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Mutual Aid and the Governance We Are Already Practicing
Mutual aid as a component of community organizing shows us that governance begins with people: those who know their needs best, build trust with one another, and create systems capable of meeting immediate and long-term challenges.
Jun 29, 2026
Governance is how we hold power responsibly and equitably. Government is just one way we organize it—and what is abundantly clear is that good governance is not always done by a government.
Since congressional Republicans passed the “Big Beautiful Bill,” 3.5 million people have lost benefits through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). That includes more than 800,000 children who are now at risk of going hungry.
It is just one of many ways in which the current administration has either actively harmed or abdicated responsibility for families and communities. This is a precarious moment, but it is not a moment for despair. In communities long abandoned by the public sector, mutual aid networks have emerged as models of resilience that show how people can govern effectively when love and care, rather than hate and scarcity, are placed at the center of how community members care for each other.
A Long Southern Lineage of Necessity and Ingenuity
Mutual aid is a term to describe people helping each other when they cannot depend on the government. More fundamentally, it’s about reciprocal care and collective responsibility, whether or not the government shows up. It can begin as informal acts of kindness and gratitude, and grow to become enduring, formalized systems that support entire communities. The practice has long existed in the United States, especially in the South, where Black communities created their own institutions and parallel infrastructure to serve the people when dominant systems turned them away or caused them harm. From immigrants, to trans folks, to members of Indigenous communities, many marginalized groups have similar histories of using mutual aid as an organizing tool to create systems of self-governance that actually serve them.
The power of mutual aid exists in recognizing that people cannot reach liberated futures while their present needs remain unmet.
Mutual aid is not only a crisis response. It can be a vehicle to facilitate civic engagement in ways big and small, and it is a way for communities to organize to sustain one another and show up as daily stewards of each other’s well-being. Just as governance is not limited to a government, civic engagement isn’t limited to voting or holding elections. Mutual aid is intertwined with social justice movements. It brings people together to meet immediate needs through shared resources, trust, and collective responsibility—work that sustains daily life while building the relationships and political consciousness needed for long-term power.
Governance Is Already in Motion
The power of mutual aid exists in recognizing that people cannot reach liberated futures while their present needs remain unmet, and that those present needs have become politicized by a government that has made it acceptable to deny certain people care, dignity, and respect. Mutual aid is not charity, which maintains a top-down hierarchy of giver and receiver. Mutual aid when done responsibly is horizontal, and undergirded by an implicit politic that we must care for and provide for one another. Mutual aid is about shared struggle, interdependence, and collective well-being
Engaging in care as a political act is how we build collective power.
For example, Project South’s Mutual Aid Liberation Center in Atlanta, Georgia stands as a living testament to the potential of mutual aid networks. The center meets community members’ basic needs while cultivating political consciousness, leadership, and collective power in the local community and for movement work across the US South. Mutual aid doesn’t separate services from organizing. In one instance, when community members came to the Liberation Center for clothes and food, they learned about a plan to install surveillance cameras in places that would disproportionately harm Black and brown folks. The same neighbors who met at the Liberation Center organized, banded together, and spoke out against the proposal at a community meeting, preventing it from becoming law.
Southerners on New Ground (SONG), an LGBTQ-led community organizing group and mutual aid network that functions across the South, is another powerful example of how mutual aid can bring folks from across the political spectrum together. The organization aims to foster real relationships between people by connecting those who need food with those who can offer it. When extreme weather events occur, those same people serve as solidarity squads who keep each other prepared and safe. The work demonstrates how relationships between people are fundamentally more important than political divisions, which become meaningless when the immediate need is a hot meal, a generator, or a safe place to sleep.
Supporting Future Governance
Mutual aid as a component of community organizing shows us that governance begins with people: those who know their needs best, build trust with one another, and create systems capable of meeting immediate and long-term challenges. Yet mutual aid is the work of community organizing that often goes unseen and unfunded.
Mutual aid networks have the ability to become the pathways of just transition toward a more just world. When we put mutual care and concern at that center of how we structure our society, then we can reimagine how we govern our resources, how we provide safety for one another, how we support each other in meeting our material needs, and how we must govern ourselves with the goal of mutual aid at the center. And, as we begin to practice this way of living on a day-to-day basis, then we can begin to establish the practices, principles and values, agreements, and social contracts that are essential for justice and liberation for all.
