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DOGE Sparks Surveillance Fear Across the US Government
The US government has increased the use of monitoring tools over the past decade. But President Donald Trump’s employee purges are making workers worry about how their data could be abused.
But the most eerie thing about the emails, which Bernier says began arriving after he filed an official charge accusing the Trump administration of violating his union’s collective bargaining agreement, is that they included personal details about his life—some of which he believes might have come from surveillance of his work laptop. Dtex’s Intercept software, which is used by multiple federal agencies, is one example of a newer class of programs that generate individual risk scores by analyzing anonymized metadata, such as which URLs workers are visiting and which files they’re opening and printing out on their work devices, according to the company. Multiple sources said that the systems are currently “overwhelmed.” Any effort by the Trump administration to extend the reach of such tools or widen their parameters—to more closely surveil for perceived signs of insubordination or disloyalty to partisan fealties, for instance—likely would result in a significant spike in false positives that would take considerable time to comb through, according to the people familiar with the work.
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