Tag: mass surveillance

Globalism Is Totalitarianism

Consider these recent news stories from Europe and North America:

(1) Germany’s government is considering a new law that would allow its spy agency to investigate and block citizens from buying homes if the would-be owners hold political views that conflict with the government’s official policies.  In effect, political dissent would disqualify a person from owning a home.

(2) London Mayor Sadiq Khan is pushing for a government-run “disinformation unit” to investigate and silence online criticism of the mayor’s policies.

(3) British police are doing more to crack down on citizens’ “politically incorrect” speech than they are to prevent Islamic rape gangs from targeting women and girls.

(4) Under the guise of “protecting the children,” unelected queen (some say European Commission President) Ursula von der Leyen has announced the rollout of Europe’s mandatory digital IDs which will eliminate online privacy, anonymity, and, eventually, all public dissent to official government policies.

(5) North American and European intelligence agencies continue to downplay the threats from Islamic terrorism and overstate any threats from “white supremacy” and “right-wing extremism.” 

(6) For the nineteenth time, Ukrainian hold-over president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, has submitted legislation to Ukraine’s hold-over parliament to extend a decree of martial law, which suspends elections, bans opposition parties, prohibits media organizations from criticizing government policy, and empowers the government to conscript men into military service and confiscate civilian resources for the war effort.

(7) In support of secret “gender transitions” at taxpayer-funded schools and taxpayer-funded “gender reassignment” surgeries, Nova Scotia Education Minister Brendan Maguire lambasted Canadian parents who believe that they “deserve rights over” their children.  Maguire made it clear that Canadian citizens have no parental rights.

(8) In France, 60% of voters believe that “a replacement of the French population by non-European populations” is occurring right now.  66% see this as bad for France.

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European Commission Official Touts 17 Investigations as Proof the Digital Services Act “Delivers”

The European Union’s Digital Services Act is a censorship and surveillance law dressed in the language of safety. It gives unelected officials in Brussels the power to decide what hundreds of millions of people are allowed to say online and it is building the infrastructure to verify their identities before they’re permitted to say it.

But at POLITICO’s AI & Tech Week summit in Brussels this month, Renate Nikolay, the European Commission’s Deputy Director-General at DG CONNECT, celebrated the law’s growing enforcement record. Seventeen ongoing investigations and one non-compliance decision, she told the audience, prove the DSA “delivers.”

What the DSA delivers is pressure. Pressure on platforms to censor more speech, faster, with fewer questions asked. Pressure to open their algorithms and internal systems to government inspection without a court order. And, increasingly, pressure on individual users to prove who they are before they’re allowed to participate in public discourse online.

Nikolay presented these enforcement numbers as proof of success. They are proof of something but not what she thinks.

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Canada House of Commons Tracks Online Posts About MPs

The House of Commons in Canada is keeping a database of what Canadians say about their elected representatives online and officials are sorting those comments by category, including the tone and identity-based content of social media posts about MPs.

That admission came from Deputy Sergeant-at-Arms Paul Mellon at a parliamentary committee, where he described the operation as a “very robust records management system.”

According to Blacklock’s Reporter, the system catalogues incidents involving MPs and allows staff to sort and analyze posts, including those deemed “misogynistic” or otherwise “abusive.”

Mellon told MPs the database tracks “every single incident” and can break complaints down by category, including gender-based harassment.

What the records contain, why they are kept, and who has access to them, none of that was explained. Mellon offered few details. A spokesperson for the Office of the Sergeant-at-Arms said files may include both criminal and non-criminal complaints, but declined to disclose specifics, citing security reasons.

So the Commons is logging non-criminal speech about politicians. Citizens posting opinions about their representatives are being filed away in a government system, sorted by category, and held for purposes the government will not describe. The line between a threat and a sharp comment is being drawn by people who answer to the institution being commented on.

The testimony came as MPs pushed for the system to track speech in more granular ways.

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The FCC Wants Your ID Before You Get a Phone Number

The era of the anonymous phone number could be ending. On April 30, the Federal Communications Commission unanimously approved a proposal requiring telecom providers to verify customers’ identities before activating service.

Government-issued ID, physical address, legal name, and existing phone numbers would all be included. The stated goal is stopping robocalls. The result would be an identity-verification regime covering one of the last semi-anonymous communication tools available to ordinary Americans.

The proposal applies to nearly every voice provider in the country, from traditional carriers and mobile operators to VoIP services. The FCC is seeking public comment on specifics, but the direction is clear.

