Authoritarians Gain Power From Lists; Here's How to Fight Back

At dawn on January 15, the infrastructure I documented in “The Disappearance Machine” completed its pivot. FBI agents seized a journalist’s devices containing 1,169 federal sources and know every person those sources ever contacted.

The surveillance tools built to map immigrant networks are now mapping dissent. The databases are merging. The lists are compiling. The machine is building its lists.

This essay asks when and how we will build ours.

In August, I preached and I warned: The United States had built a system for disappearance at scale, and it wouldn't stay at the border. I was dismissed as alarmist. Five months later, the wolf is through the door. The FBI at a journalist's home at dawn, seizing the devices that map everyone who ever talked.

The machine built to disappear immigrants is now being calibrated for journalists, whistleblowers, and political opposition. This is not the beginning of that process. It is the middle.

On January 15, 2026, FBI agents arrived at Hannah Natanson’s Virginia home before first light. They took her phone. Two laptops. A Garmin watch. The Washington Post reporter had spent a year as the “federal government whisperer,” building a network of 1,169 Signal contacts from federal workers documenting President Donald Trump’s transformation of government. Every one of those contacts trusted that encryption meant protection. Now their names, numbers, and message histories sit in FBI forensic labs. The trust was misplaced. The exposure is underway.

This is not a separate story from the immigration enforcement apparatus I documented in “The Disappearance Machine.” It is the same infrastructure, the same surveillance tools, the same logic of bureaucratic erasure, the same expansion I warned was inevitable.

The machine built to disappear immigrants is now being calibrated for journalists, whistleblowers, and political opposition. This is not the beginning of that process. It is the middle. The die is cast. The machinery is active. And it is learning how to map dissent the same way it learned to map migration: through databases, devices, and the quiet accumulation of lists that no one sees until it is too late.

The Infrastructure Does Not Discriminate

The tools were built for the border. They will not stay there.

In “The Disappearance Machine,” I described how the United States government contracted with Palantir, Amazon, and Anduril to build AI-powered surveillance systems for immigration enforcement. Predictive software. Commercial databases that map not just individuals but their relationships, behaviors, and associations. Cell signals tracked. Protest attendance logged. Clinic visits recorded. The same way totalitarian regimes once tracked enemies by ledger and index card, we now track them by algorithm and metadata.

That infrastructure was never going to stay confined to immigration. The tools don’t discriminate. They sort, flag, and process by design. A database built to map immigrant networks maps any network. Software trained to predict “deportability” predicts any target category you feed it. Surveillance systems deployed to track one population can pivot to another with a policy memo and a shift in priorities.

The Natanson raid makes that pivot visible. The FBI seized devices containing years of communications, contacts, and location data. Signal conversations with phone numbers traceable through government records. Email chains revealing addresses. Browser history showing which government sites she visited and when. Even the Garmin watch, because location data maps patterns of movement, meetings, and association.

This is not traditional criminal investigation. This is network mapping at scale. The same forensic capabilities applied to immigration databases are now being applied to journalist-source relationships. The architecture is identical. Only the target has changed.

The Lists Are Always the Core

Every authoritarian system runs on lists. Oskar Schindler knew that. He built one to save lives because the same machinery was building them to end lives. The list doesn't care what it's for. It just processes names.

The Disappearance Machine operates on lists. More than 20 million people are being targeted, already within reach of the immigration enforcement system based on the government’s own data. Not just undocumented immigrants but visa holders, DACA recipients, parolees, asylum seekers, aid workers, and US citizen children connected by family ties. The list converts proximity into guilt, connection into evidence, care into crime.

Now the same list-making infrastructure is being turned inward. Attorney General Pam Bondi’s December 2025 memo directs the FBI to compile “lists of groups or entities engaged in acts that may constitute domestic terrorism.” These lists are compiled in secret. No notice. No hearing. No means for redress. Updated every 30 days. The FBI has established cash reward systems for informants and publicized tip lines for reporting suspected domestic terrorists.

None of this is new. It is merely new again.

A government employee on both lists, flagged for immigration ties and for contact with a journalist, becomes a higher-priority target.

The FBI’s Security Index and Rabble Rouser Index, exposed by the 1975 Church Committee, rolled civil rights leaders, clergy, and students into a homogeneous category of threats to national security. The Church Committee’s core lesson remains relevant: When the government builds systems for tracking domestic enemies, those systems rarely stay confined to people engaged in actual crime. They expand, driven by broad labels and institutional instincts to gather more information than needed.

The Natanson raid exposes how these lists are populated in practice. Seize a reporter’s devices. Map every source who ever made contact. Cross-reference with employment databases to identify agencies, departments, positions. Match timing of communications with leaks or published stories. Build a network diagram of everyone connected to information the government wants to control.

Hannah Natanson’s 1,169 sources on her federal government beat are not the whole exposure. Add thousands from years covering education. Sources from her January 6 coverage. Breaking news contacts from mass shootings and disasters. Email and phone contacts accumulated across a career going back to 2019. We are talking about thousands of people whose information now sits in FBI databases, flagged by association with someone the government decided to investigate.

