It doesn't matter who compiles the lists anymore. Corporations will sell that data to the government (and anyone else willing to pay enough) or the government will march in and take it by force.
As long as lists of people are useful they will be created, and as long as our government is unaccountable to the people and the law those lists will be at risk of being abused by the state for other purposes.
Its the other way around, authoritarian governments will now compile even more and larger lists of everything they can possibly get from their citizens. North Korea would be proud of what this administration is doing.
In many other countries, people would be asking "This is horrible, how can we bring down this leader, and how can we ensure that it never happens again?"
But here in glorious America, people are asking "This is inevitable, how can we starve the government more, so that it cannot hurt us when it eventually tries to?"
It's telling that, every time there's an election, we keep hearing complaints about who can vote, because its citizens decided that the government shouldn't keep track of who are its citizens and where they live. In most other countries it's the government's job to issue a photo ID to every citizen, but no, here in America that sounds too convenient and it must be some evil big-gov agenda.
But the lists were compiled before Trump took office. Countries that have experience with totalitarianism don't make those lists to begin with.
That's why in France, for example, it's illegal for the government to keep track of people's race or religion. When the Nazis occupied France they used such documents to figure out who the Jews were.
Afaik, you can't even track marriages! Like, I get the historical reasons but I think a national statistical agency should be able to release aggregates.
Client Side Scanning tried to hash your files to help the government find any "child predators" using iPhone.
You know, the same federal government that refused to assign a special prosecutor to the Epstein files. You can rest assured Apple and the Fed are very interested in protecting the children. Anyone who refuses to allow that sort of process is probably a criminal anyways, right?
Trump getting elected wasn’t inevitable. There were unusual events during the 2016 election campaign that could have resulted in a different outcome if their timing had been different.
Billionaires paid for Hillary, dems couldn't be bothered to listen to the people. Took 0 responsibility for it. Just took her campaign war chest and dumped it into a media smear campaign.
Again, no one forced anyone to vote for her; they chose to do so of their own volition. Bernie did not win because, for whatever reason, not enough people voted for him. I say this as someone who voted for him in 2016
To muse he would have beaten Trump is like saying the Bills could have beaten the Eagles in the Super Bowl. Maybe they could have, but they didn't beat the Chiefs. It's not a forgone conclusion that he would have beaten Trump, but even so it really doesn't matter because he lost in the primaries
That's fair. I want people to understand it's not about my tribe vs your tribe. If the goal is to get idiots like Trump out of Washington, you must first remove money from politics. Then even if "your guy" doesn't get elected, you at least have a decent specimen installed who your party can work with. No one of average intelligence can even see that as an option. For this reason, the DNC is just as responsible for his election as the utterly deranged MAGA avatar.
As long as lists of people are useful they will be created, and as long as our government is unaccountable to the people and the law those lists will be at risk of being abused by the state for other purposes.