With Its Destruction of Government Data Silos, DOGE Is Building a ‘Surveillance Weapon’

Generally speaking, the United States has a piss poor track record when it comes to data privacy. One of the few protections that the federal government offers people is siloing data. Information the U.S. Census Bureau collects about you isn’t handed over to the Internal Revenue Service and so on and so forth. But as President Donald Trump mounts attacks on one of the federal government’s few safeguards, the U.S. must also confront its overall messy surveillance history. A quick Google search on data silos will tell you that they’re inefficient and need to be eliminated. But as John Davisson, senior counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, told Gizmodo: “Personal information held by the federal government is siloed for good reason.” For the U.S., that reason is Watergate. The scandal revealed that the federal government conducted extensive surveillance on “opposing political parties, civil rights activists, and others it sought to silence,” Victoria Noble, a staff attorne ... Read full article.