Nixon Called

Over at Tech Policy Press, I wrote about the government commission that lead to the creation of the 1974 Privacy Act, and how an expanding AI state puts the values of privacy from government surveillance at risk.

The Privacy Act was created as a response to the growing presence of computers in government agencies, which lead to an expansion of the types of data that could be collected and stored about Americans. Fearing the growing capacity to generate computerized intelligence dossiers on American citizens – and fearing the risks of data-sharing between agencies who had no need to access certain activities – the privacy act would go on to establish a firewall between which agencies could access personal data, under what circumstances, and with what oversight.

As DOGE rolls into the Department of Veteran's Affairs, and the Social Security Agency, and others, we are seeing an expanded risk of leakage – especially when DOGE operatives are said to be living together in a GSA office. In the meantime, Elon Musk and others in the operation have indicated a desire to build an AI chatbot on government data. If that is understood as personal data, then we are seeing a violation of the Privacy Act to build a unified government database of private and sensitive information about American citizens – and quite possibly seeing it linked to Grok, Elon Musk's Large Language Model, which was trained on X posts.

The links are an unprecedented selloff of government data in ways that could be mobilized to stifle free speech and the rights to privacy that were designed to protect democracy.