The Trump administration’s ongoing efforts to combine access to the sensitive and personal information of Americans into a single searchable system with the help of shady companies should terrify us – and should inspire us to fight back.
While couched in the benign language of eliminating government “data silos,” this plan runs roughshod over your privacy and security. It’s a throwback to the rightly mocked “Total Information Awareness” plans of the early 2000s that were, at least publicly, stopped after massive outcry from the public and from key members of Congress.
Under this order, ICE is trying to get access to the IRS and Medicaid records of millions of people, and is demanding data from local police. The administration is also making grabs for food stamp data from California and demanding voter registration data from at least nine states.
Much of the plan seems to rely on the data management firm Palantir, formerly based in Palo Alto. It’s telling that the Trump administration would entrust such a sensitive task to a company that has a shaky-at-best record on privacy and human rights.
Bad ideas for spending your taxpayer money never go away – they just hide for a few years and hope no one remembers. But we do. In the early 2000s, when the stated rationale was finding terrorists, the government proposed creating a single all-knowing interface into multiple databases and systems containing information about millions of people. Yet that plan was rightly abandoned after less than three years and millions of wasted taxpayer dollars, because of both privacy concerns and practical problems.
It certainly seems the Trump administration’s intention is to try once again to create a single, all-knowing way to access and use the personal information about everyone in America. Today, of course, the stated focus is on finding violent illegal immigrants and the plan initially only involves data about you held by the government, but the dystopian risks are the same.
Over fifty years ago, after the scandals surrounding Nixon’s “enemies list,” Watergate, and COINTELPRO, in which a President bent on staying in power misused government information to target his political enemies, Congress enacted laws to protect our data privacy. Those laws ensure that data about you collected for one purpose by the government can’t be misused for other purposes or disclosed to other government officials with an actual need. Also, they require the government to carefully secure the data it collects. While not perfect, these laws have served the twin goals of protecting our privacy and data security for many years.
Now the Trump regime is basically ignoring them, and this Congress is doing nothing to stand up for the laws it passed to protect us.
But many of us are pushing back. At the Electronic Frontier Foundation, where I’m executive director, we have sued over DOGE agents grabbing personal data from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, filed an amicus brief in a suit challenging ICE’s grab for taxpayer data, and co-authored another amicus brief challenging ICE’s grab for Medicaid data. We’re not done and we’re not alone.
The USA is turning into both shitholes, CCP run China and Vlad’s Russia.
Hmm, I feel like there’s something those 3 leaderships have in common…
We’re a cultural melting pot!
This combined with AI facial recognition, the US will be following China’s example.
The only difference is that their database will be hacked by other countries.
Under this admin, you just already know the thing is going to be a horrible hodgepodge mess of code generated by Grok or ChatGPT and put together as cheaply and quickly as possible.
They’ll contract musk to do it and call it X Internal Communications or XIC for short, and no one will be able to do trade or business without it.
Revelation 13:16-17
You’d think the crowd that avoided barcodes at grocery stores and had meltdowns over “microchips” supposedly in the COVID vaccine would be foaming over this administration.
As I keep telling people, they’re not upset about it because their media aren’t telling them about things like this, at least not in the same terms.
Of course. Funnel all that info to Peter fucking Thiel’s Palantir surveillance company that also has contracts with international law enforcement.
There couldn’t possibly be any problems with funnelling every bit of panopticon into a single billionaire super lobbiest’s hands. Especially one that has openly stated that he doesn’t believe in the continuation of the human race. Who is the closest thing to a real life vampire, regularly getting blood transfusions from healthy young “blood boys” in a hare brained attempt to prolong his own life at all costs.
I find it a massive failure of society as a whole that this fucking charlatan wasn’t laughed out of society in the 2010s when he was doing interviews about the “blood boy” bullshit and all the other crackpot shit he was doing to prolong his life. Absolute fucking ghoul. The people in power value money more than sense.
Start telling people that trump is building a national database of gun owners.
