#GamersNexus once again prove themselves as among the most important and professional of US journalists today, reporting on the connections of #Discord and its upcoming #ageVerification and #chatControl imposition to technofeudal oligarch #PeterThiel, private #panopticon maker and seller #Palantir, leading anti-#privacy UK politician and lesser oligarch Joanna Shields, child-corralling company k-ID, and even (indirectly, through Thiel) Jeffery #Epstein.
As always with GN videos since the Nvidia/Bloomberg incident, download and back up the video ahead of vexatious DMCA abuses, to ensure a Streisand effect if the oligarchs try to censor it.
Hey, speaking of #infosec disasters on the horizon... #Discord has announced global age verification. You know, face scans and ID.
Discord. The company that less than six months ago (October 2025) had an ID verification breach that exposed government-issued ID photos—including driver’s licenses and passports—of approximately 70,000 users.
people with poor values can do well in politics, if they play on resentment (as in australia and usa)
some australian polticians would say they are not about resentment but about what is right and fair. they sound like two year olds squabbling in a sand box.
here, ricky from council estate media talks about the UK, where the Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, is talking up paranoia on behalf of the Labour government.
“”Disturbingly, the home secretary wants to use technology such as facial recognition and AI to ensure the state has eyes everywhere at all times. Mahmoud recently said in a BBC interview:
“Let me say I make no apology for rolling out this technology... What I would say to people that are very motivated by sort of campaigning on civil liberties is that you can’t enjoy any of your liberties in any country if you’re not safe.””
#Amazon is now providing access to #Ring cameras via the privacy disaster that is the #Flock license plate reading network. Amazon and Flock are building a #surveillance network for profit.
Flock boasts that their service does not have facial recognition, but—surprise!—RING DOES. It’s only a matter of time until facial recognition data is collated and made searchable.
While homeowners can do whatever they want with their property, sending doorbell video to the cloud exposes EVERYONE ELSE IN SIGHT to surveillance. Every delivery person, every passerby, everyone visible on the sidewalk gets slurped up into the #panopticon whether they like it or net.
“The Patriot Act vastly expanded our domestic security apparatus and allowed the government to surveil Americans under the guise of combating terrorism. Americans are historically fine with castrating their own civil liberties, because we'd rather feel safe than actually be free, especially when our illusory feelings of safety can come at the expense of people of color, immigrants, and Muslims--you know, "them.”
― Wajahat Ali, Go Back to Where You Came From: And Other Helpful Recommendations on How to Become American
I'd like to start by revisiting an important story from last week, because I think it directly exemplifies both the vast expansion of the fascist panopticon occurring under Trump and his Gestapo, as well as the way this project is being washed through a still frightfully racist public consciousness, under the guise of "immigration policy" and the ethnic cleansing project in America.
As originally reported by the Associated Press, the Trump-controlled Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services are now sharing the personal data of every single person enrolled on Medicaid, with ICE. This decision thus gives a fascist secret police force loyal only to Trump and his executive branch, access to a trove of highly personal data from a staggering seventy-nine million Americans. That last part is important too, because while the Trumpenreich is insisting the purpose of this data sharing is to help the Gestapo root out migrants all over the country, the reality is that undocumented people in the US don't have access to Medicaid.
Let's look at this Common Dreams post from July 17th, and then talk about why I don't think this is any sort of "mistake" on the fascist Trumpenreich's part at all.
'Weaponization of Data': Trump Admin Gives ICE Personal Info of 79 Million Medicaid Recipients
"But under Monday's agreement, the AP says, the Department of Homeland Security "will use the data to identify, for deportation purposes, people who [are] in the country illegally."
However, nearly everyone enrolled in Medicaid is either an American citizen or other legal resident.
Given that the president has made very clear his intent to begin denaturalizing and deporting American citizens, the handing of tens of millions of people's sensitive information to ICE is causing widespread alarm.
"Trump is letting ICE track Americans using their personal and private Medicaid health data. Undocumented immigrants aren't eligible to receive Medicaid, but other people they want to target and track are," said Melanie D'Arrigo, the executive director of the the Campaign for New York Health. "They're not going to stop at immigrants."
It doesn't take a genius to figure out a fascist government collecting personally-identifying data from healthcare program only American citizens are eligible for, isn't doing so for the purpose of targeting undocumented migrants. Despite nativist conspiracies about "illegal aliens stealing our healthcare" (a laughable concept given the state of American "healthcare"), Medicaid fraud by undocumented migrants its virtually nonexistent; and six months into Trump's second presidency, I'm quite certain the President and all of his nazi minions in the executive branch know that. So Trump is giving the Gestapo this data, including "names, addresses, birth dates. ethnic and racial information, as well as Social Security numbers" to target Americans.
What type of Americans? Given that the regime and its fascist propaganda minions in the discourse are now arguing for their right to denaturalize American citizens born in other countries, I think you can bet on the nazis starting with naturalized immigrants in general. Particularly nonwhite immigrants, since this is an ethnonationalist project to whiten US demographics by force, even if nobody wants to admit it.
As I've discussed in a recent article however, the methods by which the Trump regime is weaponizing America's vague and robust anti-terrorism laws to persecute anyone who opposes the fascist agenda, points towards a much broader program of creating stateless people out of the regime's enemies, regardless of where they happen to have been born. In other words, whatever the Gestapo is doing with the data Trump gave them today, does not preclude the Trumpenreich's secret police from using that data to target anyone the nazis want to find at a later date. Medicaid is now officially spying on you for the nazis, whether they have an official reason to want your data, or not.
I cannot stress enough the degree to which this really isn't a discussion about privacy rights and potential authoritarian outcomes anymore. The Trumpenreich is an openly fascist regime, that through its allies at the top of the American judiciary, is rapidly transforming the United States into an executive branch dictatorship with theocratic characteristics. We don't have to ask hypotheticals about whether or not this government and its Gestapo will use our data to target Trump's political enemies; both Project 2025 and the regime's actions make it clear they are already doing so. The integration of the panopticon, with his loyal Gestapo is a necessary precursor to ruling as a fascist dictator under a perpetual state of martial law. It would be foolish to pretend at this late an hour, the regime has any other purposes for the actions they're undertaking now.
