I've always wondered what the endgame of that farce was. Cost-cutting was clearly always a pretense and a bad one at that. There's made up claims about 300 year olds getting Social Security but I think this only proves that the SSA database was an explicit goal and that was cover.

But why? The only conclusion I can come to is "stealing elections". I'll include this partial list I made of Republican voter suppression efforts going back decades [1].

I believe out there someone is collecting all this data into an AI model to predict how people will vote, something that Cambridge Analytica was a toy version of. But it goes beyond how people will vote but whether they will vote. Likewise, data will be constructed to strike off people from voter rolls if the system believes they won't vote how you want. We've seen efforts like this where similar-sounding names of felons in other states are used to strike off people from voter rolls. And that's a real problem because people might not know they're no longer registered to vote and in some states you have to register 30 or more days before the election.

There is essentially infinite money available to fund Republicans stealing elections because it results in public funding cuts to give even more tax breaks to billionaires.

You can't directly use the SSA databsae obviously so any effort must be small enough to not draw attention, involve part or all of the computing done overseas to avoid legal scrutiny and/or "washing" that data through data provider services. I would bet if you started exhaustively looking at various companies in or adjacent to these spaces, you'd find some pretty dodgy stuff.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47053453