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    Peter Thiel’s Palantir poses a grave threat to Americans | Robert Reich

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    Draw a circle around all the assets in the US now devoted to artificial intelligence.Draw a second circle around all the assets devoted to the US military.A third around all assets being devoted to helping the Trump regime collect and compile personal information on millions of Americans.And a fourth circle around the parts of Silicon Valley dedicated to turning the US away from a democracy into a dictatorship led by tech bros.Where do the four circles intersect?At a corporation called Palantir Technologies and a man named Peter Thiel.In JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, a “palantír” is a seeing stone that can be used to distort truth and present selective visions of reality. During the War of the Ring, a palantír falls under the control of Sauron, who uses it to manipulate and deceive.Palantir Technologies bears a striking similarity. It sells an AI-based platform that allows its users – among them, military and law enforcement agencies – to analyze personal data, including social media profiles, personal information and physical characteristics. These are used to identify and surveil individuals.In March, Trump signed an executive order requiring all agencies and departments of the federal government to share data on Americans. To get the job done, Trump chose Palantir Technologies.Palantir is now poised to combine data gleaned from the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Social Security Administration and the Internal Revenue Service. Meanwhile, the administration wants access to citizens’ and others’ bank account numbers and medical claims.Will the Trump regime use an emerging super-database to advance Trump’s political agenda, find and detain immigrants, and punish critics? Will it make it easier for Trump to spy on and target his ever-growing list of enemies and other Americans? We’ll soon find out.Thirteen former Palantir employees signed a letter this month urging the corporation to stop its work with Trump.Linda Xia, who was a Palantir engineer until last year, said the problem was not with the company’s technology but with how the Trump administration intended to use it. “Combining all that data, even with the noblest of intentions, significantly increases the risk of misuse,” she told the New York Times.Even some Republicans are concerned. Representative Warren Davidson, a Republican of Ohio, told Semafor such work could be “dangerous”: “When you start combining all those data points on an individual into one database, it really essentially creates a digital ID. And it’s a power that history says will eventually be abused.”Last week, a group of Democratic lawmakers sent a letter to Palantir, asking for answers about huge government contracts the company got. The lawmakers are worried that Palantir is helping make a super-database of Americans’ private information.Behind their worry lie several people who are behind Palantir’s selection for the project, starting with Elon Musk.Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) was behind Palantir’s selection. At least three Doge members had worked at Palantir, the Times reported, while others had worked at companies funded by Peter Thiel, an investor and a founder of Palantir, who still holds a major stake in it.Thiel has worked closely with Musk, who devoted a quarter of a billion dollars to getting Trump re-elected and then, as head of Doge, helped eviscerate swaths of the government without congressional authority.Thiel also mentored JD Vance, who worked for Thiel at one of his venture funds. Thiel subsequently bankrolled Vance’s 2022 senatorial campaign. Thiel introduced Vance to Trump and later helped Vance become his vice-presidential pick.Thiel also mentored the billionaire David Sacks, who also worked with Thiel at PayPal. As a student at Stanford University, Sacks wrote for the Stanford Review, the rightwing student newspaper Thiel founded as an undergraduate there in 1987. Sacks is now Trump’s “AI and crypto czar”.The CEO of Palantir is Alex Karp, who said on an earnings call earlier this year that the company wants “to disrupt and make the institutions we partner with the very best in the world and, when it’s necessary, to scare enemies and on occasion kill them”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionPalantir recently disclosed that Karp received $6.8bn in “compensation actually paid” in 2024 (you read that right) – making him the highest-paid chief executive of a publicly traded company in the United States.A former generation of wealthy US conservatives backed candidates like Barry Goldwater because they wanted to conserve American institutions.But this group – Thiel, Musk, Sacks, Karp and Vance, among others – doesn’t seem to want to conserve much of anything, at least not anything that occurred after the 1920s, including social security, civil rights and even women’s right to vote.As Thiel has written:
    The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women – two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians – have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.
    Hello?If “capitalist democracy” is becoming an oxymoron, it’s not because of public assistance or because women got the right to vote. It’s because billionaire capitalists like Musk and Thiel are intent on killing democracy.Not incidentally, the 1920s marked the last gasp of the Gilded Age, when America’s robber barons ripped off so much of the nation’s wealth that the rest of the US had to go deep into debt both to maintain their standard of living and to maintain overall demand for the goods and services the nation produced.When that debt bubble burst in 1929, we got the Great Depression. Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler then emerged to create the worst threats to freedom and democracy the modern world had ever witnessed.If the US learned anything from the first Gilded Age and the fascism that grew like a cancer in the 1930s, it should have been that gross inequalities of income and wealth fuel abuses of political power – as Trump, Musk, Thiel, Karp and other oligarchs have put on full display – which in turn generate strongmen who destroy both democracy and freedom.The danger inherent in Palantir’s AI-powered super-database on all Americans is connected to the vast wealth and power of those associated with the corporation, and their apparent disdain for democratic institutions.Had you walked to the end of Trump’s military-birthday parade and gazed above the president’s reviewing stand, you’d have seen on a giant video board an advertisement for Palantir – one of the chief sponsors of the event.Tolkien’s palantír fell under the control of Sauron. Thiel’s Palantir is falling under the control of Trump. How this story ends is up to all of us.

    Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com More

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      ‘I’m paranoid all the time’: surveillance and fear in a city of immigrants as White House ramps up deportations

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      Two months after fleeing death threats in Colombia, Juan landed a construction job in New York. But on his first day, the bulky GPS monitor strapped to his ankle caught the manager’s attention. It wouldn’t fit inside standard work boots. The boss shook his head. “Come back when you’ve resolved your status,” he said.Since arriving in the US with his teenage daughter to seek asylum, Juan has lived in a state of constant anxiety. “It feels like I committed a crime, like they’re going to arrest me at any moment,” he said, speaking near the migrant shelter where they now live in Queens. Juan started wearing oversized pants to hide the monitor, a style he finds uncomfortable. “I’m paranoid all the time,” he said.Genesis, a 25-year-old from Panama, lives in the same shelter as Juan with her two-year-old. She has worn an ankle monitor for more than 18 months. “When I go to the park with my son, other parents don’t want their kids to play with him,” she said. The stigma of the monitor, she added, makes her feel like a bad mother. Genesis fled after members of Tren de Aragua, a transnational criminal group from Venezuela, threatened her life there, she said.Juan and Genesis are among the more than 12,000 immigrants in New York enrolled in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) schemes called Alternatives to Detention (ATD) and the Intensive Supervision Appearance Program (ISAP).View image in fullscreenMost of them are asylum seekers from Central or South America who came to the city seeking safety and the chance to work, according to a recent report from the American Bar Association, a national group of lawyers. They don’t have any criminal convictions, yet without legal status, they live under constant surveillance as their cases wend their way through the badly backed-up US immigration court system.Under ATD-ISAP, people can be monitored through GPS ankle bracelets, wrist-worn trackers, telephone check-ins or a mobile app called SmartLINK.The number of undocumented people under electronic monitoring related to their lack of immigration status alone is believed to have more than doubled since 2021, when the number in the US was about 85,000, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (Trac) at Syracuse University, although the organization “advises the public to be extremely cautious” about data on this from Ice.Ice’s internal budget for ATD-ISAP has increased from $28m in 2006 to nearly $470m by the end of 2024.While attention in the second Trump administration has been on detention and deportation, electronic monitoring is still a significant factor in many immigrants’ lives and has been increasingly so in recent years.Ice promotes ATD-ISAP as a “humane and cost-effective” alternative to detention, but while it is certainly better than being locked up, lawyers and advocates argue it embeds unnecessary state control into homes, workplaces and public spaces, trapping people in cycles of fear, stigma and instability.View image in fullscreenThose assigned body-worn monitors often report skin irritation, discomfort and the need for frequent charging. When the battery runs low, the device emits a loud alert that draws unwanted attention. “People made comments while I was working at McDonald’s. I’m not a criminal,” Genesis said. Even routine activities like showering can trigger connectivity issues, leading to phone calls from ISAP officers or sudden demands for in-person check-ins.SmartLINK, by contrast, requires participants to submit geotagged selfies, typically once a week, rather than being tracked continuously throughout the day.ATD-ISAP is managed by BI Incorporated, a subsidiary of the private prison giant Geo Group. In 2020, Donald Trump’s first administration awarded the company a five-year, $2.2bn contract.Regardless of the type of surveillance assigned, participants remain under acute risk of arrest and deportation. Some have started the asylum application process; others came relatively recently from Texas when that state was bussing asylum seekers to Democratic-led cities, and so far are merely trying to find their footing, perhaps a lawyer and some advice about starting the process to get papers and a work permit.View image in fullscreenThey are expected to report in person to the ISAP office with little notice. The office is located in a basement near Ice’s 26 Federal Plaza headquarters in lower Manhattan. Appointments are usually scheduled during working hours, forcing many to miss work, arrange childcare or lose out on daily wages, all while being in terror of arrest and summary detention.On weekday mornings, people can be seen lining up outside the building while anxious loved ones wait nearby. “It’s very difficult to have a normal life,” said a man from Guatemala whose wife has been monitored for three years. He asked to remain anonymous. “We can’t even leave the city,” he added.Some people enrolled in the ADP program were arrested amid record enforcement earlier this week, NBC reported, in a national ramping-up of efforts on the orders of senior Trump administration officials, including in New York.The effects of surveillance aren’t limited to those being tracked. Entire neighborhoods are feeling its presence.Liliana Torres, a psychologist who offers weekly mental health support in Spanish to newly arrived immigrants, said that cameras, patrol cars and even the sound of sirens regularly spark panic among her clients. “Everyday elements of the city become triggers,” she said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThis fear is especially felt in areas of the city such as Corona, home to New York’s largest Latin American immigrant community. Local business owners reported a noticeable drop in customers the first few months of the Trump administration.View image in fullscreen“People think they’re going to take all of us,” said a nail salon worker who asked to remain anonymous due to concerns around her legal status. “But we can’t afford to stay home. We have to work.”Vendors at Corona Plaza say police presence has increased in recent months, especially since the launch of Operation Roosevelt last fall, a citywide crackdown on unlicensed vending and sex work. The measures disproportionately affected undocumented residents. Neighbors and advocates worry the heightened enforcement signals deeper coordination between the New York police department and federal immigration authorities.“There’s a noticeable uptick in the use of digital surveillance tools, including social media monitoring and data-sharing with local agencies,” said Veronica Cardenas, an immigration attorney who left her role as an Ice prosecutor in 2023 after witnessing first-hand the treatment immigrants receive. “More people who would have previously been considered low priority are now at risk.”View image in fullscreenFear spreads online, too. “We see people on TikTok saying Ice is coming when it isn’t,” said Niurka Meléndez, founder of Venezuelans and Immigrants Aid (VIA), a volunteer-run group that connects asylum seekers to legal and social services. “Or worse, spreading confusion about immigration law.”VIA has been leading a regular event called Miracle Mondays at the St Paul & St Andrew United Methodist church in Manhattan since 2022. Once considered sanctuary spaces, churches are no longer off limits to Ice, prompting VIA to take extra precautions. Event locations are now shared privately via WhatsApp, rather than being posted publicly on social media.In response to growing fears, the Venezuelan-led group has also started organizing legal clinics in neighborhoods such as Corona to reach those too afraid to attend the church. At one such event in March, dozens of Latin American migrants gathered to ask lawyers from the New York Legal Assistance Group how they could regularize their immigration status.“If I give birth here and they deport me, will they keep my baby?” asked Stefani, a Venezuelan woman eight months pregnant. One lawyer responded cautiously, explaining that while she would have the right to bring her baby with her, the government can still act in ways that disregard the law. Lawyers also handed out one-page notices saying that individuals with pending asylum cases cannot be detained without due process.View image in fullscreenLocal community groups such as Ice Watch have adapted to this new climate by educating communities about their rights. Ice Watch tracks immigration enforcement and sends real-time alerts via encrypted Signal chats across the five boroughs. Its members also conduct training to teach people how to recognize Ice agents, document encounters and support those being targeted. Social workers, English teachers activists and small business owners are often among those who attend.For Juan, who fled Colombia after gang members shot his father in the head, life in New York has come at the cost of constant paranoia and a sense that genuine safety remains out of reach. His 16-year-old daughter notices everything. “She sees how I live and blames herself,” he said. At times, they’ve talked about returning to Colombia, but the risk of being kidnapped and tortured by mobsters is very real for him and his family.“I fear something worse than death could happen if I go back,” Juan said.Despite the stress, he holds on to small signs of progress, such as watching his daughter attend school and slowly but steadily pick up English. “I need to give her at least the option to have a better life than I had,” he said. More