In this way, mutual aid is the foundation for future governance that is built on relationships between people, not politics.
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How (And Why) AI is Eroding Democracy in the US
Big Tech elitists have their hooks into everything—from what happens in the privacy of our homes to the rampant AI-driven militarism we see unfolding on the global stage. Luckily, people are fighting back.
Jun 16, 2026
In the first few weeks of his presidency, Donald Trump announced a massive AI infrastructure project dubbed Stargate. It was an unexpected and rather odd event for a new administration’s first major initiative. It now seems obvious that the project was a highly coordinated initiative between the federal government and the Big Tech power base that puppeteers many of its programs as the US glides into full technocrat mode.
Stargate is an ongoing $500 billion public-private partnership intended to fast-track AI. It includes tech behemoths such as OpenAI, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Oracle. In practical terms, that means only one thing: a massive push to deploy AI data centers in every US state as quickly as possible. In the public’s perception, Stargate has faded from memory and neither the public nor many media outlets make the connection with the data center controversy now gripping the nation and generating headlines practically every day.
Nominally, this initiative is part of the larger goal of establishing the US as the world leader in AI innovation, especially with respect to similar efforts in China. But, tellingly, after the announcement, OpenAI described Stargate as a project that “will not only support the reindustrialization of the US but also provide a strategic capability to protect the national security of America and its allies." Here’s the translation of that language: military use and protection against cyber threats.
Astonishingly, in the press conference announcing it, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison blithely noted: “Every police officer is going to be supervised at all times, and if there’s a problem, AI will report that problem and report it to the appropriate person. Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.”
In behind-the-scenes Oz-like fashion, the raw power of this new form of information manipulation remains largely invisible yet all-pervasive and touches every aspect of our lives.
Even more astonishing is the fact that such a blatant declaration of the intent to radically ratchet up mass surveillance didn’t get pounced on by reporters and editors in the corporate media. At an Oracle financial analyst meeting, Ellison opined that AI will be used to process vast amounts of camera footage including data from car dashboards, front-door security systems, and Flock cameras. In the meantime, many states are busy deploying the highly controversial Flock devices to feed the AI beast its insatiable appetite for data. The good news is that, according to both the American Civil Liberties Union and mainstream media, there has been strong citizen pushback against the Flock cameras, even if the general public is not aware of the full range of the Trump-Ellison vision of a dystopian digital panopticon.
States Are Cooperating with Trump’s Plan
It seems clear that the Stargate initiative is authoritarian in nature. This blanket imposition of a massive technocratic structure imposed by an unholy alliance between the federal government and Big Tech business—the public-private partnership concept on steroids—is at odds with our most fundamental democratic processes. And while the temptation exists to lay this on the doorstep of the Republican-controlled Congress, make no mistake—the change is deep and structural and includes the compliance of Democrats as well.
Let’s just look at one example. In the bluest of blue states, Massachusetts, Democratic Gov. Maura Healey has been working closely with an array of Big Tech companies that include AI giants such as Google and OpenAI. In February 2026, she announced partnerships with both companies. As described in a press release: “At Google’s office in Cambridge today, Governor Maura Healey announced a new statewide partnership with Grow with Google to offer all Massachusetts residents access to artificial intelligence…This initiative is designed to help provide every resident and small business with the AI and tech skills they need to succeed in today's digital economy at no cost.” Around the same time, Healey also announced the launch of an initiative involving Open AI’s ChatGPT, making Massachusetts the first state to embrace AI usage for the entire executive branch of approximately 40,000 employees.
But to commit to AI is also to commit to the necessary infrastructure. AI data centers are springing up like dandelions in states all over the US. This is often happening without oversight because of undemocratic non-disclosure agreements that keep plans for building data centers out of the watchful eye of the cities and towns that will have to live with them as they suck up available public resources such as electricity and water while driving up costs for those essentials. This is happening in both red and blue states. The data center push is also what’s behind various state initiatives to bring back nuclear power as a “green” alternative.
AI’s Subtle Nudge Towards an Authoritarian Mindset
Stargate and the data center debacle are just the more obvious aspect of the authoritarian threat. There’s another that’s perhaps more insidious. For years, an interesting phrase has been popping up in high-tech circles: “a single source of truth.” It’s an enticing idea of course as we all crave simplification in this increasingly complex world. But this conceptual framework lays the groundwork for a new and more subtle kind of authoritarian mindset. And the rapid advance of AI is increasingly pushing this fatuous notion into alarmingly broad adoption, even in academic and professional circles.
