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Senior editor, technology |
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There’s a great line in a recent story by my colleagues Ian Bogost and Charlie Warzel: “The federal government is a veritable cosmos of information, made up of constellations of databases.” Disparate agencies—the IRS, DHS, DEA, CFPB, and so on—have each built their own repositories of information, collecting sensitive data on Americans to facilitate their work. Historically, these archives have been kept under strict lock and key. Now, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, is working to remove safeguards and pool information in a way that has shocked security experts and the technologists who have worked with previous administrations. What will they do with it? “Advancements in artificial intelligence promise to turn this unwieldy mass of data and metadata into something easily searchable, politically weaponizable, and maybe even profitable,” Ian and Charlie write in their article, “American Panopticon,” which explores the possibility that the Trump administration may construct a new surveillance state. Officials “could, for example, target for harassment people who deducted charitable contributions to the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund, drove or parked near mosques, and bought Halal-certified shampoos. It could intimidate citizens who reported income from Trump-antagonistic competitors or visited queer pornography websites. It could identify people who have traveled to Ukraine and also rely on prescription insulin, and then lean on insurance companies to deny their claims.” These are speculative examples. But with big data and AI, they are now plausible. DOGE is bringing the United States into uncharted and dangerous territory. The government’s “sensitive and extensive collective store of information may still benefit some American citizens,” Ian and Charlie write, “but it is also being exploited to satisfy the whims and grievances of the president of the United States.” |
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| If you were tasked with building a panopticon, your design might look a lot like the information stores of the U.S. federal government—a collection of large, complex agencies, each making use of enormous volumes of data provided by or collected from citizens. The federal government is a veritable cosmos of information, made up of constellations of databases: The IRS gathers comprehensive financial and employment information from every taxpayer; the Department of Labor maintains the National Farmworker Jobs Program (NFJP) system, which collects the personal information of many workers; the Department of Homeland Security amasses data about the movements of every person who travels by air commercially or crosses the nation’s borders; the Drug Enforcement Administration tracks license plates scanned on American roads. And that’s only a minuscule sampling. More obscure agencies, such as the recently gutted Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, keep records of corporate trade secrets, credit reports, mortgage information, and other sensitive data, including lists of people who have fallen on financial hardship. | |
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