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      Ice accessed car trackers in sanctuary cities that could help in raids, files show

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      As Donald Trump’s administration ramps up its crackdown on undocumented immigrants to the US, advocates are increasingly worried immigration agents will turn to surveillance technology to round up those targeted for deportation, even in so-called “sanctuary cities” that limit the ways local law enforcement can cooperate with immigration officials.That’s because US Customs and Immigration Enforcement (Ice) in past years has gained access to troves of data from sanctuary cities that could aid its raids and enforcement actions. Among that information is data from the vast network of license plate readers active across the US, according to documents obtained by the Guardian.Local agencies across the country use license plate readers, high-speed cameras that scan and capture images and videos of every vehicle that passes, to collect information on vehicular activity, including the direction a vehicle is moving. They store those details in databases that are often shared with other local law enforcement agencies as well as federal ones. The volume of data gathered along with the wide breadth of bureaus that have access to it mean that federal agents in practice can often obtain information on individual immigrants gathered by local authorities those same agents are legally not allowed to work with.Take the example of Westchester county, New York, where police work with a license plate reader company named Rekor.Westchester, a 450-sq-mile mostly suburban area just north of New York City – has had laws limiting cooperation with federal immigration authorities on the books since 2018. But documents including emails and access logs newly made public show Ice has had access in the past to a major database that holds license plate reader information collected across the county.Westchester county police said they managed a network of 480 such cameras as of January 2023. Westchester police provided these figures in response to a freedom of information law request and are the most up-to-date figures available on the scale of the county’s license plate surveillance network. In just the last week of January 2023, the cameras scanned 16.2m cars, according to these documents. That’s up from 14m scans across 346 cameras in March 2022, these emails show. Ice, Customs and Border Protection and the agency they fall under, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), have all had access to this database as of February 2022, as do local law enforcement agencies outside New York state, these documents show. The license plate information that is stored in this database came from more than 20 cities across Westchester and spans two years.Neither Ice nor the Westchester county police department responded to questions about whether the federal agency still has access to the database.In the first few weeks of Donald Trump’s administration, a flurry of immigration enforcement activity across Westchester county prompted local mayors to reassure residents they were complying with local sanctuary laws and were not cooperating with Ice on these investigations. These laws “prohibit members of the police department from engaging in law enforcement activities solely for the purpose of enforcing federal immigration law, unless required to do so by a judicial warrant or other federal law”, the Peekskill mayor, Vivian C McKenzie, told the Westfair Business Journal.The data sharing between the county police and Ice, illustrated in the documents the Guardian reviewed, appear to have sidestepped and undermined the county’s sanctuary city laws. It also means that Ice can potentially use data captured in Westchester to pursue immigration cases elsewhere, including in other sanctuary cities.“Westchester can be a sanctuary county or a surveillance state. It can’t be both. This sort of mass tracking violates the promise made to undocumented residents that they will be safe in the county,” Albert Fox Cahn, the director of the privacy advocacy group the Surveillance Tech Oversight Project, said. “It’s unclear if Westchester county [was] violating the letter of its law, or merely its spirit, but either way it’s clear that immigrant communities are at risk.”Westchester county police, Ice and the mayors of several cities in the county did not respond to multiple requests for comment.The documents, which Westchester county police made public in response to a freedom of information law request by a legal non-profit and shared exclusively with the Guardian, include a list of its “users”, or organizations that had access to this database as of February 2022. The non-profit asked not to be named to avoid compromising the federal grants the organization was awarded. In addition to Ice and the DHS, agencies listed as having access include the Department of Justice, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the Secret Service and the FBI.A separate list details individual users who have access to the database. Among the users were five individuals who had email addresses that ended in @ice.dhs.gov and two people with Secret Service email addresses ending in USSS.dhs.gov. There were 44 users with email addresses that end in FBI.gov, 40 with DOJ.gov addresses and just over a dozen featuring DEA.gov. Many of those included on the list indicated they were part of the investigative unit of their agency. It was not clear whether that list was current as of 2025 and if those users have ongoing access to the database.A nationwide surveillance netRekor sells license plate readers and the software used to analyze their data to law enforcement agencies, though it is among the smaller companies in an ecosystem of many working in similar ways. Together, these companies’ license plate readers blanket the majority of the US. Access to more than one major network can enable law enforcement agencies to monitor people’s movements across the country.In addition to accessing local networks like Westchester’s, Ice uses the national database of Vigilant Solutions, a Motorola subsidiary which offers license-plate reading technology that competes with Rekor for contracts with local law enforcement and business across the US. In 2019, documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) revealed 9,000 Ice agents had access to the database of Vigilant Solutions.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionPrivacy and civil liberty experts argue these technologies create a vast surveillance dragnet wherein the movement of every vehicle in the US is being tracked and examined regardless of whether there is an active investigation. Residents of places where these cameras have been set up are beginning to push back.In October, residents of Norfolk, Virginia, sued the city for allegedly violating their fourth amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures by installing license plate readers from another Rekor competitor called Flock Safety. When announcing the contract to install 172 Flock cameras across Norfolk, the police chief, Mark Talbot, said his office wanted to create “a nice curtain of technology” that would make it “difficult to drive anywhere of any distance without running into a camera somewhere”. Lee Schmidt, one of the plaintiffs, said four of the cameras had fenced in his neighborhood.“He was outraged by the loss of privacy,” said Michael Soyfer, an attorney at the Institute of Justice who is representing the plaintiffs on this case. “He noticed that he basically couldn’t leave his neighborhood without one of the cameras picking it up.”Local law enforcement across the country sharing license plate data with each other and with federal agencies means that anyone’s movements are in effect being tracked across state lines, experts say.“We’re moving to a day where someone getting in their car in New York City could drive to Boston or Washington and have their car basically map every moment of the drive,” Fox Cahn said. “It is profoundly and painfully ironic that American highways went from the symbol of freedom and the liberty of the open road to this metaphor for creeping surveillance and police control.”Westchester police discuss more surveillanceIn addition to informal data-sharing with various federal and local agencies inside and outside of New York state, emails show Westchester police actively discussed creating formal data-sharing relationships to enable a cross-county surveillance network, including with the New York police department and fire departments, as well as an out-of-state agency in Stamford, Connecticut.“If you get a chance I would love to discuss what possibilities exist with a Data Sharing plan,” a Westchester police lieutenant wrote in an email to an NYPD officer dated 10 March 2022. “We are currently at 346 cameras in Westchester with about 14 million reads per week. A lot of those reads are along the city line (Bronx).”The range of agencies and individuals that have access to this database is potentially far more expansive than those listed. Rekor advertises a nationwide law enforcement platform that allows any agency that uses it “to access real time data from any part of the network at no cost”, according to a company press release. Announced in 2019, the platform would make real-time data on the “150 million plate reads” a month that Rekor collects across 30 states available to any agency that wanted to opt in. More

