(C) BoingBoing
This story was originally published by BoingBoing and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .



Government quietly builds massive database tracking all US citizens [1]

['Séamus Bellamy']

Date: 2025-07-01

Surprising no one, the Department of Governmental Efficiency and the Department of Homeland Security are in cahoots. What is surprising almost everyone is that they've quietly built a searchable database full of both naturalized and U.S.-born citizens. The database, which is being overseen by DHS's U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, is purportedly designed to help federal and state government officials look up folks on their voter lists during elections. This is, no doubt, a response to former President Trump's insistence that the 2020 election was stolen from him (despite this being proven false repeatedly).

From The Guardian:

The database is the result of an expansion of the systematic alien verification for entitlements (Save) program, made up of smaller databases within the homeland security department, and an integration with information from the Social Security Administration. The centralized repository is searchable and can be accessed by state and local election officials to look up the names of anyone trying to vote to determine if they are citizens, according to NPR. Until now, election officials had to ask potential voters for documents verifying their citizenship or rely on a hard-to-navigate patchwork of databases. In response to a request for comment, the DHS said: "Integration with the Social Security Administration (SSA) significantly improves the service offered by Save."

That last paragraph is the scary bit. Traditionally, government databases have been siloed – each agency keeping its data private from the others. The Social Security Administration's servers aren't largely accessible by your state's DMV. The Department of Agriculture has data it doesn't share with the IRS. The CIA and FBI are famously reluctant to share intelligence with each other.

This fragmentation of data, while inefficient, has actually served as an accidental privacy protection for Americans. By keeping government databases separate, there's been a natural limit on how comprehensively any single agency can monitor citizens.

But here's the real kicker: In May, The New York Times revealed that Palantir was working to consolidate all this data on U.S. citizens into one place. And there's your DOGE/DHS database. Sleep well tonight.

Think about it: The government has now assembled a single resource for tracking citizens' movements and behaviors. And who's behind it? A private company, Palantir, that's far from transparent and reportedly works with the Israeli government on targeted operations. During a 2024 shareholder's meeting, Palantir CEO Alexander Karp made the chilling statement that the company has dedicated itself to "…the service of the West and the United States of America…especially in places we can't talk about."

What's Palantir doing with the data of American citizens? Most people would probably like to know. What will the Department of Homeland Security do with this massive database? We're about to find out.

[END]
---
[1] Url: https://boingboing.net/2025/07/01/government-quietly-builds-massive-database-tracking-all-us-citizens.html

Published and (C) by BoingBoing
Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0.

via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/boingboing/

You are viewing proxied material from magical.fish. The copyright of proxied material belongs to its original authors. Any comments or complaints in relation to proxied material should be directed to the original authors of the content concerned. Please see the disclaimer for more details.