Nicole M. Bennett, Indiana University A whistleblower at the National Labor Relations Board reported an unusual spike in potentially sensitive data flowing out of the agency’s network in early March 2025 when staffers from the Department of Government Efficiency, which goes by DOGE, were granted access to the agency’s databases. On April 7, the Department of Homeland Security gained access to Internal Revenue Service tax data. These seemingly unrelated events are examples of recent developments in the transformation of the structure and purpose of federal government data repositories. I am a researcher who studies the intersection of migration, data governance and digital technologies. I’m tracking how data that people provide to U.S. government agencies for public services such as tax filing, health care enrollment, unemployment assistance and education support is increasingly being redirected toward surveillance and law enforcement. Originally collected to facilitate health care, eligibility for services and the administration of public services, this information is now shared across government agencies and with private companies, reshaping the infrastructure of public services into a mechanism of control. Once confined to separate bureaucracies, data now flows freely through a network of interagency agreements, outsourcing contracts and commercial partnerships built up in recent decades. These data-sharing arrangements often take place outside public scrutiny, driven by national security justifications, fraud prevention initiatives and digital modernization efforts. The result is that the structure of government is quietly transforming into an integrated surveillance apparatus, capable of monitoring, predicting and flagging behavior at an unprecedented scale. Executive orders signed by President Donald Trump aim to remove remaining institutional and legal barriers to completing this massive surveillance system.

DOGE and the private sector

Central to this transformation is DOGE, which is tasked via an executive order to “promote inter-operability between agency networks and systems, ensure data integrity, and facilitate responsible data collection and synchronization.” An additional executive order calls for the federal government to eliminate its information silos. By building interoperable systems, DOGE can enable real-time, cross-agency access to sensitive information and create a centralized database on people within the U.S. These developments are framed as administrative streamlining but lay the groundwork for mass surveillance. Key to this data repurposing are public-private partnerships. The DHS and other agencies have turned to third-party contractors and data brokers to bypass direct restrictions. These intermediaries also consolidate data from social media, utility companies, supermarkets and many other sources, enabling enforcement agencies to construct detailed digital profiles of people without explicit consent or judicial oversight. Palantir, a private data firm and prominent federal contractor, supplies investigative platforms to agencies such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Department of Defense, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Internal Revenue Service. These platforms aggregate data from various sources – driver’s license photos, social services, financial information, educational data – and present it in centralized dashboards designed for predictive policing and algorithmic profiling. These tools extend government reach in ways that challenge existing norms of privacy and consent.

The role of AI

Artificial intelligence has further accelerated this shift. Predictive algorithms now scan vast amounts of data to generate risk scores, detect anomalies and flag potential threats. These systems ingest data from school enrollment records, housing applications, utility usage and even social media, all made available through contracts with data brokers and tech companies. Because these systems rely on machine learning, their inner workings are often proprietary, unexplainable and beyond meaningful public accountability.

Sometimes the results are inaccurate, generated by AI hallucinations – responses AI systems produce that sound convincing but are incorrect, made up or irrelevant. Minor data discrepancies can lead to major consequences: job loss, denial of benefits and wrongful targeting in law enforcement operations. Once flagged, individuals rarely have a clear pathway to contest the system’s conclusions.

Digital profiling

Participation in civic life, applying for a loan, seeking disaster relief and requesting student aid now contribute to a person’s digital footprint. Government entities could later interpret that data in ways that allow them to deny access to assistance. Data collected under the banner of care could be mined for evidence to justify placing someone under surveillance. And with growing dependence on private contractors, the boundaries between public governance and corporate surveillance continue to erode. Artificial intelligence, facial recognition systems and predictive profiling systems lack oversight. They also disproportionately affect low-income individuals, immigrants and people of color, who are more frequently flagged as risks. Initially built for benefits verification or crisis response, these data systems now feed into broader surveillance networks. The implications are profound. What began as a system targeting noncitizens and fraud suspects could easily be generalized to everyone in the country.

