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By William M Briggs, The Stream, February 19, 2025
William M. Briggs is a senior contributor to The Stream, the author of Uncertainty and maintains an active and lively blog at wmbriggs.com. He earned his Ph.D. from Cornell University in statistics and studies the philosophy of science, the use and misuses of uncertainty, the corruption of science and the uselessness of most predictions. He began life as a cryptologist for the Air Force, slipped into weather and climate forecasting, and matured into an epistemologist.
In 2017 – the most recent data I could find — the U.S. Office of Personnel Management reported that there were 1,869,986 civilian employees working in the federal government.
None of these people were elected.
These unelected employees had, and continue to have, access to your data. Employees at the IRS, for instance, know how much money you’ve made, from whom you got paid, when, and how much in taxes you paid (or didn’t pay) in any given year.
The good people at the FBI, CIA, and especially the NSA also were not elected. These agencies spy on citizens routinely, and even more vigorously after the passage of the poorly named Patriot Act.
The wealth of data they have collected is inspiring. …
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