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 libertarian “don’t tread on me” wing of the Republican party is hilariously quiet.
That’s because their motto is “Tread on me harder, daddy” since 2016.
The libertarian wing was never really very libertarian, they mostly didn’t care much about weed and wanted to actually cut spending (or at least claimed to).
Look at Mike Lee (unfortunately my Senator) he calls himself a “libertarian” because he says no a lot, but he also toes the party line when it natters and hasn’t championed any social issues I’d call “libertarian.” I changed my registration to Republican just so I could vote against this clown twice in one election.
Coming from an ignorant outsider:
Is it possible to register as both Republican and Democrat? It feels like the primaries are at least as important as the elections themselves over there.No, you qualify for a given primary as of a specific date, so you can only participate in one. This is more due to the local Republican party policy than law, so YMMV in other states.
I’m usually registered Libertarian, and they’re primary system is way different (need to attend a convention), so the net result is that I don’t particular in any partisan primaries (and also don’t get the door to door signature spam). I’m registered this way not because I agree with the party (the national LP is basically “GOP light”, and the local one is largely irrelevant), but because they’re the largest third party and I want to help the stats.
Look on the bright side: this way, you don’t have to worry about data breach notification letters from all sorts of different companies or agencies since they’ll all be coming from the same source. Really saves on letterhead.
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
My relatives who’ve been screaming about mark of the beast and shit for years sure confuse the hell Out of me when they voice support for this while wearing their maga hats.
They want to see the mark of the beast, and the Antichrist, and the apocalypse so the end times will come and Jesus will take them all to heaven and burn their enemies in eternal damnation.
And if any of it is true, they’ll be the ones wondering why they didn’t get taken because they’re such good little christians.
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.
“We will build one concentration camp less than the Republicans!”
Signed, Democrats.
“sent on iPhone”
I’ve been saying it for decades. If we get out of this alive, privacy laws will need to have a massive overhaul like no one has ever seen. In times past it was governments, not private entities that had control over everyone, and the idea that a private business or enterprise having that kind of knowledge about people was unthinkable. Even those from the Robber Baron era of the 1890s to 1910s and the Mad Men era of the 1950s to 70s would never have had that kind of overreach.
A digital bill of rights needs not only extremely tight control over what governments can and cannot get, but even STRICTER stuff for non-government entities. I can’t believe that marketing was the downfall of freedom and privacy in this day and age!
The USA is turning into both shitholes, CCP run China and Vlad’s Russia.
We’re a cultural melting pot!
Hmm, I feel like there’s something those 3 leaderships have in common…
Release the Trump/Epstein files
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.
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.
“…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).
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.
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.
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
Can someone EL5 me on how this is different from our data being stolen under the Patriot Act for the last two decades?
Palantir creates platforms for data.
This is creating a platform that allows somebody to access every piece of data in one centralized location.
So example, when somebody is determining your social security payment (if that even exists in the future) they(or more likely AI) might be basing that decision not just on data relevant to income but also on something like a personal social credit score based on every piece of available government data related to a person over their entire lifetime.
Did you get flagged as suspicious while flying bc of 9/11. Did something end up on your record by complete mistake? In this centralized data base you could have all kinds of real and incorrect details associated with you (or even other people like friends, family, neighbors, coworkers) used to discriminate against you. Data becomes destiny.
Not to mention if they integrate it with these live facial recognition surveillance networks, something they caught you doing on camera without your knowledge could be used to make decisions.
Not to mention if they integrate it with these live facial recognition surveillance networks, something they caught you doing on camera without your knowledge could be used to make decisions.
Also remember that facial recognition has trouble with minority faces so if you get put on that list because some algorithm thought you were someone else you’re fucked.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XKeyscore
“You could read anyone’s email in the world, anybody you’ve got an email address for. Any website: You can watch traffic to and from it. Any computer that an individual sits at: You can watch it. Any laptop that you’re tracking: you can follow it as it moves from place to place throughout the world. It’s a one-stop-shop for access to the NSA’s information. … You can tag individuals … Let’s say you work at a major German corporation and I want access to that network, I can track your username on a website on a forum somewhere, I can track your real name, I can track associations with your friends and I can build what’s called a fingerprint, which is network activity unique to you, which means anywhere you go in the world, anywhere you try to sort of hide your online presence, your identity.”
As far as I can tell, the NSA data was into a dataset that allowed report software to run against it. It was also largely metadata, and it didn’t assign a person to the metadata.
Meaning it wasn’t an “enter a name” or "enter social security number.
This sounds like a dataset built for each person. Now how that’s going to work is a different question. Cops can already pull you over, and once they have your license plate, they can see if you’ve got warrants or outstanding fines, and various legal history.
Palantir’s data sounds like an efficient way to cause mass amounts of identity theft.
