Mad King Trump Wants His Own Palantír
Orange Julius Caesar signed a new Executive Order seeking to centralize US government data. I explain why this is a terrible thing, by way of my generally poor grasp of Lord of the Rings lore.
Each palantír replied to each, but all those in Gondor were ever open to the view of Osgiliath. … But alone it could do nothing but see small images of things far off and days remote. Very useful, no doubt, that was to Saruman; yet it seems that he was not content. Further and further abroad he gazed, until he cast his gaze upon Barad-dûr. Then he was caught!
In the Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien introduces readers to the palantíri, a set of seven indestructible, all-seeing stones. Individuals in possession of a palantír, such as Sauron, the evil ruler of Mordor, could see many things, but each stone was limited on its own. The real power came in the ability of individual palantír to communicate with one another across realms—to share knowledge and information.
In the novels, palantír displayed truthful images, but those images could sometimes lead users or “surveyors” astray, because the stones never informed the surveyor of what wasn’t being shown. It took someone with a “great strength of will and of mind" to use it well, and those who lacked either, would suffer terribly.
You might be wondering where I’m going with this. So I beg you to give me a few minutes—it will all become clear soon enough.
On March 20, 2025, Donald Trump declared a war. No, not this war. Or this one. Or even this one.
No, this war was against information silos. He launched his latest crusade via dictatorial fiat an Executive Order, titled “Stopping Waste, Fraud, and Abuse by Eliminating Information Silos.” The title and its purpose seem almost noble:
Purpose. Removing unnecessary barriers to Federal employees accessing Government data and promoting inter‑agency data sharing are important steps toward eliminating bureaucratic duplication and inefficiency while enhancing the Government’s ability to detect overpayments and fraud.
What’s not to love? Information silos legitimately suck. But the devil, as with all Trump edicts, is in the details.
To achieve the administration’s goals, Section 3 of the EO empowers agency heads to take “all necessary steps” to ensure federal officials designated by the White House (read: DOGE), “have full and prompt access to all unclassified agency records, data, software systems, and information technology systems” for the purposes of pursuing the administration’s priorities in eliminating “waste, fraud, and abuse.” According to the EO, this includes “facilitating both the intra- and inter-agency sharing and consolidation of unclassified agency records.” Agency heads must modify any agency guidance that gets in the way of this sharing (like Privacy Act rulemaking or other pesky laws).
Sidenote: I’m really disappointed that the administration chose the generic ‘waste, fraud, and abuse’ phrase, and didn’t go for something more colorful like ‘deception, abuse, fraud, and thievery’, or even ‘thievery, waste, abuse, and trickery’. These terms really paint a far more vivid picture of what he’s all about.
The EO also mandates that the government have “unfettered access to comprehensive data from all State programs that receive Federal funding, including … data generated by those programs but maintained in third-party databases.” Finally it specifically calls out the Department of Labor, who should receive blanket access to all “unemployment data and related payment records.”
A related EO, signed on March 25, requires all Treasury Department payments made to agencies be vetted by the administration first, and waives the barriers in the Privacy Act against matching records.
I Should Shut My Eyes and Put My Hands in My Pockets
“If all the seven stones were laid out before me now, I should shut my eyes and put my hands in my pockets.”
While this post could be about the illegality and unenforceability of the EO (particularly the bit regarding state and private-sector data and eroding the Privacy Act), I want to instead focus on what the EO itself is trying to achieve.
Trump wants to centralize and put under the administration’s control every sensitive, personal detail that state and federal governments know about you. That means everything from census data and tax records, to disability & benefits payments, voting records, health data, legal status information, criminal history, travel details, and more. And given that he’s gotten most of the tech oligarchs like Tim Cook, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and of course Elon, to bend the knee already, I suspect he’s angling to include all that delicious big tech data as well.
In short, Trump wants to join together all the discrete databases that silo away information about all of us, into a single all-seeing digital palantír. And I suspect, if Peter Thiel has his way, the administration might even use Palantir Technologies software to achieve those goals, just for added irony.1
“A wild beast cornered is not safe to approach.”
Gandalf, approaching Saruman in The Two Towers
I suspect that no matter where you fall on the political spectrum, you’d probably agree that it’s generally good public policy if people pay their taxes, participate in the decennial census, vote, get treated in hospitals when they’re ill, and obtain a license before driving a car or a truck. But we can’t pick and choose here: To be effective, everyone needs to participate, and by everyone, that includes people the prevailing government might not like.
