The US Oligarchs Who Built the Surveillance State Now Run It

BLUF-HA (Bottom Line Up Front for Hardcore Activists)

The surveillance state is a symptom. Oligarchy is the disease. The only cure is taking their power away, and that starts with getting money out of politics. Call your state representative’s office today. Ask for their schedule and the best way to follow their work. Then start showing up. Bring friends. Call. Email. Show up at their office. Show up at their events. Demand they pass a law barring any candidate who accepts non-individual contributions from appearing on the ballot. No corporate money, no dark money, no PAC money, or else you run as a write-in. Be loud. Be persistent. Never stop. We get money out of politics or we are cooked. If you want the full tactical system for making politicians do what you want, download the free booklet “Grab Them by the E.A.R.R.” by clicking anywhere on this sentence. And if you want to learn some of the legally viable ways to use tax policy to break oligarch power, download the free “Opposition Guide to Tax Warfare” by clicking anywhere on this sentence.

Your weather app is a surveillance device.

Not metaphorically. Not in some abstract future. Right now, as you read this, the app on your phone that tells you whether to bring an umbrella is collecting your precise GPS coordinates and selling them to data brokers. Those brokers package your movements with data from your coupon apps, your prayer apps, your fitness trackers, your navigation tools. They sell that package to hedge funds, to advertisers, and to the federal government.

A company called Venntel claims to collect 15 billion location signals daily from 250 million mobile devices.¹ The Department of Homeland Security has paid at least $2 million for access.² Customs and Border Protection bought a $476,000 contract.² The FBI paid $22,000 for a single portal license.² For about $14,000 a month, any government agency can subscribe to a continuous stream of location data covering most of the American population, updated almost in real time.

In 2018, the Supreme Court ruled in Carpenter v. United States that obtaining seven days of cell phone location data requires a warrant.³ Government agencies responded by simply purchasing equivalent data from commercial brokers instead. The Fourth Amendment, they argue, doesn’t apply to a transaction between a willing buyer and a willing seller.⁴

The surveillance state works through the quiet accumulation of capabilities that nobody voted for, hidden in procurement contracts and software licenses and quarterly earnings calls. Courts rarely get the chance to strike it down because nothing looks like overreach. It just looks like business. Clearview AI has a press page. Palantir is publicly traded. The infrastructure of mass surveillance is a business model.

The phone in your pocket is just the beginning.

The car you drive passes through automated license plate readers that log your movements to databases storing billions of records. Flock Safety alone operates cameras in over 5,000 communities, taking more than 20 billion plate reads monthly.⁵ Vigilant Solutions maintains a separate database now exceeding 5 billion reads.⁵ Your vehicle’s location history is queryable by thousands of law enforcement agencies, often shared across jurisdictions without the warrant requirements that would apply to a GPS tracker.

Your face is almost certainly in a police database. Clearview AI has scraped between 50 and 60 billion images from social media, news sites, and public websites.⁶ That number was 3 billion in 2020.⁶ Over 3,100 law enforcement agencies have used the system, conducting more than 2 million searches by mid-2024.⁶ Georgetown Law Center research found that half of American adults are enrolled in law enforcement facial recognition networks through driver’s license photos alone.⁷

Your social media posts are monitored in real time. Dataminr’s platform, under contracts worth millions of dollars, scans posts and relays them directly to law enforcement clients.⁸ During the 2020 George Floyd protests, Dataminr sent police the precise times and locations of demonstrations as they formed.⁸ The Los Angeles Police Department received more than 50 alerts about Gaza protests between October 2023 and April 2024, including advance warnings of locations and times.⁹ Individual journalists’ posts were flagged.⁹

None of these systems operate in isolation. That’s what makes them dangerous.

Eighty fusion centers nationwide, at least one in every state, integrate FBI databases, immigration records, state and local law enforcement systems, and commercial data broker products into unified intelligence platforms.¹⁰ Real-time Crime Centers, now numbering over 200 facilities, combine live video feeds, body camera streams, drone footage, license plate readers, gunshot detection, and social media monitoring into single dashboards.¹¹ Atlanta’s system integrates over 16,500 registered private cameras.¹¹ Detroit connects more than 800 businesses to over 100 full-time crime analysts.¹¹

Palantir provides the software that ties much of this together. The company, co-founded by Peter Thiel with CIA venture capital funding, builds platforms that merge crime reports, license plate data, arrest records, and social media into searchable profiles.¹² A person of interest can be tracked through their vehicle movements, phone location, facial recognition hits, and social media activity, all viewable in integrated dashboards, much of it accessible without warrants.

