When the federal government collects information about citizens,
the law requires specific things first.

Privacy disclosures.

Notices in the Federal Register.

Published contracts with outside vendors.

I went looking for all of it across twelve National Design Studio programs and found none of it,
not a single required document filed across any of the twelve.

Every missing document is, by itself, a violation of federal law,
and these are the laws Congress wrote after Watergate to make sure the federal government could not run secret surveillance programs on its own citizens.

The only document they did publish is a privacy policy on TrumpRx,
and it contradicts itself two paragraphs apart.

The first paragraph says PostHog records the pages users visit and the medications they view.

Two paragraphs later, it says they do not collect health or medical information.

A federal health website is lying to the people using it and cannot even keep the lie consistent.

I wanted to know whether there were more sites the studio had not announced.

Here is something almost nobody outside of security research knows.

Every website with a padlock in the address bar has a certificate,
and there is a rule that every certificate issued anywhere in the world must be logged in a public ledger the moment it is created,
no exceptions.

The side effect of that rule is that every new website on the internet,
even ones nobody has announced and even ones hidden behind a login,
leaves a public fingerprint the moment it is built.

There is a free search engine called 👉 crt.sh where anyone can look up those logs.

I typed in the studio’s domain, and underneath the public sites I already knew about were roughly forty more, unannounced,
with no links pointing to them from any public page.

I started reading the names.

Sites that looked like they belonged to the State Department.
To NASA.
To the Department of Homeland Security.

And then two that stopped me cold:

a working preview of vote.gov,

and something called fbi-kirk-tipline.

I checked the public ownership records for every subdomain,
and every single one traced back to the same place,
the Executive Office of the President.

The National Design Studio had built pre-launch versions of websites belonging to other federal agencies
and registered all of it to the White House.
#NationalDesignStudio
#surveillance #gebbia
#PostHog #AutoMonitor