A collection of my Fediverse blog posts about fascism and current events, published from April 13th to 15th, 2025. Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, I wrote a lot about the Trump regime, ICE, and nazi billionaires.
"If they get away with this, or even if they can just successfully use it to justify applying government pressure against an extremely large, well-funded news organization, there’s no limit to how far these nazis will take this. This is how a fascist regime transforms the entire media environment into pro-Trump, state news outlets and it won’t just stop with the Fox-ification of media orgs either."
Trump's recent executive order to "unleash" police in America is actually a paint-by-numbers recipe for an authoritarian police state operating under a perpetual condition of martial law; and given the Swine Emperor's history, that should alarm Americans more than their media is letting on.
"Even if we didn’t know Trump is an unhinged fascist with a penchant for punitive violence, the combination of material state support for police criminality, arming up and training to occupy American communities, and the unification of military, police, and national security assets, including personnel apparently, into a single ad-hoc domestic security force would all be ominous signs of an impending dictatorship under martial law. If I’m being honest I don’t think the author of this piece is being alarmist enough given the scope of this executive order."
News that Trump was the tapping objectively evil Peter-Thiel affiliated contractor Palantir to help him unlock the US government's vast troves of data on everyone in the country would have been ominous at the best of times. Set against the backdrop of the Pork Reich's continued expansion of the surveillance panopticon and ongoing attempts to equate opposition to the Trump regime's agenda with terrorism however, it's downright terrifying.
"They’re calling protestors terrorists, implying that speaking out against fascist mass deportations and a US-backed genocide is material support for terrorism, and plotting to use FARA and RICO laws to target a broadly-defined “radical left” in America. Now, the Pork Reich and one of the most amoral tech companies on Earth are teaming up to automate sorting and compiling the data Trump needs to conduct widespread repression, detainment, and ideological purges. Unless you’ve been living in a cave since Trump first strolled down that escalator to announce his presidential ambitions in late 2015, it should be pretty obvious to you that this is about more than mass deportations and fighting “terrorists.”
(Imagine what a different world we’d be living in today if folks in tech had heeded our warnings back then. But I guess they were too busy making mint.)
PS. yt-dlp is your friend (on Mac: brew install yt-dlp). Also make sure you have ffmpeg installed (brew install ffmpeg). Finally, I had to manually tell yt-dlp where to find ffmpeg although your mileage may vary based on installation method: yt-dlp "<URL>" --write-subs --ffmpeg-location=/opt/homebrew/bin/ffmpeg (--write-subs saves the subtitles if there are any to a file in a format you can use on the web).
“Border controls are most severely deployed by those Western regimes that create mass displacement, and are most severely deployed against those whose very recourse to migration results from the ravages of capital and military occupations. . . We are all, therefore, simultaneously separated by and bound together by the violences of border imperialism.”
Of course, the other shoe of the regime's proposed online surveillance of immigrants using legal pathways to work, study, and reside in the United States, would eventually drop; the Department of Homeland Security has announced that it is now monitoring the social media activity of law abiding immigrants for "antisemitism" - a word that no longer has meaning when used by a regime (itself littered with antisemites and nazis) that seems to think criticizing a genocide, opposing US funding for Israel's bloodthirsty fascist government, and saying Palestinians have human rights too, is antisemitism.
DHS Announces It’s Surveilling Immigrants’ Social Media for “Antisemitism”
"In a chilling statement, DHS Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin effectively said that the administration is carving out an exception to free speech rights to punish certain viewpoints.
Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem “has made it clear that anyone who thinks they can come to America and hide behind the First Amendment to advocate for anti-Semitic violence and terrorism — think again. You are not welcome here,” McLaughlin said.
Advocates for Palestinian rights noted that the clear goal of the administration is to suppress speech critical of Israel, as well as punish Muslim and Arab rights groups — similar to the implementation of the Patriot Act after 9/11.
“It doesn’t matter what you actually say. We are at the point where anything short of pledging allegiance to Israel is, in the eyes of the U.S. government and its many institutions, a criminal offense worthy of the infliction of state violence,” said media analyst Sana Saeed on social media."
I don't think anyone with a functioning brain needs to be told that a Trumpenreich regime full of literal fucking nazis, does not at all care about antisemitism. What it does care about is protecting its investment in a MENA region client state it uses to ensure American dominance of fossil fuel availability, and the US-funded genocide of Palestinians that state, Israel, is conducting in Gaza. Furthermore, the Pork Reich is also very concerned with creating ideological justification to unleash its Gestapo (ICE) on foreign students and Muslims in general, as part of a white nationalist agenda to establish America as an ethnostate.
The story here however isn't really about the hypocrisy of a fascist regime hell bent on both punishing dissent and bleaching the demographics of the American population; when you factor in the regime's use of online surveillance, AI technology, and ICE's Investigative Case Management database, what we're looking at here is the expansion of our police state panopticon during a period where the US government under Trump is actively looking to obliterate civil rights and apply its fascist ideological policing policies to an ever widening circle of people; a circle that consists of both immigrants and "natural born" US Citizens. You should care about this not just because immigrants are human beings who have rights just like anyone born in the US does, but because this digitized fascist repression does not have to, and almost certainly will not, stop with immigrants; who it must again be pointed out, are in the US legally and are actually "following the process" to study, work, and reside in the country.
In what must be understood as a tightening of the digital panopticon the fascist Trump regime is deploying to target migrants, the administration has negotiated an agreement between ICE and the IRS to share tax data with the American Gestapo for the purpose of facilitating mass deportations, without the consent of the IRS's acting commissioner - who has since resigned in protest:
IRS agrees to share tax information of undocumented immigrants with Ice
"A memorandum of understanding between the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the IRS was filed late on Monday in a case brought by immigrants’ rights groups Centro de Trabajadores Unidos and Immigrant Solidarity DuPage, represented by Public Citizen and other lawyers. The memo says Ice can request information from the IRS for its investigations into undocumented immigrants who have not left the country after receiving a final order of removal from a judge. It is signed by the treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, and the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem.
The Washington Post reported on Tuesday evening that the acting IRS commissioner, Melanie Krause, is planning to resign, in part over being bypassed in the decision.