Most did not share classified information. They shared workplace conditions, policy changes, agency mismanagement. That is often protected whistleblowing under law. But protection under law means little when the goal is not prosecution. The goal is mapping. Building lists. Identifying networks. Creating a comprehensive picture of who talks to whom about what.

And here is what makes this moment different from the Church Committee era: The lists are converging. The lists from immigration enforcement, the DOGE data accumulations, and journalist surveillance are being compiled in the same databases, using the same tools, following the same logic. Today they are separate categories. Tomorrow they can be merged, cross-referenced, analyzed for patterns. A government employee on both lists, flagged for immigration ties and for contact with a journalist, becomes a higher-priority target. The infrastructure doesn’t just track. It learns. It predicts. It escalates.

Bureaucratic Disappearance, Scaled and Refined

The violence hides in the paperwork.

In “The Disappearance Machine,” I described how people are being taken and files vanish. Lawyers find no records. Families are left with no answers. The system hides itself in bureaucracy. Cloud servers instead of filing cabinets. Charter flights instead of cattle cars. Software platforms instead of stamped passports. The fear is made public through spectacle, a raid televised, a camp built in a week, while the machine operates in silence.

The Natanson raid follows the same pattern. The spectacle is the dawn knock, the devices seized, the attorney general’s public statements about “classified information” and “national security.” That is theater. The real work happens in silence. FBI forensic labs extracting years of data. Analysts building network maps. Names added to databases. Sources flagged for investigation. All conducted under legal process that makes it feel orderly, authorized, routine.

This is what bureaucratic disappearance looks like when applied to dissent rather than detention. No one is being put on a plane. But sources are being exposed, careers destroyed, networks mapped, and fear distributed through the knowledge that contact with a journalist creates a permanent record accessible to law enforcement. The outcome is the same as physical disappearance: silence. Self-censorship. Networks dissolved not through arrests but through the rational calculation that speaking carries unacceptable risk.

The lesson is being taught one case at a time. Every federal employee now knows that contacting a journalist may mean their name ends up in an FBI file. Every journalist knows their sources face exposure if devices are seized. Every advocacy organization knows they might be labeled domestic terrorists and subjected to the same surveillance. The chilling effect operates not through mass arrests, which would be too visible, too contestable, but through the quiet accumulation of cases that teach everyone else to stay silent or risk everything.

This is how totalitarian systems operate. Not through spectacular violence but through bureaucratic process that converts dissent into data, association into evidence, and speech into crime. The machine does not announce its intentions. It simply processes the next case, adds the next name, expands the next database. And by the time the pattern is obvious to everyone, it is too late to stop it.

The Expansion Was Always the Plan

“If you’re telling yourself this is just about immigration, you are lying to yourself.” That is what I wrote in “The Disappearance Machine.” The infrastructure now in place can be turned inward with a single policy shift. A protest database. A subpoenaed group chat. A misread message. The files are already compiled. The logic is already tested. What began with immigration will not stop at the border. It will not stop at citizenship. It will not stop at all, unless it is broken.

The Natanson raid is that expansion happening in real time.

The surveillance tools built for immigration enforcement are now being applied to domestic political opposition. The lists are being compiled. The networks are being mapped. The legal framework is being established piece by piece.

This is the moment when action matters. Not later, when the pattern is obvious to everyone. Now, when the machinery is visible to those willing to look.

National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, issued September 2025, directs law enforcement to investigate “acts of recruiting or radicalizing persons” for “political violence, terrorism, or conspiracy against rights.” It identifies ideological markers as red flags: “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity.” “Extremism on migration, race, and gender.” “Hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”

The Bondi memo implements this vision by directing the FBI to compile lists of groups engaged in “organized doxing campaigns, swatting, rioting, looting, trespass, assault, destruction of property, threats of violence, and civil disorder.” These categories are breathtakingly broad. They could encompass virtually any protest that becomes disruptive, any criticism framed as “anti-American,” any opposition to immigration enforcement or support for “radical gender ideology.”

What we are witnessing is the creation of a domestic terrorism designation process without legal foundation. No federal law permits the president to label domestic groups as terrorist organizations. Yet the administration proceeds anyway, using the same infrastructure built for immigration enforcement. Secret lists compiled. Cash rewards for informants. Joint Terrorism Task Forces, historically used against foreign threats, now mobilized against American citizens engaged in constitutionally protected activities.

This is not a future risk. It is operational now. The Natanson raid demonstrates how the system works in practice. A journalist documents government actions. Sources provide information. The government decides that information is dangerous. Devices are seized. Networks are mapped. Sources are exposed. Legal process provides cover. Bureaucracy makes it feel orderly. And the next journalist, the next source, the next researcher learns the lesson: Silence is survival.

