The Emerging Security State Isn’t So Secure
On September 22, a criminal hacking group called ShinyHunters defaced the FBI’s recruiting website and announced that it held “very sensitive data on almost ALL FBI Agents” and on everyone who had applied to work there. The FBI has confirmed only that it is investigating unauthorized activity on FBIjobs.gov. Reuters could not establish where the data came from, but a sample of roughly 5,000 records, which several outlets judged authentic, appeared to include agents’ home addresses, Social Security numbers, assignments, and in some cases family members’ names.
A week later, the Pentagon disclosed a separate breach. From October 2025 until the following July, unauthorized users had access to unencrypted files in a Defense Manpower Data Center system. The files exposed Social Security numbers and service details for 2.76 million living people and 294,000 who have died. The center holds more than 60 million records on troops, civilian employees, contractors, veterans, and military families.
Earlier this year, Bloomberg reported that the FBI classified a breach of the networks it uses to manage wiretaps and other surveillance as a “major incident.”
These are not peripheral systems. They are the core inventory of a government that increasingly defines itself by what it knows about people.
Consolidating Sensitive Data
In March 2025, President Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to “eliminate information silos” by granting designated officials full access to unclassified government records. To implement this directive, the administration expanded its partnership with Palantir, the data-analytics firm co-founded by Peter Thiel, which deployed its Foundry software across at least four agencies. This expansion was part of an integration of Americans’ medical, financial, and other personal records into interoperable systems. However, the initiative faced significant pushback, with Palantir’s own engineers raising concerns about consolidating such massive amounts of sensitive data. Republicans also objected to the overreach.
Indeed, our government is recast as a data warehouse built by private contractors and run by algorithms no voter chose. Congress never voted to restructure the federal government this way. The shift came through executive orders and procurement contracts, shaped by a small circle of tech billionaires whose influence reaches leaders of both parties. When the work of governing moves into systems the public can neither see nor vote on, representative government loses its substance.
Centralization Makes a Bigger Target
A state that insists on knowing everything about its citizens owes them, at minimum, the competence to protect what it takes. The FBI could not secure the identities of its own agents. The Pentagon left millions of Social Security numbers unencrypted for nine months before noticing. Centralizing data does not make it safer; it makes a bigger target. Former FBI cyber official Cynthia Kaiser warned that criminals and foreign nation-states could use the stolen data to target agents and their families — it’s not difficult to imagine that scenario applied to each American’s merged medical and financial file.
The answer is not a better firewall. It is less data, held in fewer hands, under laws Congress writes and enforced by officials whom voters can remove. A government run by algorithm is no longer a representative government — it has become an illegitimate authoritarian administrative model, and easy pickings for criminal cartels and foreign nations with state-of-the-art hacking units.
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