The lawsuit over the plans to share IRS information, filed in March, says Internal Revenue Code makes clear that tax records for all taxpayers must be confidential, disclosed only in ways authorized by statute.
“Taxpayer privacy is a cornerstone of the US tax system,” said Lisa Gilbert, co-president of Public Citizen. “This movement by the IRS is an unprecedented breach of taxpayer privacy laws – confidentiality which has been respected by both political parties for decades.”
Although every expansion of the regime's ability to hunt down and target migrants is an important stepping stone to a white nationalist dictatorship, this policy is particularly cruel and nonsensical. For starters, it deprives the US government of tax revenue because an overwhelming number of undocumented people do in fact pay their taxes. More importantly however, the US government and the IRS have been encouraging migrants to do so for decades, under the promise that this information won't be used to target and deport them. In one single agreement signed by two members of the Trumpenreich, the US government has simultaneously harmed the American people, and forced more migrants further underground, to break our collective promise to folks who otherwise would have stayed below the radar:
"The Trump administration has been working to get the IRS and Ice to agree on some information sharing for weeks, a way to use tax filings to aid in his mass deportations. The Washington Post reported on a draft of the agreement in March, citing current and former IRS workers who said the move would be an unprecedented change in access to tax records and upend immigrants’ willingness to file taxes.
“It is a complete betrayal of 30 years of the government telling immigrants to file their taxes,” one former IRS official told the Washington Post."
Thanks to a Trump-appointed judge once again playing legal Simon Says, the Trumpenreich has taken yet another step towards a type of apartheid system and the mass deportation of migrants who overwhelmingly represent no threat to America. Ruling that the rights groups opposing the move have no standing to challenge it, Judge Trevor Neil McFadden has allowed the Trump regime to move forward with a requirement that all noncitizens register with a government hell bent on enacting mass deportations, and carry documentary proof of registration or suffer criminal consequences.
Judge allows requirement that everyone in the US illegally must register to move forward
"While questions remain about how the registration requirement will function, its impact is potentially far-reaching. The Trump administration — which has worked to make good on campaign promises of mass deportations — has said between 2.2 million and 3.2 million people could be affected.
One of the groups that sued, the National Immigration Law Center, called the Thursday ruling “disappointing” in a statement.
“This disappointing ruling unfortunately means that, for now, Trump’s scheme to force people into an impossible choice moves forward. As we weigh next steps in our case, we urge affected community members to consult with an immigration attorney to better understand the consequences of registering or not,” said Nicholas Espíritu, deputy legal director at National Immigration Law Center.
Homeland Security officials announced Feb. 25 that it was mandating that all people in the United States illegally register with the federal government, and said those who didn’t self-report could face fines or prosecution. Failure to register is considered a crime, and people will be required to carry registration documents with them or risk prison time and fines.
Registration will be mandatory for everyone 14 and older without legal status. People registering have to provide their fingerprints and address, and parents and guardians of anyone under age 14 must ensure they registered."
This one is a little complicated because the Trump administration has argued that this requirement has existed for decades, but just wasn't being enforced. As the article notes, there's some truth to that line of (motivated) reasoning, but the reality is that these rules haven't been enforced since almost immediately after they were introduced in the 1940's because by and large, migrants are not a criminal threat to the United States. Furthermore the requirement to provide fingerprints and carry documentation of registration or face criminal penalties is as far as I know, a new and disturbing wrinkle the regime has thrown in to make their arguments that they're only deporting "criminals" a de facto reality in retrospect. As any student of history can tell you, if law enforcement can demand "papers, please" and then lock you up for not producing them, what you're talking about is the criminalization of human beings in something akin to an apartheid system, and a racialized legal pretext to arbitrarily detain anyone who looks like (this is crucial) they might be a foreign national; since after all, the authorities won't know if you have "papers" until they ask, and not having papers will be treated as a crime until such a time as you can prove that you (even US citizens of the wrong complexion) aren't legally obligated to carry them.
Of course, none of this is happening in a vacuum, and the reality is that no matter what the rules say, this is an openly white nationalist government that has falsely argued migrants don't have any Constitutionally protected rights, and have already begun the process of revoking legal status for hundreds if not thousands of people lawfully residing in the United States, while openly deploying deportation to engage in fascist ideological policing to target its perceived enemies. This is a regime that hates migrants, does not care if they "follow the rules," is willing to play legal Calvinball to deport literally anyone who isn't white and a natural born citizen, and has overwhelmingly targeted immigrants following the legal process to remain in the US as a sort of "low hanging fruit" to easily generate big numbers of deportations to brag about to its deeply racist base of support. They are going to use this registration system to locate and detain migrants for mass deportation, and they know full well you'd have to be some kind of crazy to willingly turn over your location and identity to a nativist regime dead set on bleaching the American population demographics through the force of law. What the administration is doing here is purposely criminalizing migrants to justify more and more repressive crackdowns on folks it has now effectively made truly "illegal."
Creeping into the fifth month of the second Trump era, I'm starting to identify patterns in how the Pork Reich operates to prosecute the regime's fascist agenda. While it's certainly true that the administration's assault on judicial oversight, civil rights legislation, and efforts to consolidate power in the executive branch are being conducted at blinding speed, there are still a couple of key elements of deception they're relying on to accomplish their odious goals.
First, the majority of written orders from this administration, be they executive orders from the President, or internal guidance and instructions within departments in the government, are written in an intentionally vague manner that allows for a broad interpretation of who the government can target for repression and how. This creates plausible deniability for a Trump regime and larger fascist Republican Party that has no problem openly lying into a camera about what they're trying to do, and seemingly paralyzes a corporate media that remains uncomfortable drawing the obvious broader conclusions brought up by everything Trump and his minions do and say.
The second method of deception deployed by the regime to forward its fascist agenda, is to break up schemes, plots, and proposals that would likely generate a tremendous amount of public outrage, into a number of smaller rules, edicts, or guidelines that when taken together, still accomplish the same level of fascist repression and state targeting. A good example of this process in action can be found in the way the Trump regime has effectively justified a mass surveillance program targeting foreign students and scholars, while simultaneously seizing control of the student visa process at the embassy level to conduct fascist ideological screening away from the prying eyes of critics.
