New York Times: Trump Invented the Surveillance State

Donald Trump is fast becoming an Orwellian repository for America's past sins, helping erase long histories of abuses

The New York Times runs a jaw-dropper:

Elon Musk may be stepping back from running the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, but his legacy there is already secured. DOGE is assembling a sprawling domestic surveillance system for the Trump administration — the likes of which we have never seen in the United States… What this amounts to is a stunningly fast reversal of our long history of siloing government data to prevent its misuse…

They seem to be building a defining feature of many authoritarian regimes: comprehensive files on everyone so they can punish those who protest.

The guest editorial by Pulitzer-winning investigative reporter Julia Angwin is based on a number of stories, including a whistleblower claim that Musk’s DOGE team was “exfiltrating sensitive data for unknown reasons” at the National Labor Relations Board, and possibly other agencies. If true, it would for sure be an upsetting development on the domestic surveillance front, and should of course be investigated.

The rest of the editorial is a rewrite of American history comical enough to be the bones of a pre-Green Book Farrelly Brothers movie. The assemblage of “comprehensive files” so the state can “punish those who protest” is, openly, a proud part of the FBI’s creation story. J. Edgar Hoover was put in charge of “counter-radical activities” in 1917, and soon after began keeping sensitive information in separate files locked with his legendary assistant Helen Gandy. Hoover grew those files “exponentially” through the infamous Palmer raids and the 1924 founding of the FBI, and that famed cabinet of secrets helped him hold office until his heart stopped on May 2, 1972. The United States has been repeatedly nailed trying to build Hoover’s dream to scale, which the Times knows because it made history in 1975 publishing Sy Hersh’s report on a “Huge CIA Operation” to gather files on at least 10,000 antiwar dissidents and other Americans who fit the category of “those who protest”:

Sy Hersh’s story of domestic surveillance in 1975 should count as something we’ve “seen before”

As for the “sprawling domestic surveillance system… the likes of which we have never seen in the United States,” where we have a “long history” of keeping information siloed “to prevent its misuse,” I don’t know where to start. Just the admitted history of surveillance innovations in recent decades gave the United States capabilities beyond the wildest dreams of the “authoritarian regimes” Angwin references. When I called former CIA analyst Ray McGovern about the piece, he described a 2013 meeting with a former Stasi Colonel, whose eyes lit up when told about America’s post-9/11 data-collection programs. “He said, ‘Zis vould be paradise!’” Ray laughed.

No one knows this more than the Times, which boasts decades of exposés on the topic: