Michelle, well thought out response. Let me say the following…

When people commit fraud against the government especially social security it costs everyone that works. Since the government’s primary way to raise money for Social Security is payroll taxes. As I said I do sympathize with those who think the government is perhaps to tough when it comes to determining a disability, but I still want them “policing” disability for abuse.

Your next point about how government could monitor social media at an affordable cost is easier to address. Just like you use a “search” engine to find stuff on the internet, the government uses “search engines” to identify potential terrorists today. These “search” engines search people’s social networks and even phone calls. Most people may not be aware the government is already monitoring social network activity, this would just be for a different purpose (detecting disability fraud).

Again you are correct, many types of disabilities would not be easily detected searching “social networks”. But as an example, back injuries represent between 25–30% of all disability claims and these disabilities do lend themselves to identification of “potential abuse” through social network “searches”. My guess is that overtime the government will develop algorithms that identify individuals that are very likely abusing the system but they will never be either definitive or cover all disabilities.

Knowing where to look is a key way to reduce wasting resources and the SSA only has so many resources to look for fraud. When I worked for a company that administered Medicare for the government, we had fraud programs that were amazingly accurate based on analyzing “claims data”. By accurate, I don’t mean we caught most of the fraud, what I mean is that the software rarely identified something as potentially fraud that wasn’t.

In other words, our program “cheated” in favor of people. We accepted missing people who were committing fraud in favor of not “catching” honest people by mistake. I suspect the government “search” engine will use similar “rules”.

Social networks contain an amazing amount of information about people. So much so that companies like Facebook make billions selling the information to advertisers and other interested parties. My concern is that in recent years government agencies have been weaponized for political purposes. I have lost some of my trust in the government as a result.

If the government is allowed to “invade” our privacy for specific purposes, that is okay with me, but I would like to see criminal penalties to government employees that abuse the information they come across for political, financial, or personal gain and I would like to see some government employees serve jail time as a deterrent to such abuse.