Dr. Naomi Wolf

Dr. Naomi Wolf

Dr. Naomi Wolf is our Hero this week for being courageous enough to speak and write about the Feb. 2 incursions into and handling of highly sensitive U.S. Treasury payment systems data by the DOGE “broligarchs.”

As Wolf takes pains to emphasize in her Substack post (and related video) titled “The Sack of Rome: Elon Musk’s Digital Coup” (see links below), the federal data represent “the most valuable tranche of un-monetized data in the world.” Like Catherine, she is concerned that the sensationalist headlines about waste and corruption are leaving people so “enthralled” that they are unable to see that the floodgates to those data have been irrevocably opened.

A former high-level political consultant, current tech CEO, and leading voice in the New Media, Wolf is uniquely qualified to comment on the “appalling red flags” raised by granting unprecedented data access to a team lacking top-level security clearances and rife with conflicts of interest. Wolf has spent the past 13 years working with engineers and developers to build digital products based on government data, so she has a firm understanding of “the fundamentals of using government datasets, the protections around them, and the basics of [intellectual property] and data security.”

Accordingly, Wolf describes a number of worrisome possibilities. One is that the DOGE team could have copied the data and could now be storing them insecurely or using the data “for purposes not originally intended or authorized.” Noting Musk’s ambitions for an “Everything App,” she points out that the ability to view and combine datasets from different agencies facilitates the creation of a control grid. Combined with an “AI-first” approach to payments monitoring, “financial blacklisting” would be easy to achieve, and “If your rights are violated by AI, there will be no one ‘guilty,’ so no one to sue.”

From her perspicacious comments years ago about the dangers posed by the Green New Deal, to her recognition that the 2020 lockdowns constituted a savage attack on small business, to her vocal alarm about the Covid jabs’ impact on reproduction, to her effective work to bring transparency to the Pfizer documents, we have always admired Wolf’s willingness to do the hard work to unpack, document, and then articulate uncomfortable truths. For once again applying her unique set of skills and experience to sound a critical warning, we owe her our deepest thanks.