The Audit Society

Though I am feeling significantly better, I have decided to wait with the running until tomorrow. Instead, I am preparing slides for my upcoming Zoom lecture on the audit society, introducing the students to debates that seem both relevant and completely irrelevant in these DOGE-times, with irrationalism and flip-flopping becoming the norm.

Fun fact. After a decade of wholesale migration to Microsoft’s ecosystem to comply with data privacy laws, Swedish universities and other agencies now face a looming crisis. The regulatory workaround that has allowed GDPR-covered personal data to be transferred to U.S. servers may collapse – thanks to Donald Trump firing all Democrats from the "Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board". The consequences if this were to happen would be unfathomable as it would take years to find alternative solutions, assuming access to existing systems would be granted in the meantime. Even worse, if the U.S. were to suddenly shut off access (perhaps as a consequence of an escalating trade war), it would simply be game over for government agencies across most Western European countries.

In the non-virtual world, political momentum is finally building around the mass deportation to El Salvador that happened last month (which I wrote about here on Rawls & Me). More specifically, the Supreme Court has ordered the immediate return of one of the deportees, a 29-year-old Salvadoran man with no criminal record, deported under an executive order that many legal scholars argue violates both U.S. asylum law and due process. However, the Trump administration is making it clear that it is no longer executing the law in good faith by suggesting that it has no influence over the sovereign decisions of El Salvador (which it obviously has as proven by Trump’s recent cozy meeting with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele). If allowed to stand, there will be nothing preventing Trump from scooping up basically anyone critical of his administration and sending them off to a ghastly mega-prison in El Salvador.