Donald Trump has not made privacy rights — or the legal need to abridge them — a point in his frequent television drop-by moments. It was not mentioned in his address to Congress. But the daily encroachments by his administration make clear that Americans’ long-respected value for privacy from government eyes is under attack.
Whether through granting Elon Musk and his young computer coders access to health and tax information or through artificial information sweeps of social media and police records, hardly a day passes now without some mention of government actions that are based on sifting through personal data.
It is exactly the kind of intrusiveness that you would think that Trump’s MAGA movement, built on hatred for the “deep state.” would oppose from the get-go.
Instead, the Trump administration is depending exactly on rifling through those personal details to justify widespread worker layoffs, unearthing migrants for deportation, encouraging federal officials to rat on colleagues still pushing g for diversity and equity, or this week, identifying and arresting Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian-born protester legally in New York whose politics Trump dislikes.
The irony is that we have trouble finding out what exactly these intrusions are intended to discover.
Hasty and Intrusive
What seems odd is that most of those efforts could be organized, even gaining legal approval through approaching them as policies that get debated and passed by Congress or through some other public regulations process.
The Trump need for speed in its campaign of fear and awe apparently requires a different, scarier, more personal touch to assure that each of us can feel that any act perceived as disloyalty to the king can have bad results for all of us.
In the end, of course, what is repeatedly at issue is what Team Trump does with the information it gets its hands on — true or not— that is the subject for Constitutional controversy rather than the processes involved.
But the official, repeat breaching of personal records is problematic by itself. We share personal information with our government carefully and hesitantly, believing that the trust built over decades to hold these records securely and safely. In a time of rising identity fraud and inappropriate sharing of our electronic data by companies who buy and sell our data as marketing tools, we still have believed that tax information or Medicaid eligibility data, as examples, will be held close.
Learning just how cavalierly the Musk team and new Trump managers in the FBI and Justice are treating private data for political ends identified by Trump is infuriating.
There is no specific Constitutional clause guaranteeing privacy but there are layers of regulations, procedures, court decisions and traditions in place throughout the various federal agencies that are supposed to protect against such sharing.
Yet in the last weeks, the IRS, the Social Security Administration, and now the various Health and Human Services agencies are caving to Musk’s demands for access to individual records in search of employment and payout information. Musk insists he needs the access to find waste and fraud, though the high number of errors his people make have only built distrust among taxpayers he professes to serve. Apart from all else, there is distrust that people who don’t know what they are doing will muck up the systems.
Lacking Respect for Privacy
The Health and Human Services Department decided last week to allow access to a child support payments database with vast amounts of personal information about families, names, addresses, income and more. Musk approached HHS after courts intervened to delay or halt him at other agencies. For Kennedy, privacy apparently played no part in the access decision.
Part of the distrust flows from Musk’s failure to say how he will use -/ or not use — personal data.
The State Department apparently has ordered AI reviews of social postings to identify foreign student “pro-Palestinian” protestors, like Khalil, whom Trump now thinks should be deported. It turns out that Khalil holds legal green card status, but Trump and Secretary of State Mario Rubio insist the pro-Hamas statements are antisemitic and violate a standard of crossing U.S. interests. A federal judge has halted his immediate deportation for further hearings on the nature of charges and his arrest. Though this first decision will not directly address issues either of free speech or privacy, it will decide whether Trump can rewrite the meaning of First Amendment rights to protest and how we identify government critics, certainly a speech, assembly and privacy issue.
Trump is making clear that the government intends to pursue “illegal” protestors without identifying what he is talking about. Whatever else, it is an escalation of using AI to funded political opponents — almost exactly along the lines of why critics were concerned about efforts of the Chinese government to track TikTok users.
Throughout, Trump and team are making clear that when they are doing the surveillance and investigation of personal information, that is just fine. When Justice came after Trump for criminal or civil litigation, that was “weaponized” justice. Interestingly, Trump/Musk consistently show little interest in finding out, say, job titles or roles of employees they are ordered dismissed, inanely finding that they must invite workers back to do essential jobs.
Instead, they rely on incomplete personal information to make unwarranted conclusions as with supposed 150-year- old Social Security recipients who are not being paid by taxpayers — and are being coded in that database for ineligibility. It is a case that raises questions about whether Musk’s cadre even recognize what they are looking at as they paw through data.
The question is why an American value for privacy would so easily be tossed for political ends.
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