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Privacy advocates say that all this data could enable the government to punish its political opponents by weaponizing information about an individual’s personal life (bankruptcies, criminal histories, medical claims) or halting the benefits they receive (housing vouchers, retirement checks, food assistance).
“They have not demonstrated a single case in which fraud detection has required some universal governmental access to everybody’s data,” said Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland. “In fact, the creation of a monster uniform database of all information on all citizens will be an invitation to fraud and political retaliation against the people.”
That is how personal data is tracked and used in authoritarian states, Mr. Raskin added. Both Russia and China stockpile data on their citizens to track opponents and squash dissent of the ruling party in government.
The White House declined to directly address how it would safeguard and use the data it is seeking to consolidate, including whether the administration is trying to create one central database, citing only its focus on fraud.
“Waste, fraud and abuse have been deeply entrenched in our broken system for far too long,” the White House spokesman Harrison Fields said in a statement. “It takes direct access to the system to identify and fix it.”
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Technologists warn that trying to match complex data sets to make decisions about government programs — including by using artificial intelligence to identify waste in government spending, as Musk allies have discussed — could produce rampant errors and real-world harm.
And national security experts note that a large collection of data about American citizens would be an enticing target for enemy nation states, hackers and cybercriminals. Countries including China, Russia and Iran have been behind major breaches of U.S. government databases in recent years, U.S. officials have said.
Private companies and data brokers that buy and sell data know plenty about Americans, too. But a crucial difference lies in what the federal government alone can do with that data, privacy advocates say. Google doesn’t control the apparatus of immigration enforcement. Target doesn’t have the power to halt Social Security payments.
“This gets to a fundamental point about privacy: It is not just the question of, ‘Does anyone else in the world know this about me?’” said John Davisson, the director of litigation at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which has sued the administration to block DOGE’s access to financial data at the Treasury and federal work force records at the Office of Personnel Management. “It is a question of who knows this about me, and what can they lawfully — or as a practical matter — do with that information?”