Trump Admin, DOGE Are Turning Multiple Gov’t Components Into A Giant Racist Database

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the make-America-breachable-again dept

What could possibly go wrong?

Operatives from Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are building a master database at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that could track and surveil undocumented immigrants, two sources with direct knowledge tell WIRED.

DOGE is knitting together immigration databases from across DHS and uploading data from outside agencies including the Social Security Administration (SSA), as well as voting records, sources say. This, experts tell WIRED, could create a system that could later be searched to identify and surveil immigrants.

That’s the opening of Makena Kelly and Vittoria Elliott’s report for Wired. Even before you get to the part that indicates this is just a conglomeration of bigots concocting a massive database solely for the purpose of finding foreigners to deport, there’s the fact that this will become one of the most enticing targets for state-sponsored hackers and criminals ever created. Imagine having all of this data in one place and knowing those included in the database are already highly leveraged by their increasingly tenuous living situations. Being merely scammed would be the best possible outcome. Extortion might end up being far more common.

But let’s get back to the, shall we say, more practical aspects of this mass surveillance database. This sort of thing has never been done before for obvious reasons. One of the reasons is listed above. Another reason is that certain information serves certain specific purposes. Putting it all together just makes it more difficult to perform these specific functions. Converting data silos into one giant haystack isn’t necessarily efficient. It’s just something that ignores all the practical reasons data like this is siloed because this current administration is too hateful and stupid to understand the underlying problems or care about the collateral damage.

This is a surveillance state that aspires to be a police state, all while under the nominal “leadership” of a racist billionaire and the terrible person who has now become president twice, despite clearly being unable to do the job the first time around.

While this might look like a cool new way to find brown people, rest assured it will be used to find anyone the Trump administration and its components dislike, as EFF staff attorney Victoria Noble explains in the Wired article:

“When you put all of an agency’s data into a central repository that everyone within an agency or even other agencies can access, you end up dramatically increasing the risk that this information will be accessed by people who don’t need it and are using it for improper reasons or repressive goals, to weaponize the information, use it against people they dislike, dissidents, surveil immigrants or other groups.”

Normal people see bugs. The GOP only sees a list of features. Even when the inevitable data breach occurs, the administration will shrug it off because it mostly affects people it doesn’t consider to be actual people. At best, they’re 3/5ths human and 2/5ths future El Salvadoran prison inmates.

The nastiest part of this “data lake” DOGE is recklessly creating is this: it will be used to find and deport immigrants who are doing everything the government asks them to do to stay on the path to citizenship.

DOGE wants to upload information to the data lake from myUSCIS, the online portal where immigrants can file petitions, communicate with USCIS, view their application history, and respond to requests for evidence supporting their case, two DHS sources with direct knowledge tell WIRED. In combination with IP address information from immigrants that sources tell WIRED that DOGE also wants, this data could be used to aid in geolocating undocumented immigrants, experts say.

This is from an administration that (dishonestly) claims it doesn’t have a problem with migrants who reside in this country legally. These actions say otherwise. This is the administration leveraging data and good faith efforts by immigrants to eject them before they can complete the citizenship process. This is on top of the now-routine revoking of perfectly legal visas and unilateral proclamations that the immigration/visa/temporary residency rules no longer apply.

Attempting to comply just puts immigrants on the DHS radar. A database like this fills in the missing info to allow ICE and others to eject people who are here legally or are doing everything they can to stay here as legal residents. And once this administration feels comfortable doing so, the same pool of information will be used to target immigration lawyers, pro-migrant advocates, and anyone else that has managed to cross-pollinate in the data lake. It might even go after you, Joe Taxpayer and lifetime US citizen.

“As part of their fixation on this conspiracy theory that undocumented people are voting, they’re also pulling in tens of thousands, millions of US citizens who did nothing more than vote or file for Social Security benefits,” Cody Venzke, a senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union focused on privacy and surveillance, tells WIRED.

It’s stupid and dangerous, which is unsurprising. That’s Trump’s brand. As long as it gives the government enough brown people to go after, Trump and his enablers will shrug off the collateral damage suffered by actual US citizens, much in the way they’ve shrugged off the gutting of social services and setting fire to people’s retirement accounts. In exchange, we’re getting a Gestapo of our own and the opportunity to be on the wrong side of history for the foreseeable future.

Filed Under: dhs, doge, donald trump, immigration, irs, ssa, surveillance state, ucsis