In New Orleans, a secret Palantir partnership running from 2012 to 2018, funded through a philanthropy program unknown even to City Council members, created risk assessment databases on approximately 3,900 people.¹³ Roughly 1% of the city’s residents were flagged by an algorithm which the City Council discovered existed when reporters called them for comment.

That was the prototype. In 2025, the billionaires who built this infrastructure took direct control of the federal government.

The Department of Government Efficiency, created by executive order on January 20, 2025, has penetrated the data systems of at least 15 federal agencies.¹⁴ DOGE operatives, many of them software engineers in their early twenties with ties to Elon Musk’s companies, now have access to Treasury Department payment systems containing names, Social Security numbers, bank accounts, and tax returns for anyone who transacts with the federal government.¹⁵ They have access to Office of Personnel Management records containing background checks, medical records, biometric data, and security clearance files for millions of federal employees.¹⁶ They have access to Social Security Administration records containing lifetime earnings, disability status, mental health records, and banking information for hundreds of millions of Americans.¹⁷

Multiple federal judges found these actions likely violated the Privacy Act.¹⁸ District Judge Ellen Hollander ordered DOGE to delete all unlawfully accessed data, calling their methods “tantamount to hitting a fly with a sledgehammer.”¹⁹ The Supreme Court overruled her 6-3 on June 6, 2025, restoring DOGE access.²⁰

The personnel granted this access include a 19-year-old former Neuralink intern whose background, according to security researcher Brian Krebs, includes Russian domain registrations and ties to cybercrime groups that would likely fail traditional vetting.²¹ Within 15 minutes of DOGE accounts being created at the National Labor Relations Board, multiple login attempts occurred from an IP address in Primorskiy Krai, Russia, using correct usernames and passwords.²² A whistleblower reported gigabytes of data were transferred to an unidentified external destination.²² The NLRB has pending cases against both SpaceX and Tesla.²²

Palantir, Peter Thiel’s company, is building the infrastructure to integrate all of this. In 2025, Palantir won a $10 billion Army contract and $30 million for ICE’s “ImmigrationOS” platform, awarded without competitive bidding.²³ Palantir’s stock has surged over 200% since Trump’s election.²⁴ At least 12 White House staffers own Palantir stock, including Stephen Miller, who disclosed up to $250,000 in Palantir holdings while serving as chief architect of the immigration policy that Palantir’s contracts support.²⁵

Thiel holds no official position, but his network runs through the administration. Vice President JD Vance, whom Thiel backed with $15 million in his Senate race, the largest donation ever to a single Senate candidate.²⁶ David Sacks, former PayPal COO, now AI and crypto czar.²⁷ Michael Kratsios, former Thiel Capital chief of staff, now running the Office of Science and Technology Policy.²⁷

In June 2025, The Brookings Institution warned that Musk’s DOGE was building capability for mass surveillance echoing the Total Information Awareness program that Congress defunded in 2003.²⁸ Congress defunded it and the oligarchs rebuilt it anyway, with no negative consequences. Yet.

We have extensive documentation of what the surveillance state has already done.

The FBI queried its Section 702 database, which collects communications of foreign targets but inevitably sweeps up Americans, on 141 Black Lives Matter protesters.²⁹ On 19,000 donors to a congressional campaign.²⁹ On journalists and political commentators.²⁹ On a U.S. Congressman.²⁹ On a state judge who had reported civil rights violations.²⁹

The NYPD ran a Muslim surveillance program from 2001 to 2014 that mapped communities using 28 “ancestries of interest,” surveilled every mosque within 100 miles, deployed informants inside student associations, and produced, by the department’s own later admission, zero terrorism leads.³⁰