Widespread AI adoption is based on the conventional wisdom that it will greatly expand the human panorama of knowledge, scientific and otherwise. The reality may be very different. In fact, it’s possible that the precise opposite will be the result. How can this be? Let me explain. In its current trajectory, AI usage appears to hijack the vast landscape of facts, opinions, and ideas across the arc of human knowledge and the multidisciplinary spectrum. The existential danger is that we’re being ever so gradually led to believe that there’s a single “right” answer to every known question, issue, or conundrum in politics, science, religion, politics, philosophy, and many other areas of modern life.
The next six months and the midterm elections represent a critical window of opportunity to turn much of this around and “just say no” to the AI juggernaut.
While AI appears to be a conduit to vast sources of knowledge previously unavailable, one of its most concerning characteristics remains poorly understood. AI has been designed to act not just as a new conduit to the internet but also as a gatekeeper and arbiter of what’s true and not true. Just as concerning, it’s not enhancing the internet… rather it’s replacing it. This shift means that searching the web will increasingly be performed by AI agents rather than humans. At its annual I/O developer conference in May 2026, Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai confirmed this as a major change in the company’s strategy. As noted by Sarah Perez in TechCrunch, “Links will become an afterthought with the coming changes to the Search results experience.” Goodbye search as we know it.
In behind-the-scenes Oz-like fashion, the raw power of this new form of information manipulation remains largely invisible yet all-pervasive and touches every aspect of our lives. It’s a nifty setup. Big Tech can sit back and claim lack of responsibility: We only developed it, and now it’s “doing its own thing.” In the meantime, they rack in billions and begin charging businesses and ordinary internet users more and more for AI capabilities that were initially offered as free services.
AI will increase our technological dependency by orders of magnitude, reducing our collective sense of human agency so badly needed now to counteract the effects of living in day-to-day polycrisis and political gridlock. Over time, this may translate into a kind of “learned helplessness” and a potent diminishment of grassroots political power. Society will become structured into rigid tiers depending on AI status. In the meantime, as poet and political commentator Katha Pollitt has pointed out, AI is also debasing “language, imagination, individuality, and art.”
Obviously, this is not a pretty picture but, in my opinion, there are real reasons for hope on the horizon. Increasingly, the technocratic takeover is being exposed for what it is: an anti-democratic power grab informed by a warped view of what constitutes quality of life (i.e. Silicon Valley transhumanism) and an acceleration of hyper capitalism that’s already wrought significant havoc on our planetary ecosystem.
The AI data center pushback is a wake-up call. Big Tech elitists have their hooks into everything—from what happens in the privacy of our homes to the rampant AI-driven militarism we see unfolding on the global stage. But the next six months and the midterm elections represent a critical window of opportunity to turn much of this around and “just say no” to the AI juggernaut. I believe there’s a very good chance that the nationwide pushback we’re now seeing about AI data centers and the rejection of the failed use of computers in education may be the beginning of a new wave of hope, renewal, and the restoration of democracy and common sense. Stay tuned.
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As Spying Renewal Stalls in Congress, Trump Pulls Plug on Pulte for DNI
"There is a path to reauthorizing FISA, but it will require enacting meaningful reforms," said House Democratic leaders.
Jun 11, 2026
After privacy advocates in Congress blocked proposed extensions of an expiring federal spying power on Thursday over a lack of reforms and concerns about newly appointed acting Director of National Intelligence Bill Pulte, President Donald Trump announced a different man as his official nominee for the post.
"I am pleased to announce the Nomination of very Highly Respected Jay Clayton, former Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the former Head of Sullivan & Cromwell, one of the most prominent and successful Law Firms anywhere in the World, and the current United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, to be the next Director of National Intelligence and, importantly, to serve in my Cabinet," Trump wrote on Truth Social. "Few people anywhere in the Legal Community are respected at the level of Jay. I encourage the United States Senate to confirm Jay as soon as possible."
Trump's announcement came shortly after Senate Republicans' unsuccessful requests for unanimous consent to extend Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)—which lets the US government spy on electronic communications of noncitizens located outside the country without a warrant—and a failed vote in the GOP-controlled House of Representatives.
