Tai Groot

MERRI OK

- # Tai **Groot** , IT Cybersecurity Expert - # Jul 2025 …ber LinkedIn, Appointed: Tai **Groot** starts at NDS. Appointed: Tai **Groot** 7/XX/25 Source: New White House design team aims for ‘delight…- # IT Modernization … 7/XX/25 Appointed: Tai **Groot** starts at NDS. Appointed: Tai **Groot** 7/XX/25 Source: New White House design team aims for ‘delight…- # Devils in the Details … NDS? SSA 7/XX/25 – Tai **Groot** Guessing a detail because of NDS link 7/XX/25 Guessing

7 26 GGL

RAMPART

AI Overview

Rampart is an open-source, local-first ML model and PII redaction system developed by the US government's National Design Studio. It is designed to run entirely in your web browser, using machine learning and deterministic rules to automatically redact personally identifiable information (PII) before any text gets sent to an external server. [1, 2]

The Core Components & Context

The Model: Rampart is a 14.7 MB ONNX token-classification model that redacts user-typed text in milliseconds. It combines a deterministic regex layer (to catch structured data like SSNs) with a MiniLM architecture (to catch names and addresses). You can explore the code and model files at the National Design Studio Hugging Face page or the National Design Studio GitHub. [1, 2, 3]

National Design Studio (NDS): Created by an executive order in 2025, the NDS operates directly within the executive office of the president to overhaul and standardize US federal digital services. Their team of engineers, including Edward Coristine and Tai Groot, built Rampart to serve as a strong first line of defense for citizen privacy. [1, 2, 3]

The Drey Dossier: This is an investigative outlet (via Substack and YouTube) that has scrutinized the NDS. The investigators created The Drey Dossier GitHub Pages, which maps the NDS's server infrastructure, behavioral-tracking pipelines, and the federal .gov domains tied to the studio. [1, 2, 3]

Surveillance Investigations: The work by the NDS and its usage of commercial visitor-tracking software has sparked public and journalistic scrutiny. According to The Guardian, the tracking tools employed by NDS-operated federal sites operate outside of the standard public filings and privacy laws expected of government infrastructure. [1, 2]

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I’m Tai Groot, a Member of Technical Staff at National Design Studio

I’m a senior software engineer working in IoT and distributed systems. I have a strong background grounded in Linux, Go, and DevOps tooling. I’ll use this space to share some of the things I’ve learned along my way, and occasionally write about some tools and shortcuts I use to make my life easier.

Topics

Most likely, I’ll cover topics like:

My setup and dotfiles
Some Go code snippets and packages I contribute to
Problems I’ve solved in my day-to-day work
Process improvement
grlx, the FOSS DevOps tool I’ve been working on for the past several years
Justifications for my mountains of domain name purchases
why did I buy so many domain names

What to expect

My rules for this blog are simple:

Every post must should be (at least potentially) useful to someone other than myself.
No individual post should take more than 3 hours to write, with:
- max one hour towards writing
- max one hour for generating images and sourcing citations
- max one hour towards proofing and layouts

Cache Cascade is dual-hosted on GitHub and my website. The version hosted on my site has Google Adsense enabled to offset hosting cost, but I’ve made sure to keep the GitHub version ad-free. Rather than using an adblocker on my main site, I’d prefer you read the GitHub instance if you don’t want to see ads, which I totally understand :) The site is built using Hugo + Bootstrap and I’ve made an RSS feed available for those who prefer it.

If you want to comment on or discuss anything I write about here, feel free to @mention me on X or join my Discord.

Inspirations

I wouldn’t have started this blog without the inspiration of many others, so I’ve made a dedicated page listing them. I’ll likely continue to add to this list over time.

I probably wouldn't have started this blog without the inspiration of these folks (alphabetical):

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[### Engineers Edward Coristine (@as400495) and Tai Groot ...

X · tbpn

180+ likes · 1 day ago](https://x.com/tbpn/status/2071706033186373699)

FULL INTERVIEW: Engineers Edward Coristine ( @as400495) and Tai Groot ( @taigrr) just released an ML model called Rampart for the National ...Read more

Missing: GUARDIAN ‎| Show results with: GUARDIAN

[### Tai Groot - Resume

Tai Groot

https://taigrr.com](https://taigrr.com/)

Experienced DevOps Engineer and Software Developer. Specializing in Golang and Linux DevSecOps with a focus on security.Read more

Missing: RAMPART ‎NDS ‎GUARDIAN ‎DESIGN ‎STUDIO

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