Robert Williams spent 30 hours in a Detroit jail because facial recognition software matched grainy surveillance footage to his expired driver’s license photo.³¹ An officer told him “the computer says it’s you.”³¹ Nijeer Parks spent 10 days in a New Jersey jail for a crime committed 30 miles away.³² Porcha Woodruff, eight months pregnant, was arrested by six officers while getting her children ready for school, held for 11 hours, and began having contractions in custody.³³ She had been identified based on an eight-year-old mugshot.³³ Every known case of wrongful arrest due to facial recognition misidentification in the United States has involved a Black person.³⁴

ICE conducted more than 4,000 immigration-related searches through local police license plate reader systems between June 2024 and May 2025, despite sanctuary policies supposedly blocking such access.³⁵ San Francisco police allowed 1.6 million illegal searches by out-of-state agencies, including at least 19 marked as ICE-related, violating California law.³⁵

This is not institutional failure. Every component works as designed. The data brokers collect. The fusion centers integrate. The algorithms flag. The courts defer. Nobody had to conspire. The incentives aligned and the money flowed and here we are: unconstitutional surveillance that continues because the institutions meant to stop it are too corrupt, too complicit, or too captured to do their jobs.

The predictions were accurate. In November 2001, the ACLU warned the Patriot Act would “minimize judicial supervision of federal telephone and Internet surveillance” and “lead to large-scale investigations of American citizens for ‘intelligence’ purposes.”³⁶ They specifically warned that pen register provisions would extend to tracking “what websites a person had visited.”³⁶ Edward Snowden’s 2013 revelations showed the NSA’s XKeyscore could track “almost everything a user does on the internet.”³⁷

Total Information Awareness, Admiral John Poindexter’s proposed program to “gather and store the personal information of everyone in the United States,” was defunded by Congress in 2003 after Senator Ron Wyden called it “the biggest surveillance program in the history of the United States.”³⁸ According to journalist Shane Harris, author of The Watchers, the program was “defunded from the defense budget. But all the money for it would be moved over to the classified side. And it was disbanded in name, and all of the various components were separated, given new cover names, and almost all of them were shifted over to the management control of the National Security Agency.”³⁹

What Congress killed in public, the executive branch rebuilt in secret.

William Binney, who spent over 30 years at the NSA as Technical Director, described the warrantless surveillance program he witnessed after 9/11 as processing 320 million calls per day, including domestic communications. ‘

They put their devices on the line and take the entire line. Everything,’ he told Wired in 2012. In 2007, the FBI raided his home at gunpoint as part of an investigation into who leaked the program’s existence to the press.

So what does this mean for us?

This infrastructure exists because concentrated wealth built it, captured the institutions meant to regulate it, and now directly controls the executive branch. Peter Thiel co-founded Palantir with CIA venture capital.¹² Thiel named the company after the seeing stones in Lord of the Rings, the orbs the dark lord Sauron used to surveil his enemies and corrupt those who gazed into them. Not exactly subtle. Fascists rarely are.

So Thiel’s Palantir built the surveillance platforms. Then Thiel bankrolled the Vice President.²⁶ Then Elon Musk spent over $250 million electing Trump.⁴³ Trump gave Musk the keys to federal databases containing information on every American.¹⁴ The billionaires who funded the campaigns now have access to the tax returns, medical records, and location data of every citizen, every journalist, every activist, every political opponent.

This is not a conspiracy theory. This is the documented structure of the current government.

You cannot reform a surveillance apparatus that has already captured its regulators. The federal legislative path produced the largest expansion of domestic surveillance since the Patriot Act in April 2024.⁴⁴ The courts have created standing doctrines that make challenges nearly unwinnable.⁴⁵ A January 2025 federal court ruled warrantless backdoor searches unconstitutional, and the program continues anyway pending appeals.⁴⁶

The answer is not better surveillance policy. The answer is breaking the concentration of power that made this inevitable.

That means taxing the wealth that funds political capture. It means getting corporate money and dark money out of politics so elections respond to voters instead of donors. It means building public alternatives to the private infrastructure that monetizes our movements. It means state-level action not because states can fix surveillance, but because states are where we still have leverage to redistribute power itself. The surveillance state is a symptom. Oligarchy is the disease.

Let’s talk about power. Money is power, so is mass appeal. Imagine a dozen people contacting the same state rep daily for months, through phone calls, emails, showing up at their office, letters to the editor, pressure on their donors, all to get money out of politics at the state and local level. Fifty people doing the same to your governor. Loud enough. Persistent enough. I promise they will be listening.

