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.
THIS WAS ALL AVOIDABLE.
I was told if I voted for a repeat of Genocide Joe’s team then we would get genocide or something. This is much better!
Yep. Those genocide protestors sure showed us, didn’t they?
I respect the protests. Bring on more protests. It’s the whole not voting thing that I do no respect.
Exactly. Protesting is an effective way to get your voice heard. But those that chose to withhold their vote only served to cut off the noses of others to spite an issue they know little about.
SO many people are being hurt by their ignorant and selfish decision.
But both sides bad!
More like “both sides don’t care about the working class.”
The lesser evil is still evil.
Tolkien is rotating in his grave at this point with what is happening with his word Palantir. The USA Government is currently becoming a worse villain than Sauron and all of Mordor
“…Much of the plan relies on Palantir”
Owned by Sociopathic Oligarchs Peter Theil, who holds Vance’s leash, and paid Trump to put him in the VP slot, and believes that infusions of the blood of young men will help him live to be 150 (not kidding).
As much of a prick as this guy is, I don’t think that’s true. The behind the bastards episode on him couldn’t substantiate it at least
Nah, it’s true.
Well, guess I can’t deny such compelling evidence
But just the blood infusion thing right? Pretty sure all the other stuff is true
150 is probably way too young in his opinion. He’s moved on to transhumanism. He wants to live for eternity
I hope he ends up a brain in a jar and somebody stores him in the back of a closet under some old newspapers.
Oh God yes a still sentient and thinking brain just completely devoid of sensory input for eternity until he goes mad. Ironic fates ftw
Fucking bastard is the convergence of all evil going on in the last few years. Unless one morning they wake up to their neighborhoods patrolled by “militia” in their brodozers, what’s gonna take people to shock them up into outrage, and it’s not just the minorities or the progressives?
I think there’s a reason the right keeps their base only as informed as they need them to be. Most of them have no clue what truth is anymore. It honestly takes a trusted person on the right saying something is going on to even make people start questioning things.
Like without Theo Von and Joe Rogan actually asking some questions about reality, I honestly think nobody on the right would have thought twice about Palestine and Epstein would have slipped back into the abyss like before.
I always think about what creates revolutions (and counter-revolutions), and most cases the lack of a single thing usually causes the affected classes to rise up. Something really needs to break the bastards.
In Turkey, we have a portal called e-Devlet (e-Government) that is used for handling all government services. It stores every citizen’s data, including medical records, bank account information, and almost any type of personal data you can imagine. Unfortunately, this data has been leaked several times and continues to leak. These breaches result in highly convincing scams, doxxing, and other serious issues.
Such sensitive information should not be centralized under a single portal. We are already suffering from this situation in Turkey, but if a similar large-scale data leak were to happen in the US, the consequences would have a massive global impact.
I wonder how we can be evil today?
-Trump administration
I wonder if us asenting this would demonstrate our willingness to suck Trump’s cock.
-Republicans in Congress
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.
China’s surveillance is beginning to look mild in comparison.
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.
Obama did it first.
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.
It’s all in a database that can only be accessed with lefty-outer-joins
I don’t want no database full of commie left joins!
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
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
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 I’m moist now, anyone else?
Well apparently asshole prints are as unique as fingerprints, so maybe we’ll have a giant database of those too.
I thought it was already immortalized via onlyfans.
aren’t they about to go through an acquisition?
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.
You just know that they will be the first ones to restrict gun ownership, although they’ll have a half-assed excuse that their followers will be forced to swallow hard.
