The other night the City of St. Louis’ real time crime center – a combination of cameras and automatic license plate readers monitoring the streets – sent police after a carload of armed carjackers.
Meanwhile, in the Missouri legislature several elected Republicans still want to create and maintain a database of possibly pregnant women who can be watched lest they sneak off to get an abortion.
In George Orwell’s 1984 every home had a viewer allowing the government to monitor every citizen. The anti-hero’s job consisted of changing the nation’s official history to reflect the new correct narrative.
Closer to our time, the CBS series Person of Interest concerned two sentient supercomputer systems which always monitored every American, ostensibly to predict terrorism but…
Elon Musk’s DOGE denizens now have infiltrated every corner of the federal government. Now they want to combine hundreds of data streams of government information into a unified database: mix Free or Reduced-Price school meals with Stock Options Received and Work Emails and Employer’s Address against Tests for H.I.V./AIDS results or Health Insurance Policy Number and everything else any level or agency of government knows about you. [N Y Times 4-13-25 How DOGE Collects, and Connects, Your Data]
Let’s be scared.
Remember, the United States Constitution does not include a Right to Privacy. Even items we might assume to be confidential – like enrollment in food stamps or Medicaid – are actually public knowledge. The government can keep and share all it can learn. Plus, there are virtually no restrictions about what data businesses can keep and share.
For example, a couple of years back Facebook rolled out automatic facial recognition, meaning I could be linked if I’m a piece of the background in someone else’s post. Zuckerberg’s folks say they don’t still do that, but it’s difficult to imagine that data no longer exists or that other social media sites don’t retain their mirrors of my life.
Back to Elon.
As a piece in the April 6, 2025, New York Times noted, Elon’s grandfather relocated the family to South Africa because he liked the creation of apartheid and a nation where equality was systematically denied. Not surprisingly, Elon shows no respect for privacy or law. What he seeks to create is a government like we see in 1984 with the tech of Person of Interest. The government watches all, knows all and everyone must act to perpetuate the government and the wealth of the ruling oligarchs, people like Elon. We are to live on the scraps they think we deserve.
Indications are that the complexity of the federal bureaucracy perplexes Elon’s, at least for now. The battle has just begun, alas, and DOGE seems comfortable with a pretty high body count to get what he demands. Still, it is very possible that his operatives could cause Social Security payments to get screwed up or food stamps payments to disappear. As Montgomery Scott noted, “The more they overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain.” DOGE will screw up the plumbing.
Oh yes, that carload of carjackers tracked by the city’s crime center? The result was an accident which killed an innocent woman.
Better technology isn’t always progress.
Glenn Koenen
Illustration clipped from George Orwell’s press photo, public domain.