"This is simply a digital coup. A hit on the data. What Muska's cyber units – mercenaries – have done is take control of the national government's operating systems. They downloaded or collected large amounts of data. This is an unprecedented scale of hacking,” wrote Cadwalladr on X, referring to her blog article on the Substack platform.
Cadwalladr — who, together with the editorial "New York Times" received the Pulitzer Prize in 2019 for describing the illegal collection of Facebook data, accused technology companies of destroying democracy at the time, stressed in her latest text that "this is an information war and this is what the coup is today".
"Musk did not request tanks, rifles, soldiers. He had a tiny cyber hack group that he sent to the Treasury Department (equivalent to the Polish Ministry of Finance) last weekend. He now has unknown amounts of the most delicate data of the full American nation and possibly rear entrances to the system," added the journalist, stressing that the representatives of the Treasury Department first denied that Musk had access to the data, but then it turned out that this access had indeed been obtained, and his computer group is presently going through all the data and taking control of it.
"Legal attack on democracy"
"This is what the illegal attack on democracy in the digital age looks like," wrote Cadwalladr, stressing that "the most valuable and delicate resources: the private data of citizens" have been taken. "If you think I'm crazy, remember that I'm not the only 1 saying this," she added.
In her entry on the X Cadwalladr, she quoted, among others, the statements of prof. Timothy Snyder and prof. Robert Reich, erstwhile secretary (minister) of work for the presidency of Bill Clinton. She besides stressed that many journalists described the facts that explain the current series of events and criticized news organizations' publishers for focusing on distracting stories specified as rebuilding the Gaza Strip as a luxury vacation resort.
