It's all about the data ...

Photo Illustration: Wired staff - GettyImages

Well, as you, my loyal readers know, the take by yours truly regarding Doge and Musk is not efficiency, it's data as Musk is a data broker, not a genius engineer but we already know that, right? With Starrlink in the White House and SSA, along with other agencies, the ability to make tremendous amounts of money, becomes a given. The ability to amass great power also becomes a given as high end access to high end data makes Musk the defacto president as the choke point to all that content begins and ends with a really smart amoral guy bent on becoming the most powerful man on the planet.

To whit ...

It’s April, and the US is experiencing a self-inflicted trade war and a constitutional crisis over immigration. It’s a lot. It’s even enough to make you forget about Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency for a while. You shouldn’t.

To state the obvious: DOGE is still out there, chipping away at the foundations of government infrastructure. Slightly less obvious, maybe, is that the DOGE project has recently entered a new phase. The culling of federal workers and contracts will continue, where there’s anything left to cull. But from here on out, it’s all about the data.

Few if any entities in the world have as much access to as much sensitive data as the United States. From the start, DOGE has wanted as much of it as it could grab, and through a series of resignations, firings, and court cases, has mostly gotten its way.

In many cases it’s still unclear what exactly DOGE engineers have done or intend to do with that data. Despite Elon Musk’s protestations to the contrary, DOGE is as opaque as Vantablack. But recent reporting from WIRED and elsewhere begins to fill in the picture: For DOGE, data is a tool. It’s also a weapon.

What could that data be used for? Anything. Everything.

7:00 PM