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.
For what reason? How does accessing individual taxpayers private income/tax information allow you weed out wasteful government spending?
Theoretically (not wasteful spending, but corruption) - by noticing unexplainable incomes of government employees and relatives of those and politicians and their relatives. In practice - I don’t think they can be caught this easily.
Also it is a huge dataset from which one can have some insights on how to, well, optimize taxes and tax returns for whatever goal one wishes.
In practice others have already answered that.
Increasingly I am only seeing one solution to this Musk problem.
Piano wire and a train station?
9th storey window?
It is a classic for the Russian Oligarchs…what the hell, it’s traditional.
Or some 210 tea.
You can really taste the polonium!
Increasingly I am seeing Musk as the one solution to this problem:
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Yeah we need to start taxing these rich grifters.
Yes taxes, I mean taxes.
We should tax the shit out of any assets above one billion.
I think he should get access to it.
I think everyone should get access to it.
That’s how we do it in Scandinavia. It’s been good for fighting corruption.
If your neighbour has a brand new Lamborghini in his driveway, while filling an income of 20k€ the last year. Maybe ask the IRS to look a bit closer at his finances.
I use it to see how much my colleagues make, so I have a leg to stand on in salary negotiations.
That’s not how it works here… Don’t pretend and welcome his horseshit. This is probably about making a personal enemies list
The only way the Trump administration is going to do anything about people cheating on their taxes is to pardon them for it.
Well, if they are from the right class. I’m not sure that offer applies to the peasants.
Most of the world also requires annual reports to be made public
Also very convenient for criminals to target wealthy people and scam or rob them?
You know what’s even more convenient?
Scammers from poorer countries just targeting the elderly and retired in richer countries. You know, like they currently do.
What’s with the fear mongering about a system that’s been shown to reduce corruption? Do you like corruption? Do you like people cheating the benefits system?
F elon
clever love it!!! any more
Cybertruck➡️ Deplorian
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Even better, the “audit” will be done by some teenager named “Big Balls”.
I’m sure they have the wisdom, the experience, and level-headed presence of mind to properly deal with that kind of responsibility.
They are worming their way through the various departments looking for something…dirt on their opponents?
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.
AI generated dossiers, terrifying. Imagine all the crimes the AI can hallucinate a person did. And with generative audiovisual AI can manufacturer the evidence.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Fuck Musk and ship him back to South Africa without a US passport.
All Americans should freeze your credit immediately.
All Americans should have their credit frozen in general. You can unfreeze it any time you want to make a big finance decision like a mortgage but there’s no reason to just leave it out there the rest of the time.
That ads friction to the economy, which is why credit was invented.
If we all just started a grassroots campaign in which EVERYONE freezes their credit in March, it will not be awesome for banks.
The thing that makes me hesitant about a freeze is losing the code somehow. Not sure what to do if that happens.
I’m shocked they even asked
They figured they would try before they took it anyway just in case they could get some good PR
So given that his little team of unqualified racist have already proven to leak classified data and can’t secure a server with even basic security that someone on the homeserver community would do, it would be funny if this is how Trump’s tax returns would come out to light.
The only positive thing here is that they ask instead of just take.
Why?
Oh, I’m sure it’s all for good reasons of “efficiency” and more of fElon’s altruism and deep concern for the country.
🙄
They’ll start deporting American citizens who haven’t paid their student loans. Back to America! To Guantanamo!
All office dudes are shaking in their pants.
Hes good at doing things that look effective to slow ppl
