From “The Free Thought Project”
From mass surveillance through flock cameras, spying on political dissidents, and AI algorithms designating citizens as potential domestic terrorists, the surveillance state being established by the Trump administration is unparalleled even when compared to the most totalitarian regimes throughout history.
As of late American citizens have been more concerned with surveillance and privacy than ever before. Rightfully so, as we see an explosion of surveillance equipment being installed across the country.
For decades, liberty activists have diligently watched and warned of the slowly encroaching mission creep of domestic mass surveillance seeping its way into everyday American life. Opposition to such violations of fundamental liberty have been one of the few causes to transcend the false left / right paradigm, with instances such as leftists opposed to the surveillance of civil rights groups during the days of COINTELPRO and conservative opposition to the surveillance of Second Amendment activists.
Even today, amid rising concerns of the mass implementation of Flock cameras across the nation, these concerns are actively creating a bridge of solidarity among the polarized political chasm.
While surveillance of the American citizenry has existed in some way for more than a century, the persistent punitive pervasiveness of such violations of privacy have been perpetually on the rise since the passage of the Patriot Act following the false flag attack of September 11th, 2001.
Interestingly enough, the provisions of the Patriot Act with all of its violations of constitutional protections had already been cooked up well before the September 11th attacks but was projected not to pass a congressional vote until such attacks took place. Indeed, the Patriot Act simply served as an expansion of surveillance authority circumventing the Constitution implemented in the 1996 Antiterrorism Act, itself only justified following the Oklahoma City false flag attack just a year prior. Simply a coincidence, surely.
The conversation surrounding concerns about domestic mass surveillance reached mainstream dialog following the explosive revelations of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013, when leaked documents provided to journalist Glenn Greenwald revealed a sprawling network of illegal spying against American citizens through the National Security Agency’s PRISM program.
Despite Snowden’s revelations and warnings, and subsequent surveillance scandals in the years since, next to nothing has been done to curtail this campaign of illegal mass spying against the American people. In fact, it has only continued to worsen.
This brings us to today. Oftentimes in discussion of illegal mass surveillance, the cynical statist would posit a straw man argument to the likes of “What does it matter? If you’ve done nothing wrong you should have nothing to hide.” As if an all encompassing surveillance state simply exists in a vacuum. As if history has not demonstrated again and again the kind of atrocities enabled by repressive regimes who track, trace, and database their citizenry.
Mass surveillance does not simply exist to “keep an eye on people”, it serves as a tool of the state to suppress dissent, identify and silence dissidents, and centralize control over the populace.
Here at The Free Thought Project, we have warned for years about the dangers of integrating artificial intelligence with law enforcement.
Now, it appears the Trump administration is diving head first into a Minority Report style pre crime surveillance system powered by AI to throw a digital dragnet over the entirety of the American people.
As first reported by Reason magazine:
The FBI office in charge of maintaining the terrorist watch list is seeking an artificial intelligence system for pre-crime policing, according to procurement documents obtained by Reason. The request for information for vendors, posted by the FBI’s procurement division in March, solicits potential bidders for a project that would supercharge the Threat Screening Center (TSC) with new predictive AI capabilities—just as its focus moves from Islamist terrorism to domestic dissent.
In layman’s terms, in addition to the sprawling surveillance apparatus compiling information about American citizens, the new procurement request seeks to have AI systems integrated into the Threat Screening Center to siphon through the collected information to have algorithms determine who among the millions of names should be flagged as a potential threat before they commit any crime.
This new initiative is directly connected to the Trump Administration’s National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM 7) which the Free Thought Project has reported on since last year.
NSPM 7 Specifically aims to target opponents of the Trump regime and the American empire more broadly at an unprecedented scale, by identifying and designating as a domestic extremist anyone who aligns with what the administration refers to as “opposition to law and immigration enforcement; extreme views in favor of mass migration and open borders; adherence to radical gender ideology,” as well as “anti-Americanism,” “anti-capitalism,” and “anti-Christianity”, and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”
This latest move to establish an AI powered pre crime surveillance dragnet serves as the most recent escalation of an increasingly authoritarian Trump administration determined to criminalize political dissent while simultaneously establishing a technocratic surveillance grid.
In April, TFTP reported via investigative journalist Ken Klippenstein the creation of a brand new pre crime detection center within the FBI using the parameters established under NSPM 7 to effectively identify and deem anyone who holds views contrary to those espoused by the Trump administration as potential domestic terrorists.
