SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the if-you're-not-doing-anything-wrong-you-have-nothing-to-fear dept.
The Real ID Act was passed in 2005 on the grounds that it was necessary for access control of sensitive facilities like nuclear power plants and the security of airline flights. The law imposed standards for state- and territory-issued ID cards in the United States, but was widely criticized as an attempt to create a national ID card and would be harmful to privacy. These concerns are explained well in a 2007 article from the New York Civil Liberties Union:
Real ID threatens privacy in two ways. First, it consolidates Americans' personal information into a network of interlinking databases accessible to the federal government and bureaucrats throughout the 50 states and U.S. territories. This national mega-database would invite government snooping and be a goldmine for identity thieves. Second, it mandates that all driver's licenses and ID cards have an unencrypted "machine-readable zone" that would contain personal information on Americans that could be easily "skimmed" by anybody with a barcode reader.
These concerns are based on what happens when criminals access the data, but also how consolidating data from many government agencies into a central database makes it easier for bad actors within the government to target Americans and violate their civil liberties. These concerns led to a 20 year delay in enforcing Real ID standards nationally, and as a USA Today article from 2025 warns, once Americans' data is stored on a central repository for one purpose, mission creep is likely. If the centralized database is used to make student loan applications and income tax processing more efficient, what's to stop law enforcement from accessing it to identify potential criminals? Over the past two decades, criticism of the Real ID Act has come from across the political spectrum, with many people and organizations on both the left and right decrying it as a serious threat to privacy and civil liberties.
Much of these concerns have never been realized about the Real ID Act, but they are renewed with Executive Order #14143, signed by Donald Trump on March 20, 2025. This directs for the sharing of government data between agencies except when it is classified for national security purposes. The executive order does not include any provisions to protect the privacy of individuals.
Although Trump has not commented on how this data sharing will be achieved, the Trump Administration has hired a company called Palantir to create a central registry of data, which would include a national citizen database. Recent reporting describes a database with wide-ranging information about every American that is generally private:
Foundry's capabilities in data organization and analysis could potentially enable the merging of information from various agencies, thereby creating detailed profiles of American citizens. The Trump administration has attempted to access extensive citizen data from government databases, including bank details, student debt, medical claims, and disability status.
Palantir does not gather data on their own, but they do provide tools to analyze large repositories of data, make inferences about the data, and provide easy-to-use reports. There are serious concerns about the lack of transparency about what data is being integrated into this repository, how it will be used, the potential for tracking people in various segments of the population such as immigrants, and the ability to use this data to target and harass political opponents. Concerns about how Trump's national citizen database will be used echo fears raised from across the political spectrum about the Real ID Act, except that they are apparently now quite close to becoming reality.
Additional reading:
- Trump appears to be building an unprecedented spy machine that could track Americans (MSNBC)
- What is Palantir? The secretive tech company behind Trump's data collection efforts (Mashable)
- Former Palantir workers condemn company's work with Trump administration (NPR)
- Palantir filed to go public. The firm's unethical technology should horrify us (The Guardian)
- The Gleeful Profiteers of Trump's Police State (Mother Jones)
- Donald Trump's Reported Database Move Sparks Alarm: 'Dystopian' (Newsweek)
(Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Thursday June 05 2025, @10:03PM (1 child)
While I agree, I also believe it's important to keep in mind that there's a sizeable minority of the US population who believes that everyone who came before Trump + Biden were just as much of a threat to their quality of life.
It's not rational, it's not defensible, it's what they believe, and they're pretty much immune to logic.
Vance recently made a statement that "everyone who ran this country before us were MORONS!" and then he went on to rant about how brittle our supply chains are and how their predecessors did nothing but make the situation worse. And, of course, now that they have gone and wrecked major portions of the economy by disrupting those supply chains (lessons learned from the COVID response, no doubt) they're demonstrating, to their followers, just how terrible all of those guys were and how it's up to them to fix the situation by making a bunch more (painful) changes. The scary part is that I can easily imagine how the MAGA base is going to lap this up like cream and double down on "their team" come next election, no matter how screwed up the economy becomes right before their eyes - they'll feel that all this is necessary to "fix what was broken..." nevermind that it wasn't broken before their guys got control, nevermind that their guys aren't going to be making anything more stable or productive for them...
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Friday June 06 2025, @11:06AM
Reactions to the above comment have been, predictably, mixed. For the detractors, let me state the: obvious?
Globalization / international interdependence is a key structural economic difference between pre and post WWII socio-economic structures.
While the world has been less than perfect for my post-Vietnam War lifetime, I prefer it tremendously to the lives of my grandparents: teenagers during the great depression, draftees into WWII.
There was nothing great about all-out war among the top-tier military powers of the 1910s and 1940s - other than the fact that they were, at the time, incapable of total annihilation of civilization as we know it.
Globalization, and so-called "brittle" supply chains - which have so far only been "broken" during Trump administrations - are a major factor in maintaining global military restraint.
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]