Liberty For Me, Control For Thee— Big Brother Wears A Red Hat Made In China Now

The Surveillance State The GOP Always Wanted... For Itself

I can remember that when I was growing up, the GOP was positioning itself as a defender of individual rights and privacy, always emphasizing limited government and personal liberty in its rhetoric and contrasting itself with a Democratic Party that they claimed wanted to stick its nose into everyone’s business. Later, during the Reagan era, small government, deregulation and a strong pitch for keeping the state out of people’s lives became even more central to the party’s image. That branding stuck, especially on issues like gun rights, free speech and resistance to government overreach and, in some cases, government surveillance.

But the reality has always been far messier. Over time, we started seeing cracks in that GOP image. The same authoritarian-adjacent party that champions privacy has also backed policies— like abortion restrictions, an anti-LGBTQ agenda and the war on drugs— that lean hard into regulating personal choices. Trump’s run amplified this tension: his base loved the “don’t tread on me” vibe, yet some of his moves, like pushing for more police power and flirting with tech censorship, didn’t exactly scream privacy-first. Recent years show the GOP split on this— libertarian-leaning folks like Rand Paul still wave the flag for individual rights, while others double down on security and social control. So, sure, they’ve cultivated that imagine and worked that angle but they haven’t lived up to it.

And now.. whoa! With Musk’s lightning speed takeover of everyone’s private, personal files for Trump… authoritarian tendencies are sure trumping any left-over libertarian tendencies in the MAGA-dominated Republican Party. “The federal government,” reported Emily Badger and Sheera Frenkel, “knows your mother’s maiden name and your bank account number. The student debt you hold. Your disability status. The company that employs you and the wages you earn there. And that’s just a start. It may also know your

• Active-duty military status

• Addiction treatment records

• Adjusted gross income

• Adopted child’s name

• Adverse credit history

• Alimony paid

• Business debts canceled or forgiven

• Charitable contributions

• Child support received

• Country of birth

• Country of citizenship

• Credit and debit card numbers

• Criminal history

• Date of birth

• Date of hiring

• Dependent Social Security numbers

• Disability entitlement

• Driver’s license or state ID number

• Effective tax rate

• Employer name

• Employment termination dates

• Farm income/loss

• Foreign business partners

• Full name

• Gambling income

• Health provider name and number

• High school

• Home/personal phone number

• Incarceration status

• IP address

• Marital status

• Marriage certificate

• Medical diagnoses

• Mother’s maiden name

• Moving expenses

• Nonresident alien status

• Parent educational attainment

• Passport number

• Personal bank account number

• Personal email address

• Personal taxpayer ID number

• Place of birth

• Prior status in foster care

• Reason for separation (for unemployment claims)

• Social Security number

• Sources of income

• Spouse’s demographic information

• Student loan defaults

• Taxable I.R.A. distributions

• U.S. visa number

and at least 264 more categories of data.

These intimate details about the personal lives of people who live in the United States are held in disconnected data systems across the federal government— some at the Treasury, some at the Social Security Administration and some at the Department of Education, among other agencies.

The Trump administration is now trying to connect the dots of that disparate information. Last month, Trump signed an executive order calling for the “consolidation” of these segregated records, raising the prospect of creating a kind of data trove about Americans that the government has never had before, and that members of the president’s own party have historically opposed.

The effort is being driven by Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, and his lieutenants with the Department of Government Efficiency, who have sought access to dozens of databases as they have swept through agencies across the federal government. Along the way, they have elbowed past the objections of career staff, data security protocols, national security experts and legal privacy protections.

So far, the Musk group’s success has varied by agency and sometimes by the day, as differing rulings have come down from federal judges hearing more than a dozen lawsuits challenging the moves. The group has been temporarily blocked from sensitive data at several agencies, including the socialSecurity Administration. But on Monday, an appeals court reversed a preliminary injunction barring the group’s access at the Treasury, the Department of Education and the Office of Personnel Management.

