SSA data chief says NUMIDENT copied to cloud exposing 300M Americans

Charles Borges, the Social Security Administration chief data officer, filed a whistleblower complaint this week alleging that officials from the Department of Government Efficiency uploaded a live copy of the agency's master Social Security database to a cloud environment that lacked proper oversight, potentially exposing the personal information of more than 300 million Americans. Borges lodged the complaint with the U.S. Office of Special Counsel and congressional oversight committees on Tuesday and resigned from his SSA post on Friday, saying agency actions after his disclosure made his duties impossible to perform legally and ethically.

The complaint, filed on Borges's behalf by the Government Accountability Project, says Department of Government Efficiency staff employed at SSA, under the authority of SSA Chief Information Officer Aram Moghaddassi, granted themselves permission to copy the Numerical Identification System, known as NUMIDENT, into a virtual private cloud in Amazon Web Services. NUMIDENT contains information provided when applying for a Social Security card, the complaint said, including names, dates and places of birth, parents' names, Social Security...