Nadia Raymond

When Jeremiah Schofield started working at the Social Security Administration, the SSA, the first thing his boss said to him was, if you're looking up your ex's records, your own records, or looking up someone famous, don't.

We will know.

Then they made him read Title V of the U.S.

Code Section 552A, the Privacy Act, the actual legal text of it.

That's how much they wanted to drive the point home.

The Social Security Administration is the caretaker of these truly massive databases of personal information.

They use it to send social security checks, disability payments, and in order to do that accurately, given how there's over 300 million of us, they keep master files.

Jeremiah says they have all sorts of information from all sorts of moments in your life.

Where you were born, your social security number, your mom's maiden name, your citizenship status.

All of it stored in giant files.

At every job people have had?

That's for people who collect disability.

Like they contain people's whole lives, basically.

The point of the many rules governing these lists and files is not just privacy, though.

It's about making sure all this information is used only for its intended purpose.

By the book.

And Jeremiah, from what I can tell, is a by-the-book kind of guy.

There's one database with arguably more power than the others and a name to match.

It's called the Death Master File.

It's a master list of all the dead.