It’s not as if Trump or Musk came up with the idea that the government wants to know more about you, about each of us, than we wanted to tell. Remember the efforts to prohibit cash in favor of plastic so that there would be a record of every expense? Remember the elimination of paper prescriptions in favor of electronic so the government would know every drug being given?
But we were promised that the government wouldn’t go full Brave New World, and siloed pieces of information, from medical to financial to personal, in the bowels of different agencies that had a legitimate-seeming claim to gather and maintain such information about us but without the government having the capacity to put it altogether in one big beautiful database. Those days are gone.
The Trump administration is now trying to connect the dots of that disparate information. Last month, President Trump signed an executive order calling for the “consolidation” of these segregated records, raising the prospect of creating a kind of data trove about Americans that the government has never had before, and that members of the president’s own party have historically opposed.
The effort is being driven by Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, and his lieutenants with the Department of Government Efficiency, who have sought access to dozens of databases as they have swept through agencies across the federal government. Along the way, they have elbowed past the objections of career staff, data security protocols, national security experts and legal privacy protections.
The New York Times provides a partial list of the 314 categories of data that can be amassed, and it pretty covers everything short of how many sheets of toilet paper you use daily. To be fair, it’s not that the government hasn’t long sought to amass this siloed date, but that Musk and the DOGE boys finally provide the government with the means to accomplish what other administrations only dreamed about.
What this amounts to is a stunningly fast reversal of our long history of siloing government data to prevent its misuse. In their first 100 days, Mr. Musk and Mr. Trump have knocked down the barriers that were intended to prevent them from creating dossiers on every U.S. resident. Now they seem to be building a defining feature of many authoritarian regimes: comprehensive files on everyone so they can punish those who protest.
In the past, privacy advocates fought to silo data that the government demanded so that the government could not abuse the data collected and use it against whoever was the target du jour. Now, the government not only has the mechanisms in place to make this happen, but has been able to gain some public support by rationalizing it as a means to find and deport illegal aliens. After all, as long as it’s only going to be used against those we hate at the moment, what could possibly go wrong?
The IRS and Department of Homeland Security have reached a data-sharing agreement to support the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement agenda, according to a court filing late Monday night.
Under the terms of the agreement, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement would submit names and addresses of immigrants living in the United States without legal status who have final removal orders, which would be used to check against IRS taxpayer records.
Remember how people embraced civil asset forfeiture when the government claimed its only purpose was to “take the profit out of crime” by targeting drug kingpins and mobsters? How did that work out?
But this time, there is an additional wrinkle that makes the government’s creation of a single master database that will contain all our private information collected from all government sources. Who will control the database? On whose servers will that mass of data be stored, whether openly or covertly? Is Musk keeping this data for himself without anyone’s knowledge or approval? Have Musk and the Muskrats given themselves perpetual access to this data by building in backdoor that will enable the access to every iota of data about the American public at will?
For years, privacy advocates, including me, have obsessed about just how much of our data Big Tech companies possess. They know our locations, monitor our browsing and online shopping histories and use that info to make inferences about our interests and habits.
But government records contain far more sensitive information than even the tech giants possess — our incomes, our bank account numbers, if we were fired, what diseases we have, how much we gamble.
But it’s against the law? So what? Who is going to do anything about it? And even if you tried, the government would know. Imagine the government taking your darkest secret and using it to smear you for trying to prevent this from happening?
We urgently need to modernize our approach to privacy by creating a federal data protection agency with robust investigative powers.
But short of that, we still have time to stop the creation of the database of ruin. Congress could defund DOGE or repeal Mr. Trump’s executive order establishing it or support legislation that the Democratic senators Ed Markey and Ron Wyden have introduced to update the Privacy Act to provide more meaningful fines and criminal penalties.
As a believer in the judiciary as a integral institution in our functioning democracy, it would be nice to believe that laws can prevent both the government and Musk from creating such a master database. But that requires the guys with guns to enforce the laws as enacted by Congress and interpreted by the courts. Based upon what we’ve seen over the past 100 days, all evidence suggests that the guys with guns are on the side of Musk and care little about what laws prohibit. Even worse, it’s not clear that this hasn’t already happened, with all of our data already stored on Musk’s servers.
