Photo by Ernie Journeys on Unsplash
Narrated by Chad Fox
I was seven when President Franklin D. Roosevelt invoked the Alien and Sedition Acts to summarily detain and incarcerate people of Japanese descent. This was only possible because the U.S. Census Bureau violated confidentiality laws by providing the FBI and War Department with names and addresses of Japanese Americans to facilitate their forced removal and incarceration.
President Donald J. Trump’s call for “nationalizing elections” and his demand that Congress pass the SAVE America Act are reminiscent of both this violation of confidentiality and COINTELPRO, an FBI domestic counterintelligence program promoted as protecting national security that served to suppress domestic political dissent. It lasted until 1971.
Abuses under COINTELPRO led to a series of reforms. Attorney General guidelines limited the FBI’s investigative authority and spelled out rules that governed law enforcement operations.
Then 9/11 hit, and lessons learned were abandoned under a panic of paranoia about what might come next.
In the name of protecting national security and guarding against terrorism, President George W. Bush signed into law the so-called Patriot Act, which vastly expanded the U.S. government’s ability to conduct domestic surveillance.
The full extent of government surveillance on private citizens, domestically and abroad, was disclosed in 2013, when Edward Snowden leaked hundreds of thousands of highly classified NSA documents. The NSA conducted mass surveillance that swept up American communications through bulk metadata collection and warrantless searches. The NSA created a real-time, digital map of millions of citizens through programs like PRISM, which accessed data from U.S. tech giants such as Apple, Google, Facebook (now Meta), and Microsoft.
Revelations about the U.S. government’s mass surveillance of its citizens brought about the USA Freedom Act and the Presidential Policy Directive 28. Despite these guide rails, U.S. government agencies still purchase Americans’ personal data from commercial data brokers without a warrant, including precise location history, web browsing habits, and app usage. Active purchasers of commercial data include the FBI, ICE, and Customs and Border Protection.
Recent whistleblower complaints allege inappropriate access to Social Security datasets. While the IRS is relying on a former DOGE staffer to help ‘modernize’ its data systems, career officials have raised legal and privacy concerns about these intrusions into Americans’ private data.
The SAVE America Act seems to be gaining traction, largely because it’s being framed as common sense. “I have to show identification when buying wine at the supermarket, why not when voting?” At first glance, the argument seems straightforward, but only to those who haven’t read the 5500 words of the Act, are devoid of imagination, or are ignorant of history.
The issue of election integrity is a Trojan horse for massive domestic surveillance. It allows the construction of a police state — database by database, server farm by server farm, algorithm by algorithm.
In its narrowest form, the SAVE Act requires documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote. But in more expansive versions, it goes further — linking voter registration systems to federal databases and requiring ongoing comparisons with national systems.
This would connect the act of voting to centralized data systems that would intersect with immigration enforcement, tax records, and other administrative databases. Combined with the burgeoning capabilities of AI, the possibilities of this centralization are endless. Once such systems are built, they rarely remain limited. Data collected for one purpose is often used for another.
A centralized system creates a single point of control — and a single point of failure. Errors can scale nationally. Decisions can propagate instantly. Those in charge will decide who will vote. And the burden shifts. Citizens become victims of a Kafka-esque, opaque bureaucratic system with incomprehensible rules.
The United States has historically mitigated that risk in its election system through decentralization. Article 1, Section 4 of the Constitution dictates that states have the primary authority over election administration — the “times, places, and manner of holding elections.”
We can build systems that centralize identity, citizenship, and participation in a single national framework. But once created, such systems create powerful interests, are vulnerable to being used in unintended ways, and become extraordinarily difficult to dismantle. Over time, they will reshape the balance between citizen and state in ways we may not be able to reverse — no matter how badly we want to.
Richard Badalamente is a veteran of the United States Air Force, and worked with the CIA, the NSA, the FBI, the JTTF, and a DOE field intelligence element.
