siloed data (12. 425)

Unseriously I‘ve often said that none of us would have jobs if the various platforms we used could talk to one another. Since the rampage of DOGE through the US federal government, I’ve thought differently about this segregation of information is a function of bureaucracy, like the checks and balances of power amongst the three coequal branches. Even if the Department of Government Efficiency were to happily sublimate into an awkward memory and their designs to purge and private equitied were all ultimately foiled and reversed, the damage is still done with copying formerly cordoned off databases to an unsecured server (and not chiefly for me risk of the information getting into the hands of ransomers or nogoodniks though that’s a bad enough prospect) but that the aggregate data points create a custom and comprehensive dossier on every single US citizen—the sort of thing that American social media providers shrilly decried with with integrated platforms like WeChat and lately with TikTok, hurling warnings in the gravest of language that it poses a national security risk and inculcates Americans with Chinese communist propaganda. Again every accusation is a confession, and DOGE‘s legacy despite any thing else will be cementing a surveillance state without equal.