360 year old receiving pension? Musk questions social security data, IT expert: algorithm issue

According to reports, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) led by Musk has reached at least 19 US government departments since its establishment and gained internal system access to some departments. On February 17th, Musk shared a screenshot of the US social security database obtained from an investigation by the DOGE team, some of which were shocking.

According to the screenshot, there are nearly 20 million centenarians receiving social security in the United States, with the oldest recipient registered between the ages of 360 and 369. It should be noted that 360 years ago, the United States was not yet established, and this obviously illogical result has been referred to by Musk as the "biggest scam in history".

However, did the DOGE team really expose a shocking scam? American IT expert David Gilbert stated in the technology magazine Wired that the explanation for these seemingly unreasonable aspects is actually quite simple, which is that the young team led by Musk is not familiar with the early COBOL programming language, causing a misunderstanding.

Elon Musk's' audit 'reveals' scam'?

The number of people assigned social security numbers is 60 million more than the total population

According to a statistical chart posted by Musk, there are nearly 20 million recipients aged over 100, with 4.74 million in the 100-109 age group and 3.74 million in the 110-119 age group. What is' abnormal 'is that there are actually more people in the 120-129 age group, approaching 4 million people... There are also many people in the older age group.

Faced with the absurd scene of 20 million centenarians receiving social security, Musk joked, "Are these vampires from Twilight still receiving pensions

According to Musk, the oldest recipient is at least 360 years old, corresponding to being born in 1665, while the United States was not founded until 1776. Elon Musk said, "Long lived individuals who receive US social security were born before there was a single American citizen on Earth

After analyzing the data posted by Musk, a netizen found that the number of people assigned social security numbers has reached 395 million, which is 60 million more than the current population of the United States. Musk said, "This may be the biggest scam in history." Some netizens said, "I want to know how many of these elderly people aged 120-369 voted in the election." Musk replied, "I guess there must be quite a few." Before last year's election, Musk had publicly accused the Democratic Party of vote fraud.

On February 16th, Musk also disclosed the audit results of the US defense department, which found that the military spent $32000 on only 25 cups purchased on the KC-10 tanker of the 60th Air Transport Squadron at Travis Air Force Base in California that year. In addition, Boeing provides in-flight soap boxes and other items to the US Air Force at a premium of about 80 times the market price.

IT experts:

Early programming languages can lead to misunderstandings, do not modify them casually

Regarding Musk's public disclosure of the "shocking scam", American IT expert David Gilbert said that the truth behind it is actually very simple, which is the misunderstanding caused by the early use of the COBOL programming language. He gave an example: in the statistics posted by Musk, there are an unusually high number of elderly people in the age group of 150, which precisely indicates that this bug may be caused by a defect in the computer system, rather than being artificially fabricated. Otherwise, the counterfeiter could have made the data more "smooth".

David Gilbert explained that there is no date data type in the COBOL language, so only characters can occupy positions. When encountering incomplete birth dates and missing data, the system may automatically use some benchmark data to fill in the spaces, the most commonly used being 1875 (the year of signing the Metric Convention). By 2025, this part of the system will display people born in 1875, which happens to indicate an age of 150.

According to publicly available information, COBOL (full name "General Large Business Oriented Language") was a programming language created by a group of programmers in the 1950s, suitable for large computers and compatible with various mainstream systems at that time. In that era, almost all large corporations and government departments in the United States adopted this programming language. However, later on, private enterprises gradually abandoned the COBOL language because the code was cumbersome and difficult to create quickly. However, many large government agencies like the US Social Security Administration choose to use COBOL because the language was originally designed for mainframes and has strong reliability and fault tolerance mechanisms.

The tech website Fast Company is concerned that Musk's young team has apparently not heard of early programming languages like COBOL, and if they rashly decide to modify the code, the consequences could be unimaginable. The COBOL language is actually very fragile, and every change requires extensive security testing. If these young engineers casually modify the code in the background, it is possible that a life-saving medical subsidy cannot be delivered on time

In addition, the official website of the US Social Security Administration explained in 2022 that the system will stop automatically paying benefits to anyone over the age of 115 and will require manual review. A technical review report in 2023 shows that 98% of centenarians in the US social security database actually do not receive any financial assistance. However, the US Social Security Administration will not modify these outdated materials because the technical cost of modification is relatively high.

Source: Red Star News