Musketeers in the Machine

The End of Privacy

In the last few days, federal employees at sensitive posts in the U.S. Treasury, USAID, and Office of Personnel Management have been locked out of computer systems containing the social security numbers of every taxpaying American, by young math geniuses dispatched without security clearances or any kind of official job other than the nongovernmental DOGE, the “Department of Government Efficiency.”

This wholesale invasion of American privacy may be technically illegal but it’s happening so fast that no one seems to have any idea how to stop it. Shocked federal employee witnesses are speaking anonymously to reporters because they “fear retaliation,” the articles report.

Let’s sit with that phrase for a minute: Fear retaliation. Who doesn’t, these days? The President has been promising retribution for years, to cheering throngs of men and women all spangled in red white, and blue, slobbering to see it happen.

This was all predictable to anyone paying even a little attention to Project 2025. A conspicuously sanctimonious little P25-aligned man named Russell Vought (now wormed back into the government as Trump’s nominee for director of the Office of Management and Budget and is very likely to be confirmed soon) is on video licking his chops over this very prospect not long ago.

Speaking to some motley collection of capital area God squatters, he said, “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can't do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. … We want to put them in trauma.”

Vought really doesn’t like to be identified. Someone secretly took and snuck this video out and he didn’t like it at all.

For brave warriors, these men really like their hidey holes. They’re afraid. They always need a bully on their side. Trump’s stand-in U.S. Attorney in DC, Ed Martin (a long-time anti-abortion fanatic and long-time Phyllis Schafly sidekick) just openly threatened to prosecute anyone who stands in the way of Musk’s boys.

The Musketeers invading the offices reportedly refused to share their surnames. In a lovely little scoop, WIRED identified six young men—all apparently between the ages of 19 and 24, with little to no government experience. Their names, should you feel moved to crowdsource them: Akash Bobba, Edward Coristine, Luke Farritor, Gautier Cole Killian, Gavin Kliger, and Ethan Shaotran.

All had trails on the interweb, some rapidly being erased. Kliger writes a Substack newsletter under his own name. A recent cogitation was titled “Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense: The Warrior Washington Fears.” A day before he was reportedly among the tools who invaded the federal computers, Kliger wrote a post titled “Why I gave up a seven-figure salary to save America.” It’s only for paid subscribers though, so unless you want to supplement his early retirement coder stash, you will have to guess why.

They are true brainiacs: Luke Farritor used code to translate an ancient Roman papyrus last year. Imagine what good he could be doing.

He’s a Thiel Fellow though. He and an unknown number of other comp-sci geeks are renting their brains to Nazi-saluting, German-right-supporting Musk, who reportedly set up beds in the government offices so they don’t have to go home to sleep. One wonders if he didn’t also provide them with astronaut diapers so they never have to leave their coding chairs, like pro video gamers.

This is all “scary” to a lot of people, and I understand why. But it’s important to keep our eyes on them, to know the enemy. Their worldview is only surprising if you haven’t been paying attention.

Most of the manly warriors working so hard to seize and alter, without any official or Congressional oversight, the national payment system (no, their access is not “read-only”) and fire federal bureaucrats imagine themselves members of a master race. Judging by the company they keep, many of these men do not have your or my best interests at heart.

If you still wonder where Elon Musk got Nazified, take a dip into a digital subculture of weirdos like “cremieux” and “captive dreamer” and others with tens or hundreds of thousands of followers, all fantasizing about the creation of (or, in their minds, re-creation) of a Golden Age of white masculinity.

Often credited as men who “make the intellectual case for Trump,” most of them evince a timorousness at odds with their fantasy world. They hide. On social media, they take pseudonyms, usually magisterial-sounding Latin names. Monarchist Curtis Yarvin used the nom de guerre “Mencius Moldbug” in his anonymous years. Early pro-Trump intellectual Publius Decius Mus later came out of the closet as Michael Anton when he joined the first Trump administration.

Among the Millenial set, Jonathan Keeperman, a California-bred spoiled brat, founded a publishing house that sells leatherbound versions of the ravings of racists and Nazis like Steven Sailer and ardent German nationalist Ernst Junger. He tweets proto-fascism at tens of thousands of followers under the nom de plume Lomez. He didn’t like it at all when the Guardian outed him. His followers include Latin-named pseudonymous wags who lately are dropping hints that they wink-wink might be serving in the new Trump administration.

