Trump’s plan to work with Palantir is very, very bad. Not only is it an extreme invasion of the privacy of every American citizen, but it it all but guarantees that all of their government data is going to be hacked and leaked on the dark web. We need to write to our representatives to alert them to the dangers of this. I’ve printed letters out to my representatives using the following format:
My representative, [representative name],
My name is [your name], and I am a voter in the [number] district of [state]. [If you voted for them in the last election, or donated to their campaign, include that here.] President Donald Trump is planning on partnering with Palantir Technologies to create a database containing all the information on every American citizen from various government agencies, including very sensitive things like medical claims, addresses, faces, and fingerprints. This is an extreme infringement on the privacy rights of every American citizen. Moreover, once a database like this is created, it will inevitably become the target of a cyber-attack, and its contents will be leaked on the dark web, making everyone more vulnerable to identity theft and to attack from bad actors. It is imperative that action be taken to stop this before that happens, because once information is leaked on the dark web, it can’t be taken back.
Your constituent,
[your name]
Look up the mailing addresses of your reps and send the letters there. I recommend writing to as many people as you can, i,e, your district representative and both of your state’s senators.
I encourage all of you to send this as a letter, since that’s more likely to get your representatives’ attention, but if you can’t do that, sending an email is also acceptable.
I understand not having a lot of faith in the U.S. government to help with privacy, but we need to do everything we can to try to stop this, even if success seems unlikely. Everyone here should understand why that kind of defeatist attitude is detrimental. The fact that an individual letter is unlikely to be seen is why it’s important for as many people to send them as possible.
I’ll also add that from what I can tell, based on the news coverage, this decision to make a centralized database is disliked by both the left and the right, which makes it seem more likely to me that congress will care. And I’m aware that the issue has already been brought to their attention, but I don’t know that they’ve been informed of the cybersecurity risk.
It may also be worth reaching out to a civil rights organization, like the EFF or ACLU to suggest they start a legal case as another avenue to stop this from happening. There’s been a lot of success in courts.
We need to call as much attention to this as possible.
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