And if they are not in the office when you show up, you do not have to leave angry. Just call up and say you would love to help the representative do more, ask for the best way to follow their work and attend their events. Then you and a dozen friends show up everywhere they are to raise the same issues over and over until they cannot escape it.

Oligarchs never stop lobbying. They never stop pushing for more. They do not say “thanks for passing that law” unless it is immediately followed by “here is the next bill we need.” They are never satisfied. That persistence, that refusal to ever let up, is why they win. We can do the same thing. We can fundraise for the good ones. We can make it so donors do not want to give money to the bad ones. We can show up, be loud, help the people who do the right thing, and destroy the careers of people who do not.

We cannot organize as if we have privacy we do not have. But we also cannot mistake surveillance reform for the actual fight, which is over who holds power and what they are allowed to do with it. If you want to know how to actually make change, I wrote a tactical field guide called “Grab Them by the E.A.R.R.” that breaks down exactly how to do it based on what is proven effective, rather than what state media approves. Educate yourself on targets and who funds them. Activate by showing up and applying pressure. Recruit others so it multiplies. Repeat until they move or you replace them.

References

1. ACLU, “New Records Detail DHS Purchase and Use of Vast Quantities of Cell Phone Location Data” (July 18, 2022).

2. Joseph Cox, “Customs and Border Protection Paid $476,000 to a Location Data Firm,” Vice/Motherboard (Aug. 25, 2020); Electronic Frontier Foundation, “How the Federal Government Buys Our Cell Phone Location Data” (June 13, 2022).

3. Carpenter v. United States, 585 U.S. 296 (2018).

4. Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Senior Advisory Group Report on Commercially Available Information (Jan. 2022).

5. NBC News, “Flock Police Cameras Scan Billions Per Month” (Nov. 2025); Motorola Solutions, Vigilant Solutions acquisition materials (Jan. 7, 2019).

6. Chris Burt, “Clearview Facial Recognition Searches Double, Database Reaches 50B Images,” Biometric Update (June 26, 2024).

7. Clare Garvie, Alvaro Bedoya, and Jonathan Frankle, “The Perpetual Line-Up: Unregulated Police Face Recognition in America,” Georgetown Law Center on Privacy & Technology (Oct. 18, 2016).

8. Sam Biddle, “Police Surveilled George Floyd Protests with Help from Twitter-Affiliated Startup Dataminr,” The Intercept (July 9, 2020).

9. Sam Biddle, “LAPD Surveilled Gaza Protests Using This Social Media Tool,” The Intercept (Mar. 17, 2025).

10. U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, “Federal Support for and Involvement in State and Local Fusion Centers” (Oct. 3, 2012); Brennan Center for Justice, “Ending Fusion Center Abuses” (2022).

11. NPR, “Real Time Crime Centers, Which Started in Bigger Cities, Spread Across the U.S.” (Aug. 16, 2023); Motorola Solutions, “What U.S. Locations Have Real Time Crime Centers?” (2025).

12. NPR, “How Palantir, the Secretive Tech Company, Is Rising in the Trump Era” (May 1, 2025).

13. Ali Winston, “Palantir Has Secretly Been Using New Orleans to Test Its Predictive Policing Technology,” The Verge (Feb. 27, 2018).

14. Stephanie K. Pell, Josie Stewart, and Brooke Tanner, “Privacy Under Siege: DOGE’s One Big, Beautiful Database,” Brookings Institution (June 25, 2025).

15. Axios, “DOGE’s Treasury Access Limited Amid Privacy Lawsuit” (Feb. 6, 2025).

16. Electronic Frontier Foundation, “Our Privacy Act Lawsuit Against DOGE and OPM” (Apr. 2025).

17. CNBC, “Supreme Court Just Gave DOGE Access to Social Security Data” (June 9, 2025).

18. Congressional Research Service, “Privacy Act Lawsuits and the Department of Government Efficiency” (2025).

19. U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland, Judge Ellen Hollander, Preliminary Injunction Opinion (Apr. 17, 2025).