But in order for people to pay their taxes, vote, share information with census takers, go to the hospital, or obtain identity documents to drive, they need to feel confident that no matter which party is in power, the data various governments collect about them won’t be weaponized against them later for some other purpose. It’s important that some information remains isolated and compartmentalized, safe from the prying eyes of political operators, adversaries, vigilantes, or others who would do them harm. There’s loads of history behind this, but it can be rounded down to governments tend to do bad things when they have access to lots of data all in one place.
You may think I’m being a Privacy Cassandra here (in fact, I’m pretty sure at least a few readers will send me an email saying as much), but we’ve got lots of history demonstrating the catastrophic consequences of centralizing data. For one, we’ve had 30+ years of damaging data breaches, both in the public and private sectors. And the harms and consequences of government data centralization and the weaponized use of that data is within the living memory of millions.
This is why we have laws that keep government information collection and sharing in check. Laws like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the EU Convention on Human Rights in 1948 and 1950, respectively, came out of the Third Reich’s use of IBM punch card data to target ethnic Jews and Roma. In the 1970s, the Watergate scandal and other abuses of tax records by President Nixon helped usher in the Privacy Act of 1974 (I wrote about that here). Over the years Congress and state legislatures have also passed laws protecting the sharing of census & tax records, voting information, and driver’s license details across systems or with other agencies.
If Trump gets his wish, and uses the EO to centralize all this information, people will go underground. If you’re undocumented, transgender, a criminal, or receiving state benefits that the administration believes are wasteful, being honest quickly becomes a very costly liability.
Some of you might be reading this and saying, ‘Well great, fuck those people! They’re breaking the law anyway! They should be scared. This will thwart all that lawlessness, fraud waste and abuse!”
Here’s the thing, gang: even if you’re an upright, by-the-book, taxpaying lawful American, centralization can still screw you, too. If the administration decides, for example, that you’re not the right kind of person, a centralized system could cut you off from Social Security benefits, Medicaid disbursements, FEMA relief, or financial aid. And by ‘not the right kind of person’ I mean
you have a green card and said something that opposed Dear Leader's policies;
you’re a student who said something mean about Trump or Musk online or attended a Tesla protest;
you have the wrong kind of tattoos;
you’re a married lady who wants to vote;
because you live in California.
Or, it might mean getting iced out of government contracts (gotta save those for the MAGA faithful, after all), bar your ability to vote, prevent you from travelling (can’t let women who might be pregnant cross state lines), or even cost you your liberty.
Centralization means we eventually all live in fear, because when the Mad King decides you’re not showing enough fealty, or the computer accidentally adds you to a terrorist watch list, or right-wing vigilante groups / Elon Musk decide you’ve done them dirty, there’s very little stopping the government from shipping you off to an El Salvadoran labor camp, or stripping you of your rights and freedoms, due process be damned. And given the precarity of the rule of law and the current administration’s disinterest in data accuracy, centralizing government data could ruin the lives of anyone on US soil, even if you’re just a tourist.
I’ll spare you the horror of thinking about what happens when someone else gets access to all this sensitive data. If you really want a sneak-peek, go ask someone at the OPM.
If it isn’t already apparent, Trump’s attempts to centralize data should scare the shit out of everyone in America, and yet, with exception of a few articles, it’s barely registered as newsworthy. I suppose that’s not totally a shock though: Trump’s tanking of the economy surely stands out as the more pressing existential crisis of the moment, which is fair.
In the Lord of the Rings, Tolkien wrote of the palantíri as a cautionary tale—a reminder that a powerful communications and information sharing tool can easily corrupt those who use it. To wrap up the LotR analogy, the American people are Gandalf, and the Trump administration is the Balrog on the bridge of Khazad-dûm. Gandalf keeps yelling ‘You Shall Not Pass!’ but everybody who’s watching knows that we’re going to need a helluva lot more than just words alone to fell this beast.
We can’t let Trump throw America into the abyss.
What You Can Do
First, I get that was a lot, on top of a few months of a helluva lot. So, let’s all take a moment to admire Shadow here, one of our neighbor’s outside kitties who David has told me I cannot adopt. Shadow is the friendliest, sweetest boy though, and gives the best head bumps:
If you’re a US citizen or resident, consider calling your representatives. Click below to get all the deets:
This personally scares the shit out of me, because I was a pretty heavy user of a very early version of the platform (from 2012-2014). It was insanely powerful then, and I can only suspect that it has gotten even moreso in the last 12 or so years, especially now that AI is involved.