"If Trump had announced this last night, or even this morning, it could've helped avoid a FISA/702 lapse," Punchbowl News reporter Andrew Desiderio said of Clayton's nomination. "Now the House is gone (and out next week) and the Senate is holding its final vote of the week right now—but most senators have already voted and dashed to the airport."
House Democratic leaders who opposed the extension pointed to Trump's appointment of Pulte following Tulsi Gabbard's recent announcement that she's resigning from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). As Federal Housing Finance Agency director, Pulte has sent criminal referrals to the US Department of Justice, alleging mortgage fraud by four of the president's political foes.
The Senate is due back on Monday, but Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) told reporters after the Clayton announcement that it "doesn't matter what else they do, Pulte's got to be gone. He's still in that role."
Meanwhile, the top Democrats on the intelligence panels in both chambers of Congress, Vice Chair Mark Warner (Va.) and Ranking Member Jim Himes (Conn.), praised Clayton. Sean Vitka, executive director at Demand Progress—a leader in the massive coalition of civil society groups demanding FISA reforms—said that "no Democrat should find solace in the fact that Trump has once again named a partisan hatchet man to be the nation's top spy."
"Just as Trump asked Bill Pulte to investigate Letitia James and Adam Schiff, he also has asked Jay Clayton to investigate Democrats' ties to Jeffrey Epstein," Vitka noted. "The fact that Sen. Warner and Rep. Himes would gush so effusively over Clayton shows their clear desire to sabotage a deal on FISA privacy reforms and hand President Trump the unfettered surveillance powers that he is asking for."
"Both Pulte and Clayton have already shown that they will carry out Trump’s directive to weaponize the government against his political enemies," he added. "Putting either of them at ODNI at a time when Trump is asking for warrantless surveillance powers through FISA is too big of a risk."
With both the House recess and Section 702's Friday expiration looming, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) had tried to get two-thirds majority support for an extension on Thursday. He secured support from seven Democrats—Reps. Henry Cuellar (Texas), Don Davis (NC), Jared Golden (Maine), Vicente Gonzalez (Texas), Josh Gottheimer (NJ), Susie Lee (Nev.), and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (Wash.)—but 19 Republicans joined the rest of the Democratic members present for the 198-218 vote.
"Section 702 is a critical foreign intelligence authority, but we cannot in good conscience vote for reauthorization without significant reforms to protect both national security and the constitutional privacy rights of Americans," said House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), Democratic Whip Katherine Clark (D-Mass.), Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar (D-Calif.), Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), and Himes.
"Bill Pulte has no relevant national security experience. Consequently, his appointment is in defiance of the law that requires the director of national intelligence to have 'extensive' national security experience. The apparent motivation for his elevation is the demonstrated willingness of Bill Pulte to search government databases for alleged dirt on President Trump's chosen political enemies," they continued. "There is a path to reauthorizing FISA, but it will require enacting meaningful reforms. We oppose this bill to kick the can further down the road."
Explaining her vote against "this sham extension of FISA that would allow continued spying on the American people," Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), a key progressive leader in the chamber, said that "a warrant requirement would pass today if Republican leadership put it up for a vote."
"However, Trump is doubling down on his appointment of Bill Pulte, closing any pathways for negotiation," she said before Clayton was announced. "I voted no today, and will continue to vote no until a warrant requirement is in place to protect our civil liberties."
Hajar Hammado, senior policy adviser at Demand Progress, said in a statement that "Speaker Johnson keeps trying and failing to jam through a no-reform FISA reauthorization, expecting different results—this time without even getting a simple majority of the House."
"If Johnson wants a FISA deal, all he has to do is allow amendment votes on privacy reforms," Hammado continued. "Adding warrant requirements to FISA is a path forward that has clear, bipartisan support. The only reason we're up against the deadline now is that congressional leaders and the White House keep ignoring this obvious reality and obstructing privacy reforms from getting a fair vote."
Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the Brennan Center for Justice's Liberty and National Security Program, similarly said on social media that "Section 702 was in trouble well before Trump announced the appointment of Pulte as acting DNI (and by the way, Pulte could still be in that role through the midterm elections). The 702 renewal hit a wall because Republican leaders wouldn't allow votes on widely supported reforms."
After Johnson complained to reporters about the vote and said that "I pray that we do not have a serious calamity on our shores over the next few weeks," Jake Laperruque at the Center for Democracy & Technology said: "I'm sorry, you cannot demand the high ground claiming to be distraught about our national security when you are treating FISA as less important than blocking all reform votes. You sure as hell can't claim the high ground when treating it as less important than going on vacation."
