Privacy advocates say all this data allows the government to punish political enemies by weaponizing information about an individual's personal lives (bankruptcy, criminal history, medical claims) or by suspending benefits received (home coupons, retirement checks, food aid).
“They have not demonstrated a single case in which fraud detection requires universal government access to everyone's data,” said Jamie Ruskin, Democrat of Maryland. “In fact, creating a monster uniform database of all information about all citizens is an invitation to fraud and political retaliation against people.”
That's how personal data is tracked and used in authoritarian countries, Ruskin added. Both Russia and China stockpile citizen data, track down their enemies and squash their opposition to the government's ruling party.
The White House refused to directly address how to protect and use the data it is trying to consolidate, such as whether an administrator is trying to create a single central database, citing only the focus of fraud.
“Not all, fraud and abuse have long been deeply rooted in broken systems,” White House spokesman Harrison Fields said in a statement. “To identify and fix it, you can access the system directly.”
Engineers are warning that they will try to match complex datasets and make decisions about government programs. This warns that, as Mask's allies have argued, artificial intelligence to identify waste from government spending, could cause ramp-stretched errors and real-world harm.
National security experts point out that a large collection of data about American citizens is an attractive target for enemy nations, hackers and cybercriminals. Countries, including China, Russia and Iran, have been lagging behind in recent years with large-scale violations of the US government's database, US officials say.
Private companies and data brokers who buy and sell data also know a lot about Americans. But the key difference is that only the federal government can do with that data, privacy advocates say. Google does not control immigration enforcement equipment. Targets have no power to stop Social Security payments.
“This reaches the basic point about privacy. It's not just the question of 'Does the rest of the world know this about me?'” he said. “It's the question of who knows this about me and what they can do with that information legally or practically.”