Trump Administration Orders Pause on All New Student Visa Interviews
"The State Department cable does not specifically state what the expanded social media screening will look for, although it alludes to President Donald Trump's executive orders aimed at combating terrorism and antisemitism.
Trump's January 29 order titled "Additional Measures to Combat Antisemitism" authorizes the deportation of noncitizen students and others who took part in protests against Israel's war on Gaza, which has killed more than 54,000 Palestinians and is the subject of an International Court of Justice genocide case.
Last month, the Department of Homeland Security announced the launch of a task force to surveil immigrants' social media posts, including those of around 1.5 million foreign students, for alleged antisemitism. While DHS did not say how antisemitism would be defined, critics note that the Trump administration has adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition, which conflates opposition to Zionism—the settler-colonial movement for a Jewish homeland in Palestine—with hatred of Jews.
Earlier this year, the State Department also launched a controversial artificial intelligence-powered "catch and revoke" program to cancel the visas of international students deemed supportive of the Palestinian resistance group Hamas.
Rubio has invoked Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 to designate for deportation pro-Palestine international students who the government admits committed no crimes."
I think this story is the perfect example of the paint by numbers process Trump is employing to install a fascist dictatorship in America because it touches on both types of deception the regime is employing to do so. The announcement that US embassies would halt student visa interviews in anticipation of a vastly expanded social media screening and vetting process of all foreign student applicants must be understood as part of a larger process by which the regime has established a digital panopticon for foreign students studying and residing in the US; ostensibly to "fight antisemitism" which we know means targeting critics of US foreign policy, Israel's genocide in Gaza, or the Trump regime more broadly. If you're a foreign student on US soil, you're already living under a form of surveillance state fascism and reactionary ideological policing.
Which brings us to the vague wording, and potentially broad applications of this ideological screening. As we've learned to watch for from studying the Heritage Foundation's Project Esther, and the Trump administration's clear adherence to its doctrines, there is nothing in any of the administration's orders targeting dissidents that essentializes being pro-Palestine, or anti-genocide. The regime has already asserted the power to define anything as terrorism, or material support, and even casual criticism as being a threat to US national security, so why would they stop at anti-genocide protestors or foreign students at all for that matter?
After Trump won the 2016 election, a few analysts, mostly on the actual left, immediately noted that Trump was now in possession of a vast federal surveillance panopticon, and if the new President was serious about his openly stated authoritarian fantasies, he had a fully-operational modern police state that would make the Stasi green with envy with which to enforce that agenda. In perhaps one of the few lucky breaks Americans who don't want a fascist dictatorship have caught during Trump's time in politics however, Downmarket Mussolini and his minions weren't clued in to the full range of possibilities the pre-existing American security state's digital panopticon had to offer. Trump is after all an aging billionaire nazi who recently admitted that he probably can't drive the Tesla he bough from his "first buddy" Elon Musk because "everything's computer" now.
Unfortunately in a second Trump era bought into being by not only Musk but other "AI" obsessed billionaire broligarch defense contractors as well, it looks like our luck has run out; fueled by automated systems the Trump regime is already engaging in targeted ideological policing in the government, in our universities, and on our social media platforms. Similar forms of data collection and surveillance technology are being employed to identify and hunt down migrants, critics of America's support for Israel, and anti-genocide activists; with ominous signs Americans with disabilities, and trans people may well be next. At an administrative level, the regime has worked toward routing all government data at every possible level to Trump's Gestapo; the government has forced agencies like the IRS and the Social Security Administration to share data with ICE, and the Justice Department under nazi sycophant Pam Bondi has openly threatened Democrat State and Municipal governments that don't put their law enforcement agencies and surveillance system data at the Department of Homeland Security's disposal as the government conducts a racist, immoral, and almost certainly illegal mass depuration scheme nationwide.
Given this integration of multiple enforcement arms of the government towards objectively white nationalist and unconstitutional programs, a recent report that law enforcement officials across the country are sharing AI-powered license lookups with ICE goons is at once predictable, and yet extremely alarming all the same.
Report: State and Local Cops Doing License Plate Lookups for ICE
"Data reviewed by 404 Media found that state and local police are using an artificial-intelligence-powered automatic license plate reader (ALPR) system made by Atlanta-based Flock Safety to perform immigration-related lookups and other actions in service of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) investigations, "giving federal law enforcement side-door access to a tool that it currently does not have a formal contract for," according to report authors Jason Koebler and Joseph Cox.
Koebler and Cox found that Flock Safety's ALRP systems are being used in more than 5,000 communities from coast to coast, where law enforcement agencies have conducted over 4,000 lookups "either at the behest of the federal government or as an 'informal' favor to federal law enforcement."
I think it's important to understand the backstory behind Trump's attempts to recruit US police to enact his fascist agenda in order to really grasp what's going on here; otherwise what is a clear step by step program to integrate the larger American police state into Trump's domestic ethno-nationalist ethnic cleansing project, can look like an ad-hoc informal practice between the feds and local muderpigs who broadly share a duty to uphold white supremacy. As the article notes, Trump issued a day one executive order empowering cops to conduct operations traditional reserved for ICE under the direction of DHS, and the regime has encouraged further cooperation from local law enforcement under a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act; cooperation that has allowed the Gestapo to hover up massive amounts of data about migrants from even designated sanctuary cities.
Finally, the broader context surrounding this story takes us well beyond a question of privacy rights for migrants in America. I have noted in the past that Trump needs to recruit an army for at least two of his clearly identifiable goals; ICE isn't big enough to accomplish mass deportations or police state suppression of Trump's political enemies and its increasingly looking like Pete Hegseth won't be able to deliver the actual army at Der Führer's whim. That makes police the most logical target for collaboration with the regime and the ICE Gestapo, to accomplish those goals. That's why Trump wants to "unleash the police" to enforce martial law, and if this story is any indication, those tendrils of collaboration are growing.
