Cosa succede, quando un governo "democratico" vira verso
l'autoritarismo e ha a disposizione un'immensa quantità di dati sui
propri cittadini? Probabilmente, nulla di buono.
Da The Atlantic:
"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. DOGE is
reportedly attempting to build a “master database” of immigrant
data to aid in deportations; NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya has floated
the possibility of an autism registry (though the administration
quickly walked it back). America already has all the technology it
needs to build a draconian surveillance society—the conditions for
such a dystopia have been falling into place slowly over time,
waiting for the right authoritarian to come along and use it to crack
down on American privacy and freedom."
"Trump and DOGE are not just undoing decades of privacy measures.
They appear to be ignoring that they were ever written. Over and
over, the federal experts we spoke with insisted that the very idea
of connecting federal data is anathema."
"Musk has said that his goal with DOGE is to serve his country. He
says he wants to “end the tyranny of bureaucracy.” But around
Washington, people are asking one another what he really wants with
all those data. Keys to the federal dataverse could, for example, be
extremely useful to a highly ambitious man who is aggressively trying
to win the AI race.
"We already know that Musk’s people have access to large swaths of
information from federal agencies—what we don’t know is what
they’ve copied, exfiltrated, or otherwise taken with them. In
theory, this material, whether usable together or not, could be
recombined with other identifying information from private companies
for all kinds of purposes. There has been speculation already that it
could be fed into third-party large language models to train them or
make the information more usable (Musk’s xAI has its own model,
Grok); outside firms could use their own technologies to make sense
of disparate sets of data, as well. Such approaches, the federal
workers told us, could make it easier to turn previously obfuscated
information, such as the individual elements of a tax return, into
something to be mined."
"The thought that the government would centralize or even give away
citizen data for private use is scandalous. But it’s also, in a way,
expected. The Vietnam War and Watergate gave Americans reasons to
believe that the government can’t be trusted. The Cold War issued a
constant, decades-long threat of annihilation and the necessary
surveillance to avoid it. The War on Terror extended the logic into
the 21st century. Optical, recording, and then computer technologies
arose, offering new ways to watch the public. During the 2010s,
Edward Snowden’s NSA surveillance leaks took place, and the
Facebook–Cambridge Analytica scandal was brewing. By then, the
20th-century assumption that U.S. intelligence agencies were running
mind-control experiments, infiltrating and disrupting civil-rights
groups, or carrying out surreptitious missions at home like they do
abroad had been fully internalized, and fused with the suspicion that
Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Walmart were—in their own
ways—following suit."
Buona lettura,
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/04/american-panopticon/682616/
F.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/federicoguerrini/
