Donald Wants To Spy On Every American

This is without a doubt a “take to the streets” moment

by Bob Cesca

WASHINGTON, DC – This week, we learned from reporting in the New York Times that the Trump White House is compiling a centralized database with hundreds of personal data points about American citizens, from Social Security numbers to student loan information and more. And while there are certain voices in the MAGA entertainment complex who’ve condemned the project, it’s largely flown under the radar. Most people just don’t seem to care.

I guess we’ve given up on privacy. In a time when our private lives are voluntarily chronicled on one or more social media platforms, personal privacy doesn’t carry the same weight as it once did, say, 12 years ago this month when Edward Snowden delivered his first tranche of National Security Agency Powerpoint slides to Glenn Greenwald.

As I covered extensively on the old website version of The Daily Banter back in 2013, the outrage surrounding Snowden’s revelations about NSA was thick and unrelenting, largely due to the nearly blanket coverage in the mainstream news media. It was the biggest story of the year, even though many of the revelations had already been covered in books and earlier reporting.

But now, the NSA story seems like a quaint memory of an antiquated time as Big Tech is engaged in far greater intrusions into our lives than the intelligence community was ever legally able to accomplish. Specifically, NSA had to convince a three judge panel known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) before it could touch anyone’s metadata. Big Tech, on the other hand, has murky, unreadable terms of service and zero oversight to the point where we all just willingly allow ourselves to be surveilled.

How often have you been talking with your partner or spouse, only to log on to a social media app to see ads about the very thing you were just talking about? It’s either happened to you personally, or you’ve probably heard about it from someone else. Obviously, your phone is listening to you and feeding keywords into an algorithm. Presumably, anyone with an Amazon Echo device is even more susceptible. Corporations are eavesdropping on our lives, collecting our deeply personal conversations and using that data to manipulate us. And it’s all just part of life in the 21st Century. Privacy is dead.

So, it makes sense that most Americans haven’t even heard about Donald’s attempt to obliterate the government’s information silos in order to produce a convenient means of targeting, intimidating, and perhaps prosecuting anyone he chooses.

In order to do it, Homeland Security and other agencies have partnered with Peter Thiel’s Palantir firm. Incidentally, the company is named after a palantir, a “seeing stone” from Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings that was used by the dark lord Sauron and the white wizard Saruman to spy on other inhabitants of Middle-earth. Palatir’s software is called Foundry and it’s the tool of choice for the Trump surveillance plot. The Times:

Widely adopting Foundry, which organizes and analyzes data, paves the way for Mr. Trump to easily merge information from different agencies, the government officials said. [...] The Trump administration has already sought access to hundreds of data points on citizens and others through government databases, including their bank account numbers, the amount of their student debt, their medical claims and any disability status.

The Trump administration already used Palantir to compile all of your IRS data into a central database.

At the I.R.S., Palantir engineers joined in April to use Foundry to organize data gathered on American taxpayers, two government officials said. Their work began as a way to create a single, searchable database for the I.R.S., but has since expanded, they said. Palantir is in talks for a permanent contract with the I.R.S., they said.

It’s important to note that the fascist Trump government isn’t planning on using the system to deliver targeted ads to your social media feed. Remember who’s in charge and his pledge to seek retribution against his perceived enemies. He’s actively ignoring the courts, deporting American citizens including children with cancer, while rescinding due process and habeas and renditioning people to foreign torture prisons. He has zero regard for the Constitution or basic human rights. And now he’s compiling the means to conveniently punish anyone who criticizes or didn’t vote for him.

It’s such a trespass against personal liberty and privacy that even MAGA loyalists are outraged. Newsweek reported:

"People are so quick to suggest that I flipped on Trump...No, no, no...I didn't flip on Trump. TRUMP FLIPPED ON US. I'm just not willing to continue living in a LIE, and I will tell you the unfortunate TRUTH about it," The Patriot Voice wrote on X to his 158,000 followers.

The Hodgetwins, popular conservatives and Trump supporters, have more than 3.3 million followers on X. In response to The New York Times report, they wrote on May 30, "Hope this ain't true y'all."

Nick Fuentes, a far-right Trump supporter described as an "America First" white nationalist, called the association between the Trump administration and Palantir "the ultimate betrayal of his own people."

According to the Times, Palantir employees are also protesting the use of Foundry.

The company risks becoming the face of Mr. Trump’s political agenda, four employees said, and could be vulnerable if data on Americans is breached or hacked. Several tried to distance the company from the efforts, saying any decisions about a merged database of personal information rest with Mr. Trump and not the firm.

Does anyone seriously believe the Trump government is competent enough to protect the system from being breached? If the database were hacked, as Palantir workers warned, the consequences would be nightmarish, far worse than having to change your passwords or order a new credit card. The dark web would have easy access to your Social Security number, your tax returns, your bank accounts, and more. Worse, due to mass firings of federal workers, it’d be nearly impossible for millions of us to conduct damage control.

Americans of all factions need to draw the line here. It’s without a doubt a “take to the streets” moment. But the first step is to get the word out about what’s happening. Knowing that MAGA loyalists are as outraged as anyone could create a mass movement beyond the anti-Trump coalition – a movement that has the potential to bring down Donald’s presidency.

There’s no choice here. This is far beyond Alexa or Siri listening for keywords, this is unconstrained fascism and it needs to end.

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