Over the past couple of months I've written a lot about the rapid expansion of the already-formidable American surveillance state under Trump. Unfortunately, because the regime has cloaked this alarming and extremely dangerous expansion of the police state panopticon primarily inside the machinations of its immigration policies and mass deportation schemes, the vast majority of Very Serious People TM in our discourse are not properly assessing the danger this represents. Some might call that "ubiquitous US white supremacy in action," and those people would be absolutely correct. It is also however, extremely shortsighted because as I've noted many times, a dystopian panopticon police state for migrants, is a dystopian panopticon police state for everyone if the government wants it to be; and I think it's safe to say that Trump indeed desires as much.
To get a better idea of the scope of the problem I've been talking about, let's take a look at this Truthout article from last week.
Trump Is Rapidly Expanding the Surveillance State as Protests Grow
"While mainstream media has framed the issue in terms of surveillance of immigrants, data on all Americans is being sucked into a growing digital dragnet. Guariglia and other privacy advocates are sounding the alarm over efforts by the Trump administration and its Silicon Alley partners to consolidate personal data on millions of people at the Social Security Administration and other federal agencies. As law enforcement increasingly turns to private companies to buy data instead of asking courts for search warrants, a data broker owned by major airlines has sold customer flight records and personal information to Customs and Border Patrol, according to an investigation by 404 Media.
“You are seeing that federal agents working under this current administration are very openly using surveillance technologies to trump our free speech, to completely violate our privacy, and not even giving personal privacy consideration anymore,” Tse said. “That is the thing that I am seeing that is new.”
I think to a degree it's still very hard for Americans, even cynical Americans raised in a post 9/11, post-Snowden leaks counterterrorism environment, to understand the degree to which technologies like facial recognition software, and so-called "AI" have supercharged a US state panopticon that is now more or less completely under the control of Swine Emperor Trump and his executive branch nazis. Furthermore, agencies like ICE, DHS, and the larger counterterrorism apparatus entwined throughout agencies like the FBI, and NSA, simply do not have the same level of oversight as even notoriously unsupervised local police forces because this entire police state panopticon was installed under the guise of fighting terrorism, which is more or less the President and the executive branch's purview in US government. These factors have always made the War on Terror panopticon a civil rights nightmare that has lead to numerous abuses by the Bush, Obama, and Biden governments over time; which is part of why giving that same panopticon "counterterrorism" police state to a guy like Trump, who thinks disagreeing with him publicly is tantamount to treason, or supporting terrorism, is an existential crisis in its own right.
Look folks, I know it isn't exactly news in the year 2025 that the government is spying on you, and we've even talked about some of the ways its doing so already. But you have to understand the sheer scope of what the Trump regime is doing here, and what AI-enabled oppression is going to look like. We're talking about the ability to integrate literally every aspect of your data and living footprint into one all seeing master computer that makes the punchcards they used to conduct the Holocaust in Germany look quaint. That means DNA, Healthcare data, traffic cameras, tax information, real time tracking technology, full identity theft folders from private data brokers, SSA and tax data, and so on; this is some actual Minority Report shit now. No matter how passé you thinking privacy rights discussions have become after Snowden's leaks, I cannot stress enough that this is a devil many orders of magnitude more dangerous than the police state we were dealing with a mere 6-8 years ago.
Which of course brings us back to a Trump regime arguing, in court, that being anti-genocide and pro-Palestine is a threat to national security, interfering with racialized Gestapo kidnappings is materially supporting terrorists, and nonviolent protests are actually an insurrection. It does not take a genius to look at the regime's ongoing war on both dissent and a broadly defined American left, as exemplified by Project Esther, and realize that the rapidly expanding "migrant" panopticon is also a rapidly expanding "anyone Trump doesn't like" panopticon.
In news from the quivering bowels of Vichy America, a major liberal law firm has agreed to work for fascists and stop hiring so many women, brown people, or members of the LGBTQ community to placate an aggrieved, would-be dictator and keep raking in those sweet government contracts:
Trump-Targeted Law Firm Caves, Vows $40M in Legal Support to Right-Wing Causes
"resident Donald Trump withdrew an executive order targeting a major Democratic-leaning law firm after the firm agreed to provide $40 million in pro bono legal services in support of his administration’s far right initiatives.
“This is unbelievably shameful from Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP,” Molly Coleman, executive director at People’s Parity Project, said on LinkedIn. “I’m embarrassed to have any association with this firm that failed to find the courage the moment requires.”
Recently, the White House has escalated attacks on law firms whose attorneys have been involved in legal efforts opposing Trump. Just last week, Trump signed an executive order attempting to revoke security clearances from Paul, Weiss attorneys, restrict the firm’s access to federal buildings, and terminate any of its government contracts. The order reportedly prompted at least one client to sever ties with the firm.
However, following a meeting between Trump and Brad Karp, the chair of Paul, Weiss, the administration abruptly rescinded the order. “We look forward to an engaged and constructive relationship with the President and his Administration,” Karp said in a statement."
So, let's make sure we all understand what's going on here. Trump is brazenly and almost certainly illegally, shaking down a powerful law firm that has literally worked on cases opposing him in the past, and is known from their commitment to diverse hiring practices, and instead of fighting back, or even just taking the loss of government money on the chin, they've decided to check notes concede that a former partner who worked on cases against Trump was engaged in "wrongdoing," work pro-bono for the fascist regime, and capitulate to the fascist "war on DEI" - an idea whose ever-expanding meaning appears to be "restore mandated white supremacy in America."
Are you kidding me? Does the larger liberal establishment in the United States have anything resembling a spine to share between them? More importantly, if Americans trapped inside the increasingly ominous, fascist nightmare that is Trump 2.0 can't count on a high profile law firm in the business of protecting civil rights and taking on the government, to even stand up for the firm's own rights, how can they have faith that anyone in position to defend their rights in a legal capacity, is going to step up to the plate for them? The answer of course, is that they can't.
Folks, you'll get no argument from me if you say that the greater evil in this story is a fascist president who would be king, using the authority of his office to gain revenge on law firms that helped charge him for real crimes, he absolutely committed. As the extorted settlement proves, this too is part of Trump's plot to take complete control of America as a dictator. This isn't legal, and as a federal judge's restraining order in a similar case involving the Trump-targeted firm Perkins Coie demonstrations, complete surrender was not the only option Paul Weiss and its chair Brad Karp had here. By that same measure you can't win if you don't fight, and when losing means capitulating to fascism, a law firm full of civil rights lawyers has a goddamn responsibility to resist.