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr framed it around negligent carriers. “As we have continued to investigate the problem of illegal robocalls over the last year, it has become clear that some originating providers are not doing enough to vet their customers, allowing bad actors to infiltrate our U.S. phone networks,” he said. Some providers, he added, “do the bare minimum (or worse) and have become complicit in illegal robocalling schemes.”

That language targets telecom companies and the surveillance targets everyone else.

The framework borrows from banking’s anti-money-laundering rules. The FCC is also asking whether carriers should retain identity documentation for at least four years after a customer leaves and whether they should check customers against law enforcement watchlists. Penalties would shift to a per-call basis, meaning fines of $1,000 to $15,000 for every illegal call a poorly verified customer places.

The real privacy stakes sit in the proposal’s section on prepaid service. Right now, you can pay cash for a prepaid phone and SIM card without showing identification. Journalists use prepaid phones to protect sources, domestic violence survivors use them to avoid being traced, and whistleblowers, activists, or anyone with a reason to separate phone activity from legal identity relies on this.

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The Invisible Occupation: How Palantir and AI Built a Financial Prison the Masses Cheered For

We are living in an occupied nation, but the occupying force didn’t arrive in tanks or uniform. They arrived in server racks and boardrooms, selling our enslavement back to us under the guise of convenience and national security. The creeping surveillance state isn’t being forced upon a resistant public; it is being welcomed with open arms by a populace asleep at the wheel.

Palantir is the Lockheed Martin of the domestic data war, acting as the defense contractor for an invisible battlefield, but their depravity extends far beyond American borders. They don’t merely sit on the sidelines building the overarching dragnet that seamlessly ingests the Ring camera footage oblivious citizens hand over to local police. They are active participants in global slaughter. This is the very same company supplying the algorithmic targeting systems and AI intelligence used by the Israeli military to facilitate the genocide in Palestine. They test and refine their digital kill chains on the bodies of innocents abroad, only to package those exact same mass-surveillance weapons and turn them inward against the American public. And to feed this beast domestically, Palantir relies on far more than voluntary home surveillance. They aggregate billions of data points involuntarily harvested from your daily life—sucking up automated license plate reader data, scraped social media, purchased cell phone location pings, and even medical records—creating an inescapable digital panopticon you never consented to.

This infrastructure wasn’t built by well-meaning public servants, but rather by the darkest elements of the global elite. According to leaked audio, Jeffrey Epstein explicitly advised former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak to “look at” Palantir back in 2013 to monitor citizens. Furthermore, Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel shows up extensively in the infamous Epstein files, with Wired reporting his name appearing over two thousand times in the disgraced financier’s records.

These are the individuals constructing the systems designed to monitor your every move, and their reach is now absolute. As we have documented extensively at The Free Thought Project, whistleblowers are screaming from the rooftops that Palantir has effectively taken over the US government data infrastructure from the inside out.

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Fears erupt over ‘tyrannical tool’ Washington DC is eyeing as it could control your spending

A new form of money being explored in Washington could reshape how Americans buy, sell and save, sparking warnings from lawmakers.

Known as a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), or ‘digital dollar,’ the form of money would be issued and regulated by the Federal Reserve. Formal discussion regarding CBDC intensified around 2020.

The debate on the US adopting the digital dollar has been reignited online after Congressman Eric Burlison deemed it ‘the most tyrannical tool you could put in Washington’s hands.’

‘Flip a switch, you can’t buy a firearm. Flip another, you can’t donate to your church. China built that system. We are NOT building it here,’ the Missouri representative posted on X on Tuesday. 

If the US government were to adopt CBDC, critics have warned that it could directly manage money flow, monitor transactions in real-time, instantly distribute payments and enforce targeted monetary policy. 

Potential capabilities include programming money for specific uses, reducing financial privacy, and potentially enforcing negative interest rates.

Many lawmakers have been pushing to block the Federal Reserve from creating a digital currency, trying to attach a ban to several major bills.

Most recently, they attempted to include it in legislation extending a key surveillance program. However, that effort fell through when Congress passed the measure without the digital currency restriction before an April 30 deadline. 

The House voted 235-191 to extend the spy program, known as Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

However, a group of Republican lawmakers had hoped to include an effort to block CBDC in the bill, but the Senate resisted.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune warned that any legislation including a ban on a digital currency would be ‘dead on arrival’ in the Senate, effectively killing the proposal. 

Instead, lawmakers approved a short-term extension to keep the surveillance program in place while the debate continues. 

Burlison responded to Thune’s comments on X, saying: ‘I don’t care what Thune thinks. 

‘A Central Bank Digital Currency is a threat to all of our rights and liberties. It must be banned.’

