Since 1934, we have known that Santa Claus made a list and checked it twice. Santa had been doing this in secret, but Haven Gillespie and J. Fred Coots were the whistleblowers who wrote about Santa’s list of good and naughty boys and girls. They put this information in song lyrics in Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town. Eddie Cantor sang the song for the first time on his radio show in November of 1934. Santa’s naughty/nice list was based on verified (parental) facts and verified not once, but twice. Oh, if only our government were as conscientious as Santa.
The Trump administration has been systematically gathering reams of data on everyone in the US. It seems that one of the many insidious things included in the Big Beautiful Bill passed in 2025, was a funding effort to equip Big Brother with a searchable database for use by the Trump government across all agencies. The New York Times identified at least 314 pieces of information available across various government databases that the government could now put into one single bin. We all know how well the government protects its data. Did Michael Waltz really add a reporter to a Signal chat where he announced plans for an upcoming military strike on Yemen? Yes, he did. Feel better?
To consolodate this data, they repurposed the DHS Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) program information. They have aggregated Social Security, IRS, and other government databases that have been hoovered up with the help of DOGE and other efforts. They have even gone outside government sources and recently sued the University of Pennsylvania to force it to hand over a list of all Jewish faculty, staff, and students. The EEOC also sent text messages to Barnard College current and former students and employees and asked if they were Jewish or Israeli. The pretense was that they wanted to assess if there was discrimination.
To assist in its massive data consolidation of all US citizens, Trump tapped Palantir Technologies, Inc., in an executive order to compile this master list to be shared between all government agencies. At least three DOGE members had worked at Palantir.
The system called Foundry, is being implemented at DHS and Health and Human Services. The product, if Trump gets his way, will have hundreds of data points on all US citizens including their bank account numbers, amount of student debt, and medical data including disability status. The Foundry program uses AI to find patterns in data to draw conclusions from data for security and defense purposes. According to their CEO, Alex Karp, the program is good at “finding hidden things.”
At least 13 former employees of Palantir expressed concern and urged the company to stop its endeavors with Trump. In a signed letter to the company they said, “Data that is collected for one reason should not be repurposed for other uses,” they went on to say, “Combining all that data, even with the noblest of intentions, significantly increases the risk of misuse.”
Similar data aggregations in India and China have resulted in broad behavioral profiling. Palantir is using machine learning to identify patterns, fraud and threats, the religious, racial, economic, and immigration data can introduce biases just like the humans they are trained to analyze. Errors and false positives could flag innocent people that result in ICE or FBI investigations and be used to freeze benefits without recourse. The data sources and algorithms are proprietary and would be difficult to challenge. The erosion of privacy and the normalization of government monitoring would have a chilling effect.
Santa’s list of naughty/nice children resulted in either a toy at Christmas or a lump of coal in a stocking. This massive invasion of privacy and this much data in the hands of politicians bent on achieving dominance, will almost certainly result in its misuse. If anyone thinks the recent collection of voter data by federal mandate isn’t a step in that direction, I hear that George C. Parker has a bridge for sale. Mr. Parker died in 1936 but if you go to Brooklyn, New York, and ask around I’m sure someone will help you.
The federal government is generally prohibited by the Privacy Act of 1974 from using personal information outside the purpose of its initial collection without individual consent. Agencies must publish "routine uses" in the Federal Register, allowing data to be shared only for purposes compatible with the original collection. But we all know what Trump thinks about pesky laws and rules.
The consolidation of both public and private personal information about all citizens of the US into a singular database which can also then be analyzed by AI to draw unvalidated conclusions, which will then be used to initiate other government actions, is Big Brother on steroids. We can all rest assured that, to quote the HAL 9000 in 2001 Space Odyssey, “No 9000 computer has ever made a mistake or distorted information.”
Since we are now watching science fiction evolve into science reality, another quote comes to mind. This one from the sci-fi thriller Westworld where its Arrivals Announcer reassures guests about the safety of the robotic theme park with its iconic line, “Nothing can go wrong.” This is repeated as the theme park’s AI tagline while everything that can go wrong, does. So, in Trumpworld, we can all trust the fact that, “Nothing can go wrong…go wrong…go wrong…”
Postscript: For those who have theorized that Trump’s interest in Greenland was only because he thought Santa lived there, and he wanted his list, you may be on to something. He just killed an old man with white hair and a long white beard in Iran. Trump fears lists, any list, Santa’s, Epstein’s, Putin’s…
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