According to a protected disclosure filed with the Office of Special Counsel, Borges told the Government Accountability Project that DOGE officials working at Social Security created a “live copy” of the country’s Social Security records in a separate cloud environment that sidestepped usual security checks.
The group says those lapses put the Social Security information of more than 300 million Americans at risk.
ssn was never intended to be a form of identification. it was specifically decided that it would not be used as a form of identification by the administration that controlled it
Besides, it’s a really bad form of ID. The numbers aren’t even unique, and up until 2011, a few digits are reserved for geographical information.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_number#Structure
If I had to reach for a hasty solution, it would be to use the IRS taxpayer ID instead. Of course, that might weaken the SSA’s importance overall, so that wouldn’t be without consequences: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Individual_Taxpayer_Identification_Number
I guess that shows what people get for believing the state.
i am not going to defend the government, but in this case, it was problem laziness from the private sector. instead of relying on actual identification forms they used the ssn to shortcut paperwork