20. Supreme Court of the United States, SSA v. AFSCME, Emergency Stay Order (June 6, 2025).

21. Brian Krebs, “Teen on Musk’s DOGE Team Graduated from ‘The Com,’” Krebs on Security (Feb. 2025).

22. Brian Krebs, “Whistleblower: DOGE Siphoned NLRB Case Data,” Krebs on Security (Apr. 2025).

23. U.S. Army, “U.S. Army Awards Enterprise Service Agreement to Enhance Military Readiness” (July 31, 2025); Immigration Policy Tracking Project, “Palantir Granted $30 Million for ImmigrationOS” (Apr. 17, 2025).

24. CNBC financial reporting; Investing.com market data (2025).

25. Project On Government Oversight, “Stephen Miller’s Financial Stake in ICE Contractor Palantir” (June 2025).

26. CBS News, “The Billionaire Who Fueled JD Vance’s Rapid Rise to the Trump VP Spot” (2024); OpenSecrets FEC data.

27. White House announcement (Dec. 5, 2024); U.S. Senate confirmation vote (Mar. 25, 2025).

28. Stephanie K. Pell, Josie Stewart, and Brooke Tanner, “Privacy Under Siege: DOGE’s One Big, Beautiful Database,” Brookings Institution (June 25, 2025).

29. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, Memorandum Opinion re Section 702 2021 Certification (Apr. 21, 2022, declassified May 2023).

30. Matt Apuzzo, Adam Goldman, Eileen Sullivan, and Chris Hawley, Associated Press investigation (Aug. 2011-Apr. 2012); NPR, “Stories Put Spotlight on NYPD Surveillance Program” (Apr. 18, 2012).

31. ACLU, “Williams v. City of Detroit” case materials; MIT Technology Review, “The New Lawsuit That Shows Facial Recognition Is Officially a Civil Rights Issue” (Apr. 14, 2021).

32. ACLU-NJ, Amicus Brief in Parks v. McCormac (Jan. 29, 2024); NBC News (Dec. 29, 2020).

33. NBC News, “Detroit Woman Sues City After Being Falsely Arrested While Pregnant Due to Facial Recognition” (Aug. 6, 2023).

34. ACLU, “Police Say a Simple Warning Will Prevent Face Recognition Wrongful Arrests. That’s Just Not True” (2024); Kashmir Hill, “Facial Recognition Led to Wrongful Arrests. So Detroit Is Making Changes,” The New York Times (June 29, 2024).

35. 404 Media, “ICE Taps into Nationwide AI-Enabled Camera Network, Data Shows” (May 27, 2025); Tomoki Chien, “SFPD Let Georgia, Texas Cops Illegally Search City Surveillance Data on Behalf of ICE,” The San Francisco Standard (Sept. 8, 2025).

36. ACLU Washington National Office, “USA Patriot Act Boosts Government Powers While Cutting Back on Traditional Checks and Balances: An ACLU Legislative Analysis” (Nov. 1, 2001).

37. Glenn Greenwald, “XKeyscore: NSA Tool Collects ‘Nearly Everything a User Does on the Internet,’” The Guardian (July 31, 2013).

38. Harry McCracken, “Senator Wyden Reflects on 9/11’s Orwellian Legacy,” Fast Company (Sept. 10, 2021).

39. Shane Harris, The Watchers: The Rise of America’s Surveillance State (Penguin Press, 2010).

40. James Bamford, “The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say),” Wired (Mar. 15, 2012).

41. “The Original NSA Whistleblower,” Reason Magazine (Apr. 17, 2014); Democracy Now! (Apr. 20, 2012).

42. Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill, “Edward Snowden: The Whistleblower Behind the NSA Surveillance Revelations,” The Guardian (June 9, 2013).

43. NBC News, “Elon Musk Spent a Quarter-Billion Dollars Electing Trump” (Dec. 6, 2024); CNN FEC analysis (Feb. 1, 2025).

44. Elizabeth Goitein, “Senate Approves Massive Expansion of Government Surveillance Power,” Brennan Center for Justice (Apr. 19, 2024).

45. Clapper v. Amnesty International USA, 568 U.S. 398 (2013).

46. United States v. Hasbajrami, 2025 WL 447498 (E.D.N.Y., unsealed Jan. 21, 2025); ACLU press release (Jan. 22, 2025).

47. Indivisible, “A Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda” (2017).