This was then expanded upon a month later with the issuance of the White House’s 2026 Counterterrorism Strategy report, which in addition to the previous parameters, would also continue to blatantly flaunt the administration’s fascistic tendencies by equating “anarchists and anti-fascists” on the same level as narcoterrorists, transnational gangs, and Islamic jihadists. Making millions of Americans who may hold anti authoritarian ideologies potential targets of state violence.
It didn’t take long for this pre crime apparatus to bear its teeth in suppressing political dissent. Reported by TFTP writer John Vibes in June, multiple individuals who participated in a protest outside of an ICE detention facility in Prairieland, Texas in July of last year found themselves on the receiving end of being charged as domestic terrorists despite committing no acts of violence. In what documents later revealed to be a rigged trial by a Trump appointed judge in favor of the prosecution, these American citizens who committed no crime other than having the wrong political beliefs were swiftly made an example of and sentenced to several decades in prison. Thus setting an alarming precedent against First Amendment rights in the United States.
But this is not the only way in which the Trump administration has been building its surveillance panopticon. After laying the foundations for such a partnership in his first term, from the very beginning of his second term Trump has partnered directly with the most prevalent big tech and AI firms, making it a primary focus of Trump’s “one big beautiful bill”, handing them a blank check to blanket the United States with surveillance equipment ranging from the integration of AI to scrape millions of people’s private healthcare data, to the implementation of mandatory biometric scanning for foreigners to enter or exit the country.
As mentioned earlier, the mass implementation of Flock cameras nationwide which has implicitly received support from the administration carries its own set of unique risks and overreach as the cameras create a veritable end-run around the Fourth Amendment.
Investigations have shown that Flock cameras are frequently used as a tool of abuse, having been misused for everything from police officers stalking their exes, the illegal surveillance of protesters, to a nationwide manhunt for a woman who got an abortion.
Meanwhile, the FBI’s own data indicates that the presence of Flock cameras have little to no effect on actually reducing crime. Rendering the rhetorical justification for their existence completely moot. However, this hasn’t stopped the surveillance state from expanding even further to specifically target anti-flock activists, as a recent report from Dan Boguslaw revealed internal memos from the FBI and DHS specifically designating activists and protesters opposed to the mass surveillance of ALPR cameras as national security threats.
At the same time, police departments around the country are taking advantage of the surveillance craze to lobby for the addition of AI powered surveillance drones utilizing facial recognition technology to their arsenal, on the heels of a similar request from the FBI late last year. This, in spite of growing concerns regarding the unreliability of AI powered facial recognition which consistently misidentifies innocent people as criminals.
Perhaps the most pervasive of all of these mass surveillance entities is Palantir. Palantir essentially serves as the central nexus for the implementation of technofascist technocracy in the United States. From its outset, the Trump administration has been connected at the hip with Palantir, with one former Palantir employee turned whistleblower sounding the alarm, as Palantir has effectively embedded itself in the United States government merging the American empire, Zionist military infrastructure, surveillance capitalism, and technofascist ideology into a single architecture of control.
Last year, TFTP reported that the White House had tapped Palantir to build a government wide database merging together data collected from various agencies into a singular surveillance hub, concentrating vast quantities of information gathered about American citizens into one centralized system.
At the same time, while the Trump administration has empowered Immigration and Customs Enforcement to effectively act as a modern Gestapo terrorizing America’s streets, Palantir has played a central role in enhancing ICE’s surveillance capabilities.
Reports from 404 Media revealed Palantir to have built enhanced surveillance technology specifically to be used amid ICE operations. The tool, called Enhanced Leads Identification & Targeting for Enforcement (ELITE) provides ICE agents with real time dossiers on over 20 million people to help determine which neighborhoods and individuals to be targeted.
Furthermore, recent reporting from The Guardian has revealed the Department of Homeland Security has taken their surveillance operations a step further, conducting a mass spying campaign against anti-ICE protesters which saw undercover agents infiltrate organizations and chat groups to gather information on the dissidents.
The modern American surveillance state has become a multi-headed hydra, a ravenous Leviathan deeply embedded in every aspect of everyday life. The mass construction of data centers across the country are rapidly building the infrastructure of this surveillance panopticon. Through the aggressive deployment of ICE, and the normalization of soldiers on American streets, the Trump administration is actively building the standing army that our founding fathers warned against, powered by a surveillance grid that would make even the most despotic tyrant of the 20th century blush.
The time is now for Americans to stand up and stop this in its tracks, before it ultimately results in the same kind of atrocities committed by every militarized mass surveillance regime throughout history.