Big Brother Has A New Name: Executive Order 14243

HBO’s hit series Westworld wasn’t actually about replicating the old West, but a cautionary tale about the new frontier of artificial intelligence.

It didn’t end well. For the humans, that is. The third season’s big reveal was a sinister-looking AI sphere the size of a building, called Rehoboam. It was shaped like a globe for a very good reason – it determined the destinies of every person in the world. It predicted and manipulated human behavior and life paths by analyzing massive amounts of personal data – effectively controlling society by assigning roles, careers, and even relationships to people, all in the name of preserving order.

The American government – yes, you read that correctly – America, not China, is plotting to build its own version of Rehoboam. Its brain trust will be Palantir, the AI power player recently called out in the Daily Beast with the headline, “The Most Terrifying Company in America Is Probably One You’ve Never Heard Of.”

In March of this year, President Trump issued Executive Order 14243: “Stopping Waste, Fraud, and Abuse by Eliminating Information Silos.” The outcome will be a single database containing complete electronic profiles of every soul in the United States. And all of it is likely to be powered by Palantir’s impenetrable, proprietary AI algorithms.

Reason got to the heart of what’s at stake: an AI database on such a massive scale is only nominally about current issues such as tracking illegal immigrants. It’s really about the government’s ability to profile anyone, anytime, for any purpose.

With a billion dollars in current federal contracts across multiple agencies, Palantir is currently in talks with Social Security and the IRS. Add that to existing agreements with the Departments of Defense, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, and others. Add to that the Biden administration’s previous contract with Palantir to assist the CDC with vaccine distribution during the pandemic.

While the primary arguments in favor of such an Orwellian construct are commendable-sounding goals like a one-shop stop for efficiency, PPSA and our pro-privacy allies find such thinking – at best – appallingly naïve.

And at worst? There’s an applicable aphorism here: “This is a bad idea because it’s obviously a bad idea.” Let’s not kid ourselves – this is the desire for control laid bare, and its results will not be efficiency, but surveillance and manipulation. It makes sense for Treasury to know your tax status or State to know your citizenship status. But a governmentwide database, accessible without a warrant by innumerable government agents, is potentially the death knell for privacy and the antithesis of freedom.

Think of all the government already knows about you, your family, and friends across multiple federal databases. All this data is about to be mobilized into one single, easily searchable database, containing everything from disability status and Social Security payments to personal bank account numbers and student debt records to health history and tax filings – plus other innumerable and deeply personal datapoints ad infinitum.

Simply put, this database will put together enough information to assemble personal dossiers on every American.

It is bad enough to think any U.S. government employee in any agency will have access to all of your data in one central platform. But at least those individuals would theoretically authorized for such access. Not so the Russian and Chinese cyberhackers who’ve already demonstrated the ability to lift U.S. databases in toto.
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If that ever happens with this database, it will truly become a matter of one-stop shopping.

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