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Hello and welcome back to Equity TechCrunch's flagship podcast about the business of startups.

Today is Friday, March 13th. I'm Anthony Ha, and I'm joined by senior reporters Rebecca Boulon and Sean O'Kane.

Rebecca, for our lead store, we have something that's a little scary. Do you want to tell us

about it? Yeah, well, I mean, it is Friday the 13th, so why not get a little spooky, right? So

a Doge employee stole social security numbers. I'm sure it shocks you all to learn that this

happened. A whistleblower claims that a former Doge employee copied two restriction SSA databases

onto a thumb drive before leaving the agency and then apparently went and bragged about it as like,

here's all the data I'm going to use for my new company. The names, by the way, of the files were

numidant and master death file. So I'll just I'll just stop there and let you guys.

Very on brand for Friday the 13th. You're right. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's nice to check in on

where things wound up, isn't it? After, you know, we still don't know how far, how far this is

gone. I mean, this was the this was the concern right like last year when a bunch

of these people were going into different agencies and doing things you know breaking down walls

physical or or metaphorical this was always the concern and i think a lot of people who follow

this stuff really closely and were really dug into this you know basically saw this coming

and so you know it's a shame that we have to get to a whistleblower coming out now and saying that this is what happened, but now we know what happened. This news, if it sounds a little bit familiar, it's because there were other reports, you know, last year about Doge and like, oh, they have access to this, what they shouldn't have. And it seems like the security protocols are really

not being followed or respected here. As far as I can recall, this is the most extreme version where it's not

just, hey, this is a risk, but actually somebody walked, you know, apparently walked out with this data.

We should note that the Trump administration is calling this fake news and saying that, you know,

essentially the Washington Post, which broke this story,

is just trying to get clicks. But it does seem very consistent with a lot of other reporting.

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