An executive order issued by President Trump in March signaled the administration’s intent to bypass existing federal privacy safeguards. The order forced states to hand over their own sensitive datasets and transfer protected statistical information to Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE, giving this unaccountable Trump-created government entity unrestricted access to nearly every American’s sensitive personal information.
The executive order was presented as an initiative to rein in “waste, fraud, and abuse” by eliminating information silos. But for decades, federal government databases have been deliberately separated and placed into individual silos in order to make it more difficult for bad actors to gain unfettered access to steal or abuse sensitive personal information – and thereby limit potential damage.
Labor unions and the advocacy group Democracy Forward filed a lawsuit to block DOGE from accessing millions of Americans’ confidential Social Security information, but in June the extremist right-wing Supreme Court majority temporarily overturned actions by two lower courts – granting DOGE access to the data. Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Rebecca Gordon, a semi-retired professor of philosophy at the University of San Francisco, author and longtime political and faculty union activist. Here she discusses the intention behind Trump’s new surveillance state, examined in her recent article titled, “How Will Your Data be Deployed in an Age of Dark Enlightenment?”
REBECCA GORDON: This is an executive order that came out in March and it was actually called the “Stopping Waste Fraud and Abuse by Eliminating Information Silos” Executive Order. What eliminating “Information Silos” really means is combining information from the many sensitive databases that the federal government maintains.
And two of the most important of these, of course, are all of the information that the IRS has about our financial situations, including everything from our bank accounts to our sources of income, to where we’ve lived for the last 30 years with information from the Social Security Administration, which also includes information from Medicare. And so, in that sense health information as well.
This is something that was one of the main purposes of DOGE to a certain extent, although there was a lot of theater and a lot of terrible destruction of all of the instruments of government by the attacks on the federal workforce and so forth and entire agencies.
But another key goal that was not really trumpeted, so to speak, so loudly, was this one of really increasing the capacity for surveillance on people in this country at a grossly detailed level. And to do that, they are hiring a company named Palantir. And Palantir is a security company that has also worked for the Israel Defense Force and the Israeli government and has its fingers pretty much everywhere, including in the Pentagon. They’ve just received a huge contract at the Pentagon for three-quarters of a billion dollars. But their goal is to do the technical work of combining these databases into one big, beautiful database, and they already have access to all of the data. It’s too late to stop this. It’s already happening.
SCOTT HARRIS: Tell us about the role of Elon Musk/DOGE as well as Peter Thiel, the corporate head of Palantir, who’s also an investor, as you say in the article of Clearview, which deals in facial recognition technology.
REBECCA GORDON: So Elon Musk, who brought in the Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE, is one of a set of Silicon Valley-based technology mavens, who are all part of — I don’t want to go so far as to say a “cabal” — but they are a group of people who are adherents of a certain philosophical viewpoint. And this becomes important because they have enough money to actually attempt to impose their particular philosophy on the entire country. And this is the idea that is sometimes called “Neoreactionary movement” or the Dark Enlightenment.
And there are different flavors of this, but the essential idea is that democracy has run its course. Democracy is a failed experiment. All of the ideas of the European 17th and 18th Century Enlightenment, things like democratic rule that governments derive their power from the just consent of the government, which is in our Declaration of Independence; the idea of human equality— all of that was wrong, is a failed experiment. And what we really need are small monarchical, essentially corporate-run nation-lets that are part of a whole network of nations, all run by autocratic, monarchical, if not necessarily dynastic, rulers.
SCOTT HARRIS: Rebecca, we’re almost out of time. A last point I’d like you to make is that you conclude your article by asking the question, how should we respond to this new high-tech surveillance state, which really violates our privacy and has hold of all of our sensitive information?
REBECCA GORDON: What I think and what I’ve always thought is that the only answer to knowing that you are under surveillance is to live as openly and freely as you possibly can. And yes, that means you put yourself at risk. But if you don’t live openly, if you don’t take risk, then they’ve already won. They’ve already succeeded in doing what the purpose of this is, which is to constrain resistance. The only answer to mass surveillance is mass defiance.
Listen to Scott Harris’ in-depth interview with Rebecca Gordon (21:15) and see more articles and opinion pieces in the related links section of this page. For periodic updates on the Trump authoritarian playbook, subscribe here to our Between The Lines Radio Newsmagazine Substack newsletter to get updates to our “Hey AmeriKKKa, It’s Not Normal” compilation.
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