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.
Holy fuck. All of that will be stolen in 3 seconds and the minute it launches Russia will be granted special access. It was nice knowing ya’ll. Not really but. Yeah.
we will die when they get our socials 🥀
You joke but they could open up lines of credit, loans, make big purchases in your name. Of course, all my shit is shot so good luck getting approved with mine. Either way at this scale you could infinitely fuck with Americans in kind of financially devastating ways.
ok we don’t like that, I was not thinking about the larger picture etc
The libertarian “don’t tread on me” wing of the Republican party is hilariously quiet.
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.
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.
Release the Trump/Epstein files
Start telling people that trump is building a national database of gun owners.
This system will, does, or will one day know your porn preferences.
Cat ears and butt stuff. Might as well save them some CPU cycles.
Just that one video over and over for me.
The USA is turning into both shitholes, CCP run China and Vlad’s Russia.
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
It’s stupid from a comsec perspective even if it wasn’t stupid for any other reasons. Compartmentalization is a good strategy as we continue to upgrade outdated and vulnerable systems. But of course, this “leader” is an idiot. So he wouldn’t know that.
Exactly.
I certainly agree with agencies having some amount of open access to their data, but only for things that are actually relevant. For example, the IRS should be able to check Social Security benefits to verify tax reports, but it shouldn’t see details like where their checks are being sent.
If an agency needs access to data, they should specify exactly what they need and the source agency should provide an API to only get that into.
nice of them to put everything in one place for easier access for the ruskies.
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.
We need to start saying they’re adding people who own guns as a table in that database and either get conservatives onboard with stopping it, or more likely just be able to call them hypocrites for one more thing.
and should inspire us to fight back.
LOL. We won’t. US citizens have given up and those that haven’t don’t believe in anything but peaceful protests or trying to go about things “the right way”. Neither of which will do anything but hand over more control to billionaires and child rapists.
Sounds like you’ve given up and are ready to roll over for Daddy Fascist. Might as well get yourself a MAGA hat to match.
I’ve given up because I have tried rallying people and nobody wants to rally.
Everyone just wants to peacefully protest, which I disagree with.
Everyone wants to just wait until midterms, which is too late.
Nobody, dems included, have any balls. It’s over.
What the fuck have you done?
If nobody wants to rally behind your rallying cry, maybe try joining some existing organizations that have similar strategy and tactics as you. But just be aware that sometimes meeting those folks requires being active in adjacent spaces. You might need to put in the work to really get plugged in and involved.
But there is a vast sea of resistance work happening between, on one end, peacefully waving cardboard signs at passing cars and, on the other side, armed revolution. I’ll give you some examples:
- Meet with your local representatives and politicians and convince them to pass resolutions or legislation that put local roadblocks in the way of fascist incursions.
- Look up vendors that supply or provide services to Immigration and Customs Enforcement offices and contact their customers, encouraging them to drop their contracts due to those vendors working with ICE.
- Block entrances to ICE buildings to prevent kidnapped migrants from being transferred.
- Follow and harass ICE vehicles so as to screw up their operational security.
- Bang pots and pans outside hotels where ICE agents are known to be staying so that they can’t get any sleep.
- Show up at immigration court cases in support of migrants.
- Post long screeds on social media encouraging folks not to give up the fight.
I’ve done some but not all of the above. You might consider doing the same.
I agree that the people who are just twiddling their thumbs waiting for midterms are misguided, but so are the people who have given up six months into this regime. What I think isn’t misguided is trying to slow, delay, and generally gum up the works of everything this regime is trying to accomplish before the midterms. There are only so many months before then, so the more we can prevent them from damaging now, the better off we’ll be if and when we take back control. (I fully realize the prospect of even having midterms isn’t guaranteed, much less winning them.)
I really like your second bullet.
A couple of the others, my only hesitation is that I am a naturalized, non-white citizen so I do sometimes have to balance the progress my actions will yield with being disappeared from the equation entirely. Thoughts?
Yeah, I think right now it’s probably smart to be cautious. I don’t know your particular situation or risk tolerance, but I gotta believe that there’s some type of resistance you’d be comfortable doing. I will say though that pretty much anything worth doing right now is going to be outside our comfort zone. And that applies to all of us.
But even if you feel like there’s nothing you can do, you can support those who are in a better position to act.
Risk tolerance high, but blocking ICE entry a no-go because for me that’s just a visual fail and kind of a dumb move.
Stealth disruption, great. Funding efforts, happy to. Provide arms, fine. Use of my own arms, sure.
He’s right.
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.
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
