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.