Tag: mass surveillance

America the Unfree—Home of the Policed, Surveilled and Occupied

“I love the inflation.”—Donald Trump (June 2026)

“I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody.”—Donald Trump (May 2026)

America has become an occupied nation.

Not by one invading army, but by many occupying powers: the police state, the surveillance state, the war state, the corporate state, the foreign influence machine, and a ruling class that treats the American people as little more than collateral damage in its pursuit of power, profit and control.

We have been policed, surveilled, taxed, indebted, manipulated, censored, tracked, searched, silenced and sold out.

Foreign powers are buying up our farmland, buying favor with the Trump family, weaseling their way into the White House, dictating national policy, and now—with the backing of the Trump administration and bipartisan support in Congress—one of America’s closest partners-in-crime may soon gain even greater access to U.S. intelligence and surveillance capabilities.

This is what we have come to.

The swamp under President Trump has taken on a decidedly foreign flavor: any nation with enough money, leverage or strategic value to enrich the Trump family can now get its hands on a piece of the American pie—all the while, the American people continue to struggle to survive Trump’s self-enrichment schemes, broken promises, endless wars, militarized streets and vanity projects.

We’re being sold to the highest bidders, and still nothing is being done to protect us.

Ordinary Americans are told there is not enough money to honor the government’s promises to them. Social Security’s retirement trust fund is now projected to run short in late 2032, at which point retirees could face an automatic 22 percent cut in scheduled benefits if Congress fails to act. Medicare’s hospital insurance fund is projected to run short the following year. Seniors, the disabled, working families and the poor are told to brace for sacrifice.

But there is always money for war.

There is always money for surveillance.

There is always money for police-state crackdowns, border militarization, private contractors, foreign aid, weapons systems, tax breaks for the wealthy, slush funds for political allies, and spectacles of imperial excess.

While Americans worry about groceries, rent, medical bills, job security, retirement and whether their children will inherit anything resembling freedom, the White House is being turned into a playground for power and celebrity. Trump’s June 14 birthday celebration is reportedly set to include a UFC fight on the White House lawn, with weigh-ins at the Lincoln Memorial, transforming public symbols of sacrifice, liberty and national memory into props for one man’s vanity show.

This, too, is occupation.

Not merely the occupation of land, but the occupation of the public imagination. The occupation of the people’s institutions. The occupation of the Constitution itself.

The contrast could not be more obscene.

On June 8, 1789, James Madison rose in the House of Representatives to introduce amendments to the Constitution that would become the Bill of Rights. Madison and the founding generation fought to bind the government down. They understood that written limits on government power were not optional. They were essential.

Today’s rulers are fighting to free the government from those restraints.

They want fewer limits on surveillance, police power, presidential immunity, war-making, foreign entanglements, secrecy, corruption, and the ability of the rich and powerful to buy their way into the machinery of government.

That is how far we have fallen.

From a Bill of Rights, we have descended into a bill of sale.

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Section 702 Surveillance Reaches Its Friday Deadline. Why “Going Dark” Is a Myth.

The government’s broadest warrantless surveillance power is set to expire Friday after the House refused to keep it running.

Lawmakers voted down a three-week extension of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act on Thursday, 218 to 198, with 19 Republicans joining most Democrats against it and seven Democrats crossing over in support.

Speaker Mike Johnson had fast-tracked the bill under a process that needed a two-thirds majority, so the lopsided count sank it. The House then left town for a scheduled weeklong recess, which removes any path to a quick fix. Congress has already punted twice since the original April deadline.

The reaction from the program’s defenders followed a familiar script. They raised the same alarm at earlier deadlines and the catastrophe never showed up.

When Congress last renewed the authority in 2024, the law slipped past its midnight deadline and lapsed for under an hour before the Senate restored it and the surveillance kept running through the gap.

The warnings are back this week regardless. Sen. Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican, pressed for renewal ahead of the World Cup and backers keep noting that Section 702 feeds more than half of the president’s daily intelligence briefing.

“Democrats in the Senate are playing political games right now with the lives of Americans,” Johnson told reporters Wednesday. “It’s a very dangerous situation.”

What actually arrives at midnight Friday is legal limbo, not a blackout.

The FISA court signed off on the current collection in March and that order runs until 2027, so the machinery keeps operating on permission it already holds.

The court’s authorization runs for another year and the program continues whether Congress acts or not. The honest word for the risk is uncertainty, the kind that government lawyers and company lawyers argue over, and uncertainty does not sound like an emergency. So the defenders reach for “going dark” instead.

What sunsets at midnight is all of Title VII of the surveillance law, which carries separate powers the government uses to spy on Americans living abroad.

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UK Plans To JAIL Tech CEOs Who Refuse To SPY On Every Phone

New measures would compel client-side inspection of every photo, video and message on devices, escalating the digital ID lockdown already plotted for British smartphones in coordination with major technology firms.

Privacy advocates warn the “child safety” framing masks a broader drive to turn personal phones into mandatory surveillance endpoints, with criminal penalties aimed at any executive who resists.

Reclaim The Net, an organization dedicated to countering online censorship and digital surveillance, flagged the draft legislation in recent updates. 

The group described how UK authorities are preparing to imprison tech executives for up to five years under the Online Safety Act if companies refuse to build and deploy scanners capable of reviewing every piece of content on user devices.

The push targets expanded “client-side scanning” features, requiring devices to inspect material before it is sent or received.

Existing tools from Apple and Google, such as nudity detection in Messages or sensitive content warnings, would be broadened into comprehensive, always-active systems. Non-compliance would trigger direct penalties against company leadership rather than the firms alone.

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This Company Will Add Phone, AirPod, and Smartwatch Trackers to License Plate Readers

 A surveillance company plans to add sensors to automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) that would mean the devices, as well as capture the license plate of passing vehicles, would also sweep up unique identifiers of mobile phones, wearables, and other Bluetooth-enabled devices in those cars, potentially letting law enforcement identify specific drivers or passengers.

The technology, called SignalTrace, would turn ALPR cameras from devices focused on tracking cars to ones that can more readily track the location of particular people. ALPR cameras have become a commonly deployed technology all across the U.S.; SignalTrace would make some of those cameras capable of collecting much more data.

SignalTrace “bridges license plate recognition data with sensor-captured device identifiers—such as those from mobile phones, Bluetooth wearables, and vehicle systems—to create a unique, trackable ‘electronic fingerprint’ for investigative use,” according to a product sheet describing the tool, written by surveillance company Leonardo, which advertises SignalTrace.

The sort of data Leonardo says SignalTrace can sweep up includes the RFID tags in key cards and pet microchips; devices with Bluetooth such as wireless headphones, fitness trackers, and mobile phones; components of a car like tire pressure sensors and infotainment systems; and Wi-Fi sources such as vehicle hotspots and laptops, according to the product sheet.

The idea is to correlate these unique device identifiers to a license plate. If a Leonardo camera detects a license plate and sees where a vehicle was at a specific time, it can then allegedly link those unique device identifiers to it.

The sheet suggests SignalTrace collects this data for it to be searched by law enforcement much later. One line says SignalTrace “stores device and correlation data securely in the EOC [Enterprise Operations Center] for future queries and analysis.”

“When multiple devices consistently move together with a vehicle, SignalTrace’s algorithms link them to that vehicle’s license plate and time-stamped location data. This correlation provides investigators with another layer of actionable intelligence, even if a suspect changes or removes a plate,” the sheet reads.

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Signal, DuckDuckGo, and NordVPN threaten to exit Canada if metadata surveillance law passes

Another day, another government attempt to force tech companies to build backdoors. This time, Canada is proposing legislation that would require companies to retain certain metadata and provide law enforcement with access to it. Predictably, many tech players have sharply criticized the proposal, with some saying they would rather leave the Canadian market than comply.

The latest version of Canada’s Bill C-22 would require digital services such as internet service providers, messaging platforms, email providers, and potentially hardware companies to retain up to one year of user metadata. In addition, tech companies would have to implement mechanisms that allow authorities to obtain “lawful access” to that information for criminal investigations. Critics argue the proposal amounts to another government-mandated backdoor.

