Katie Drummond: Fascinating. Well, we’re going to take a short break. When we come back, we will pick up where we left off and talk about how concerning Americans should actually be about their privacy and that Doge has access to their data. Welcome back at Ominous valleyI am Wired’s global editorial director, Katie Drummond. I am here with our senior editor for security and investigations, Andrew Couts. Andrew, thank you again for being here.

Andrew Couts: Thanks for having me.

Katie Drummond: And let’s talk a little broader about Doge and American privacy. So, as we know very well at Wired, there was a great deal of coverage about Doge and what they have been doing in the federal government over the past few weeks. Many turns, a lot of chaos and very concerns, isn’t it? There is a lot of concern among journalists and among Americans more about the fact that Doge has access to different government systems, access to data, access to sensitive information about Americans. Can you explain what kind of information might have access to the agencies they are currently working in the federal government?

Andrew Couts: So they are going to have access to essence, and they will know wherever you lived, wherever you bank, exactly how much money you earn, possibly what your tax returns are. They are going to have access to your medical history, probably like what your networks look like, what your social networks look like, wherever you worked, possibly travel records.

Katie Drummond: There was a paragraph in the story we published yesterday, which I think was really surprising, and it reads in a few weeks, Doge staff members have access to federal employee records at the office of staff management, government payment data at the Treasury Department of Treasury Recipients at the Department of Education, information on the Department of Labor in the Department of Labor. And it’s going from there. I mean, it’s a greasy attempt to access and a large amount of very sensitive information about Americans. Can you guide us through a few different hypothetical scenarios? If Doge and Musk and President Trump and the White House acquire all this information, then they get all this access, what can they do with it?

Andrew Couts: One of the things we think very internally at Wired is threat models and just like the chance that you are targeted by any kind of attack? And in this case, we have to completely redefine what our threat models look like. And this is especially true if you are a vulnerable person. So if you are trans, if you are an immigrant, if you are looking for an abortion, just to throw out the most obvious examples. This information can be used to target you somehow, and we just don’t know how the information can be used. Historically, you will not think that a highly placed government employee, such as Elon Musk as he is now, would tweet your bank records or your health records, and we can see that this is happening now if you are publicly critical of the Trump administration. It is clear that law enforcement, if the FBI can use the large amounts of information they have on people, to target whoever they are going to target, and we just don’t know. We are only a month after this administration. We already see an outline of immigration, and it will develop. We are going to go through at least four years of this, and it is impossible for someone to know if they are going to be a target. So we just don’t know what the threat model looks like in an environment where someone could possibly become a political target. And if we look at authoritarian regimes, it will be used in different types of ways to go to people. And that data could possibly be manipulated to postpone charges against people to accuse people of crimes they did not commit. For many years, Wired has covered the best privacy practices, best security practices, and many people just say, “If you have nothing to hide, don’t worry about it.” But now we do not know what to worry about and we do not know what you had to hid and the things you were trying to hide, or the things protected by the government systems may now be exposed. And that’s why it’s really someone’s guess what can happen and what the consequences can be.