“It is a sad day for the legal industry. Paul, Weiss, didn’t just bend a knee, it set a new standard for shameful capitulation. This is a stain on the firm, every one of its partners, and the entire legal profession,” Marc Elias, founder of Democracy Docket, said on Bluesky."
Folks, I've been talking about and writing about the rise of fascism for over a decade now. And I'm not bragging, because I wish I had been wrong about the signs I was reading around me, but I have largely been right when I insisted we were all heading for a moment like this. Furthermore, I have repeatedly warned that a liberal establishment (no, not you; your leaders, your media, your "liberal" capitalist employers) which would always have the option of simply collaborating with the fascist order, wasn't going to save us from fascist predation. There is no cavalry; the opposition party, the courts, and the lawyers aren't going to stop this. At the rate things are going, I have no idea how long I'll still be able to tell you that we are the cavalry, and the only way this nightmare ends is if we use our bodies en masse to shut down the fascist order and the profits that motivate the guys paying for all this; but it's the truth. If you can do it to Tesla, you can do it to any of them.
Over the past three months, I've written about a couple of alarming mass surveillance stories that pushed into the mainstream discourse for a day and vanished under the howling gale of a modern Pig Empire 12 hour news cycle. First we learned that pigs were sharing data from private AI-powered license plate reading cameras nationally, and then we found out those same local law enforcement agencies were conducting searches for the ICE Gestapo using that data, despite neither ICE nor DHS have a contract with the company that produces those cameras, Flock. We then went on to further discuss all the ways these relationships between the Gestapo and local law enforcement were enabling an ethnic cleansing operation, and Trump's agenda to install a fascist dictatorship in America; an agenda which is powered by an AI-enhanced mass surveillance panopticon that companies like Palantir are helping Trump build out further.
Although a discourse may have moved on from the Flock surveillance network, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and 404 media have stayed on the story and recently turned up something both fascinating, and deeply disturbing. It turns out, that two large US home improvement chains in particular appear to have developed an ad-hoc data sharing arrangement with the police, who are then sharing license plater reader data with ICE. The story gets even wilder however when you realize that the stores sharing Flock data with the cops, who then share it with ICE, are Lowe's and The Home Depot, whose locations have been some of the most heavily, and intentionally targeted spots for Gestapo kidnapping raids to snatch random brown people ICE thinks might be an "illegal" for "reasons."
Home Depot and Lowe's Share Data From Hundreds of AI Cameras With Cops
“What we're learning is that two of the country's most popular home improvement stores are contributing to the massive surveillance dragnet coordinated by Flock Safety,” Dave Maass, director of investigations at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told 404 Media. “Do customers know that these stores are collecting their data and sharing indiscriminately? Probably not. Have these companies given thought about how this data might put their customers in danger, whether it's cops stalking their exes or aggressive ICE agents targeting yard workers? Probably not. If these companies want customers to feel safe in their homes, then they should make sure they're also safe where they buy their supplies."
Flock’s automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras are stationed along roads or at entrances to parking lots around the United States, and constantly scan the license plates of cars that drive by. Because there are Flock cameras around the country, Flock often has a snapshot of people’s movements which police can search, typically without a warrant."
So, this is kind of a "holy shit" moment. For various reasons of legality, neither 404 Media, nor the EFF are willing to directly accuse two major American brands and an AI-surveillance company of collaborating with a fascist regime to conduct an ethnic cleansing operation, but boy does it sure look like that's what's going on here. It turns out we were wrong about Stephen Miller's hate on for Home Depot parking lots, and the Gestapo was probably just going where the easy arrests would be because those companies were sharing private data with ICE, through a national network of cop surveillance data the private sector gleefully helps compile on the regular to "fight crime" and "keep us safer."
So, why is there even a national network of cop surveillance data for private companies to feed into, and pigs to share with the Gestapo? Because in extremely rare instances, like perhaps the kidnapping of a child, or when an escaped mass shooter is on the loose, it can be very useful for the authorities to have access to a network of license plate readers. No privacy advocate has ever disputed that, but the reality is when you give murderpigs the right to surveil society openly, the vast majority of the time it doesn't lead to rescuing abducted children; it leads to shit like this - a national panopticon dragnet whereby fascist pigs who hate minorities can help fascist pigs who're being paid to brutalize and deport minorities, find their targets.
Finally, as with every story about the Trumpenreich's burgeoning fascist panopticon, it must be pointed out that even if you don't fucking care about this because you're a racist who doesn't think migrants and apparently legal immigrants who happen to be Hispanic matter to you at all, the reality is that companies like Lowe's and Home Depot are sharing your data with the Gestapo all the same. The fash might not care right now, but sooner or later they're gonna run out of people to deport and have lots of spare time to look into you and your life.
Given the horrifying nature of the DOGE (you have no idea how much I loathe typing that) cuts by which Musk is effectively conduction a rolling shutdown of the US government, the Trump administration's attempts to either take control of, or bankrupt prominent American universities for blatantly ideological reasons, and news that Trump intends to sign an executive order to shut down the Department of Education, there's a conversation we have to start having now that I've run out of time to avoid.
I don't know how to say this without sounding like I'm employing conspiratorial hyperbole to at least some portion of the people reading this, but there really are a whole bunch of obscenely wealthy, mostly-white, mostly-Anglo nazis working together to transform our world into a dystopian fascist hellscape to increase their own power over us and preserve their way of life in the face of anticipated uprisings. And a lot of these guys, particularly those concentrated in the American tech sector, are extremely weird Bond movie villain types with horrifying ideas about how to run a society, but enough money to give them a try anyway. I get that to some of you that sounds exactly like a conspiracy theory, but let me assure you that these are all established facts, discussed sporadically in mainstream media outlets; even if those outlets are rarely willing to criticize rich people, or use the word "fascism" in order to explain what those facts mean.
These guys meet in the open to talk about shaping the future of our species in places like Davos and Aspen, they buy elections on live television, and then they go on podcasts to openly admit they want to end democratic rights, destroy regulatory authority over their activities, and transform the places we live into various types of dictatorships run by guys like them. I get that this is a lot to take in, but I should hope that watching a weird little nazi freak like Elon Musk spend $300M to elect Trump, immediately join the government, and start taking a chainsaw to every department that isn't the military or the fascist police state, might make it easier to consider the evidence in retrospect.
