Trump's Chilling Weaponization of Confidential Government Records

[alwaysinasnit]

https://www.thebulwark.com/p/trump-chilling-weaponization-confidential-government-records-data-information?publication_id=87281&post_id=185363685&isFreemail=true&r=69mr8o&triedRedirect=true

Over the past year, I’ve been tracking the Trump administration’s use and abuse of federal data. For the most part, this has involved deletions of records that the regime finds inconvenient, or other forms of censorship. For example, the administration has stopped publishing certain statistics on climate change, hunger, trade and sexual orientation. It has also deleted photos of nonwhite people serving in the military. When Trump found the official jobs reports insufficiently flattering, he fired the head of the statistical agency that produces those figures, after having already slashed the agency’s staffing by 20 percent.

But now it’s becoming clearer that some of the most disturbing developments don’t involve data the administration is suppressing, but rather data it’s collecting—in some cases illegally—and the ways those data can be weaponized against perceived enemies.

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For example, the Trump administration recently sued the University of Pennsylvania to force it to hand over a list of Jewish faculty, staff, and students. The government is demanding the school release these records without first obtaining consent from Jewish community members themselves; authorities say they need the university to produce this Jewish registry to help the government “combat antisemitism” on college campuses.

THE POSSIBILITY THAT THESE DATA could be misused is not just a baseless, hypothetical concern: Again and again the Trump administration has been caught sharing data and breaching confidential records for purposes other than the stated reason for why those confidential records were collected in the first place.