Federal Government’s Mass Data Collection Poses Wide Potential for Misuse, Experts Warn
While immigrants seem to be the current target of mass-data collection, the federal government's collection of massive amounts of personal information has implications for other populations, including those who speak out against Washington, panelists said during a webinar Wednesday hosted by the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) and the Leadership Conference’s Center for Civil Rights & Technology.
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Historically, people shared personal information with federal agencies to access a benefit or renew a document, and the data was used for that purpose only, said Lia Nitake, senior director of technology, telecommunications and media policy at Asian Americans Advancing Justice. The public trusted the government would not misuse data and felt comfortable sharing personal information.
“Right now, what we're seeing is that DOGE is dismantling that structure,” she said. “They're linking records that ... were never meant to be combined, and it's being done under this umbrella of fraud, waste and abuse, but in practice, what we're seeing is a wide range of deeply personal information that's being intentionally linked together for immigration-enforcement purposes.”
Laura MacCleery, senior policy director at UnidosUS, agreed. “This is a betrayal of how the data was collected in the first place,” she said.
Kristin Woelfel, policy counsel on CDT’s Equity in Civic Technology team, said that the previous Trump administration explicitly said it wanted to use data for immigration enforcement. “There was an executive order [during Trump's first term] to try to mandate states to share this information specifically for immigration purposes,” she said. “Given that, I think we're right to be wary about whether rooting out fraud is the true goal and the only goal for that information.”
Nitake said the biggest concerns are that “people never agreed for their data to be used in this way,” so it's happening without consent, and the uncertainty around exactly what information DOGE accessed. “DOGE is moving toward a kind of centralized master database, and this is unprecedented,” she said. “The potential" for using a combined database "goes way up when this much personal data is concentrated in one place and easier to access, and it can lead to things like surveillance, profiling and for immigrants, wrongful deportation.”
Alejandra Montoya-Boyer, senior director of the Center for Civil Rights & Technology at the Leadership Conference on Civil & Human Rights, agreed. “One of the biggest unanswered questions that we have right now is the way in which artificial intelligence and algorithmic decision-making tools are being utilized to process, analyze, and even learn from this data,” she said. “Not only are we seeing a massive increase in data access, but there are other technological pieces that are being added to this mix.”
With large volumes of data collection and combination, mass surveillance becomes a huge concern, Nitake said, especially when it's sensitive data, like biometric information, geolocation data or even social media information that is collected.
“If you have the capability to put all of this data together in one place, you can imagine the scale of surveillance that it enables,” she said. “Potentially a single database could be able to link … who you are biologically, to your movements, to your online presence, to the content and the views that you've shared online, and to your interactions with the government.”
MacCleery is concerned about the courts' mixed results. “I see this general pattern where we're getting good decisions on constitutional and due process principles, but on administrative-agency relationships, the courts are struggling,” she said.
For example, a federal judge halted DOGE's access to Office of Personal Management data on June 9 (see 2506090043), but three days earlier the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the agency to access sensitive data at the Social Security Administration (see 2506090052).
“Going forward, we're just going to have to have a really clear understanding across our culture and our democracy that none of our constitutional rights … are actionable ... unless we have an understanding of the foundational nature of data rights at the bottom of them,” said MacCleery. “It's an abuse … [or] what the founders would have called tyranny … for the government to play ‘gotcha,’ to collect data from citizens or non-citizens on a certain basis and then to use it for other purposes.”
Nitake said it's important to continue monitoring information collection. “From a data-privacy standpoint, what we really should be watching out for isn't just the misuse of individual data points, but really the normalization of surveillance at scale, of surveillance that's carried out under the claimed purposes of things like public safety or national security,” she said.
“Once this kind of approach starts to expand, the risks of harm aren't just limited to immigrants anymore,” but to “anyone who's viewed to be challenging or obstructing the administration's goals,” such as "protesters, journalists, [or] anyone who speaks out, anyone who speaks against what the administration is doing.”