Look, this is a big subject; in my studies I've found the overt, direct influence of ideologically reactionary billionaires with fascist, dystopian, and religious agendas intersecting with topics like climate catastrophe, mass surveillance, reproductive rights and the natalism movement, what I would describe as a literally fucking cult for rich people in the TESCREAL movement, the anti-trans pogrom, the carceral state and forced labor, the assault on protest rights in the Pig Empire, climate change denialism, fascist internet influencers and "independent" media sources on the right, and of course elections and fascist political parties in the Pig Empire - that list is by no means exhaustive, these rich freaks have a lotta fingers in a lotta pies. If you want to understand what's going on with the Trump regime right now, why they're destroying what the right calls "the administrative state," why they're seizing control of higher education, and why expanding the powers of the fascist police state in case you get any ideas about stopping them however, then the conversation about weird fascist billionaires with horrible tech-nazi plans has to start somewhere. Let's start with the 2024 election, and the specific group of fascist tech bro billionaires that got Trump into power, and how their stated agendas line up perfectly with Project 2025 and match what we've seen the Trump regime do so far in disturbing ways.
This thirty minute video is a few months old now, and was produced after Trump was elected, but before Der Führer took office. The video is fast paced, and informative; focusing on the activities and recorded statements of hyper-reactionary tech billionaires in the Trump regime's immediate orbit, and how those actions and stated intentions are expressed in Trump's fascist agenda. The presenter names names too, including Trump, JD Vance, Peter Thiel, Marc Andresson, Elon Musk, David Sacks, Brian Armstrong, Ben Horowitz, Balaji Srivisan, and an absolute freak named Curtis Yarvin, who extremely online folks may know as Mencius Moldbug. What the producer of the video couldn't possibly have known, but we know now, is how much of Trump's destructive, authoritarian, and quite frankly illegal attempts to reshape America into his personal fascist autocracy would align perfectly with a plan written by Peter Thiel's pet fascist "philosopher" and a man these right wing extremist, weirdo billionaires literally call "the prophet." No, I am not making that up. Like I said, it's a big conversation and one we're going to keep having on an ongoing basis now that Trump appears to be speedrunning Yarvin's how to build a dictatorship checklist. This should get you started:
Dark Gothic MAGA: How Tech Billionaires Plan to Destroy America by Blonde Politics
For the past several years, I've been arguing with AI advocates about the purpose of the technology they're enamored with. I mean don't get me wrong, I'm aware that there are use cases for so-called AI programs that aren't inherently evil, but when you take a look at the nazi billionaires who're behind the projects to force widespread adoption, their long term plans to establish city-state dictatorships out of the hollowed out core of the nation-state era, and what these guys ultimately do with it, it's pretty clear AI is a fascism machine; just as much as IBM's punch card computers were a genocide machine for the Nazis. It doesn't have to be this way, but this is the way it is.
As such, I can't say I'm shocked that after Elon Musk bought himself a president, the first thing he started doing is using AI purge his political enemies as well as their ideas, sort surveillance data to identify targets for a white nationalist regime, and now spy on federal workers in search of those with insufficient loyalty to God Emperor Trump, the regime, and Musk himself.
Exclusive: Musk's DOGE using AI to snoop on U.S. federal workers, sources say
"Reuters’ interviews with nearly 20 people with knowledge of DOGE’s operations – and an examination of hundreds of pages of court documents from lawsuits challenging DOGE's access to data – highlight its unorthodox usage of AI and other technology in federal government operations.
At the Environmental Protection Agency, for instance, some EPA managers were told by Trump appointees that Musk’s team is rolling out AI to monitor workers, including looking for language in communications considered hostile to Trump or Musk, the two people said.
The EPA, which enforces laws such as the Clean Air Act and works to protect the environment, has come under intense scrutiny by the Trump administration. Since January, it has put nearly 600 employees on leave and said it will eliminate 65% of its budget, which could require further staffing reductions.
Trump-appointed officials who had taken up EPA posts told managers that DOGE was using AI to monitor communication apps and software, including Microsoft Teams, which is widely used for virtual calls and chats, said the two sources familiar with these comments. “We have been told they are looking for anti-Trump or anti-Musk language,” a third source familiar with the EPA said. Reuters could not independently confirm if the AI was being implemented.
The Trump officials said DOGE would be looking for people whose work did not align with the administration's mission, the first two sources said. “Be careful what you say, what you type and what you do,” a manager said, according to one of the sources."
Naturally the regime and DOGE have denied that they're using AI to conduct "thought" policing inside the federal workforce, but I think given how readily the Trump administration has engaged in clear ideological warfare and suppression against its perceived political enemies, that denial sound a lot like a hollow lie. Speaking broadly however, I can't say I'm surprised at all that this is where a technology like AI and the billionaire nazis who're pushing it, have lead us as a society. There are a near infinite number of things "AI" technology is terrible at, but one thing it does really well is sort through the vast amounts of data and metadata collected as part of our already existing police state panopticon society; in fact, without automation we really wouldn't be able to sift through that amount of data at all with human eyes. AI doesn't have morals, it doesn't have humanity, it doesn't have any sense of what's right and wrong; it presumes the world it's programmed to presume, and engages in the tasks it's purposed to engage in; and billionaire nazi cultists who want to build their own technofeudalist dicatorships are the guys in charge of the coding and tasking of this technology. Whether it's picking out targets for extermination by the IDF during a genocide in Gaza, hunting down student protestors in vast seas of education and immigration data, or spying on federal workers for anti-Musk sentiments, the fact is fascist oppression and violence can be automated - particularly if you don't give a fuck about false positives because you're a soulless fascist murderbot.
So uh, what stage of "you can't call it fascism!"TM is it when Downmarket Mussolini sends the immigration Gestapo that pretty much answers to only him, to unlawfully arrest student protest leaders who legally in the country, and disappear them into the labyrinth of the American migrant carceral complex?