They’ll justify it somehow. Or blame the democrats somehow.
i can’t wait until the pictures of my asshole are finally immortalized in a dark web database leak torrent of the entire government
Well apparently asshole prints are as unique as fingerprints, so maybe we’ll have a giant database of those too.
Well I’m moist now, anyone else?
I thought it was already immortalized via onlyfans.
aren’t they about to go through an acquisition?
The Trump administration’s ongoing efforts to combine access to the sensitive and personal information of Americans into a single searchable system with the help of shady companies should terrify us – and should inspire us to fight back.
We should indeed fight back against the governments and corporations that for decades have been doing this shit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010s_global_surveillance_disclosures
nice of them to put everything in one place for easier access for the ruskies.
PLEASE check out any privacy community on Lemmy, PrivacyGuides.org, or ugh…even /r/Privacy
Saying “I have nothing to hide” does nothing but empower the surveillance state. You are living in a surveillance state and advertising tracking data is how you are tracked.
privacy@lemmy.world privacy@lemmy.ml privacy@lemmy.ca privacy@lemmy.ca
The party that used to flip their shit at the very idea of a federal database.
It was always a projection. Sure as shit, if a party ever created a one-world-government it would be the conservatives.
That was the whole point of DOGE. Access to the main servers of every government department, not “efficiency”. If this data is combined with data from social media, it’s possible to make quite detailed profiles of people.
Let’s not forget Peter Thiel and the Mercers have been doing this since Brexit.
Also scary that Palantir got a big contract for the NATO.It should be pretty clear at this point that the point of DOGE was to further enrich Elon Musk, by dismantling all the government agencies that regulated his businesses.
It depends on the situation. Better information sharing is important for protecting vulnerable people and children. However, we absolutely shouldn’t have every agency accessing sensitive information like medical records just cos they want to.
There is no situation where collecting vast amounts of information benefits the general public. It only serves to increase the power of the government.
When you’re tried in court for a crime, whether or not you actually committed the crime is not the only question that will be raised. There will be mountains of evidence about your “character” and basically “is this this type of person who could commit this crime?” The more information they collect, the more they can use against you as evidence of criminal intent.
In this way, they can basically make anyone they want into a criminal, and in a vindictive administration like we have right now (and most certainly will have again), that will most certainly be abused.
Release the Trump/Epstein files
They for sure won’t get hold of any notes about medical conditions (or god forbid, notes from your therapist) and use them against you if you opposed them.
I mean also the fact that they’re targeting youth specifically. I worry they will try to remove kids from homes and claim that parents who allow kids to transition are harmful to their own children.
I’m just beyond not thinking worst case scenario at this point.
I was being sarcastic.
They will for sure use things like phobias/weaknesses to psychologically influence you to get you out of their way.
I got the sarcasm. I was just stating that in addition to whatever information they get from notes, I worry they will target people for even allowing their children to receive or seek gender affirming care.
Like they have been arguing for years that allowing your child to begin hormonal therapy before 18 equates to child abuse (while also arguing physical and psychological abuse is your unquestionable God given right as a parent).
And I agree, they start with a focus on hormone blockers to get their foot in the door bc they know their base will support that.
Then it very easily becomes oh well we also need to have access to all the information about any child that has seen a doctor for things like ADHD.
When I say I’m beyond not thinking worst case scenario, I just mean I don’t think there’s really a scenario where this is somehow something everyone shouldn’t be worried about. Even if your child isn’t trans.
There’s always a canary in the coal mine that becomes the scapegoat they use to get their foot in the door. Somehow people didn’t see that was the case with immigrants despite all the warning signs. They argued shit like this was overblown fear mongering.
Now they’re moving the goal post a little further, and I don’t give a fuck if people want to tell me I’m crazy or fear mongering. They don’t fucking deserve the benefit of the doubt. They never did.
There are reasons why it is illegal for the german state to have a central database of all it’s citizens. Guess what the US will do with such a thing when they have it…
Become home of the extra free and brave? /s
