American Panopticon

That means the government has at least some ability to map or re-create the past everyday movements of some American citizens. But what can an American authoritarian, or his private-sector accomplices, do with all the government’s data, both alone and combined with data from the private sector? Today, they argued, Trump is targeting law firms, but DOGE data could allow him to target individual Americans at scale. Over and over, the federal experts we spoke with insisted that the very idea of connecting federal data is anathema. These examples are all speculative and hypothetical, but they help demonstrate why Americans should care deeply about how the government intends to manage their private data.