Steve Bannon, who used to be a top adviser to Donald Trump, has taken a surprising position by agreeing with privacy advocates and civil liberties groups on a major issue involving government surveillance.
On a recent TV appearance, Bannon said he’s concerned about Palantir, a tech company that works with the U.S. government to collect and organize data on American citizens.
He admitted that if a Democrat were in charge of this effort, he and his supporters would be making a lot more noise about it. He even said his show, War Room, would focus on it daily. According to Bannon, many Trump supporters aren’t happy with what’s going on, and he called Palantir a “Democratic company,” despite its ties to Trump supporters like billionaire Peter Thiel.
In March, President Trump signed an executive order to improve data-sharing between federal agencies, including the IRS, Social Security, Education Department, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The stated goal was to make the government more efficient and save taxpayer money. However, critics worry that combining so much personal data into one system could threaten Americans’ privacy.
Palantir, which is helping carry out this effort, responded to criticism by saying the media reports were full of false claims and insisted that protecting civil liberties is central to their mission.
But many people aren’t convinced. Privacy experts and civil rights organizations warn that this could lead to the creation of a massive federal database containing detailed information about every person in the country. They fear this kind of system could be misused to target people who disagree with the government or speak out against it.
Even some Palantir employees have said they’re worried. They fear that if such a huge database were ever hacked, it could expose sensitive information on millions of people. Meanwhile, Bannon, who was involved in the Cambridge Analytica scandal—where millions of Facebook users had their data harvested to influence the 2016 election—is now expressing similar concerns to those raised by privacy watchdogs.
According to the New York Times, Palantir has already received over \$113 million in federal contracts this year alone and was awarded a \$795 million deal with the Department of Defense. While the White House says the effort is meant to make government work better, many people on social media are warning that it could lead to dangerous levels of surveillance.
Cody Venzke from the American Civil Liberties Union said the ultimate fear is that the government could end up with one huge database that contains everything it knows about every citizen.
He called it the beginning of a digital surveillance state. Bannon took it even further, calling the people behind this movement “techno-feudalists” who care more about controlling digital systems than supporting democratic governments.
In short, people from very different political backgrounds are coming together in their concern about where all this is heading.
