> The classic example here is what happens when someone is being stalked by an abusive ex-partner who works in law enforcement and has access to those databases.

There’s a world of difference between a government using legally collected data for multiple purposes and an individual abusing their position purely for personal reasons.

The parent's example is of an individual using that "legal" state collected data for nefarious purposes. Once it's collected, anyone who accesses it is a threat vector. Also, governments (including/especially the US) have historically killed, imprisoned and tortured millions and millions of people. There's nothing to be gained by an individual for allowing government access to their data.

That difference is looking very thin right now.

Is this legal though?

& effectively if there is no checks on this is there actually a difference? There only difference is that the threat is to an entire cohort rather than an individual.

At this moment, the primary difference appears to be scale.

When did legality make something right?

The whole social battle is a constant attempt to align our laws and values as a society. It's why we create new laws. It's why we overturn old laws. You can't just abdicate your morals and let the law decide for you. That's not a system of democracy, that's a system of tyranny.

The privacy focused crowd often mentions "turnkey tyranny" as a major motivation. A tyrant who comes to power and changes the laws. A tyrant who comes to power and uses the existing tooling beyond what that tooling was ever intended for.

The law isn't what makes something right or wrong. I can't tell you what is, you'll have to use your brain and heart to figure that one out.

Musk and his flying monkeys came in with hard drives and sucked up all the data from all the agencies they had access to and installed software of some kind, likely containing backdoors. Even though each agency had remit for the data it maintained, they had been intentionally firewalled to prevent exactly what Palantir is doing.

There is also a world of difference between a government using data to carry out its various roles in service of the nation and a government using data to terrorize communities for the sadistic whims of its leadership.

Think I'm being hyperbolic? In Trump's first term fewer than 1M were deported. In Obama's eight years as president, 3.1M people were deported without the "techniques" we are witnessing.