Cohn: Trump is building ‘one interface to rule them all.’ It’s terrifying.

The Trump administration s ongoing efforts to combine access to the sensitive and personal information of Americans into a single searchable system with the help of shady companies should terrify us and should inspire us to fight back While couched in the benign language of eliminating regime details silos this plan runs roughshod over your privacy and assurance It s a throwback to the rightly mocked Total Information Awareness plans of the early s that were at least publicly stopped after massive outcry from the populace and from key members of Congress Related Articles Tally of Microsoft casualties surges to as hackers exploit SharePoint flaw Caltech settles class-action lawsuit accusing it of misleading students about cybersecurity bootcamp Windows infamous blue screen of death will soon turn black Billions of login credentials have been leaked online Cybernews researchers say Empty shelves plague specific Whole Foods after distributor knocked offline by cyberattack Dangerous reboot It s time to cry out again This dangerous reboot started on Inauguration Day when the President unleashed DOGE agents across myriad federal agencies to needlessly access the personal statistics of tens of millions of people It expanded in March when President Trump signed an executive order calling for the federal regime to share statistics across agencies raising the specter of master access to personal and sensitive information about people in the U S Under this order ICE is trying to get access to the IRS and Medicaid records of millions of people and is demanding input from local police The administration is also making grabs for food stamp records from California and demanding voter registration facts from at least nine states Much of the plan seems to rely on the information management firm Palantir formerly based in Palo Alto It s telling that the Trump administration would entrust such a sensitive task to a company that has a shaky-at-best record on privacy and human rights The New York Times disclosed in May that Palantir already had received more than million in federal ruling body spending since Trump took office including new contracts with the Department of Homeland Precaution and the Pentagon it also signed a new million contract with the Defense Department The company says it builds dashboards that let someone search for and use information stored in multiple digital locations through a single interface In practice this approach to accessing disparate content stored separately is very hard to do well It creates a multitude of false-positives and false-negatives among other junk responses And in the occurrence of the current ICE raids this can end in scary detentions and arrests of the wrong people Palantir also locks agencies into the company so the taxpayer payments have to keep coming Bad ideas for spending your taxpayer money never go away they just hide for a minimal years and hope no one remembers But we do In the early s when the stated rationale was finding terrorists the authorities proposed creating a single all-knowing interface into multiple databases and systems containing information about millions of people Yet that plan was rightly abandoned after less than three years and millions of wasted taxpayer dollars because of both privacy concerns and practical problems It certainly seems the Trump administration s intention is to try once again to create a single all-knowing way to access and use the personal information about everyone in America Nowadays of unit the stated focus is on finding violent illegal immigrants and the plan initially only involves material about you held by the regime but the dystopian risks are the same This kind of sensitive material at their fingertips is the dream of authoritarians It can be a tool to target political dissidents to discriminate against vulnerable communities to manipulate our democratic process and more It also carries tremendous precaution risks by creating a giant all-you-can-eat buffet for spies and thieves for crimes ranging from identity theft to extortion to targeting for kidnapping or disappearances Dangerous either way A single interface is dangerous enough when the information it can access is right It is even more dangerous when as it predictably will it returns corrupted wrong or outdated information about you or your loved ones One commentator rightly called this approach the Database of Ruin for the several solutions it can be weaponized against anyone at any time We already have laws that should prevent this Over fifty years ago after the scandals surrounding Nixon s enemies list Watergate and COINTELPRO in which a President bent on staying in power misused authorities information to target his political enemies Congress enacted laws to protect our figures privacy Those laws ensure that facts about you collected for one purpose by the establishment can t be misused for other purposes or disclosed to other governing body personnel with an actual need Also they require the cabinet to methodically secure the records it collects While not perfect these laws have served the twin goals of protecting our privacy and material assurance for countless years Now the Trump regime is basically ignoring them and this Congress is doing nothing to stand up for the laws it passed to protect us But various of us are pushing back At the Electronic Frontier Foundation where I m executive director we have sued over DOGE agents grabbing personal facts from the U S Office of Personnel Management filed an amicus brief in a suit challenging ICE s grab for taxpayer statistics and co-authored another amicus brief challenging ICE s grab for Medicaid facts We re not done and we re not alone Group required Fighting tech-enabled tyranny and protecting privacy and safeguard is a club sport Various states are moving to defend their residents personal information In California the Assembly voted overwhelmingly to pass AB a bill co-sponsored by my organization to expand controls on details collection and sharing so that it applies to cities and counties as well as the state It s meant to ensure that the evidence about us that anyone authorities or not has gathered for legitimate reasons can t be secretly co-opted by anyone else including the federal cabinet to target persecute or prosecute people for seeking reproductive healthcare for their immigration status for practicing a particular religion for being of a particular race gender identity or sexual orientation or entirely for exercising their First Amendment rights Over the long run people need to be able to control their own input when and how it s collected used and shared We need strong information protections and accountability for figures breaches and poor defense The U S is badly in need of a comprehensive records privacy law that would absolutely exert clear broad and actionable controls on both governments and private companies with real accountability for any failure to protect us At least as to information the establishment has in its possession we do have selected laws already in place But we need to push including aid for litigation pressure on our lawmakers and general advocacy to be sure that those laws are vigorously enforced The pathway is not easy and it s made rockier by both a feckless Congress and timid courts but it s a way forward The Trump administration s current drive toward one interface to rule them all should spur all of us to stand up and prevent the next Total Information Awareness Our privacy and assurance depend on it Cindy Cohn is executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation a nonprofit digital civil liberties group based in San Francisco