While national security hawks have tried to use the deadline to force an extension, suggesting that a lapse would cause "a potential significant gap in foreign intelligence collection," privacy advocates such as Laperruque have emphasized that "the text of the law makes clear that this threat of collection suddenly going dark... is fearmongering and not a genuine possibility."
As Laperruque explained earlier this week: "So long as an approved FISA 702 certification is active, collection from communications providers based on directives stemming from that certification will continue. Because the FISA Court approved the most recent annual certifications this March, this lapse would not occur until 2027."
The House and Senate GOP's failures to extend Section 702 on Thursday came a day after Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) objected to a proposal from Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.)—a leading privacy advocate—to pass by unanimous consent a nine-month renewal with warrant requirements. The Republican also opposed a five-week offer.
Calling out Cornyn's moves, Hammado said Wednesday that "surveillance hawks have spent all day screaming about how important it is to renew FISA, but then they just objected to a good faith deal that would reauthorize Section 702 with popular, bipartisan privacy reforms. The only thing stopping FISA from being renewed is congressional leadership's unexplained, persistent opposition to making the government get a warrant when it tries to access the private communications of Americans."
"Clear majorities in both parties, and of Americans in general, want a warrant requirement before renewing FISA," the Demand Progress campaigner added. "Why does congressional leadership prefer sunset over privacy?"
This article has been updated with additional comment from Sean Vitka of Demand Progress and Elizabeth Goitein of the Brennan Center for Justice.
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'Resounding Defeat for Opponents of Privacy': Warrantless Spying Extension Stalls in Senate
"Clear majorities of Americans across the nation, and in Congress, do not want the government bypassing the courts to hoover up our private, personal data."
Jun 05, 2026
Privacy advocates celebrated Friday after a Republican-led effort to extend warrantless spying powers failed to advance in the US Senate in the early hours of the morning, with seven GOP lawmakers joining every Democrat except Sen. John Fetterman in opposition.
The failed vote was another stumble for supporters of renewing Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which lets the federal government surveil the electronic communications of noncitizens located outside the US. The authority is set to lapse next Friday.
Advocates have long demanded reforms to the law, noting that US intelligence agencies have relentlessly abused it to spy on Americans.
Sean Vitka, executive director of Demand Progress, called Friday's vote a "resounding defeat for opponents of privacy," arguing it "shows that there is no path forward for FISA without a warrant requirement."
"Clear majorities of Americans across the nation, and in Congress, do not want the government bypassing the courts to hoover up our private, personal data," said Vitka. "If the White House and congressional leadership want to renew FISA, they have to stop ignoring this obvious fact and allow votes on real privacy reforms."
Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, called the vote "an interim victory" but warned that some senators "who would have voted to advance the bill changed their vote" due to President Donald Trump's selection of loyalist Bill Pulte to serve as acting director of national intelligence—a choice that drew bipartisan backlash.
Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), who supports extending Section 702 spying powers, voted against advancing the FISA legislation on Friday after decrying Pulte as an "enormously bad choice" who is "grossly unqualified."
Goitein noted that Pulte, who currently heads the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), is currently "under investigation by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office for misusing his position and his access to government records to trigger dubious charges of mortgage fraud against Trump’s perceived political enemies."
"If Pulte can do that with the limited access to Americans’ information he has as head of the [FHFA], imagine what he could do with all the authorities and capabilities of the intelligence community—including, of course, Section 702," she added. "What wouldn’t make sense? Handing Section 702 to whomever Trump could nominate in Pulte’s place without ensuring that they can’t use it as a tool for domestic spying."
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'The Creep State Is Watching': Guerilla Art Project Takes on Big Tech's Power Grab
“These people and these companies need to continue to be exposed for all of the harm that they're causing and the real power that they have over our government and those governed,” one organizer said.
May 05, 2026
On their way to attend the Met Gala on Monday night, guests might have spotted a different image of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos than the one he tried to project by chairing the annual fundraiser: a poster featuring his bulbous head, looming over them out of the darkness, attached to a muscular spider-shaped body. Above it, a mysterious message: “The Creep State is watching.”
What does it mean?
The Creep State is an anonymous guerilla art and protest project that debuted in Austin, Texas during South by Southwest earlier this year. It is designed to draw people’s attention to the threat posed by Big Tech billionaires and their increasing influence over both the US government and the daily lives of everyone who interacts with their products.