Rep Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, a member of the House Freedom Caucus who is a supporter of the ban, said in the press conference that most of his constituents ‘don’t want the government monitoring their bank accounts, telling them what they can buy, when they can buy it, and when they’re not allowed to buy.’

More than 130 countries are researching or launching CBDCs, with full usage in the Bahamas, Jamaica and Nigeria. 

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EU Targets VPNs in EU Age Verification Push

Brussels has a problem with people trying to stay anonymous online and now it’s eyeing the tools they use to do it.

Henna Virkkunen, the European Commission’s Executive Vice-President for Tech Sovereignty, Security, and Democracy, told reporters that VPNs sit on the agenda as the EU pushes its age verification app toward member states.

Asked how Brussels intends to stop children from routing around age checks with a VPN, she said “it’s also an important part of next steps also to look at that it shouldn’t be circumvented.”

VPNs are more than a tool for teenagers trying to access Instagram. They are how journalists protect sources, how dissidents talk to family, how ordinary people stop their internet provider from logging every site they visit. Treating circumvention as a problem to be solved at the network level means treating privacy tools as the obstacle, rather than the proportionate response to a system that demands ID for ordinary online activity.

The VPN comment surfaced at a press conference about the Commission’s broader regulatory squeeze.

Brussels provisionally found that Meta likely violated the Digital Services Act by failing to keep under-13s off Facebook and Instagram, accusing the company of “failing to diligently identify, assess and mitigate the risks of minors under 13 years old accessing their services.”

By the Commission’s own count, roughly 12% of European children below the age limit log into the platforms anyway.

Virkkunen framed the finding as enforcement of existing rules rather than a new mandate. “The DSA requires platforms to enforce their own rules: terms and conditions should not be mere written statements, but rather the basis for concrete action to protect users, including children,” she said.

A Commission spokesperson echoed the line, telling ISMG that the DSA “does not mandate specific mitigation measures,” and pointing to alternatives like better internal review processes.

The denial sits awkwardly next to everything else Brussels is doing. The Commission published guidelines last July recommending age verification. It is now pressing member states to “accelerate the adoption of age verification tools.”

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The Trump Surveillance State

The Fourth Amendment protects all persons from warrantless government searches and seizures of their persons, houses, papers and effects. It requires that warrants be supported by probable cause of crime and specifically describe the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized.

Last week, for the first time in the modern era, the government argued to the Supreme Court of the United States that the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution did not outlaw general warrants. General warrants were issued in the colonial era by a secret court in London. They were not based on probable cause of crime or even on articulable suspicion about a potential defendant. They did not identify a target or state what crime was being investigated.

Rather, general warrants were based on governmental need; a meaningless standard as whatever the government wants it will tell a court it needs. The warrants authorized the bearer of the warrant to search wherever he wished and seize whatever he found.

The stated motivation for the general warrants was the British government’s enforcement of the Stamp Act. That legislation required all colonists to have stamps affixed to all papers, books and newspapers in their possession. The enforcement of the Stamp Act was the government’s fig leaf for spying.

We know that the true reason for the Stamp Act was to conduct surreptitious searches for revolutionary materials. We know this because during the one-year existence of the Stamp Act — 1765 — a group of enterprising students at the College of New Jersey, now known as Princeton University, calculated that more revenue was spent to enforce the act than was collected by the sale of the stamps.

Historians believe that the use of general warrants for the enforcement of the Stamp Act pushed many colonists into the independence camp 10 years later in 1775. The use of general warrants also motivated James Madison and his colleagues in 1791 to craft the Fourth Amendment whose specificity requirement “particularly describing the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized” poignantly did away with search where you wish and seize whatever you find.

Until now.

Now, in one week on Capitol Hill, the right to privacy is facing its gravest challenges since pre-colonial days, in Congress and the Supreme Court. Congress will wrestle with Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which expires in just days, and the court will hear a claim that general warrants are still viable.

Sec. 702 permits warrantless surveillance on Americans by permitting federal agents to use software that allows them to conduct surveillance of all fiber optic means of communication — mobile phones, message texting, emails — based on the lawful communications of some Americans to foreign persons and then their subsequent lawful communications to other Americans. The “other Americans” can include all 340 million of us.

Theoretically, the data gathered from these warrantless searches cannot be used for criminal prosecutions, since even the feds who do this spying have told members of Congress that they recognize the need for search warrants to access the content of the data. There are at least two reasons that no one should believe what the feds have said. The first is the feds lie. In 2023, they accessed the content of the data thousands of times without warrants. The second reason is that Madison and the Fourth Amendment’s ratifiers did not believe the government would restrain itself, hence the specificity requirement.

