The Trump administration is building a Panopticon
It seems quaint now, but not that long ago, one of the biggest reasons for concern about the surveillance of our behavior by massive internet platforms like Facebook, Google, and Amazon — or by companies buying click data and GPS location from our smartphones — was that they might use that information to flog advertising at us in a more personalized and irritating way. This was supplanted quickly by a fear that our data might be used by foreign agents like the Internet Research Agency, a "troll farm" linked to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, or by those who wanted to target voters in order to get Trump elected. Those things are bad, obviously, but compared to what is happening now, they seem almost anodyne — like being concerned that you might get a bug bite while on a picnic in the woods, compared with seeing a massive grizzly bear advancing on your location, its teeth bared and its intentions obvious.
If you've been following The Torment Nexus for the last little while, you may recall a recent post titled "Be careful what you say on social media, part 2" — which was a followup to an earlier post. The first was triggered by the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a former student at Columbia who took part in peaceful pro-Palestine protests and was detained by agents of ICE — Immigration and Customs Enforcement, part of the Department of Homeland Security. They told Khalil that his visa was being revoked, and when they were told that he had a green card, the agents said that this was being revoked as well. He was taken to a detention facility, and has been there ever since. The second post in this series was sparked by the similar detention of several other students, including Turkish graduate student Rumeysa Öztürk, Columbia PhD student Ranjani Srinivasan, and Yunseo Chung, who came to the US when she was seven. Öztürk's main offence seems to be that she wrote an op-ed about Israel in a student paper.
In that post, I described some of the tools that ICE and others are using to identify people they wish to detain and/or rendition to a for-profit prison in El Salvador (something which is unconstitutional in a number of different ways, but continues to occur, despite the Supreme Court's attempts to get the government to stop). There are a variety of methods that government agencies can use to monitor social media with the aid of AI and then use those posts as evidence of potentially un-American conduct, as part of what Marco Rubio has called a "Catch and Revoke" plan. As 404 Media has reported, an ICE contractor known as ShadowDragon has the ability to monitor more than 200 social media and other sites, including Bluesky, OnlyFans, Instagram, etc. As I wrote:
Since at least 2017, the agency has been using an AI-powered tool called Giant Oak to scan social media posts for content deemed "derogatory" to the US. Screenshots show that analysts can search the system for identifiers such as name, address, email address, and country of citizenship, and the software will provide a “ranking” from zero to 100 based on the criteria provided. Analysts can click on a specific person and review images collected from social media or elsewhere, as well as reviewing their “social graph,” potentially showing who the system believes they are connected to. Other users include Customs and Border Protection, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the State Department and the Air Force.
This is just a tiny part of a much larger picture, however. Scanning social media is one thing, and at this point it appears to be well established in federal US law enforcement circles, despite all the First Amendment issues it raises. The larger risk, as The Atlantic described in a recent piece, is the other kinds of surveillance that government agencies have at their disposal — and the prospect of that growing even further, thanks to the consolidation of a vast array of personal information from various government databases.
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Gaze into the Palantir
According to a report from CNN, based on interviews with anonymous sources inside the government, staffers from the Department of Government Efficiency are building a master database to speed-up immigration enforcement and deportations by combining sensitive data from across a number of different federal agencies. A key player in the construction of this database is Palantir, the Silicon Valley data-analytics company started by Peter Thiel — a man who has said that he doesn't think "freedom and democracy are compatible," and has financed a variety of libertarian projects, as well as the lawsuit that bankrupted Gawker Media. It's almost comical how a technocrat who sees himself as an evil genius decides to name his global surveillance system after the all-seeing orbs used by the Dark Lord Sauron in the Lord of the Rings. Not very subtle!
The DHS contract with Palantir includes “streamlining selection and apprehension operations of illegal aliens,” and self-deportation tracking, according to public records on a federal contracting site. “If they are designing a deportation machine, they will be able to do that,” said a former senior IRS employee. 404 Media reports that a recent version of Palantir’s case-management system for ICE allows agents to search for people based on “hundreds of different, highly specific categories,” including how a person entered the country, their current legal status, and their country of origin. It also includes a person’s hair and eye color, whether they have scars or tattoos, and their license-plate reader data, which would provide detailed location data about where that person travels by car. In recent weeks, immigration authorities have arrested and detained people with student visas and green cards, and deported at least 238 people to El Salvador.
At the IRS, officials agreed this month to share data with DHS, which plans to use tax information to find as many as 7 million people suspected of being in the country illegally. HUD Secretary Scott Turner said in March the agency has an agreement to share data with DHS in order to ensure that taxpayer funds “are not used to harbor or benefit illegal aliens.” Turner told Fox News Digital that “those that are here illegally, that are living in HUD-funded public housing, we’re putting on notice,” and has said there are 24,000 “ineligible” people in HUD-assisted housing. HUD knows which households include undocumented people because all applicants are required to report their status.
According to the Washington Post, officials at the Department of Housing and Urban Development are working on a rule that would ban mixed-status households — in which some family members have legal status and others don’t — from public housing and other public programs. The Social Security Administration recently added the names of more than 6,000 immigrants to a database it uses to track dead people, which had the effect of cutting off their ability to receive benefits. The Post also reported that staffers of Elon Musk's DOGE project gained access to a dataset with personal information such as driver’s licenses and citizenship status, which would permit DOGE officials to identify individuals without a Social Security number.