After the 2024 election, this is the fact that sometimes kept me up at night: We are all sticky with the glue of digital surveillance. The system that these men control has been in the making since the dawn of the digital age and is now entirely at the disposal of fanatical religious maniacs and borderless billionaires with allegiance not to any nation, but only to the bank or the next merger.

Shortly before the election, I visited Berlin, where the vestiges of their not-so-distant nightmare political history - Checkpoint Charlie, the Berlin Wall - are now selfie backdrop tourist attractions. One night while there, I re-watched the greatest film ever on modern totalitarian surveillance, The Lives of Others.

The movie is about a lot of things that are relevant right now in America. We don’t of course have a Stasi (yet) presented in the film as a cadre of grubby, envious Peeping Toms given immense state power. But MAGA is filled with the same banal, hypocritical lackey types. And we live in a surveillance society about which the East German totalitarian regime could only have dreamed, passively subject to total machine surveillance.

While MAGAs like to fret over a phantom “Deep State,” they have no problem with a private corporation that essentially IS a privately held deep state. Several of the young invaders are connected to Musk and each other via Peter Thiel. Thiel, like Musk, a native South African, is a founder of the data hoovering surveillance giant Palantir, which is “among the most secretive and understudied surveillance firms globally,” according to an academic journal report on what is known about its structure and clients.

It’s difficult to overstate just how insidiously powerful Palantir is. Its programs have been used in the Middle East, where the IDF lets Palantir’s AI decide whether any given civilian is a terrorist, resulting in untold numbers of innocents massacred.

Here in the Land of the Free, Palantir is a major vendor to the U.S. government — including the Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, and the FBI. Other Palantir security technologies include AI for predictive policing and surveillance.

Poor us.

Of course, this was pretty foreseeable. Edward Snowden told us about this all the way back in 2013. What he revealed is today’s horse and buggy in the mass surveillance world.

In 2016, after the election, the world learned about the amazing capabilities of Russian trolls and British-American social media manipulators at Cambridge Analytica slicing and dicing Facebook users into easily propagandized electoral segments and then targeting them with bots and bullshit.

Also in 2017, ad tech was collecting a whopping 72 million data points on the average American child by age 13. Fast forward to last year, when a survey found that 85 percent of Americans assume that companies are constantly tracking and collating data on them, but who wants to give up traffic apps and sexting?

Now, according to this horrifying 2023 report, commercial data harvesters have at least 650,000 labels or categories of Americans, based on such intimate knowledge as the “heavy purchasers” of pregnancy tests and the “depression-prone” to those with “an interest in brain tumors.” That same year, a report by a government agency that oversees intelligence agencies found that those agencies routinely dip into the commercially available data that’s legally collected and for sale.

Now that the Musketeers have reportedly connected a private, commercial server to the government systems - how long before our Social Security numbers are attached and matched to whether we are frequent “pregnancy testers” or worried about brain tumors or working for Democrats?

Laura Poitras, one of the journalists who worked closely with Snowden published a book called Astro Noise, both an emotional meditation on the effects of 9/11, and what it means to live under a net of total surveillance. Shoshana Zuboff, in her book "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism," calls the recipients and manipulators of this collateral behavioral data collectively “Big Other.”

I have often recommended both books because they contain ideas and useful tips about how to think about and evade the sticky net. Now that Musk’s Boy Scouts have hooked up The Big Other to your Social Security number, some of those tips, like turning off your phone, are obsolete. But still worth thinking about.

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Note To Readers:

Before the Musketeers took over the government computers, I had intended to write this week about the outrageous pusillanimity of corporate owners of journalism, most recently Shari Redstone/Paramount, selling out 60 Minutes to save some corporate megadeal from Trumpian vengeance. The idea that Trump has been able to claim bias and sue or frighten standard-issue journalism into silence or, actually, into PAYING him is extra-repulsive when one considers that Fox “News” lies hourly. The Media and Democracy Project is joined by former FCC members - yes, even Republicans! - in a lawsuit challenging Fox’s broadcast license. The deadline for the case is soon, and there is no guarantee of success but at least they are doing something. Please consider helping them out.