The Tariff Saga Is About One Thing
“Trump’s desire to dominate others is the driving psychological force of his administration.”
Corporate Media Minimize Massive Hands Off! Protests FAIR
The San Francisco Chronicle and the Astroturf Network The Phoenix Project
What the Government Knows About You in Official Data Sets Trump Wants to Link Together
The New York Times [no paywall]: “The US government holds a tremendous amount of data about US citizens. Now The Trump administration is trying to access that data and link it together. These intimate details about the personal lives of people who live in the United States are held in disconnected data systems across the federal government — some at the Treasury, some at the Social Security Administration and some at the Department of Education, among other agencies.
The Trump administration is now trying to connect the dots of that disparate information. Last month, President Trump signed an executive order calling for the “consolidation” of these segregated records, raising the prospect of creating a kind of data trove about Americans that the government has never had before, and that members of the president’s own party have historically opposed.
The effort is being driven by Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, and his lieutenants with the Department of Government Efficiency, who have sought access to dozens of databases as they have swept through agencies across the federal government.
Along the way, they have elbowed past the objections of career staff, data security protocols, national security experts and legal privacy protections [they have access to at least 263 more categories of personal data collected by the IRS, Social Security, Dept. of Education, HHS, Medicare/Medicaid….]
But on Monday, an appeals court reversed a preliminary injunction barring the group’s access at the Treasury, the Department of Education and the Office of Personnel Management. And this week, the Internal Revenue Service agreed to help the Department of Homeland Security obtain closely held taxpayer data to help identify immigrants for deportation, over the objections of career employees.
In the wake of that decision, the acting I.R.S. commissioner and other top officials are preparing to resign. The categories of information shown here are drawn from 23 data systems holding personal information about the public across eight agencies that Mr. Musk’s aides are seeking to access, according to people familiar with their efforts as well as internal documents and court depositions.
In all, The New York Times identified more than 300 separate fields of data about people who live in the U.S. contained in these data systems…