“These individuals are a danger to all of us,” a DC-based organizer said.
What Is the Creep State?
The Creep State image of Jeff Bezos is shown. (Photo via Creep State)
The idea for the Creep State came from the desire to raise awareness about certain Silicon Valley oligarchs and their anti-democratic actions and aspirations. Participants in the project who spoke to Common Dreams asked to remain anonymous in keeping with the guerilla-style tactics of their effort.
“There's what is really a very small group of men who control these algorithms, who control the software, the hardware, and.. they are trying to initially infiltrate our government and eventually replace our government,” a Seattle-based organizer explained. “They've all been pretty clear about, you know, some version of, you know, a company town run by a CEO king.”
The project’s designers wanted to convey that “these specific individuals have very nefarious and creepy goals, and they are personally creeps,"—hence, the “creep state” framing.
“Whatever you do, see, hear, touch, say, feel, believe, dream, the Creep State is watching."
Currently, the project consists of a physical and digital element.
Volunteers wheatpaste posters of seven Silicon Valley kingpins—Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Peter Thiel, Bill Gates, and Marc Andreessen, drawn in cartoon style as B-movie monsters—in major US cities. To date, the images have been displayed in Austin, Seattle, DC, Palo Alto, the area around the Met Gala in New York, and Los Angeles, with more to come.
The posters include a QR code that leads to a website, including a video highlighting how these moguls' companies and products are already monitoring people’s daily activities, from surveillance pricing to sleep tracking.
“Whatever you do, see, hear, touch, say, feel, believe, dream, the Creep State is watching," the video declares, before concluding: “We’re fighting back.”
“These people and these companies need to continue to be exposed for all of the harm that they're causing and the real power that they have over our government and those governed,” the DC-based organizer said.
‘People Versus the Machines’
The Creep State image of Sam Altman is shown. (Photo via Creep State)
While there have been many different campaigns and critiques calling out Big Tech and the rise of AI in recent years, the creators of the Creep State took an artistic approach partly to grab people’s attention, to make something that “quite literally visually shocked people out of the normal way that they think about and talk about these guys,” as the Seattle-based organizer put it.
They added that they wanted a viewer’s first response upon seeing the art to be, “Woah!”
So far, it seems to be working.
When the art went up in Seattle ahead of the No Kings protest on March 28, “people walking by stopped and took pictures and were like, ‘Whoa, what is this about? Oh my God, is that Jeff Bezos? Whoa, is that Bill Gates?’” the Seattle organizer said.
A member of the team who put the posters up in DC on April 18 similarly recalled: “We had a young woman come up to us and ask us about the Creep State and said she was glad we were exposing these guys. She said she was from [Prince George's] County in Maryland and was part of the movement to stop data centers there.”
"Fundamentally the question that we face is will we allow one or a few of these corporations to literally remake our society?"
The project’s designers see themselves as operating within a tradition of guerilla art against the powerful from Banksy, Favianna Rodriguez, and Shepard Fairey's OBEY posters to student protests against Slobodan Milošević in Serbia in the 1990s and the FeesMustFall campaign in South Africa in the 2010s. However, the project—which made a point of working with actual human creators, including a screenwriter, comic book artist, and graphic designer—takes on extra resonance in an age in which AI slop clogs up social media feeds and threatens to put creative workers out of a job.
“This is very much a people versus the machines kind of thing,” the Seattle-based organizer said. “Are we going to be a society where human creativity and human inspiration and human thinking are valued, or are we going to be a world where.. we're all plugged into a screen?”
Bipartisan Appeal
The Creep State image of Peter Thiel is shown. (Photo via Creep State)
As the project uses an artistic approach to hook people who might otherwise ignore its messaging, it also crafts that messaging in an attempt to appeal to people who might not always agree politically.
The name “Creep State” was chosen in part for its similarity to “deep state,” which is often used on the political right to describe hidden actors undemocratically controlling the federal government. Some of the headlines highlighted in the introductory video were also selected to appeal to right-leaning viewers. (“Prayer apps: is AI playing God?” one reads.)
“Our assessment here is that we may have, and we very much do have, some very deep disagreements in a variety of ways with the right wing. But there is a very real grassroots right-wing opposition to the Silicon Valley takeover of our economy and our democracy. And we want to make sure that this is a campaign that different types of folks can see themselves reflected in,” the Seattle-based organizer said.
