In A Hyper-Digital World, Leaks Like Kristi Noem’s Social Security Number Are An Everyday Thing

It is impossible to keep anything private any longer. It might sound cliche, but considering that all of our information and documentation is digitized and stored on computerized systems that other people are paid to manage, it doesn’t matter how hard you try to hide something or how confidently somebody told you your data or personal information is secure, it simply isn’t. 

This past weekend, South Dakota’s Republican Gov. Kristi Noem saw this first-hand. Her Social Security Number (SSN), as well as those belonging to her three children and her son-in law were potentially leaked after they recorded the information on White House visitor logs. This information was later used as “exhibits during the January 6th committee hearing” “illegally disseminated to the public” They were there when they were “published online via the U.S. Government Publishing Office’s website.” 

According to the letter the Noems’ attorney sent to the people believed to be responsible for the leak, the sensitive information was “publicly available for days before being removed from the website,” The Washington Post “prominently reported.”

This isn’t to make a case for Noem or her politics (although there is a nonzero chance that her politics did have a role in the delayed retraction of her family’s SSNs and that this was a collaboration between the corporate media and government in an elaborate form of ritual humiliation). It is intended to show the incompetence and lack of competence of those charged with protecting sensitive information. They and the systems they manage are incapable of protecting us.

The Chinese Communist Party, (CCP), robs anywhere from $2.5 billion annually. $180 billion To $600 billion Intellectual property from the United States. The CCP isn’t sending physical marauder gangs around Silicon Valley to steal hard drives from nerds; party members are stealing information through high-tech espionage. Consider the following: sheer amount North American-based corporations believe their intellectual property has been stolen by the CCP. Why should they believe that private assets worth trillions of dollars are safer?

The media hype around Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX may have died down, but that doesn’t change the fact that the nepo baby High-powered Compliance lawyers He swindled his customers from the Billions of dollars They trusted him with. FTX was a centrally managed digital asset trading platform. It was praised as being one of the most secure places to store your money in the burgeoning cryptocurrency market. Watch how that turned out. Because of incompetence by the managerial elite, Billions of dollars went missing into the ether.

According to the Federal Trade Commission, the U.S. experienced a 311 percent Increase Between 2019 and 2020 ransomware attacks cost the American public hundreds upon millions of dollars. People had their identities stolen, bank accounts compromised, and private information seized by ne’er-do-wells seeking to cash in on their anxieties after they were sequestered at home during Covid-19 lockdowns. The FTC stated that most victims of these scams were 60-plus.

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