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      Ice contractor plans for surveillance boom under Trump migrant crackdown

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      The Geo Group, the largest single private contractor to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice), said it was building out its surveillance business to be able to monitor hundreds of thousands or millions more immigrants than it already does.The Geo Group, a private prison corporation and parent company of BI Inc, has contracted with Ice for nearly 20 years to manage the agency’s electronic monitoring program. It currently tracks approximately 186,000 immigrants using devices such as ankle monitors, smart watches and a facial recognition app, according to public Ice data. Due to increasing demand from Donald Trump’s administration, which has promised mass deportations, company executives said that they expect that number to grow past its previous peak of 370,000 to 450,000 immigrants within the next year. The remarks were made during the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call on Thursday morning.“A little over two years ago, the ISAP contract utilization peaked at approximately 370,000,” George Zoley, the executive chair of the Geo Group, said on an earnings call on Thursday, referring to the agreement between Ice and Geo. “Returning to that utilization level would generate incremental revenues of $250m and even more if the contract exceeds the prior peak of utilization.”While the company is still ramping up its production of additional GPS units in anticipation of an expanded Ice contract, executives said they are able to monitor “several hundreds of thousands” of people and are trying to position themselves to be able to monitor millions of people. Zoley said that the Geo Group, and its competitor in running private prisons and detention centers, Core Civic, are in expedited discussions with Ice to expand current contracts for detention facilities as well as electronic monitoring.“It’s a fluid situation, but it’s picking up pace, if I may say,” he said. “We’ve gone from conceptual proposals … to substantive pricing and operational discussions. But the procurement process is moving at a speed that is unprecedented. We’ve never seen anything like this before.”The company’s vast electronic monitoring program was instituted as an alternative to detention in 2004 and has been entrusted to Geo group subsidiary BI Inc since then. Many of those forced to wear the ankle monitors, designed and produced by BI, have complained the devices can overheat, shock them or have been put on too tightly. The company has pitched its smart watch location tracker and smart phone app, called SmartLink, as a lower-level of surveillance than the monitor. Executives said on Thursday’s earnings call, however, that they expect a return to a reliance on the physical ankle monitors.“I think there is going to be a preference in the beginning for the ankle monitors which represents the high-security level of monitoring,” Zoley said.Though the company has yet to receive an indication from Ice on when the agency expects to reissue a new contract for the electronic monitoring program, called the Intensive Supervision Appearance Program, executives say they believe the agency is focused on expanding the number of people being tracked through the existing program. The Geo Group is investing $16m into building out its inventory of ankle monitors in order to “be in a position to scale up the federal government’s utilization of ISAP by several hundreds of thousands to upwards of several millions of participants as required”, according to Zoley.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionCompany executives also said they believed that under the Laken Riley Act, which requires the detention of undocumented immigrants charged with violent crimes or theft, those detained will be required to be monitored under the ISAP program “indefinitely” if there is not enough capacity in detention facilities. The executives signaled their intent to expand the company’s surveillance program so that it could monitor an estimated 7 to 8 million people on the non-detained docket who entered the US through non-authorized pathways and then are released into the US. They are also building up capabilities to monitor the estimated 9.5 to 10 million people in the US who are otherwise undocumented in anticipation of Ice’s requests.“Given the size of the population our view is in addition to increased detention capacity … the Laken Riley Act will require significant ramp-up of electronic monitoring services to ensure proper trafficking of persons on non-detained docket and their compliance of the requirements of their immigration court proceedings,” Zoley said. More

