The Infrastructure Is Already Built

The federal government, under the Trump administration, has been systematically breaking down data-sharing barriers between agencies since early 2025.

DOGE staffers — operating with minimal oversight — swept through federal agencies and harvested sensitive personal data. Then came an executive order directing agencies to "eliminate information silos," effectively ordering them to pool everything they'd collected, according to a June 2025 House Oversight Committee hearing.

Then came Palantir.

The Trump administration dramatically expanded federal contracting with Palantir — the Silicon Valley surveillance company co-founded by Peter Thiel — and directed the firm to use its AI systems to merge data from multiple agencies into unified profiles on Americans, according to reporting from The New York Times cited during that hearing.

The result: a government database of dossiers on private citizens.

What Palantir Actually Does

Palantir isn't a generic tech contractor. This company was built for surveillance.

Its ICE app, called ELITE, "populates a map with potential deportation targets, brings up a dossier on each person, and provides a 'confidence score' on the person's current address," according to reporting by 404 Media cited by the ACLU of Massachusetts in a February 2026 analysis.

The State Department is already running a "catch and revoke" program using similar tools — flagging visa holders based on their social media posts. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has extended that screening to visa applicants, according to the ACLU of Massachusetts.

Now those same tools are being pointed at citizens.

The Pentagon Tried to Cut Off the One AI Company With a Spine

Anthropic — the AI company behind the Claude models — refused to allow its technology to be used for mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons. The Pentagon's response: it announced the government would cease using Anthropic's products entirely, according to The Guardian's March 2026 reporting by Ashley Gorski and Patrick Toomey of the ACLU.

The Trump administration went further, labeling Anthropic a "supply chain risk" and prohibiting anyone doing business with the military from working with Anthropic commercially.

A company said "don't use our AI to spy on Americans" — and the federal government responded by blacklisting them. This was the government's message to the private sector: help us surveil citizens, or get out.

The Legal Framework Is Decades Behind the Technology

Gorski and Toomey identify in The Guardian the core problem: the law has not caught up.

Current law doesn't account for a world where your phone is a tracking device, your browsing history reads like a diary, your data is commercially available for purchase, and AI can stitch all of it together in seconds into a comprehensive personal profile.

The government has exploited this gap before. After September 11, the executive branch secretly defined what counted as "lawful" surveillance — and the programs that emerged were sweeping, warrantless, and aimed at Americans. We only found out years later.

Without specific legislation from Congress, the Trump administration can rubber-stamp a domestic spying program and call it legal because an internal lawyer said so.

Congress has NOT passed that legislation. As of June 2026, no federal data privacy law with real teeth is in effect.

The Left Is Right on the Surveillance Problem — and Wrong to Only Half-Tell It

Rep. Lori Trahan (D-MA) raised alarms at the June 2025 House Oversight hearing. Her hypothetical about a single mother whose social media post triggers an IRS audit and Medicaid termination is dramatic — but the underlying mechanism she described is real and already partially operational.

The ACLU is correct that this infrastructure is dangerous. They're right that state-level data privacy laws matter as a backstop.

The surveillance apparatus, however, didn't start with Trump. The NSA's bulk collection programs under Bush and Obama, the post-9/11 FISA court abuses, the FBI's COINTELPRO-era targeting of political dissidents — the federal government's appetite for citizen data is bipartisan and decades old. Trump didn't build the hunger. He's feeding it with better tools.

Sanders' Answer Is Worse Than the Disease

While the surveillance debate rages, Sen. Bernie Sanders is pushing his American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act, which would give the federal government a 50% ownership stake in the largest AI companies in America, according to Reason's Elizabeth Nolan Brown.

Sanders frames it as giving "the public" a cut of AI profits. What it actually does, as Nolan Brown notes, is hand bureaucrats and politicians direct control over the companies building these systems.

The combination creates an obvious concern: the government already wants to use Palantir to surveil you, AND Sanders wants the government to own half of the AI industry. This would put control of both the surveillance tools and the industry building them in the hands of the same officials.

What This Means for You

If you pay taxes, use Medicaid, own a gun, have a social media account, or carry a smartphone — your data has been collected by federal agencies. Right now, Palantir is potentially being used to merge it.

There is NO federal law specifically prohibiting this. Congress has not acted. The courts are moving slowly.

The question isn't whether the government could build a dossier on you. The question is whether anyone will stop them before they finish.