Republican Budget Bill Signals New Era in Federal Surveillance
"The looming rapid expansion of federal surveillance may signal a step change on a trajectory set in motion after September 11, 2001, with broad implications for the rights and privacy of all Americans."
Link: Dean Jackson and Justin Hendrix at TechPolicy.Press.
TechPolicy.Press looks at Trump's big bill from a technology-enabled civil rights perspective. This much has become very clear:
"The current form of the Republican budget bill commits as much as $175 billion to enforce President Trump’s anti-immigration agenda. While the final number will depend on reconciliation between the chambers of Congress, the next budget will almost certainly include billions of dollars for administration priorities, such as new technological capabilities for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), including Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) and ICE."
What's important to understand is what this bill enables in terms of aggregation between data stores owned by individual states and departments. Trump's executive order to “ensure the Federal Government has unfettered access to comprehensive data from all State programs that receive Federal funding, including, as appropriate, data generated by those programs but maintained in third-party databases” is hugely important - not only have local government databases like this never been aggregated before, but that mention of third-party databases may require unfettered access to private services.
Data brokers already provide warrantless access to the information we're sharing with online services for a low price. It'll all be connected and - you can put money on this - used to train AI models that will supposedly provide information about us to law enforcement, ICE, and other agencies, but will also hallucinate and be subject to systemic biases.
It's fair to assume that all data that is collected anywhere will be eventually used by the worst possible actor. The best way to avoid this kind of surveillance is to never collect this kind of data in the first place. Failing those needed restrictions, we need stronger controls on how data is stored, used, and redacted.
That ship has now completely sailed. It's all out there, being used by the worst possible actor to enact policies that have the potential to lead to the worst possible things. Just as the civil liberties violations of the PATRIOT Act never really went away, the cat is out of the bag forever. Even when this administration is behind us, we can never really go back. For that, we can blame the failure of imagination of every system designer, every digital policy leader, every decision-maker who led us here.
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