During a town hall on Tuesday, Rep. Bill Foster (D-IL) spoke about DOGE gaining access to government agency databases.
Fuel your success with Forbes. Gain unlimited access to premium journalism, including breaking news, groundbreaking in-depth reported stories, daily digests and more. Plus, members get a front-row seat at members-only events with leading thinkers and doers, access to premium video that can help you get ahead, an ad-light experience, early access to select products including NFT drops and more:
https://account.forbes.com/membership/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=display&utm_campaign=growth_non-sub_paid_subscribe_ytdescript
Stay Connected
Forbes on Facebook: http://fb.com/forbes
Forbes Video on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/forbes
Forbes Video on Instagram: http://instagram.com/forbes
More From Forbes: http://forbes.com
Fuel your success with Forbes. Gain unlimited access to premium journalism, including breaking news, groundbreaking in-depth reported stories, daily digests and more. Plus, members get a front-row seat at members-only events with leading thinkers and doers, access to premium video that can help you get ahead, an ad-light experience, early access to select products including NFT drops and more:
https://account.forbes.com/membership/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=display&utm_campaign=growth_non-sub_paid_subscribe_ytdescript
Stay Connected
Forbes on Facebook: http://fb.com/forbes
Forbes Video on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/forbes
Forbes Video on Instagram: http://instagram.com/forbes
More From Forbes: http://forbes.com
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00We do have a number of questions related to Doge and Musk, and really a grave concern
00:06about his authority to fire people and his authority to see our private information.
00:12How is that being addressed?
00:13Okay.
00:14Two semi-separate issues.
00:15You know, he has sent these computer whiz 23-year-old kids into every single one of
00:22the offices.
00:23You know, we have, frankly, you know, I regard myself as a pretty accomplished computer programmer.
00:29And when I look at the computer systems of the federal government, they're not great
00:36because they've been underfunded for a long, long time.
00:39And so what he's done is just sent these people in to just rip the data out of those systems.
00:46And then he's going to have access to all the, you know, every one of us who's had any
00:51financial interaction with the government, you know, the data is sucked into those systems.
00:57And then you have a tremendous potential invasion of privacy.
01:02And Congress has passed, you know, one of the reasons why the systems are so clunky
01:07is that Congress has passed many restrictions on what the government can and cannot do with
01:13your money.
01:14For example, the IRS, well, before, in the pre-Doge times, the IRS could almost never
01:19share data with other sections of the government, you know, partly because some members of Congress,
01:26you know, maybe they have a lot of voters who are like minor tax cheats or major tax
01:30cheats and they don't want to get caught.
01:32And so there are lots of restrictions, and those are all just being thrown out the window,
01:36you know, by the Doges who just say, we want all the data.
01:40And so there's a huge potential problem.
01:43There's also the problem that the firewalls that normally separate the government data
01:49from whatever it is Musk wants to do.
01:52You know, I mentioned that protest that was outside the Treasury when all this stuff started.
01:57And at the time, they said, don't worry, they have only read-only access and it's all anonymized
02:01and all this complete lie.
02:04And in fact, they were given root access, administrator access to the system, which
02:09means they could pull down firewalls and exfiltrate the data, they could just install arbitrary
02:15software.
02:16And we were just directly lied to about the situation there, and that made a lot of Republicans
02:21unhappy as well as Democrats, and they stayed quiet.
02:25We did not.
02:26And so, but this is something where I think there can be common ground, is just providing
02:32stronger safeguards against unelected third parties like the Doges coming in.
02:38And, you know, if you want to have access to the IRS data, you know, you have to have
02:42like months of training on safety and data safety and data privacy, or even get permission
02:49to access this stuff, and they've just bypassed that because Trump told them they could.
02:54What about civil lawsuits?
02:56Yeah.
02:57What?
02:58The civil lawsuits?
02:59Yeah, I'm not a lawyer.
03:00Yeah, there are...
03:01I'm not a lawyer.
03:02There are a bunch of really smart lawyers that are doing...
03:03And isn't it against the law for them, the Doges, to do what they're doing?
03:04Yes.
03:05Your point is what?
03:06Yeah.