During his testimony before the House of Commons Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security, Signal executive Udbhav Tiwari said Bill C-22 would turn everyday digital tools into a surveillance network. He argued that requiring companies to retain metadata about users’ communications runs counter to Signal’s privacy practices.

A spokesperson for DuckDuckGo also confirmed that the company would remove its VPN service from Canada if Bill C-22 passes. NordVPN and other VPN providers have made similar statements.

Apple and Google have also joined industry warnings that the legislation could force them to weaken encryption. Last year, Apple successfully opposed a similar proposal in the United Kingdom that would have required it to build a backdoor into iCloud. The incident was the latest in a series of conflicts between the Cupertino-based company and government regulators over security and user privacy.

The primary concern is that malicious actors would inevitably discover and exploit any digital backdoor, regardless of whether it was designed exclusively for law enforcement or domestic government agencies. OpenMedia, which has described C-22 as an attempt to create a surveillance state, pointed to a late-2024 incident in which Chinese state-backed hackers compromised government-mandated police wiretap systems to steal sensitive data from AT&T, Verizon, Lumen Technologies, and other telecom providers.

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Starmer Calls for Spyware on All Phones

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer strode onto a stage at London Tech Week and handed Apple, Google and friends a three-month ultimatum with all the menace of a substitute teacher confiscating phones at the door. Build us controls that stop children from taking, sharing, or viewing nude images, switch them on by default across every phone and tablet already humming away in the nation’s pockets, and look sharp about it.

“This government will not stand by while children are put at risk online,” he announced, before adding the line every tech executive in the room heard as a polite threat.

“Today I am calling on the tech companies to introduce device-level controls to prevent children from taking, sharing or viewing nude images. And if they don’t act, we will.”

Stirring stuff. Nobody wants children harmed, and saying so out loud is the cheapest applause line in British politics.

The trouble is the two innocent-looking words tucked into the speech like a wasp in a picnic basket, the words “device-level.”

Here is what “device-level” means once you peel off the cuddly branding. To catch one naughty photo on your phone, something has to inspect every photo on your phone. All of them.

It is software that leans over your shoulder the instant you raise your camera, squints at whatever you are making, and decides whether you may keep it or it gets reported to authorities.

Engineers named this trick years ago, client-side scanning, and even Apple, a company that would happily sell you the air inside its packaging, built a version of it in 2021 and then sprinted away from the idea the moment people worked out what it did to private messaging.

The worst part is what it does to encryption. End-to-end encryption is meant to mean nobody in the middle can read your stuff, not the app, not your internet provider, not a bored government with a search warrant fetish.

Client-side scanning waltzes around all of that by reading your photo on your own device first, before the encryption clicks shut. The lock on the front door stays bolted. There is just a man with a clipboard standing in your hallway, jotting notes before you turn the key. The math survives. The privacy, meanwhile, is dead.

Step back and admire how casually people are treating this. A government politely asking every phone maker to install a tiny invigilator inside the camera lens, marking your snapshots as they form, would have been thrown out of a Black Mirror writers’ room a decade ago for being too on the nose.

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UK Encryption Backdoor Could Hit US Data, Jordan Warns

Britain has refused to let a US technology company brief Congress about a secret order to weaken encryption and the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee is treating that refusal as a problem in its own right.

Jim Jordan, the Ohio Republican who leads the committee, wrote to Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood on Friday warning that Britain may be using encryption powers to reach the private data of US citizens.

The underlying dispute is not new. For more than a year, the UK’s use of secret “technical capability notices” under the Investigatory Powers Act 2016 has strained relations with Washington, ever since reports that Britain ordered Apple to open up encrypted iCloud data. What is new is the wall Jordan says he keeps hitting when he tries to learn more.

He met Sir Christian Turner, the British ambassador to the United States, in March, after a US company asked to brief members of Congress about one of these notices, something that would require Mahmood’s sign-off.

The ambassador suggested it could happen. Mahmood then refused.

