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by Ed Tibbetts

Iowa is helping the Trump administration build a national citizen registry.

Groups worry the registry threatens the privacy of millions of Americans

Brenna Bird buried the news. I can understand why.

No self-respecting right-winger would want to be seen backing a centralized citizen registry in Washington, DC.

For as long as I can remember, conservatives were in the vanguard of opposing such big government excesses. Yet, here is Iowa’s attorney general—along with Secretary of State Paul Pate—actually helping to build what some critics are likening to a super database for Big Brother.

Iowa’s involvement in this pursuit was revealed on Monday, when Bird and Pate bragged about an agreement with the Trump administration. They called it a victory for election integrity. But they conveniently failed to explain a separate part of the deal. The news organization Stateline reported that Iowa, Florida, Ohio and Indiana also agreed as part of the bargain to assist the federal government’s effort to scoop up the driver’s license records of Americans now being held in a nationwide law enforcement computer network.

The pursuit of this detailed personal data is part of the Trump administration’s effort to convert the federal Department of Homeland Security’s SAVE program into what is, essentially, a national citizen data bank.

Originally, the SAVE program was built to ensure applicants for government benefits were eligible citizens. But the new Trump initiative, which has been under-reported in the mainstream news media, has been going on for several months and is currently the subject of a court challenge.

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