Since its release this month in 1949, far before the advent of the internet—let alone artificial intelligence—George Orwell’s timeless novel 1984 has left generations with one primary warning: “Big Brother is always watching.” Now more than ever, it feels in America that Big Brother truly is here. While many opine about the dangers of private companies holding information and data about civilians, the real warning that 1984 gives us—which may be in our near future—is a consolidation of governmental entities that hold our information and data.
In recent weeks, the Trump Administration awarded Palantir a contract to the tune of more than $100 million in taxpayer dollars to potentially consolidate all of the information and data that exists across the federal government into one massive database. While it is meant to fulfill the goal of an executive order from March, “Stopping Waste, Fraud, and Abuse by Eliminating Information Silos,” its implications are likely to go far beyond simply the noble goal of government efficiency.
The far more ominous collateral consequence of such a centralized database of information on citizens is the shattering of already tenuous privacy laws, which are meant to protect Americans from the misuse of their personal information. The federal government, across its alphabet soup of executive agencies, already has so much information on all of us, including tax records, voting records, or health records, just to name a few.
As such, a law was enacted in 1974 to safeguard against improper use of all of this information, aptly called the Privacy Act. This law very intentionally silos the various types of data that the federal government has on its citizens, ensuring that agencies cannot disclose the information they may have on any individual to another agency or entity without express authorization.
A database like the one the administration is pursuing through Denver-based Palantir would do the opposite. Data privacy law professor Bernard Chao of the University of Denver put it this way: “[The Privacy Act] was designed to silo our data, saying the IRS gets to use your tax records, Health and Human Services gets to use your health records for Medicare and Medicaid records, but those purposes don't cross, and those records don't cross. Palantir provides the capability, in theory, to put that all together."
In other words, this Palantir contract isn’t an attack on inefficient bugs in government, but on privacy features that were intentionally built into these systems to protect Americans from the misuse of their information by federal agencies.
While the cross-cutting goals of the second Trump administration—government efficiency—are commendable, we must ask ourselves: What kind of efficiency are we pursuing? And at what cost? True efficiency means improving how the government performs its core functions, cutting red tape, and slashing waste and fraud. It does not mean creating a centralized infrastructure that threatens the foundational right to privacy guaranteed to us under the Fourth Amendment.
Too often, defenders of efforts that threaten Americans’ civil liberties fall back on a familiar refrain: “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.” But that argument misunderstands the core principles of a free society. Privacy isn’t about hiding wrongdoing—it’s about the right of every person to live without the fear that their activities will be scrutinized, recorded, or misinterpreted by the state without cause or process.
As the famed whistleblower Edward Snowden said, “When you say that I don’t care about the right to privacy because I have nothing to hide, that’s no different than saying I don’t care about the freedom of speech because I have nothing to say, or freedom of the press because I have nothing to write.” All of our constitutional rights are worth defending, because they were established with purpose and intention to safeguard liberty for this generation and the next.
To protect our privacy, stopping the creation of the Palantir database is essential. We do not need to choose between an efficient government and a free society, but we do critically need to remember which priority comes first in a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. If we abandon the existing protections of Americans’ privacy in the name of expediency, we may find ourselves living in a version of Orwell’s warning far closer to reality than fiction.