“This denial is inconsistent with our understanding from Ambassador Turner and raises serious concerns about shared cooperation on these sensitive matters, particularly as Congress exercises its important oversight responsibilities,” Jordan wrote, the Telegraph reported, adding that it cast doubt on the “trust and effective partnership between our two countries.”

He asked Mahmood to “review this matter and grant the US company’s request to speak with Congress about an alleged technical capability notice,” which he said would “honour the representation made by the ambassador during our meeting and uphold the spirit of transparency and cooperation that is the foundation of our shared security relationship.”

The secrecy Jordan ran into is built into how these orders work and it is worth keeping in view.

The UK may be building “backdoors into their encrypted services,” he wrote.

A backdoor is a deliberately built flaw, a master key, or a hidden bypass that lets an intelligence agency read encrypted data without the user ever knowing. It defeats end-to-end encryption, the design that normally keeps a message readable only to the person who sent it and the person who received it.

A company served with a notice cannot tell its customers, the press, or apparently even a foreign legislature, without the express permission of the Home Secretary.

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7 Republicans vote no on FISA extension

Seven Republican senators sided with Democrats early Friday to vote against advancing an extension of warrantless spy powers set to expire next week, complicating efforts to keep those powers alive.

The procedural vote failed by a vote of 47-52 after Sens. Josh Hawley (Mo.), Sen. John Kennedy (La.), Mike Lee (Utah), Rand Paul (Ky.), Eric Schmitt (Mo.), Rick Scott (Fla.) and Tommy Tuberville (Ala.) broke with their GOP colleagues.

Some of the pushback was attributed to President Trump’s tapping of Federal Housing Finance Agency chief Bill Pulte to serve as acting director of national intelligence, which received backlash from both sides of the aisle.

Lee brushed off speculation that anger over Pulte’s appointment was the motivator behind the defectors who voted with Democrats, instead pointing to privacy concerns.

“FISA 702 reauthorization failed because it did not contain a warrant requirement for spying on Americans,” the Utah Republican wrote on the social platform X. “The people who spied on the Trump campaign, Members of Congress, and countless other Americans hate the idea.”

He added, “Come back with warrant requirement, and we’ll pass the bill.”

The motion to proceed would have paved the way for enhanced federal surveillance authorities under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) before it lapses June 12.

Trump’s decision to name Pulte to replace outgoing Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard triggered fights on Capitol Hill.

Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Democrats could not support extending surveillance authorities with Pulte in a position to access sensitive intelligence information that could be used against Trump’s political foes.

“I thought I had gotten to the stage where I could no longer be shocked by Donald Trump’s choices, but this may be the most outrageous of all,” he told MS NOW, speaking of the recent appointment.

Every Senate Democrat except Sen. John Fetterman (Pa.) voted against the motion, as they argued Pulte could not be trusted to oversee the nation’s intelligence apparatus, among other reasons.

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Flock Cameras Being Used By Police To Target Citizens For Variety Of Non-Criminal Investigations

A new analysis by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has revealed that law enforcement agencies across the United States are increasingly deploying automated license plate reader (ALPR) systems — particularly those operated by Atlanta-based Flock Safety — for non-criminal administrative purposes, including school residency verifications and employment background checks, often without warrants.

Flock Safety promotes its nationwide camera network as a vital public safety tool that assists police in solving crimes and locating missing persons. However, the EFF report contends that the technology is being repurposed for routine administrative tasks far removed from urgent law enforcement needs, raising significant privacy concerns.

School Districts Turning to ALPR for Residency Enforcement

According to the report, several school districts have enlisted local police to conduct ALPR searches on vehicles belonging to parents and guardians suspected of falsifying residency information to enroll children outside their designated zones.

In Georgia’s Buford City Schools, which serves roughly 6,000 students, officials authorized more than 375 ALPR queries between January 2025 and March 2026 specifically for residency verification. A district spokesperson defended the practice, stating: “Because Buford City Schools is a highly sought-after district, we experience ongoing challenges with residency fraud. Flock Safety is one of the tools we use to verify residency and protect the integrity of the Buford City School System for families who live within the district.”

