The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), according to reporting in the Washington Post, recently set its sights on creating “a single centralized [government] database” that would enable broad access across government agencies to vast amounts of information currently collected and held by individual federal agencies.
Government data aggregation and unification on this scale is antithetical to the purpose-driven requirements for data sharing among government agencies that lie at the heart of the Privacy Act, a 1974 law passed in the aftermath of Watergate and the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) scandals. Then-Senate Judiciary Chairman Sam Ervin, the Privacy Act’s primary sponsor, recognized that one of Watergate’s primary lessons was the need to place “limits upon what the Government can know about each of its citizens.”
The Privacy Act established “a code of fair information practices that governs the collection, maintenance, use, and dissemination of information about individuals that is maintained in systems of records by federal agencies.” Systems of records is defined as “a group of any records under the control of any agency from which information is retrieved by the name of the individual or by some identifying number, symbol, or other identifying particular assigned to the individual.” Federal agencies are prohibited from disclosing Privacy Act covered records absent written consent of the individual to whom the records pertain, unless the disclosure is pursuant to one of the act’s 12 statutory exceptions. Those exceptions include disclosures to other officials within the agency “who have a need for the record in the performance of their duties” or disclosures that constitute a “routine use.” Significantly, the act allows agencies to define “routine uses” for each system of records that allow for disclosures without individual consent. The statutory standard—compatibility with the purpose for which the record was collected—is vague and thus supports broadly defined disclosures established by agencies.
[T]here is a danger in accepting the rhetoric of efficiency and elimination of waste, fraud, and abuse at face value. This rhetoric obfuscates the substantial growth in government surveillance powers this project incidentally or intentionally promotes. The creation of a single, centralized government database will allow for aggregation of and broad government access to extremely sensitive data including Social Security numbers, federal tax returns, health records, birth dates, and income, asset, and demographic information.
Should this database be built, it would constitute an enormous expansion of government surveillance powers that can be directed toward more efficient targeting of individual Americans.
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