And this week, the Internal Revenue Service agreed to help the Department of Homeland Security obtain closely held taxpayer data to help identify immigrants for deportation, over the objections of career employees. In the wake of that decision, the acting I.R.S. commissioner and other top officials are preparing to resign.

The categories of information shown here are drawn from 23 data systems holding personal information about the public across eight agencies that Musk’s aides are seeking to access, according to people familiar with their efforts as well as internal documents and court depositions. In all, the New York Times identified more than 300 separate fields of data about people who live in the U.S. contained in these data systems.

…Through his executive orders, Trump has sought to grant Musk’s group access to “all unclassified agency records”— a category that leaves out national security secrets but that includes personally sensitive information on virtually everyone in America.

With such data stitched together, Musk and the White House have said they could better hunt for waste, fraud and abuse.

“The way the government is defrauded is that the computer systems don’t talk to each other,” Musk said in a recent Fox News interview. Link the data, he suggested, and the government could identify swindlers who collect aid from one agency when the I.R.S. knows their income is too high or when the Social Security Administration knows their age is too low.

But critics such as privacy groups, public employee unions and immigrant rights associations who have sued to block the group’s data access warn that so much accumulated information could be used for far more than detecting fraud— and would be illegal.

This assembled data, they say, would give the government too much power, including potentially to punish critics and police immigrants. It would create a national security vulnerability that could be targeted by hostile nation states. And it would break a longstanding covenant between the federal government and the U.S. public rooted in privacy laws— that Americans who share their personal data with official agencies can trust that it will be secured and used only for narrow purposes.

…Privacy advocates say that all this data could enable the government to punish its political opponents by weaponizing information about an individual’s personal life (bankruptcies, criminal histories, medical claims) or halting the benefits they receive (housing vouchers, retirement checks, food assistance).

“They have not demonstrated a single case in which fraud detection has required some universal governmental access to everybody’s data,” said Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland. “In fact, the creation of a monster uniform database of all information on all citizens will be an invitation to fraud and political retaliation against the people.”

That is how personal data is tracked and used in authoritarian states, Raskin added. Both Russia and China stockpile data on their citizens to track opponents and squash dissent of the ruling party in government.

The White House declined to directly address how it would safeguard and use the data it is seeking to consolidate, including whether the administration is trying to create one central database, citing only its focus on fraud.

“Waste, fraud and abuse have been deeply entrenched in our broken system for far too long,” the White House spokesman Harrison Fields said in a statement. “It takes direct access to the system to identify and fix it.”

Technologists warn that trying to match complex data sets to make decisions about government programs— including by using artificial intelligence to identify waste in government spending, as Musk allies have discussed— could produce rampant errors and real-world harm.

And national security experts note that a large collection of data about American citizens would be an enticing target for enemy nation states, hackers and cybercriminals. Countries including China, Russia and Iran have been behind major breaches of U.S. government databases in recent years, U.S. officials have said.

Private companies and data brokers that buy and sell data know plenty about Americans, too. But a crucial difference lies in what the federal government alone can do with that data, privacy advocates say. Google doesn’t control the apparatus of immigration enforcement. Target doesn’t have the power to halt Social Security payments.

“This gets to a fundamental point about privacy: It is not just the question of, ‘Does anyone else in the world know this about me?’” said John Davisson, the director of litigation at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which has sued the administration to block DOGE’s access to financial data at the Treasury and federal work force records at the Office of Personnel Management. “It is a question of who knows this about me, and what can they lawfully— or as a practical matter— do with that information?”

Congress debated that question 50 years ago as it considered passing a law to protect the privacy of Americans’ data in the wake of the Watergate scandal and with the growing computerization of personal records.

“Where will it end?” said the Republican senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona at the time. “Will we permit all computerized systems to interlink nationwide so that every detail of our personal lives can be assembled instantly for use by a single bureaucrat or institution?”

With the passage of the 1974 Privacy Act, Americans chose privacy over efficiency, said Julian Sanchez, a libertarian privacy scholar.