Ice arrests Palestinian activist who helped lead Columbia protests, lawyer says
"Mahmoud Khalil was at his university-owned apartment, blocks from the private Ivy League university’s main campus in New York when several Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents entered the building and took him into custody, his attorney, Amy Greer, told the Associated Press.
One of the agents told Greer by phone that they were executing a state department order to revoke Khalil’s student visa. Informed by the attorney that Khalil, who graduated last December, was in the United States as a permanent resident with a green card, the agent said they were revoking that too, according to the lawyer.
The arrest comes as Donald Trump vows to deport foreign students and imprison “agitators” involved in protests against Israel’s war in Gaza."
As the story goes on to mention, Khalil, who is Palestinian, is in the United States on a legally-issued Green Card, which cannot be revoked by either ICE Gestapo pigs or our fascist State Department without the order of an immigration judge; which makes this an unlawful arrest and detention. What the story doesn't discuss however is that Khalil's wife, who is eight months pregnant, is an American citizen. I mention these things not because it would somehow be "okay" for the fascist Trump regime to snatch up a student leader for the (not illegal) "crime" of protesting a genocide if he only had a student visa, or his wife wasn't a U.S. Citizen, but to point out that clearly the administration and its security forces do not give a flying fuck about any of the rules they're violating or laws they're breaking to punish dissent. Furthermore, reports posted on social media by a person identifying themselves as Khalil's lawyer, indicate that the Department of Homeland Security has already moved Mahmoud, possibly as far as Georgia, and thus he does not have access to legal representation. If this were Middle Eastern country with oil reserves, our establishment would rightfully note that the regime has thus effectively "disappeared" what amounts to a political prisoner.
Folks, I don't want to sound like a broken record here, but like I've been telling you (even long before Trump was re-elected) the fact is that fascists don't give a fuck the about laws, rules, or standard operating procedures. If the law can be used to justify seizing power, eliminating civil rights, and punishing enemies they're happy to employ it. But if not, they'll replace or simply ignore any rule that gets in the way of the attempts to purge the opposition and transform society into the full on fascist dictatorship of their dreams. You don't get to let this one slide because "he's not an American," you don't care about Gaza, or you've been taught to hate student protestors by your media and the larger ruling class establishment. If Americans (including the nominal opposition in the US establishment) stand by and watch this happen to folks like Mahmoud Khalil, then it is an absolute historical certainty that it is only a matter of time before Trump is sending jackbooted thugs after anyone who won't goosestep along with the fascist order - and that includes figures in our complicit media and political classes. A whole bunch of affluent liberals have spent the past couple of years tossing around historical warnings about how Nazism and the Holocaust happened in Germany; now its time to prove you understand the lessons those words were trying to teach you about resisting the slide into overt fascism before it goes far enough that you can no longer stop it - because I assure you, if you tolerate this then (you and) your children will be next.
As every move Trump makes builds towards ideological purges, martial law, and a war against the broader left, news leaks that Thiel-backed firm Palantir is supercharging the Pork Reich’s panopticon in a story right out of science fiction dystopias.
"The Pork Reich has made no secret about its intentions to transform America into a fascist dictatorship under a perpetual state of something that sure does look like martial law. With an already-functioning militarized police state at his disposal, the biggest obstacle facing Downmarket Mussolini is the pure logistics involved in tracking and targeting all the folks who have no place in the “new America” he’s trying to build. Now, just like IBM punch card computers allowed Hitler to conduct the Holocaust, noted supervillain Thiel, his shadowy contracting company, and the power of “AI” are offering a way for Trump to unlock that panopticon and use it to empower a police state that would make East Germany at the height of the Cold War jealous."
In another thread and some recent conversations on my personal account, I talked a little bit about why the Trump regime's actions in court signal that they have no intention of ceasing their ideological policing of anti-genocide, pro-Palestine critics, through the federally-controlled immigration process. As if to demonstrate the point, the US government has deported an Australian blogger returning to the country, expressly for his writings about Israel's genocide in Gaza, and anti-genocide student protests in the United States.
Australian deported from US says he was ‘targeted’ due to writing on pro-Palestine student protests
"The 33-year-old said he was “clearly targeted for politically motivated reasons” and said officials spent more than 30 minutes questioning him about his views on Israel and Palestine including his “thoughts on Hamas”.
Kitchen said officials asked him for his “thoughts about the conflict in a very broad sense”, including about student protesters, what Israel “should have done differently” and “how I would resolve the conflict”.
“It was quite an in-depth probing of my views on the war,” he said.
Kitchen said he was deported and landed back in Melbourne on Saturday morning.
“The CBP explicitly said to me, the reason you have been detained is because of your writing on the Columbia student protests,” he told Guardian Australia on Sunday. The US Department of Homeland Security was contacted for comment."
To be clear, Kitchen is not a resident of the United States and nothing CBP did is strictly illegal; it's not like they kidnapped him and threw him in private prison cage, as they have done to anti-genocide protestors and critics in America where immigration law made it possible (but not legal.) However the blogger's testimony makes it clear that US immigration officials knew who he was in advance, wanted to grill him on his writing about the genocide and anti-genocide protests on college campuses, and denied him entry for the purely ideological reason that he doesn't support Trump's genocide or fascist repression of student protestors. The investigating officials made up some bullshit about there being evidence of drug use on Kitchen's phone, but their laser-like focus on his writing makes it abundantly clear that this was fascist ideological policing.
Folks, let's be clear here; Kitchen is a guy with a conscience who maintains a small blog. He is not a threat to the US government, and there was no valid reason to deny him entry to the United States or deport him whatsoever. Immigration enforcement under the Trump regime is clearly about keeping the kind of people Trump himself doesn't like out of the country, and has nothing to do with the law, national security, or keeping us safe.
This episode brings us back to something I was talking about when immigration pigs harassed and detained Hasan Piker at the Chicago airport, in that it speaks to the scope of the Trump regime's ideological policing. These fascist pigs are tracking Twitch streamers and guys writing blogs with a few thousand regular readers (folks not unlike myself) and the only reason this is all focused on immigrants and foreign visitors to the United States is because that's the part of the government Trump more or less controls completely. The regime thinks opposing the regime itself is a crime, and as soon as they can make this ideological policing an operational program domestically, you can bet that they're coming for American-born critics in the same ways, and for the same reasons.