“President Trump could soon have the tools to satisfy his many grievances by swiftly locating compromising information about his political opponents or anyone who simply annoys him,” says Julia Angwin, a longtime investigative reporter, in a New York Times opinion article.
“The administration has already declared that it plans to comb through tax records to find the addresses of immigrants it is investigating — a plan so morally and legally challenged, it prompted several top IRS officials to quit in protest. Some federal workers have been told that DOGE is using artificial intelligence to sift through their communications to identify people who harbor anti-Musk or -Trump sentiment (and presumably punish or fire them),” she says.
“Over the past 100 days, DOGE teams have grabbed personal data about U.S. residents from dozens of federal databases and are reportedly merging it all into a master database at the Department of Homeland Security,” Angwin says.
And “this month House Democratic lawmakers reported that a whistle-blower had come forward to reveal that the master database will combine data from such federal agencies as the Social Security Administration, the Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Health and Human Services. The whistle-blower also alleged that DOGE workers are filling backpacks with multiple laptops, each one loaded with purloined agency data,” she says.
Angwin cites Georgetown law professor Paul Ohm, who in 2009 envisioned the assemblage of a DOGE-like amount of data into what he called a “database of ruin.” He said, “Almost every person in the developed world can be linked to at least one fact in a computer database that an adversary could use for blackmail, discrimination, harassment or financial or identity theft.”
Several lawsuits allege that DOGE's data incursions violate the Federal Privacy Act of 1974, but that law doesn’t give judges the ability to levy meaningful fines or easily stop illegal actions, Angwin says.
The United States is the only one of the 38 developed nations making up the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that lacks a data protection agency to enforce comprehensive privacy laws, she says.
Congress could defund DOGE, repeal Trump’s executive order establishing it, or support legislation that Democratic Sens. Ed Markey, Mass., and Ron Wyden, Ore., have introduced to update the Privacy Act to provide more meaningful fines and criminal penalties.
“This should be a bipartisan issue,” Angwin says. “Because once we create a database of ruin, none of us are safe from having our information — no matter how innocuous — used against us.”
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