“We made a very conscious choice to say we’re accepting the costs of inefficiency,” he said, “because if a unified database came into the hands of someone who wanted to put state power to some repressive purpose, their task would be made too easy by that centralization.”

At times, he said, libertarians have been called paranoid for suggesting such a scenario was still realistic in America in the 21st century.

“I think it’s very evident,” he said, “now it is.”

In Trump’s March 20 executive order, he called for “eliminating information silos” across the government. Within 30 days, the order states, “agency heads shall, to the maximum extent consistent with law, rescind or modify all agency guidance that serves as a barrier to the inter- or intra-agency sharing of unclassified information.” The administration has not specified who would be able to view data that gets consolidated across the government, but the order broadly grants wide-ranging access to federal officials “designated by the president or agency heads.”

The president also is targeting information held by states, seeking “unfettered access to comprehensive data” related to programs that receive federal funding.

…It remains to be seen whether the [toothless MAGA Supreme Court] will ultimately permit the administration’s efforts, some of which appear to run counter to the Privacy Act and other laws.

The Privacy Act prohibits agencies from disclosing personal information without your consent. Agencies also generally aren’t supposed to share data across the government for a purpose unrelated to why it was originally collected.

That means, for example, that the government shouldn’t use personal data you handed over to apply for student loans to later carry out immigration enforcement against your parents. Or use information you filed to itemize your tax deductions to later identify you as a supporter of left-leaning causes.

“The government is not necessarily supposed to be thinking creatively about how it can combine all of the information that it has ever collected about you and your family across dozens of databases over the course of your entire life to find out new things about you,” said Aman George, the legal policy director with Democracy Forward, a liberal-leaning legal group that has brought some of the lawsuits against DOGE.

There are some exceptions to legal privacy standards, including for criminal investigations and for government employees who need restricted data to do their lawfully assigned jobs. But courts that have blocked DOGE’s data access, for now, have found that Musk’s team probably doesn’t have such a need given the group’s vague and shifting mandate.

“Instead, the government simply repeats its incantation of a need to modernize the system and uncover fraud,” wrote district Judge Ellen Hollander in issuing a  temporary restraining order at the Social Security Administration. “Its method of doing so is tantamount to hitting a fly with a sledgehammer.”

This is the culmination of a long slide from libertarian posturing to ugly authoritarian reality. The MAGA-dominated GOP no longer even pretends to be about small government in any meaningful sense. It— and its supporters— are not about limiting state power— but about controlling who wields it, and making sure it serves the interests of their movement. From book bans to drag show crackdowns, from criminalizing abortion to intimidating election officials, the goal isn't freedom— it's domination.

The Republican Party of 2025 isn’t trying to protect individual liberty; it’s trying to monopolize it. When power is in their hands, the state becomes a tool to punish enemies and reward loyalists. Surveillance is fine, so long as it targets “woke” universities. Censorship is patriotic, if it silences dissenting views. The old libertarian mask has fallen away, revealing something much darker underneath.

What we’re witnessing now— with Trump exploiting his alliance with Musk to peer into the private lives of American citizens— isn’t a bug in the system. It’s the authoritarian endgame of a party that long ago stopped caring about principles and started caring only about power.

And we’ve seen echoes of this before. When J. Edgar Hoover built vast secret files on civil rights leaders, dissidents, politicians and ordinary Americans, it was justified in the name of “national security.” When Joseph McCarthy led his witch hunts through government, academia, and Hollywood, it was in the name of rooting out “un-American” influences. Today, Trump and his allies use the same pretexts— national security, public safety American values— but this time they have far more powerful tools at their disposal: massive surveillance infrastructure, AI-enhanced data mining, and private-sector partners willing to hand over personal information on command.

As Hannah Arendt warned, authoritarianism doesn’t arrive all at once. It grows through the erosion of norms, the twisting of language and the normalization of state intrusion. The MAGA movement has turned these tools into a governing philosophy. And while they still drape themselves in the language of liberty, the reality is becoming inescapable: the party that once claimed to fight for your freedom now sees your freedom as an obstacle to be overcome.