Eyes on everyone

This is not merely a question of data privacy. It is a broader transformation in the logic of governance. Systems once designed for administration have become tools for tracking and predicting people’s behavior. In this new paradigm, oversight is sparse and accountability is minimal. AI allows for the interpretation of behavioral patterns at scale without direct interrogation or verification. Inferences replace facts. Correlations replace testimony. The risk extends to everyone. While these technologies are often first deployed at the margins of society – against migrants, welfare recipients or those deemed “high risk” – there’s little to limit their scope. As the infrastructure expands, so does its reach into the lives of all citizens. With every form submitted, interaction logged and device used, a digital profile deepens, often out of sight. The infrastructure for pervasive surveillance is in place. What remains uncertain is how far it will be allowed to go. Nicole M. Bennett, Ph.D. Candidate in Geography and Assistant Director at the Center for Refugee Studies, Indiana University This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Molly Jackson, The Conversation Pope Francis, whose papacy blended tradition with pushes for inclusion and reform, died on April, 21, 2025 – Easter Monday – at the age of 88. Here we spotlight five stories from The Conversation’s archive about his roots, faith, leadership and legacy.

1. A Jesuit pope

Jorge Mario Bergoglio became a pope of many firsts: the first modern pope from outside Europe, the first whose papal name honors St. Francis of Assisi, and the first Jesuit – a Catholic religious order founded in the 16th century. Those Jesuit roots shed light on Pope Francis’ approach to some of the world’s most pressing problems, argues Timothy Gabrielli, a theologian at the University of Dayton. Gabrielli highlights the Jesuits’ “Spiritual Exercises,” which prompt Catholics to deepen their relationship with God and carefully discern how to respond to problems. He argues that this spiritual pattern of looking beyond “presenting problems” to the deeper roots comes through in Francis’ writings, shaping the pope’s response to everything from climate change and inequality to clerical sex abuse.

2. LGBTQ+ issues

Early on in his papacy, Francis famously told an interviewer, “If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?” Over the years, he has repeatedly called on Catholics to love LGBTQ+ people and spoken against laws that target them.

But “Francis’ inclusiveness is not actually radical,” explains Steven Millies, a scholar at the Catholic Theological Union. “His remarks generally correspond to what the church teaches and calls on Catholics to do,” without changing doctrine – such as that marriage is only between a man and a woman. Rather, Francis’ comments “express what the Catholic Church says about human dignity,” Millies writes. “Francis is calling on Catholics to take note that they should be concerned about justice for all people.”

3. Asking forgiveness

At times, Francis did something that was once unthinkable for a pope: He apologized. He was not the first pontiff to do so, however. Pope John Paul II declared a sweeping “Day of Pardon” in 2000, asking forgiveness for the church’s sins, and Pope Benedict XVI apologized to victims of sexual abuse. During Francis’ papacy, he acknowledged the church’s historic role in Canada’s residential school system for Indigenous children and apologized for abuses in the system. But what does it mean for a pope to say, “I’m sorry”?

Annie Selak, a theologian at Georgetown University, unpacks the history and significance of papal apologies, which can speak for the entire church, past and present. Often, she notes, statements skirt an actual admission of wrongdoing. Still, apologies “do say something important,” Selak writes. A pope “apologizes both to the church and on behalf of the church to the world. These apologies are necessary starting points on the path to forgiveness and healing.”

4. A church that listens

Many popes convene meetings of the Synod of Bishops to advise the Vatican on church governance. But under Francis, these gatherings took on special meaning. The Synod on Synodality was a multiyear, worldwide conversation where Catholics could share concerns and challenges with local church leaders, informing the topics synod participants would eventually discuss in Rome. What’s more, the synod’s voting members included not only bishops but lay Catholics – a first for the church.

The process “pictures the Catholic Church not as a top-down hierarchy but rather as an open conversation,” writes University of Dayton religious studies scholar Daniel Speed Thompson – one in which everyone in the church has a voice and listens to others’ voices.

5. Global dance

In 2024, University of Notre Dame professor David Lantigua had a cup of maté tea with some “porteños,” as people from Buenos Aires are known. They shared a surprising take on the Argentine pope: “a theologian of the tango.”