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      The question no one dares ask: what if Britain has to defend itself from the US? | George Monbiot

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      All the talk now is of how we might defend ourselves without the US. But almost everyone with a voice in public life appears to be avoiding a much bigger and more troubling question: how we might defend ourselves against the US.As Keir Starmer visits the orange emperor’s court in Washington, let’s first consider the possibilities. I can’t comment on their likelihood, and I fervently hope that people with more knowledge and power than me are gaming them. One is that Donald Trump will not only clear the path for Vladimir Putin in Ukraine, but will actively assist him. We know that Trump can brook no challenge to his hegemony. Russia is no threat to US dominance, but Europe, with a combined economy similar to that of the US, and a powerful diplomatic and global political presence, could be.Putin has long sought to break up the EU, using the European far right as his proxies: this is why he invested so heavily in Brexit. Now Trump, in turn, could use Putin as his proxy, to attack a rival centre of power. If Trump helps Russia sweep through Ukraine, Putin could then issue an ultimatum to other frontline and eastern European states: leave the EU, leave Nato and become a client state like Belarus, or you’re next. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán might agree to this. If Călin Georgescu wins in Romania in May, he might too.What form could US support for Putin in Ukraine take? It could involve intelligence sharing. It could involve permanently withdrawing Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite internet service from Ukraine, which is strategically crucial there, while making it available to the Russian armed forces. Already, the US government has threatened to nix the service if Ukraine doesn’t hand over its minerals, as reparations for being invaded. This is how Trump operates: blackmailing desperate people who are seeking to defend themselves against an imperial war, regardless of past alliances. In the extreme case, Trump’s support for Russia might involve military equipment and financial backing, or even joint US-Russian operations, in the Arctic or elsewhere.Now consider our vulnerabilities. Through the “Five Eyes” partnership, the UK automatically shares signals intelligence, human intelligence and defence intelligence with the US government. Edward Snowden’s revelations showed that the US, with the agreement of our government, conducts wholesale espionage on innocent UK citizens. The two governments, with other western nations, run a wide range of joint intelligence programmes, such as Prism, Echelon, Tempora and XKeyscore. The US National Security Agency (NSA) uses the UK agency GCHQ as a subcontractor.All this is now overseen by Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s director of national intelligence, in charge of the CIA, NSA and 16 other agencies. After she recited conspiracy fictions seeded by the Syrian and Russian governments, she was widely accused of being a “Russian asset” or a “Russian puppet”. At what point do we conclude that by sharing intelligence with the US, the UK might as well be sharing it with Russia?View image in fullscreenDepending on whose definitions you accept, the US has either 11 or 13 military bases and listening stations in the UK. They include the misnamed RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk, actually a US air force base, from which it deploys F-35 jets; RAF Menwith Hill in North Yorkshire, in reality a US NSA base conducting military espionage and operational support; RAF Croughton, part-operated by the CIA, which allegedly used the base to spy on Angela Merkel among many others; and RAF Fylingdales, part of the US Space Surveillance Network. If the US now sides with Russia against the UK and Europe, these could just as well be Russian bases and listening stations.Then we come to our weapon systems. Like everyone without security clearance, I can make no well-informed statement on the extent to which any of them, nuclear or conventional, are operationally independent of the US. But I know, to give just one example, that among the crucial components of our defence are F-35 stealth jets, designed and patented in the US. How stealthy they will turn out to be, when the US has the specs, the serial numbers and the software, is a question that needs an urgent answer.Nor can I make any confident statement about the extent to which weapons designed here might be dependent on US central processing units and other digital technologies, or on US systems such as Starlink, owned by Musk, or GPS, owned by the US Space Force. Which of our weapons systems could achieve battle-readiness without US involvement and consent? Which could be remotely disabled by the US military? At the very least, the US will know better than any other power how to combat them, because our weapons are more or less the same as theirs. In other words, if the US is now our enemy, the enemy is inside the gate.Much as I hate to admit it, the UK needs to rearm (though cutting the aid budget to find the money, as Keir Starmer intends, is astonishingly shortsighted). I reluctantly came to this conclusion as Trump’s numbers began to stack up last July. But, if they are fatally compromised by US penetration, rearmament might have to begin with the complete abandonment of our existing weapons and communications systems.This may need to start very soon. On 24 February, the UN general assembly voted on a Ukrainian resolution, co-sponsored by the UK and other European nations, condemning Russia’s invasion. Unsurprisingly, Russia, Belarus, North Korea, Hungary and several small and easily cowed states voted against it. But so did the US andIsrael. This, more clearly than any other shift, exposes the new alignment. An axis of autocracy, facilitating an imperial war of aggression, confronts nations committed (albeit to varying degrees) to democracy and international law.For many years, we have been urged to trust the UK’s oppressive “security state”. Yes, this security state is yanked around like a fish on a line by the US government, with such catastrophic outcomes as the US-UK invasion of Iraq. Yes, it is engaged in mass surveillance of its own citizens. But, its defenders have long argued, we should suck all this up because the security state is essential to our defence from hostile foreign actors. In reality, our entanglement, as many of us have long warned, presents a major threat to national security. By tying our defence so closely to the US, our governments have created an insecurity state.I hope you can now see what a terrible mistake the UK has made, and how we should have followed France in creating more independent military and security systems. Disentangling from the US will be difficult and expensive. Failing to do so could carry a far higher price.

