Trump’s Sneaky Plot to Steal Your Data—and Weaponize It Against You

In the targeting of academic institutions, nonprofits, and law firms, the administration has been just as open about the fact that it will bring the weight of the federal government down to bear on those that are advancing oppositional or even just disfavored political agendas. It doesn’t take much imagination to tease out what form this obsession with regulating acceptable speech and political organizing could take if the Trump team could, with a few keystrokes, pull up a person’s health records, tax records, business associations, registrations, and so on.

“AI is making it possible to have the sort of surveillance that once was only targeted at political dissidents, the most high-profile government opponents, and to replicate that level of tracking for millions,” said Fox Cahn, pointing to the manpower J. Edgar Hoover once devoted to surveilling Martin Luther King Jr. “There were huge efforts to track the members of political dissident groups, and now you can use weaponized tax data to figure out the identities of donors to nearly every major political and social organization in the country.”

In a few cases, DOGE has been sued over access to individual data streams. Even as Trump and Musk are already pretty clearly violating the law, Senators Ron Wyden and Ed Markey are now trying to reinforce data protections with a new bill that would clarify routine data uses, increase penalties for misuse, and expand the ability of courts to stop these data-collection and matching programs as they’re litigated. As Wyden told The New Republic, “No one in the United States should have to worry that the government will illegally weaponize their private information against them. But Trump’s administration is violating every law on the books to pillage Americans’ financial information, medical histories, and other private data.”