Watch the video below to find out why veterans should be worried about the privacy and security of their VA data. [Transcript below the video if you prefer to read.]
Please get involved in pushing back on overreach at the VA and elsewhere!
- Contact your congresspeople daily.
- Hit the streets.
- Support Federal Workers Against DOGE! https://bsky.app/profile/fedsagainstdoge.bsky.social and https://www.instagram.com/federalworkersagainstdoge/ are good places to start.
The only way we stop this is if people get off the sidelines.
Video transcript:
People don’t want the things that they’re going to their doctors for to be blasted out into the public sphere. If the security of va.gov is inadequate because they don’t have an adequate staff maintaining it, then all that information could be stolen by bad actors and could be leaked or, you know, held for ransom.
Hi, my name is Jonathan Kamens. Up until Valentine’s Day, I was employed by the United States Digital Service, which was recently renamed by the Donald Trump to the United States DOGE service where I worked with the group That builds and maintains the VA.gov website which millions of veterans use every single month to access the benefits that they are entitled to.
We provide a lot of services online to veterans so that they don’t have to go handle things in person at a VA medical center or mail forms in on paper and as a result of that there’s a lot of private information and health information that is processed and stored. And it was my job to make sure that we are doing the right things to keep that private information that belongs to our veterans safe.
The thing about security is that the threats constantly evolve and therefore security efforts need to constantly evolve. And if they don’t have enough capacity to really be keeping track of all the security threats they need to be worried about and managing those threats effectively, the site is going to become less secure over time. That’s kind of inevitable.
So, for example, someone could call up a veteran pretending to be one of their doctors and use the information stolen from VA.gov in order to convince the veteran that they are legitimate and then leverage that convincing to take advantage of the veteran, to scam them out of money or services.
I would recommend that people who are concerned about what is happening in the federal government right now do three different things to push back against what’s happening.
The first thing is every single American voter should be contacting their U.S. senators and their U.S. representative on a regular basis.
Number two is get out there and protest. There are regular protests that are happening in Washington, DC, all over the country. We need to be hitting the streets.
And then third of all, there’s an organization that I’m involved with called Federal Workers Against DOGE. And I would encourage you to follow them on Instagram. And we are organizing resistance against DOGE. And we are trying to support federal workers to help them be brave enough to push back and resist illegal and illegitimate orders being given to them by DOGE. So we could use your support. And if you follow us, we will give you additional tips for activism that you can do moving forward.
