The administration is pursuing a plan to combine sensitive and personal information into a single searchable system with private companies. The plan is presented as eliminating government data silos but undermines privacy and security and echoes earlier Total Information Awareness efforts. Efforts began on Inauguration Day with widespread agency access to personal data and grew after an executive order directing inter-agency data sharing. ICE seeks IRS and Medicaid records and local police data while states report demands for food stamp and voter registration data. Much of the effort appears to rely on Palantir, a firm with extensive federal contracts and privacy concerns.
This dangerous reboot started on Inauguration Day, when the President unleashed DOGE agents across myriad federal agencies to needlessly access the personal data of tens of millions of people. It expanded in March when President Trump signed an executive order calling for the federal government to share data across agencies, raising the specter of master access to personal and sensitive information about people in the U.S.
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,
The New York Times reported in May that Palantir already had received more than $113 million in federal government spending since Trump took office, including new contracts with the Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon; it also signed a new $795 million contract with the Defense Department. The company says it builds dashboards that let someone search for and use information stored in multiple digital
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