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House Renews FISA Section 702, Rejects Warrant Requirement

The House voted 235 to 191 on Wednesday to keep Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act running for another three years, declining once more to require federal agents to get a warrant before searching Americans’ communications scooped up under the program.

Around twenty Republican privacy hawks broke with leadership and joined Democrats in opposition, but the bill cleared the chamber with hours to spare before the Thursday midnight expiration.

Section 702, first authorized in 2008, lets intelligence agencies intercept the electronic communications of foreign nationals outside the United States without a warrant.

The catch, and the part that has driven nearly two decades of reform fights, is that those intercepts routinely sweep up the texts, calls, and emails of Americans who happen to be in contact with the roughly 350,000 foreign targets surveilled each year. That data sits in a federal database, and the FBI can search it for Americans’ information without going to a judge first.

The reforms attached to the renewal do not change that. They tinker around the edges. Federal agents will need an attorney’s sign-off before targeted reviews of Americans’ data, each query will require written justification submitted to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and misuse can now carry up to five years in prison.

The FBI will also have to file monthly reports to oversight officials defending searches involving Americans.

None of this requires a judge or forces the government to articulate probable cause before reading what an American wrote or said.

A bipartisan bloc has pushed for almost twenty years to require specific court approval before agents can pull up an American’s communications from the 702 trove, arguing that anything less is a Fourth Amendment workaround.

The bill that passed Wednesday explicitly references the Fourth Amendment in its text. It just does not require a warrant to honor it.

We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.

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Federal In-car Monitoring Mandate Expands Data Collection and Control Powers

A federal mandate rooted in a 2021 bipartisan law is set to reshape every new car sold in the United States, and potentially the boundaries of personal mobility itself. By the 2027 model year, vehicles will be required to include systems that monitor drivers for impairment and can intervene if necessary. Supporters frame it as a safety breakthrough. Critics call it a “kill switch.”

The policy has broad political backing. It passed with support from both Democrats and Republicans and has remained intact across administrations, including under the recent Consolidated Appropriations Act, which preserved both funding and the mandate. In January, that support was tested when the House voted down an amendment that would have stripped funding for the requirement, effectively keeping the rule on track.

One of the most persistent critics is Representative Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), who continues to lead opposition alongside a small group of lawmakers. Massie warns that Congress is normalizing continuous monitoring inside privately owned vehicles, a shift he argues carries implications far beyond roadway safety.

The Law

The requirement comes from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, specifically Section 24220. The law directs regulators to establish a safety standard for what it calls “advanced impaired driving prevention technology.”

The statute defines that technology as a system that can

(i) passively monitor the performance of a driver of a motor vehicle to accurately identify whether that driver may be impaired; and
(ii) prevent or limit motor vehicle operation if an impairment is detected;

It also allows for systems that can “passively and accurately detect whether the blood alcohol concentration of a driver … is equal to or greater than” the legal limit, with authority to intervene. The law sets the objective, not the method.

It also cites research from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) estimating that such technology “can prevent more than 9,400 alcohol-impaired driving fatalities annually.”

The mandate and its funding were reaffirmed in early 2026, when President Donald Trump signed the Consolidated Appropriations Act, ensuring the requirement remains in force.

From Safety Feature to Standard Equipment

Driver monitoring is not new. It is already embedded in many modern vehicles, especially those equipped with advanced driver-assistance systems.

General Motors says its Super Cruise system “tracks the driver’s head position and/or the driver’s gaze” and alerts the driver when attention drifts. Chevrolet describes the system as using a camera mounted on the steering wheel to track “head and eye movement.”

Similarly, Ford’s BlueCruise uses “a driver-facing camera and infrared lighting” to confirm that the driver remains focused on the road. Subaru’s DriverFocus system uses comparable technology, capable of alerting occupants if the driver appears drowsy or distracted.

Today, these systems primarily issue warnings. Under the federal rule, similar technology could become standard in every new vehicle. It would not simply prompt the driver. It could help determine whether the vehicle should start or continue operating.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) describes the current landscape in similar terms. Its 2026 report to Congress explains that indirect systems infer driver state “through camera-based monitoring and vehicle inputs.” It also notes that most current systems are designed to detect “drowsiness, inattention, and sudden sickness,” not alcohol impairment.

That distinction matters. A system designed to detect distraction is not automatically capable of reliably identifying intoxication. Yet the mandate moves in that direction, turning optional in-cabin monitoring into a required compliance system.

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