Big Brother Is Watching
FBI, DOGE Have Collected Personal Data On Citizens
Also on today’s menu at the News Café:
NH Defends Termination Of State Inspection Requirement
AI Moving From Helpful Tool To One Displacing Humanity
True independent analyses are becoming as rare as Amur Leopards — we’re at the “there are only eleven individuals left in the wild” stage.
— Racket News
This is “Sunshine Week” — when those involved in journalism, civic groups, education, government, and the private sector focus on the importance of public records and open government. As legacy journalism fades amidst corporate takeovers, government threats, competition from internet advertising, and the prospect of artificial intelligence replacing human news-gathering, the number of those able to delve deeply into public records is smaller and smaller.
The News Café and By The Way are able to contribute in a small way to keep the public informed, and financial support helps to sustain that effort. It takes time to cover local government and to follow news at the state, national, and world levels, so I appreciate those who are able to take out paid subscriptions. The News Café will remain free for those unable to pay, and By The Way will continue to make a portion of the stories available to free subscribers. All readers are appreciated.
Ryan Lovelace of Racket News focused on the increased number of government searches of Americans’ data, noting that new documentation unearthed by The Record shows that the FBI under President Donald Trump increased its searches about Americans in a foreign intelligence database by 34 percent in 2025, compared to the final year of the Biden administration.
Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) asked FBI Director Patel about the agency’s probes into US citizens, and Patel admitted that, under Trump, the government has been purchasing location data from private companies that collect personal information through their use of social media. Wyden noted that, in 2023, after Edward Snowden leaked classified documents revealing the US government’s massive, clandestine surveillance programs that collected data on millions of people worldwide, FBI Director Christopher Wray testified that the FBI no longer bought that information. Wyden asked if Patel would commit to keeping the FBI from buying that data. Patel said, “We do purchase commercially available information that’s consistent with the Constitution and the laws under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, and it has led to some valuable intelligence for us.”
The Fourth Amendment prevents law enforcement officers from obtaining information such as location data from cell phone companies without a warrant, but government agencies are finding they can buy that information directly from private data brokers who currently are allowed to collect thousands of data points about internet users for “marketing purposes”.
Wyden later posted, “Kash Patel refused to deny that the FBI is buying up Americans’ location data. This is a shocking end run around the 4th amendment and exactly why we need to pass real privacy reforms NOW.”
TheWashington Post has reported on a whistleblower complaint about an employee of the Department of Government Efficiency who claimed he had taken two highly restricted databases of information about US citizens — Social Security numbers, birth dates, place of birth, citizenship, race, ethnicity, and parents’ names — from the Social Security Administration while he had unrestricted access, planning to take them to a government contractor, saying he expected that Trump would pardon him if he were convicted of a crime.
In another whistleblower complaint, the administration admitted in court that a DOGE employee had entered into a secret agreement with a political group to share Social Security data in order to overturn election results in certain states. DOGE employees had used an unofficial third-party service to share data with each other that the SSA had been unable to access. Those employees were not publicly identified, and a DOJ official said the department was not investigating.
Discussion: As we have previously reported, Gerry Kennedy of Observatory Holdings has been pressing for government action on the unauthorized collection of personal data, pointing out the value of that information. People should have the right to control that access and receive compensation for the value of any data that is collected. When that happens, it also allows the government to tax that income to increase revenue that will stabilize state and national budgets — and even, perhaps, reduce local taxation.
NH Defends Termination Of State Inspection Requirement
Assistant attorneys-general Mark Lucas and Joshua Harrison have filed a brief with the First Circuit Court of Appeals to overturn a federal court decision delaying the end of vehicle inspections in New Hampshire. The state claims that Gordon-Darby, the emissions-testing company that filed the lawsuit, is trying to use the federal courts to compel New Hampshire to preserve its vehicle inspection program as a way of preserving the company’s lucrative contract.
“This case is a private contract action masquerading as a Clean Air Act (“CAA”) citizen suit,” the state argues. “The speculative hope seems to have been that a judicially forced continuation of the state I/M (“inspection/maintenance”) program would require New Hampshire to renew its contract with [Gordon-Darby’s] subsidiary, thereby redressing [Gordon-Darby’s] private economic harm. That hope has not, and likely will never, come to pass.”
Executive Councilor John Stephen (R-District 4) said of the lawsuit, “The legislature repealed the inspection program. The governor signed it. The Executive Council voted 3-2 to deny the contract extension. Every branch of New Hampshire’s government has spoken. A single federal district court judge does not get to overrule all three.”
Discussion: There are compelling reasons to keep vehicle inspections — identifying problems before they require expensive repairs and ensuring that vehicles are safe to operate being the strongest reasons — but Stephen is correct in pointing out that every branch of state government has reached the decision to end inspections. Had the federal government brought a Clean Air Act lawsuit, the case would have more merit than a company with a financial stake in the decision seeking to overturn state law.
AI Moving From Helpful Tool To One Displacing Humanity
Matt Shumer has offered a perspective on artificial intelligence that merits our attention. “I've spent six years building an AI startup and investing in the space. I live in this world. And I’m writing this for the people in my life who don’t,” he writes in his blog. “Most of us who work in AI are building on top of foundations we didn’t lay. We’re watching this unfold the same as you... we just happen to be close enough to feel the ground shake first.”
He continues, “Here’s the thing nobody outside of tech quite understands yet: the reason so many people in the industry are sounding the alarm right now is because this already happened to us. We’re not making predictions. We’re telling you what already occurred in our own jobs, and warning you that you’re next.”
What does that mean? “I am no longer needed for the actual technical work of my job. I describe what I want built, in plain English, and it just... appears. Not a rough draft I need to fix. The finished thing. I tell the AI what I want, walk away from my computer for four hours, and come back to find the work done. Done well, done better than I would have done it myself, with no corrections needed.”
He continues, “The experience that tech workers have had over the past year, of watching AI go from ‘helpful tool’ to ‘does my job better than I do’, is the experience everyone else is about to have. Law, finance, medicine, accounting, consulting, writing, design, analysis, customer service. Not in ten years. The people building these systems say one to five years. Some say less. And given what I’ve seen in just the last couple of months, I think ‘less’ is more likely.”
Discussion: The problem is not that AI can do work better, but that it separates us further from understanding how things work. Studies have shown that people using AI lose their ability to think things out for themselves. If the computers go down or the electric grid is too stressed, AI will not be able to help. Beyond that, there is the emotional side of things. Efficiency is useful until it conflicts with human needs. The Pentagon wants to allow AI to determine when to kill people, and who to kill. Read Colossus or watch The Forbin Project, based on the book. The novel predated HAL 9000 in “2001: A Space Odyssey” but it is the same story: Computing without soul is deadly. Reality will not be the same fiction, but the elements of disaster are there — perhaps not apocalyptic, but still devastating to the human race.