In the past, if you have ever tried to access your Social Security account online at  www.ssa.gov, likely you would have noticed that for “security reasons,” your password must be changed (by you) every six months. Some security experts at SSA must have decided this would make the account more robustly secure and perhaps, more darkly, preclude the possibility that had you died, any account access would then become a legal question. Of course, access without your permission would be illegal and mostly we are still a nation of laws (maybe). 

Undoubtedly, few experts realized that Elon Musk could simply and likely illegally “send in his clowns,” and pirate not only confidential and personal information (Social Security number, bank account, personal data, etc.) from your account, but that of tens of millions of other Americans as well. 

In government and private corporations, billions are spent each year on security to thwart hackers, but no one ever thought that someone could simply “get permission” to walk through the front door of Treasury, plug in a thumb drive and hack at will.

Now, Musk, the unelected billionaire bureaucrat who abruptly stopped vital food and medical shipments to the world’s poorest and sickest people via his personal declaration, also has all our private data. 

Toward what end? You think “Trump will fix it?” Since the data might now be “read only” access to the Musk “team,” are you comforted? $eems to me that something foul may be afoot. Even looting Treasury and the wealth of the American people, once unthinkable, now seems possible. Willie Sutton famously claimed he robbed banks because that was where the money was.

John Pace
Honesdale, PA