Ok, let’s have a show of hands: How many of you voted to hand ALL of your most personal data to Trump’s intrusive government?

By “all,” I mean he is setting up one Silicon Valley “data aggregator” to collect, store, and control your Social Security number, bank codes, health records, tax filings, voting history, biometrics… and, well, the whole statistical YOU. This aggregator will vacuum up all these unconnected data points and reconstruct them into a full computerized profile of your life, behavior, and beliefs.

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This mass surveillance infrastructure isn’t some 1984ish fiction, but a fast-moving reality spun from Trump’s Project 2025. In an executive order quietly issued in March, he decreed that every federal agency must dump our personal data into a new centralized computer system, effectively creating government dossiers on each of us. Like every tyrant everywhere, Trump says his order is benign, merely “streamlining” data searches to increase government “efficiency.”

But this is no paper-shuffling decree, for Project 2025 operatives have already moved into the IRS, ICE, Social Security, the Pentagon, etc. – putting the technology in place to aggregate the master file.

Trump has – with no public input – already appointed a right-wing, high-tech data espionage outfit to be America’s surveillance overlord. Named Palantir, it was created and financed by Peter Thiel, a Silicon Valley Republican billionaire, anti-democracy crusader, and self-absorbed plutocrat. Palantir bluntly declares that its role in amassing and rummaging through our private information is “the finding of hidden things.”

You think you have “nothing to hide,” right? But tyrants can “find something” on everyone. To help stop Trump’s thugs from weaponizing ourselves against ourselves, go to Electronic Frontier Foundation: eff.org

Extra, extra: For more on just how lousy (and dangerous) of a human Peter Thiel is, check out the 4-part series that the podcast Behind the Bastards produced on him in late 2024.

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