The Dossier State

Imagine this scenario: A union leader suddenly changes his vote. He signs a one-sided contract with management, clearly betraying his union brothers and sisters. That night, he goes home and eats his shotgun.

To outsiders, it’s a mystery. To his coworkers, it’s a betrayal. To those in the know, it’s just the latest casualty in a new kind of war—a war fought not with bullets, but with data.

In this dark scenario, someone blackmailed the union leader. Until recently, he was happily married. But then he met the most beautiful woman who "really got him." After he first spotted her on her first day at work, he couldn’t take his mind off her. On a physical level, she embodied his most intimate fantasies. When he first spoke with her, he quickly discovered, much to his delight, that she shared many of his interests. It was as if he had known her his whole life. In time, she got to know him so well that it felt as though she could read his mind! Despite his hesitation, he couldn't resist her mystical seduction.

Then one day, someone slipped a photo into his locker. It was an image of him sharing an intimate moment with the woman. A message on the back of the photo made it clear what he should do to save his marriage and his reputation: sign the contract management had proposed.

After the shock of surprise subsided and his heart returned to its normal rhythm, he reflected on his relationship with the woman. Above all, he felt heartbroken and betrayed. He thought she was a coworker; she wasn’t. He thought she loved him; she didn't. She was merely part of an impersonal sting operation arranged by a consulting firm with ties to management. They selected her based on the union leader's profile, which was built from a detailed dossier of his life. In cold, digital bits, the dossier laid bare the man's most private thoughts, preferences, and insecurities. It included his search history, social media activity, and even his Spotify playlists, all of which were analyzed by AI and used to identify and exploit his vulnerabilities. In the end, management didn’t need to out-negotiate him. They already owned the script.

Of course, this is just a story—for now. But like all good fiction, it’s built on a terrifyingly real foundation. This foundation is the logical conclusion of a system where vast, interconnected digital dossiers are quietly built on every citizen. You may not know it, but the engine powering this future is already under construction. You may have heard about it in the news, but you may not know what's actually taking place behind the scenes and out of sight. It's called the Department of Government Efficiency—or DOGE.

DOGE is a federal initiative launched by the Trump Administration under Elon Musk's leadership. Despite its stated goal of making government more efficient, its true purpose is to consolidate data systems across agencies, streamlining access under the elusive pretense of efficiency and modernization. Already, it has probed into several departments, including Social Security, IRS, ICE, NLRB, Customs and Border Protection, Homeland Security, and more. It’s an information collection operation, not a quest for government efficiency.

As is always the case with information, when it falls into the wrong hands, it’s misused to implement control, not efficiency. With no meaningful oversight, no transparency regarding who has access to what, and no limits on how that data can be used, DOGE opens the door to the widespread manipulation of union leaders, utility workers, politicians, priests, police officers, community planners, and more.

It’s not hard to imagine how such a system could be misused. For example, a journalist critical of a rising political figure is discredited when his private medical history mysteriously appears online. Or consider a judge known for standing up to corporate interests suddenly rules differently after a copy of his personal communications is delivered to his office, along with a threatening note. Or consider a whistleblower who hesitates to come forward after receiving anonymous text messages quoting her confidential therapy notes.

All of this is possible when surveillance becomes centralized, which is the primary goal of DOGE. And worse, we’re growing numb to it. We’ve already normalized data mining for online shopping and social media engagement. But the stakes are no longer just about targeted ads—they’re about democracy, autonomy, control, and privacy.

The Cold War gave us vivid examples of how spies manipulated their targets. They turned seduction, blackmail, and ego-stroking into a science. Today, those same tactics require no trench coats or dead drops. They merely require a search bar, a facial recognition scan, and a database query. The tools of surveillance have evolved, but the goals remain the same: influence, leverage, and most of all, control.

Most people won’t be targets, but that’s not the point. Anyone can become a target. And when they do, those with access to your dossier can pull the strings, unchallenged. You won't even know what's happening until it's too late.

That union leader? Well, he's a fictional character. But in this dangerous new world of unregulated information consolidation, he's rapidly becoming a real person. If we remain indifferent to the quiet consolidation of our digital lives, dismissing DOGE as simply an army of pimple-faced teenage hackers, we unwittingly turn our backs on the real threat. There isn't much we can do about the march of technology, but there’s a lot we can do about who has access to it and who oversees its use.

For more information on the recent horrific abuse of our private information, please visit the following sites:

Wired: DOGE Is Building a Master Database to Surveil and Track Immigrants

NextGov: DOGE is building a ‘master database’ of sensitive information, top Oversight Democrat says

NPR: A whistleblower's disclosure details how DOGE may have taken sensitive labor data