Claire Berlinski – If data is the new oil, Elon Musk is the new Persian Gulf – “The list below is part of the second installment of The MechaHitler Reich. In a better world, it would be a sidebar to that newsletter—something you could glance at while you were reading it. But alas, this is not the best of all possible worlds, and Substack doesn’t give me that option. I got worried that if I put the list at the top of the article, no one would read the article. But I also worried that if I put it at the end of the article, no one would read the list. I spent too much time compiling this list for that prospect to be tolerable. So I’ve decided just to send it separately. Hang on to it, and when you receive Part II, keep it in an open tab just slightly to the left of your open newsletter, okay? As if it were a sidebar to an article. This is the most complete account I can come up with of the agencies in which Grok has been deployed, and the databases it has probably mined. It isn’t final, and it isn’t exhaustive. It’s only what I was able to put together from reports in the news and court filings. Unless I’ve seen a credible report indicating that DOGE has access to a database, I haven’t listed it, even if it would be reasonable to surmise that it has. I use the word “probably” because in many cases, the reporting isn’t clear. An article might say, for example, that DOGE was given access to a database, but it might not say explicitly that the data wound up in Grok. Or it says that the data was “analyzed using AI,” but doesn’t say that this AI was Grok. I’m assuming that probably, every time DOGE gains access to a database, its contents are swiftly fed to Grok, as a matter of routine. We have a consistent portrait of DOGE’s modus operandi. In report after report, court filing after court filing, employees recount witnessing the following sequence of events:

1. The DOGE boys arrived.
2. They figured out where the data was.
3. They demanded the highest level of access to it.
4. They weren’t interested in hearing that this was illegal and a violation of every known security protocol.
5. They made it clear that they viewed the people who offered these objections as caviling Deep-State dinosaurs who should be replaced with AI as quickly as possible.
6. If anyone tried to stop them, they were fired.
7. Either these positions were left vacant or they were filled by someone pliant and DOGE-friendly.
8. DOGE hooked up the department’s most sensitive databases to God-knows-what kind of server and vacuumed up the data without regard to long-established data-protection protocols.
9. The chief security officer began vomiting or had an aneurysm.
10. He quit or sued.
11. DOGE used Grok, or “some kind of AI,” to analyze the data.
12. If the courts temporarily blocked their access to the data, DOGE looked for ways to skirt the court order.
13. DOGE’s attorneys told judges who had blocked their access that they would be very, very responsible with the data, or they promised to send only DOGE boys who’d received training in data handling.
14. In some cases, the judge (or the White House and the Treasury Department) said they could have the data, but only in read-only mode, or an anonymized version. Otherwise, the judges mostly decided that DOGE should have unimpeded access to the data.
15. If they hadn’t done so already, DOGE swiftly vacuumed up the data without any regard to long-established data protection protocols, then used Grok, or “some kind of AI,” to analyze it.
16. The data soon showed up on the open Internet (sometimes on Elon Musk’s X feed). Foreign adversaries (Russia especially), profiting from the security vulnerabilities created by DOGE’s behavior, launched attack after attack on these now-vulnerable databases. Security analysts were left shaking, gibbering wrecks.

So whenever we read of DOGE gaining access to a database, it’s reasonable to think the data has already been shoveled into Grok’s maw. But I’m not 100 percent sure, hence “probably.” I assume, when I read that DOGE used AI to analyze the data, that the AI in question is Grok. I can’t imagine Musk’s employees would feed all this precious data to a rival AI, can you? But again, I’m not 100 percent sure. Unless I’ve found reporting to the contrary, I’ve assumed that DOGE still has access to these databases. Despite the Trump-Musk feud, Musk-aligned cadre remain inside the executive branch, so I don’t know why they wouldn’t. This list is probably very incomplete, because it doesn’t necessarily make the news when DOGE helps itself to another data set. But it will give you a sense of the scale of this undertaking. Normally, sharing data from a federal agency requires the agency’s authorization and the oversight of a specialist who ensures adherence to relevant privacy and confidentiality laws and regulations. DOGE hasn’t bothered with any of that. What they’re doing is a thousand kinds of illegal. But the law doesn’t enforce itself, and if the executive doesn’t feel like enforcing the law, then for practical purposes, no law exists…”