Journalist Urges Security and Privacy Sectors to Unite in Stopping DOGE
Government access to individuals’ sensitive data and the potential to use it for the wrong purposes poses serious privacy risks, but it's also a unique opportunity for groups with varying political agendas to collaborate on stopping it, said investigative journalist Julia Angwin during a keynote speech Friday. Angwin, founder of technology publication The Markup, is a contributing opinion writer to The New York Times.
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What the “so-called Department of Government Efficiency” is doing is “going into every federal agency, scooping up the data and trying to build a master database across ... the federal government.” This “is actually exactly what Congress wanted to ensure never happened" when it created the federal Privacy Act of 1974, Angwin told the audience at a surveillance and democracy event that the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University hosted at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.
President Lyndon Johnson's “administration had actually proposed the exact same thing,” Angwin said. “They said, ‘Why don't we, for efficiency’s sake, put everything in one place?’ And everybody went crazy and said, ‘That so violates our privacy.’”
When people share data, “like [when] you file your taxes, you give a lot of sensitive information, but you have an expectation that it's being used for one specific purpose, which is to calculate whether you have the right tax amount or not,” she said. “The nature of that transaction is not that … ICE is going to comb through [it] and try to figure out where I live in order to detain me,” or that the government will “see my donations and make some assumptions about my political beliefs.”
Angwin said the Privacy Act lacks strong enforcement, like injunctive relief or fines, to make sure it's followed. Its weakness has prompted the activities of DOGE and Elon Musk. As such, she asked: “If you have all the information that the government has, are you the government?”
“We have seen presidents who have sought to use the power of the government to quash dissent or to harass their opponents, but generally, they did it in secret,” she said. “This is an administration that has declared that that's their agenda and is being really brazen about the fact that they're collecting this data in order to use it for political purposes.”
“That's the difference between being in a democracy" or an authoritarian regime.
However, today is an opportunity for the privacy and national security communities, who are usually not in agreement with each other, to finally be on the same side, Angwin argued. “This is the moment, because actually, all of this data being in" limbo "is a huge national security vulnerability.”