      George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist More

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      How to survive the broligarchy: 20 lessons for the post-truth world | Carole Cadwalladr

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      1 When someone tells you who they are, believe them. Last week Donald Trump appointed a director of intelligence who spouts Russian propaganda, a Christian nationalist crusader as secretary of defence, and a secretary of health who is a vaccine sceptic. If Trump was seeking to destroy American democracy, the American state and American values, this is how he’d do it.2 Journalists are first, but everyone else is next. Trump has announced multibillion-dollar lawsuits against “the enemy camp”: newspapers and publishers. His proposed FBI director is on record as wanting to prosecute certain journalists. Journalists, publishers, writers, academics are always in the first wave. Doctors, teachers, accountants will be next. Authoritarianism is as predictable as a Swiss train. It’s already later than you think.3 To name is to understand. This is McMuskism: it’s McCarthyism on steroids, political persecution + Trump + Musk + Silicon Valley surveillance tools. It’s the dawn of a new age of political witch-hunts, where burning at the stake meets data harvesting and online mobs.4 If that sounds scary, it’s because that’s the plan.  Trump’s administration will be incompetent and reckless but individuals will be targeted, institutions will cower, organisations will crumble. Fast. The chilling will be real and immediate.5 You have more power than you think. We’re supposed to feel powerless. That’s the strategy. But we’re not. If you’re a US institution or organisation, form an emergency committee. Bring in experts. Learn from people who have lived under authoritarianism. Ask advice.6 Do not kiss the ring. Do not bend to power. Power will come to you, anyway. Don’t make it easy. Not everyone can stand and fight. But nobody needs to bend the knee until there’s an actual memo to that effect. WAIT FOR THE MEMO.7 Know who you are. This list is a homage to Yale historian, Timothy Snyder. His On Tyranny, published in 2017, is the essential guide to the age of authoritarianism. His first command, “Do not obey in advance”, is what has been ringing, like tinnitus, in my ears ever since the Washington Post refused to endorse Kamala Harris. In some weird celestial stroke of luck, he calls me as I’m writing this and I ask for his updated advice: “Know what you stand for and what you think is good.”8 Protect your private life. The broligarchy doesn’t want you to have one. Read Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: they need to know exactly who you are to sell you more shit. We’re now beyond that. Surveillance Authoritarianism is next. Watch The Lives of Others, the beautifully told film about surveillance in 80s east Berlin. Act as if you are now living in East Germany and Meta/Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp is the Stasi. It is.9 Throw up the Kool-Aid. You drank it. That’s OK. We all did. But now is the time to stick your fingers down your throat and get that sick tech bro poison out of your system. Phones were – still are – a magic portal into a psychedelic fun house of possibility. They’re also tracking and surveilling you even as you sleep while a Silicon Valley edgelord plots ways to tear up the federal government.10 Listen to women of colour. Everything bad that happened on the internet happened to them first. The history of technology is that it is only when it affects white men that it’s considered a problem. Look at how technology is already being used to profile and target immigrants. Know that you’re next.11 Think of your personal data as nude selfies. A veteran technology journalist told me this in 2017 and it’s never left me. My experience of “discovery” – handing over 40,000 emails, messages, documents to the legal team of the Brexit donor I’d investigated – left me paralysed and terrified. Think what a hostile legal team would make of your message history. This can and will happen.12 Don’t buy the bullshit. A Securities and Exchange judgment found Facebook had lied to two journalists – one of them was me – and Facebook agreed to pay a $100m penalty. If you are a journalist, refuse off the record briefings. Don’t chat on the phone; email. Refuse access interviews. Bullshit exclusives from Goebbels 2.0 will be a stain on your publication for ever.13 Even dickheads love their dogs. Find a way to connect to those you disagree with. “The obvious mistakes of those who find themselves in opposition are to break off relations with those who disagree with you,” texts Vera Krichevskaya, the co-founder of TV Rain, Russia’s last independent TV station. “You cannot allow anger and narrow your circle.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion14 Pay in cash. Ask yourself what an international drug trafficker would do, and do that. They’re not going to the dead drop by Uber or putting 20kg of crack cocaine on a credit card. In the broligarchy, every data point is a weapon. Download Signal, the encrypted messaging app. Turn on disappearing messages.15 Remember. Writer Rebecca Solnit, an essential US liberal voice, emails: “If they try to normalize, let us try to denormalize. Let us hold on to facts, truths, values, norms, arrangements that are going to be under siege. Let us not forget what happened and why.”16 Find allies in unlikely places. One of my most surprising sources of support during my trial(s) was hard-right Brexiter David Davis. Find threads of connection and work from there.17 There is such a thing as truth. There are facts and we can know them. From Tamsin Shaw, professor in philosophy at New York University: “‘Can the sceptic resist the tyrant?’ is one of the oldest questions in political philosophy. We can’t even fully recognise what tyranny is if we let the ruling powers get away with lying to us all.”18 Plan. Silicon Valley doesn’t think in four-year election cycles. Elon Musk isn’t worrying about the midterms. He’s thinking about flying a SpaceX rocket to Mars and raping and pillaging its rare earth minerals before anyone else can get there. We need a 30-year road map out of this.19 Take the piss. Humour is a weapon. Any man who feels the need to build a rocket is not overconfident about his masculinity. Work with that. More