An Immigration OS with an API
In effect, Thiel and Palantir are building a complete software system to detect illegal immigrants — a kind of all-in-one ImmigrationOS. But why stop at illegal migrants? The Post notes that in February, the administration opened investigations into whether five universities properly handled allegations of antisemitism, and told the attorneys handling the cases to ask the schools for the names and nationalities of students who protested against Israel’s war in Gaza. This is identical to a plan that was described in an essay that Max Eden — then a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and now a White House official — wrote in the Washington Examiner in December. In the essay he suggested that the department’s civil rights office could find “the identities of every single foreign student who supported the protests,” and then immigration authorities could “revoke every single one of the protesting foreign students’ visas.”
According to a Wired report, DOGE operatives inside the IRS created a hackathon designed to build a “mega API” that would allow certain users to see all the agency's data from a central access point, and the project was to be hosted on a platform owned by Palantir. The Treasury Department denied the existence of such a contract, but Wired notes that IRS engineers were invited to a “training and building session” on the project located at Palantir’s offices in Washington, DC. Sources told Wired that it would be easy to connect the IRS’s Palantir system with the ICE system at DHS, allowing users to query data from both systems simultaneously. A system like the one being created at the IRS with Palantir "could enable near-instantaneous access to tax information for use by DHS and immigration enforcement." As The Atlantic put it:
Historically, much of the data collected by the government has been heavily compartmentalized and secured; even for those legally authorized to see sensitive data, requesting access for use by another government agency is typically a painful process that requires justifying what you need, why you need it, and proving that it is used for those purposes only. Not so under Trump. This is a perilous moment. Rapid technological advances over the past two decades have made data shedding ubiquitous—whether it comes from the devices everyone carries or the platforms we use to communicate with the world. As a society, we produce unfathomable quantities of information, and that information is easier to collect.
Elizabeth Laird, director of equity in civic technology at the Center for Democracy and Technology, told Wired that “it's hard to overstate what a significant departure this is and the reshaping of longstanding norms and expectations that people have about what the government does with their data.” Victoria Noble, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, pointed out that there is a reason federal databases are siloed. “When you put all of an agency's data into a central repository... you end up dramatically increasing the risk that this information will be accessed by people who don't need it and are using it for improper reasons or repressive goals, to weaponize the information [and] use it against people they dislike." And Cody Venzke, a senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union focused on privacy and surveillance, said that what the administration seems to be building is "a panopticon of a single federal database with everything that the government knows about every single person.”
It's not just the IRS or DHS, as The Atlantic points out. The federal government has a tattoo database, created in 2014 by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and distributed to multiple institutions for the purpose of training software systems to recognize common tattoos associated with gangs and criminal organizations. The FBI has a “Next Generation Identification” biometric and criminal-history database program; the agency also has a facial-recognition apparatus capable of matching people against more than 640 million photos—a database made up of driver’s license and passport photos, as well as mug shots. The Social Security Administration keeps a master earnings file, which contains the individual earnings histories for 350+ million Social Security numbers. Other government databases contain secret whistleblower data.
Building blocks of dystopia
The Atlantic notes that America "already has all the technology it needs to build a draconian surveillance society—the conditions for such a dystopia have been falling into place slowly over time, waiting for the right authoritarian to come along and use it to crack down on American privacy and freedom."
Say you want to arrest or detain somebody—activists, journalists, anyone seen as a political enemy—even if just to intimidate them. An endless data set is an excellent way to find some retroactive justification. It 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.
In a separate Atlantic story about DOGE agents achieving what some have called "God mode" on various systems (a term taken from gaming culture), the magazine notes that one agent was working to open back doors into systems used throughout the federal government, including privileged access to 19 different IT systems administered by teams, a level of control that would allow him to not only view and modify federal data, but also grant and revoke access to other people. That same story quotes a federal official from the downsized USAID agency as saying: “it is not ridiculous to think they’d have bank-account and routing numbers for every single person in the United States. What do you do with this information? I had to ask myself, Do I file my taxes this year or not?"
One contractor who has worked on classified information-security systems at numerous government agencies told The Atlantic that “this is the largest data breach and the largest IT security breach in our country’s history — at least that’s publicly known. You can’t un-ring this bell. Once these DOGE guys have access to these data systems, they can ostensibly do with it what they want.” A number of federal judges have been trying to stave off the merging of databases, with one in DC expected to rule on whether to block the IRS from sharing taxpayer data with ICE, and another who decided to extend restrictions on DOGE getting access to personal Social Security data. “The Privacy Act is not toothless. Defendants cannot flout the law,” US District Judge Ellen Hollander wrote.
That's an admirable statement, but so far the Trump administration has shown that it has no problem flouting that law and plenty of others. The president issues executive orders, which have no legal or constitutional authority, and then his lieutenants proceed as though these orders were law, even though none have been approved by Congress. Why would he or his followers pay any attention to the Privacy Act? Welcome to the Panopticon.
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