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‘This Is What We Were Always Scared of’: DOGE Is Building a Surveillance
State
The New York Times
Julia Angwin
April 30, 2025
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/30/opinion/musk-doge-data-ai.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Dk8.lzc4.DBAR8L6qNDOp&smid=url-share
Ms. Angwin, a contributing NYTimes Opinion writer, is an investigative
journalist.
Elon Musk may be stepping back from running the so-called Department of
Government Efficiency, but his legacy there is already secured.
DOGE is assembling a sprawling domestic surveillance system for the
Trump administration — the likes of which we have never seen in the
United States.
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.
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 I.R.S.
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).
What this amounts to is a stunningly fast reversal of our long history
of siloing government data to prevent its misuse.
In their first 100 days, Mr. Musk and Mr. Trump have knocked down the
barriers that were intended to prevent them from creating dossiers on
every U.S. resident. Now they seem to be building a defining feature of
many authoritarian regimes: comprehensive files on everyone so they can
punish those who protest.
“This is what we were always scared of,” said Kevin Bankston, a longtime
civil liberties lawyer and a senior adviser on A.I. governance at the
Center for Democracy & Technology, a policy and civil rights
organization. “The infrastructure for turnkey totalitarian
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.
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.
For years, privacy advocates, including me, have obsessed about just how
much of our data Big Tech companies possess.
They know our locations, monitor our browsing and online shopping
histories and use that info to make inferences about our interests and
habits.
But government records contain far more sensitive information than even
the tech giants possess — our incomes, our bank account numbers, if we
were fired, what diseases we have, how much we gamble.
In 2009 the Georgetown law professor Paul Ohm envisioned the assemblage
of a DOGE-like amount of data and called it the “database of ruin.”
“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,”
he wrote.
We are not all the way down the rabbit hole yet. It appears that DOGE
has not yet tried to scoop up data from the intelligence agencies, such
as the National Security Agency, which collect vast amounts of
communications between foreigners — and often catch Americans’
communications in their net. (That said, it is not encouraging that the
head of the N.S.A. was recently fired, apparently at the behest of an
online influencer who is friends with the president.)
Even so, the creation of a huge government database of personal
information about U.S. residents is dangerous and very likely against
the law. In the 1960s, the Johnson administration proposed combining all
of its federal dossiers together into a new national databank. The
administration said it just wanted to eliminate duplicate records and
perform statistical analysis, but the public was outraged.
The databank was scuttled, and Congress passed the Federal Privacy Act
of 1974, which requires federal agencies to obtain consent before
disclosing individuals’ data across agencies.
Of the more than 30 lawsuits that involve DOGE, several allege that its
data incursions violate the Privacy Act.
So far, courts have ruled in plaintiffs’ favor in two of those cases,
issuing orders limiting DOGE’s access to data at the Social Security
Administration and Department of Treasury. Both cases are ongoing. While
the orders restricted DOGE from obtaining personally identifiable data,
it remains unclear what happens with data that has been already collected.
But the deeper problem is that the Privacy Act lacks real teeth. It did
not give judges the ability to levy meaningful fines or easily halt
illegal actions. It failed to establish an enforcement arm to
investigate privacy violations in ways that courts can’t. And since
then, Congress hasn’t been able to pass comprehensive privacy laws or
create stronger enforcement mechanisms.
That makes the United States the only country in the 38-member
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development without a data
protection agency to enforce comprehensive privacy laws. In the European
Union, each country has a dedicated data protection authority that can
conduct investigations, write rules, issue fines and even demand a halt
to data processing.
Without a privacy cop on the beat, Americans can submit a Privacy Act
request to try to find out what data DOGE is holding about them or hope
that judges side with them in one of the dozens of lawsuits winding
their way through court. Still, DOGE continues going from agency to
agency grabbing data.
To pick just two recent examples: Last month DOGE bullied its way into
the federal payroll records for about 276,000 federal workers, placing
the officials who objected on administrative leave, and this month a
separate whistle-blower at the National Labor Relations Board came
forward with evidence showing that after DOGE workers arrived, there was
a spike in data being siphoned out of the agency.
“In no other country could a person like Elon Musk rummage through
government databases and gather up the personal data of government
employees, taxpayers and veterans,” said Marc Rotenberg, a longtime
privacy lawyer and founder of the Center for A.I. and Digital Policy, a
nonprofit research group. “There are many U.S. privacy laws. But they
are only effective when enforced by dedicated privacy agencies.”
We urgently need to modernize our approach to privacy by creating a
federal data protection agency with robust investigative powers.
But short of that, we still have time to stop the creation of the
database of ruin. Congress could defund DOGE or repeal Mr. Trump’s
executive order establishing it or support legislation that the
Democratic senators Ed Markey and Ron Wyden have introduced to update
the Privacy Act to provide more meaningful fines and criminal penalties.
This should be a bipartisan issue. Because once we create a database of
ruin, none of us are safe from having our information — no matter how
innocuous — used against us.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the
editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our
articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Julia Angwin, a contributing Opinion writer and the founder of Proof
News, writes about tech policy. You can follow her on Bluesky, Twitter
or Mastodon or her personal newsletter.
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