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Elon Musk is slated to leave the White House soon — but he’s still planning to mine private data with the help of his old friend Peter Thiel to assist in speedier deportations on his way out the door.
According to sources who spoke to Wired and CNN, Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is planning to harvest all kinds of sensitive data as it builds out a centralized database of immigrants targeted for deportation.
Sources who spoke to both outlets said DOGE is planning to use software from Palantir, Thiel’s data mining company that has long worked with the government, to compile information from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), Social Security, and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Although Palantir has worked for over a decade with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to track immigrants regardless of documentation, it appears that this new effort will have fingers in more agencies as it centralizes data the government will need to deport people at top speed.
“They’re going to take the information we already have and put it into a system,” a Trump administration official told CNN. “It will be able to rapidly queue information. Everyone is converting to Palantir.”
According to another White House insider who spoke to CNN on condition of anonymity, this new database will help ICE quickly build “targeting lists” to identify, detain, and deport immigrants. Others who spoke to the broadcaster were rightfully troubled by that use case.
“If they are designing a deportation machine,” a former senior IRS employee told CNN, “they will be able to do that.”
Along with concerns about the alleged database’s uses, others are raising alarm bells regarding the privacy violations it may entail.
“A pattern of technical malfeasance has emerged, showing these DOGE staffers are not abiding by our nation’s privacy and cybersecurity laws and their actions are more in line with tactics used by adversaries,” a senior aide to the House Oversight Committee told Wired. “They are using excessive and unprecedented system access to intentionally cover their tracks and avoid oversight so they can creep on Americans’ data from the shadows.”
Beyond the draconian purpose of the alleged immigration database — which Trump, notably, denied would be used for deportation in a recent interview with Time — building a singular, centralized file of that sort would set a horrific precedent regardless of how anyone came to this country.
As attorney Karen Noble of the Electronic Frontier Foundation told Wired, “there’s a reason these systems are siloed”: because bad actors, inside or outside the government, could use such a database to track and target anyone they wanted.
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