In Ohio, the Delhi Township Police Department (DTPD) ran 35 ALPR searches tied to residency verification across five schools during a three-month period in spring 2025. Following an inquiry from the EFF, DTPD said the searches were not used for initial enrollment screening but to investigate suspected false information on forms. The department did not disclose the threshold of suspicion required to justify a search or how many cases were ultimately substantiated.

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A Nation of Suspects

Some of the recent legal challenges to the use of surveillance by the Department of Homeland Security upon Americans have resulted in the revelation of truly terrifying behavior by the government, in direct defiance of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. We now know that the federal government spies on innocent Americans without suspicion and without warrants.

The spying seems to fall into several categories. The National Security Agency, which is in the Department of Defense, employs about 60,000 domestic spies. These are the folks who want us to believe that they go through the trouble of making applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for warrants to spy on foreigners.

Actually, from time to time they do go to this court, but their travels there — where judges are frisked upon entering and leaving the courthouse by the NSA agents who appear before them — serve as fig leaves for their massive warrantless spying on Americans. The FISA Court is unconstitutional because it issues warrants based on probable cause of communicating with a foreign person, rather than on probable cause of crime as the Fourth Amendment requires.

The courts have ruled consistently since the 1960s that spying — surveillance, as the feds call it — is a search, and the capture of data from a surveillance is a seizure.

The Fourth Amendment protects all persons in America — not just Americans — from warrantless searches and seizures of their “persons, houses, papers, and effects.” There are some well-recognized exceptions to this constitutional baseline, such as evidence that will quickly vanish or be seriously degraded, but those exceptions do not apply here as the NSA captures in real time all keystrokes on all digital devices and all fiber optic data transmitted into, out of and within the United States.

The judges of the FISA Court surely know that the Department of Justice lawyers and NSA agents who appear before them are going through a charade, and the court has been made a part of it. The charade is the pretense that all spying is done pursuant to the warrants that FISA Court judges issue. Former NSA agents have revealed publicly that this is hardly the case.

Nevertheless, the lowered standard from probable cause of crime to probable cause of communicating to a foreign person was crafted by Congress — in another of its many moments heedless of the Constitution. After a few years of this, the FISA Court began to issue warrants for spying on the Americans who communicate with foreigners, out to the sixth degree. A sixth grader can do the math, as this leads to hundreds of millions of Americans whose communications are captured.

A second category of spying is employed by the DHS. The DHS — now a 250,000-person strong federal police department nowhere countenanced by the Constitution — has sophisticated software that can read fingerprints at 15 feet and irises at 15 inches. So, if you wave goodbye or good riddance to an ICE agent, and he holds up his mobile phone, and you are in the federal system for any benign reason, he has captured your bank, health, legal and commercial records on the spot. If he talks to you in your car and is within 15 inches of your face, he can capture the same data.

As if all this were not enough, the feds and local police use a device called a Stingray, which mimics the signal sent to all mobile devices as if the device were being used to communicate. But the communication is just one way, as the Stingray will tell the government where the person possessing the mobile device is at any given moment. This, too, is a seizure of private personal information — the contents of the computer chip in your mobile device — which the Fourth Amendment characterizes as an “effect.”

And then there is the FBI, which now uses zero-click software. This permits agents without warrants or even approval of their superiors to engage in computer hacking without having to trick the hacked victim into clicking on a link. Computer hacking is a felony.

All of this surveillance is unconstitutional, dangerous and commonplace. It consists in the use of surveillance and law enforcement tools without articulable suspicion.

For 600 years, articulable suspicion — the lowest evidentiary standard we have — has been the baseline for all government behavior that targets an individual. Articulable suspicion is the fact-based ability to state why a person — not a group — should be targeted and for what crime. This is the same standard that must be met when police stop someone in public.

Anything less than articulable suspicion is a fishing expedition; stated differently, a general warrant. General warrants — which were used by British agents on American colonists — permitted the agents to stop anyone, to search anywhere and to seize anything without articulable suspicion. The Fourth Amendment outlawed them.

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