Francis does love the dance – in 2014, thousands of Catholics tangoed in St. Peter’s Square to honor his birthday. But there’s more to it, Lantigua explains. Francis’ vision for the church was “based on relationships of trust and solidarity,” like a pair of dance partners. And part of his task as pope was to “tango” with all the world’s Catholics, carefully navigating culture wars and an increasingly diverse church. Francis was “less interested in ivory tower theology than the faith of people on the streets,” where Argentina’s beloved dance was born. This story is a roundup of articles from The Conversation’s archives. Molly Jackson, Religion and Ethics Editor, The Conversation This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Justin de Benedictis-Kessner, Harvard Kennedy School and Christopher S. Warshaw, George Washington University Following George Floyd’s death at the hands of police in Minneapolis in 2020, the U.S. has undergone a national reckoning over crime prevention and police reform. Across the country, calls went out from activists to rethink the scope and role of the police. Some on the left vowed to “defund” the police. Others on the right promised to instead “back the blue” and maintain or increase police funding. This rhetorical tug-of-war unfolded while many cities across the country grappled with spiking crime rates during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Blaming crime on Democratic city leaders was a centerpiece of Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. He repeatedly made claims about crime spikes in recent years without evidence or context. More recently, Republican congressional leaders have called several Democratic mayors from across the country to testify before Congress about their sanctuary city policies that are aimed at protecting noncitizens from deportation. These congressional politicians have asserted that these Democratic mayors – Brandon Johnson of Chicago, Mike Johnston of Denver, Michelle Wu of Boston, and Eric Adams of New York – have “created a public safety nightmare” in their cities by allowing immigrants without legal authorization to stay there. Journalists and politicians on both sides of the aisle have claimed that local election results over the past four years in places like San Francisco and Los Angeles reflect a widespread frustration with Democratic policies on crime in cities. Under this argument, Democratic city leaders need to change their approach on crime to satisfy voters. It’s become a political axiom of sorts that policies championed largely by Democratic city leaders over the past half decade have resulted in rising crime levels. As researchers of politics and public policy, we wanted to figure out if that was true.

Neither party does a better job

As any student of introductory statistics learns, correlation doesn’t imply causation. Looking at increases or decreases in crime rates in Republican or Democratic cities and claiming either party is to blame would be making exactly this error: confusing correlation with causation. We put to the test the argument that one side or the other is better at fighting crime in our research published in January 2025. By employing three decades of data on mayoral elections from across the country, we were able to disentangle city leaders’ partisanship from other features of cities. Contrary to much of the political rhetoric and media coverage aimed at most Americans, our results show that neither party is doing a better job at actually causing crime to decrease. In Dallas, Mayor Eric Johnson has claimed that Democratic leaders aren’t taking public safety seriously and that the Democratic Party is “with the criminals.” Johnson switched from being a Democrat to a Republican in 2023 and attributes his decision at least partially to this partisan difference on crime and policing and the seriousness with which he takes this policy issue. But our research shows that Johnson’s and others’ claims about Democratic cities becoming more dangerous just aren’t true: Mayors from the Democratic Party aren’t making cities any more – or less – dangerous than mayors from the Republican Party. Nor, it turns out, is there any support for claims by some progressive Democrats that they would reduce the role – and enormous budgets – of police departments in cities across the country. When we examined the number of sworn police officers in cities and how much money those cities spend on the police, Democratic and Republican mayors alike have had surprisingly little influence on police department budgets or sizes. In other words, Democrats aren’t cutting police budgets, nor are Republicans increasing police budgets. Most cities have increased police budgets in the past few years, possibly due to pressure from police unions.

‘Crime is nonpartisan’

It turns out that campaign promises from both sides of the partisan aisle about crime and policing have little bearing on what’s happening on the ground in most cities and police departments across the country. Neither party is doing a better job at reducing crime. Nor is either party actually addressing the ballooning financial cost of local police forces in the U.S., nor the long-term reputational costs from police misconduct for trust in the police and government more broadly. As others have said: crime is nonpartisan. Crime has decreased across the U.S. during the past three decades overall, and the isolated cities where crime has increased recently can reverse these temporary trends. Partisan blame narratives do little to actually lower crime and make neighborhoods safer, though. There are real evidence-backed policies that reduce crime – such as youth jobs programs in Chicago and Boston. Other policies reduce racial disparities in the criminal justice system – such as alternative 911 response programs that use unarmed behavioral health workers to respond to some types of emergencies. These policies and interventions might not be as slogan-worthy as “defund the police” or “back the blue.” Nor is implementing these policies as politically convenient as blaming sanctuary city mayors. But research shows that they work and can move cities toward the shared goal of improved public safety for their residents. Justin de Benedictis-Kessner, Associate Professor of Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School and Christopher S. Warshaw, Professor of Political Science, George Washington University This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.