The NSA, state and local police departments have been improperly accessing my data for years. The only reason people care about this is because of the (justified) general anger of DOGE. Yet there are far worse offenders, with far more intrusive access.
I don't know why you think people aren't complaining about state and local police accessing data. I've seen these complaints a lot (though the state and local data access is a lot less visible, especially with the gutting of local news)
Who cares? LinkedIn just locked my account (I don't log in often), and is demanding my driver's license to unlock it. Ostensibly to "protect me from identity theft".
That's right. They want me to send my identity documents to some third world contractor to protect me from identity theft. Apparently they're doing this with many people... I'm supposed to be worried about the NSA? I'm not a Russian spy, and I'm no drug cartel leader. The cops and NSA don't give a shit about me. Nor DOGE, come to that.
There is a phrase I like: don't fail with abandon. Just because the NSA broke public trust doesn't make it ok for anything like it to happen again.
This data breach from DOGE is worse in many ways. DOGE employees / contractors are have fewer scruples and guardrails. This data has been used primarily for Trump-and-Company's advantage. All to the detriment of American values, such as being for democracy and reasonable capitalism while standing against authoritarianism and kleptocracy.
The NSA's bulk metadata collection, while later found to violate FISA and likely unconstitutional, operated under a formal legal architecture: statutory authorization via Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act (from 2006 onward), FISA Court orders renewed approximately every 90 days, and at least nominal congressional oversight — though most members were kept uninformed of the program's scope until 2013.