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      US Senate votes to renew Fisa surveillance program

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      The US Senate voted late on Friday night to approve the reauthorization of the controversial Fisa surveillance program, narrowly preventing its midnight expiration.The reauthorization secures what supporters call a key element of the United States’ foreign intelligence-gathering operation.“Democrats and Republicans came together and did the right thing for our country safety,” said Chuck Schumer, the leader of the Democratic majority in the Senate.“We all know one thing: letting Fisa expire would be dangerous. It’s an important part of our national security, to stop acts of terror, drug trafficking and violent extreme extremism.”Fisa has attracted criticism from some Republican and Democratic lawmakers, who argue it violates Americans’ constitutional right to privacy. The bill was blocked three times in the past five months by Republicans in the House of Representatives bucking their party, before passing last week by a 273-147 vote when its duration was shortened from five years to two years.The White House, intelligence chiefs and top lawmakers on the House intelligence committee warned of potentially catastrophic effects of not reauthorizing the program, which was first created in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.Although the right to privacy is enshrined in the US constitution, the data of foreign nationals gathered by the program often includes communications with Americans, and can be mined by domestic law enforcement bodies such as the FBI without a warrant.That has alarmed both hardline Republicans and leftwing Democrats. Recent revelations that the FBI used this power to hunt for information about Black Lives Matter protesters, congressional campaign donors and US lawmakers raised further doubts about the program’s integrity. More

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      The US isn’t just reauthorizing its surveillance laws – it’s vastly expanding them | Caitlin Vogus

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      The US House of Representatives agreed to reauthorize a controversial spying law known as Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act last Friday without any meaningful reforms, dashing hopes that Congress might finally put a stop to intelligence agencies’ warrantless surveillance of Americans’ emails, text messages and phone calls.The vote not only reauthorized the act, though; it also vastly expanded the surveillance law enforcement can conduct. In a move that Senator Ron Wyden condemned as “terrifying”, the House also doubled down on a surveillance authority that has been used against American protesters, journalists and political donors in a chilling assault on free speech.Section 702 in its current form allows the government to compel communications giants like Google and Verizon to turn over information. An amendment to the bill approved by the House vastly increases the law’s scope. The Turner-Himes amendment – so named for its champions Representatives Mike Turner and Jim Himes – would permit federal law enforcement to also force “any other service provider” with access to communications equipment to hand over data. That means anyone with access to a wifi router, server or even phone – anyone from a landlord to a laundromat – could be required to help the government spy.The Senate is expected to vote on the House bill as soon as this week, and if it passes there, Joe Biden is likely to sign it. All Americans should be terrified by that prospect.Section 702 is supposedly a foreign intelligence tool that allows the US government to surveil the communications of non-US citizens abroad without a warrant. But as many civil liberties groups have pointed out, intelligence agencies like the FBI also use it as a warrantless spying tool against Americans. The FBI abused its authority under the law no fewer than 300,000 times in 2020 and 2021, according to a ruling from a Fisa court judge. In arguing for the reauthorization of Section 702 late last year, Turner, chair of the House intelligence committee, shockingly suggested in a closed-door briefing that the law could be used to spy on Americans protesting against the war in Gaza.It’s not supposed to be that way. In most cases, the fourth amendment requires the government to have a court-approved warrant to obtain an American’s communications. But intelligence agencies have used Section 702 as a loophole that allows them to vacuum up and comb through communications between an American and a foreigner who can be targeted under the law – all without a warrant.The House didn’t just fail to reform Section 702. It voted to grant intelligence agencies expansive new surveillance powers. The Turner-Himes amendment would allow them to deputize ordinary Americans and businesses as government spies. When privacy advocates raised alarms about the Stasi-like powers this would create, lawmakers like Himes brushed them off without a substantive response. The proposed expansion deserves an explanation. The US government has a long history of abusing its existing surveillance powers. It would be naive to think it wouldn’t abuse new ones.While the Turner-Himes amendment lists some business types that are excepted from the requirement to help spy – like dwellings and restaurants – an almost limitless number of entities that provide wifi or just have access to Americans’ devices could be roped into the government’s surveillance operations. Using the wifi in your dentist office, hiring a cleaner who has access to your laptop, or even storing communications equipment in an office you rent could all expose you to increased risk of surveillance.The Turner-Himes amendment would also make it harder to push back on abusive surveillance practices, including those targeting first amendment rights. Take, for example, the surveillance of journalists. Big tech companies may sometimes resist government orders to spy on news outlets. They command armies of lawyers, receive Section 702 orders frequently, and have a commercial incentive to at least appear to care about their customers’ privacy concerns. But what hope could a news organization have that its cleaning crew, for instance, will want to take on the federal government on its behalf?The FBI’s abuses of Section 702 violate Americans’ privacy and often threaten their first amendment rights. A declassified report from 2023, for example, revealed that the FBI had used Section 702 to investigate Black Lives Matter protesters. Section 702 has also been used to spy on American journalists, weakening their first amendment right to report the news by undermining their ability to speak with foreign sources confidentially – something reporters must do frequently.In response to these and other abuses, many reformers argue that Section 702 should be reauthorized only with real reforms that would rein in government spying, such as requiring the government to get a warrant before it can access Americans’ communications. Johnson himself initially attempted to weaken Fisa’s surveillance provisions in an effort to satisfy the hardline rightwingers in his caucus and Donald Trump. He did not succeed. The House voted to reauthorize Section 702 without adding a warrant requirement.The fact that Section 702 has been used so often against the exercise of first amendment rights – including those of journalists – makes it both shocking and inexplicable that so many news outlets continue to support it. The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and Chicago Tribune have all published editorials in recent days cheering the demise of the warrant requirement and urging Congress to reauthorize the law. But the House vote wasn’t just a reauthorization. It was a drastic, draconian expansion of the government’s surveillance powers.Some of these editorials scoff at Trump’s recent nonsensical social media post criticizing Section 702 and frame the anti-surveillance crowd as a ragtag bunch of fringe rightwingers, ignoring that lawmakers and civil liberties organizations across the political spectrum opposed extending Fisa without reforming it. They also ignore the real threats Section 702 poses to Americans’ privacy rights and first amendment interests, especially if a future administration is determined to surveil and chill its opponents.Thankfully, it’s not too late for the Senate to prevent these future abuses. In the face of the pervasive past misuse of Section 702, the last thing Americans need is a large expansion of government surveillance. The Senate should reject the House bill and refuse to reauthorize Section 702 without a warrant requirement. Lawmakers must demand reforms to put a stop to unjustified government spying on Americans. More

