

          • @einlander
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            45 days ago

            While Elon might not do this, he has lackeys that aren’t scrupled. And maybe Trump has a meddlesome priest he wants Elon to take away. I’m not very optimistic about the current regime.

            • @rottingleaf
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              35 days ago

              What you said is a subset of what I said, so I didn’t say you were wrong, just that it’s not everything. Point being, I said I think it’s worse. Didn’t sleep well, so my grammar is atrocious.

      • @rottingleaf
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        45 days ago

        Right, propaganda had to be aimed at the average citizen, or at least the average citizen of a few major groups or layers. A huge headache. With enough data one can have personalized propaganda.

        It’s only the Web and customer UI\UX which are now “one size fits all” and becoming worse, with things really important for these companies they are doing their job properly.

        I mean, that’s where it was always going, since “big data” was a new buzzword, and neural nets were something only geeks cared about, with no commercial hype visible. When Bitcoin seemed a new anarchist (right anarchism is still that) thing, and The Silk Road was operational.

        Why - because it was about advertising and insights for companies about customers, and also about creating a non-neutral medium from a social network, or in our current existence from the Web itself. A non-neutral medium is where your messages get effectively lost or amplified or distorted, depending on some policy.

        You as a customer or a user don’t need that to make your choice with whom to talk or what to buy. These destinations are all real, and thus a social media company doesn’t need any information to “create” them. If they are distorting them, then they are distorting your own choices. They are stealing from you, in fact. This is violence and was always going towards the sad state of affairs we have now.

        And I think it’s worse than what people say about “fascism” or “cronyism” or whatever.