What History Teaches

Ask survivors of authoritarian regimes what they remember. They rarely describe the first moment of violence. They describe the silence.

They remember when neighbors vanished and no one asked where they had gone. They remember how fear hardened into habit. How routine replaced resistance. How everyone waited too long to believe what was happening because believing meant acting, and acting meant risk.

We have seen this before. Not identical, but unmistakably familiar. In Nazi Germany, it was lists, uniforms, house visits, household registries, and public silence. Files became train rosters. Erasure became routine. Citizens looked away because the violence arrived not as chaos but as order. The Stasi in East Germany compiled comprehensive surveillance files on millions of citizens. The KGB used networks of informants to map dissent. The Gestapo maintained card files on suspected opponents. Each system relied on the same core infrastructure: comprehensive surveillance, secret lists, bureaucratic processing, and the normalization of disappearance.

The technology changes. The logic does not.

Now it is cloud servers instead of filing cabinets. AI-powered network analysis instead of hand-drawn relationship maps. Device seizures instead of house searches. The scale of what is now possible exceeds anything historical authoritarian regimes could achieve. The Stasi employed hundreds of thousands of informants and took decades to compile files on millions of people. The FBI can map networks of millions in months, using tools that automatically analyze communications, predict associations, and flag targets for investigation.

One device seizure exposes thousands of sources. Metadata reveals patterns of contact that would have taken years of human surveillance to establish. Location data maps every meeting, every movement, every association. And the databases that receive this information do not forget. Unlike paper files that could be destroyed, digital records persist indefinitely. They can be searched instantaneously, cross-referenced with immigration records, tax records, health records, financial transactions, social media activity, and location data from cell towers and traffic cameras.

This is not paranoia. This is documented capability. The contracts are public. The technologies are commercial. The legal frameworks are established. The only question is how far the government chooses to go. And history teaches that governments with comprehensive surveillance capability always go further than they initially promise.

The question survivors of other regimes ask is always the same: Why didn’t anyone act sooner? And the answer is always the same: because it arrived not as chaos but as order. Forms being filed. Legal procedures followed. Systems working exactly as designed. By the time the violence becomes undeniable, the infrastructure is already complete and the space for resistance has closed.

We are in that middle space now. The infrastructure is operational but not yet complete. The expansion is happening but not yet normalized. The lists are being compiled but not yet acted upon at full scale. This is the moment when action matters. Not later, when the pattern is obvious to everyone. Now, when the machinery is visible to those willing to look.

What Schindler Knew

Schindler understood something essential: The list is the power. Whoever holds the names decides who disappears and who survives. He built a list to save lives because the same machinery, in other hands, was building lists to end them. Same columns. Same categories. Same bureaucratic logic. Different purpose. That was the only difference that mattered.

Hannah Natanson built a list too. Not names to save from trains, but names willing to speak truth. 1,169 sources who believed that documenting the dismantling of democratic government mattered more than their comfort, their careers, their safety. She built a network of witnesses. A chorus of voices. A record of resistance written in encrypted messages and quiet meetings and the steady courage of people who decided that silence was not an option.

That list is now in FBI hands. The sources are exposed. The network is mapped. The chorus is identified. The machinery built to disappear immigrants has turned inward, and the first thing it seized was a record of everyone who ever talked.

This is not coincidence. It is strategy.

The answer to a list of targets is a list too long to process, too distributed to seize, too deeply rooted to pull from the ground.

Hannah Arendt wrote that totalitarianism succeeds not through violence alone but through isolation. It atomizes. It separates. It makes each person feel alone, unseen, unable to trust that anyone else sees what they see or feels what they feel. The purpose of seizing a journalist’s sources is not prosecution. It is silence. It is severing. It is teaching every federal employee, every potential whistleblower, every citizen with something true to say that they stand alone. That no one will protect them. That the machine sees all, remembers all, and forgives nothing.

The answer to isolation is solidarity. The answer to silence is a thousand voices. The answer to a list of targets is a list too long to process, too distributed to seize, too deeply rooted to pull from the ground.

Schindler saved 1,100 lives because he understood that the list was the power and he seized it. Hannah Natanson documented a transformation of government because she understood that the truth required witnesses and she gathered them. Both built something the machinery could not build for itself: trust. Connection. A web of humans who chose each other over safety.

That is what the machine cannot tolerate. Not the leaks. Not the stories. The solidarity. The proof that isolation can be broken, that people will still speak to people, that the chorus can grow louder even as the machinery grows stronger.

What we build now determines what survives. The networks we create. The connections we protect. The records we keep in too many hands to seize, too many places to raid, too many voices to silence.

The machine is processing names. It will not stop. It does not tire. It does not forget.

But neither does memory. Neither does history. Neither do the witnesses who refuse to look away.

Schindler built a list. Hannah built a list.

Now build yours.

This essay builds on “The Disappearance Machine,” published in Common Dreams, August 30, 2025. A comprehensive academic version has been accepted for peer-reviewed publication and will appear this spring.