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      What is Fisa, and what does it mean for no-warrant spying?

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      Congress spent the past week in a fractious debate over a major government surveillance program that gives US authorities the ability to monitor vast swaths of emails, text messages and phone calls without a warrant. In a vote on Friday, lawmakers ultimately decided to keep that warrantless surveillance intact and passed a two-year reauthorization of the law, known as section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or Fisa.The law has long been contentious among both progressives and libertarian-leaning conservatives who view it as a violation of privacy rights and civil liberties. Donald Trump has likewise lambasted it out of personal grievance. Its defenders, which include intelligence agencies and Joe Biden’s administration, argue that it is an important tool in stopping terrorist attacks, cybercrime and the international drug trade.What is section 702 of Fisa?Section 702 is a measure added in 2008 to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, first passed in 1978, which allows authorities, including government agencies such as the NSA and FBI, to collect and monitor communications. More specifically, it gives them the authority to surveil the messaging of foreign citizens outside US soil and to do so without requesting a warrant.Although section 702 was ostensibly intended to be used to monitor foreign terrorist groups and criminal organizations, law enforcement agencies have also used its authority to collect and surveil US citizens’ communications. This is because Americans messaging with people abroad are also liable to have their data accessed, which has led to improper use of the law and allegations from civil liberties groups that it gives authorities a backdoor into warrantless searches.The law emerged from the George W Bush administration’s post-9/11 surveillance policies, adding government oversight to a secret program that had been monitoring foreign communications for years without formalized congressional approval.Why is section 702 so divisive?Section 702 has opponents on both sides of the political spectrum, with its critics especially concerned over the law’s ability to conduct warrantless searches of American citizens’ communications and law enforcement’s tendency to improperly overreach in its use.Under section 702, authorities are only supposed to be able to search databases of communications for US citizens if they believe that the query could yield intelligence on malicious foreign actors or proof of a crime. But between 2020 and early 2021, the FBI improperly used section 702 almost 300,000 times in searches that targeted January 6 suspects, racial justice protesters and other American citizens, according to documents from Fisa court.That misuse gave new life to calls for reforming section 702, potentially including requiring authorities to get a warrant from a judge before accessing US citizens’ communications. Civil liberties groups demanded numerous revisions, including closing loopholes that allowed the government to purchase information on US citizens through third-party data brokers.Donald Trump’s campaign also reignited criticism of section 702, especially among far-right Republicans who tend to operate in lockstep with his pronouncements. The former president demanded that lawmakers “KILL FISA” in a post on Truth Social on Wednesday and accused authorities of using it to spy on his campaign – an apparent reference to an FBI investigation of a former campaign adviser of his that was unrelated to section 702.Defenders of the law argued that there were already adequate provisions for stopping its misuse, and that requiring warrants or killing section 702 entirely would severely limit authorities’ ability to stop terrorist attacks and other crimes. Administration officials and backers of the reauthorization cited numerous US adversaries, from Chinese government spying operations to Islamist extremist groups, as reasons that warrantless surveillance was necessary for stopping urgent threats.What happens to section 702 now?The reauthorization of Fisa on Friday means that the program and warrantless surveillance will be able to continue for at least another two years. An amendment that would have required authorities to get a warrant for searches of US citizens narrowly did not pass, with a House vote ending in a 212-212 tie that resulted in its failure.While the law was originally intended to be renewed for five years, Mike Johnson, the Republican speaker of the house, was forced to seek only a two-year reauthorization to mollify far-right GOP members who threatened to quash the bill entirely. More