Trump Wants to Put You in a Massive, Secret Government Database

The Trump administration is on its way to creating every authoritarian’s dream: a centralized database containing intimate details about every resident of this country, fully searchable by artificial intelligence.

“Lauren Harper is Freedom of the Press Foundation’s first Daniel Ellsberg Chair on Government Secrecy”

The Intercept

This powerful tool would empower the government to conduct previously unimagined levels of surveillance and harassment against its own people.

The Intercept

Freedom of the Press Foundation is suing the administration for documents behind the database.

We know that this isn’t just something that the Trump administration would exploit; once built, it’s unlikely any administration could resist the urge to weaponize our personal information.

The Intercept

This nightmare privacy scenario began one year ago, when President Donald Trump issued an executive order that expanded data sharing across the federal government.

“Lauren Harper is Freedom of the Press Foundation’s first Daniel Ellsberg Chair on Government Secrecy”

The Intercept

The administration touted the order, “Stopping Waste, Fraud, and Abuse by Eliminating Information Silos,” as a way to target fraud within a supposedly bloated government.

Instead, it took a machete to long-standing privacy protections that mandate agencies can only share our data when absolutely necessary, to install a massive data-mining operation in their place.