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.
“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 totalitarianism is there for an administration willing to break the law.”
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.
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.
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.
Lambert here: That’s not a bug. It’s a feature.
(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.)
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.
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