American Panopticon | The Trump administration is pooling data on Americans. Experts fear what comes next.

People opposed to widespread data collection have cited something like this as the worst case scenario for a long time: "you collect all that data. It might be relatively safe for now, but it takes only one undemocratic moment to put it all together" - well I'm paraphrasing, badly.

In March, President Trump issued an executive order aiming to eliminate the data silos that keep everything separate. Historically, much of the data collected by the government had been heavily compartmentalized and secured; even for those legally authorized to see sensitive data, requesting access for use by another government agency is typically a painful process that requires justifying what you need, why you need it, and proving that it is used for those purposes only. Not so under Trump.

Advancements in artificial intelligence promise to turn this unwieldy mass of data and metadata into something easily searchable, politically weaponizable, and maybe even profitable.