"Once they're burrowed in, it's going to be very difficult to root them out.”
Indeed, the rise of AI and the hyperscale data centers it relies on seems to have, at least so far, bypassed the usual culture war divides. As communities across the country have mobilized against the data center buildout, “you've got DSA people linking arms with, you know, like ultra-MAGA folks,” the Seattle organizer added.
The numbers reflect this, with around 50% of both Republicans and Democrats now saying they are more concerned than excited about AI and 55% of the politicians opposing data centers, which are often located in red states, being Republicans.
The embrace of AI and its Silicon Valley pushers may be one wedge between President Donald Trump and some of his supporters, as 75% of 2024 Trump voters think that AI should be regulated while the president himself has thrown his weight behind a plan to prohibit states from regulating AI at all.
Indeed, even as the Creep State’s developers reach out to Trump voters, they are clear that the Trump administration itself has escalated the Big Tech takeover of the US government, upping the urgency of their project.
Even before Trump was elected a second time around, Silicon Valley enabled his rise. Bezos sunk The Washington Post’s endorsement of his rival Kamala Harris, while Musk donated more than a quarter billion to back Trump's campaign. His Vice President JD Vance is a protege of Thiel, who has backed Trump since 2016.
Trump has repaid these Big Tech executives handsomely with access, money, and his deregulatory push. The DC-based organizer said they were partly inspired to get involved with the Creep State project after witnessing the havoc wreaked by Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, which cut funding for essential grants and may lead to the deaths of over 14 million through the shuttering of the US Agency for International Development. At the same time, tech billionaires have increased their profits by contracting with the government, enabling deportations via Immigration and Customs Enforcement and both surveillance and targeting via the Pentagon.
Yet the Seattle-based organizer said that some Trump supporters “are beginning to realize… that these guys don't care about Trump. Trump is a vehicle for them. And, you know, once they're burrowed in, it's going to be very difficult to root them out.”
‘We’re Fighting Back’
The Creep State image of Mark Zuckerberg is shown. (Photo via Creep State)
Ultimately the goal of the Creep State project is to plug everyone who sees and responds to the art—whatever their politics—into the growing movement to push back against the Big Tech power grab.
“The more we can expose these actors, it can inspire people to… organize against them, demand… oversight and regulations over AI and the influence that these individuals have on their politics,” the DC-based organizer said.
People who scan the QR code can be funneled into future wheatpasting sessions (which are all volunteer efforts) or local fights related to tech policy. One hope the organizers have is that communities across the country who are fighting data center construction or Flock camera expansion could order posters from the site that would have their QR codes adjusted to direct viewers to the local struggle.
“If we can plug people into some of those fights with organizations and for them to get more deeply involved, we'd love to do that,” the DC organizer said.
The Seattle organizer concluded, "Fundamentally the question that we face is will we allow one or a few of these corporations to literally remake our society?"
They continued: "We're all living through this polycrisis. The climate is collapsing, the economy is in tatters, we're at war abroad. There's something new and crazy every day, and it's hard to break through to people. So the hope is that this art specifically, in this way of highlighting both the like political creepiness and the personal creepiness of these guys, can maybe shock some people who otherwise are just trying to get through their day into, 'I need to do something.'"
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Privacy Advocates Relieved Trump Allies 'Can't Get Their Warrantless FISA Reauthorization Across the Finish Line'
"Our bipartisan movement in defense of civil liberties is holding strong," a Demand Progress campaigner said after Congress passed a short-term extension to continue talks on a longer renewal.
Apr 30, 2026
Just a day after Democrats in the GOP-controlled US House of Representatives helped Republicans send a major spying bill to the Senate, despite warnings that it was dead on arrival there, both chambers on Thursday passed a 45-day extension to continue negotiations.
The Senate approved the stopgap bill for Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)—which allows the federal government to spy on electronic communications of noncitizens located outside the United States without a warrant—by a voice vote. The House signed off with a 261-11 vote, just hours before a previous short-term extension was set to expire.
President Donald Trump and his homeland security adviser, Stephen Miller, have been demanding a "clean" extension of the program, while critical lawmakers from both parties and over 100 civil society groups have called for privacy reforms to protect Americans whose data is swept up in federal surveillance efforts.
Hajar Hammado, senior policy adviser at Demand Progress, one of the organizations leading reform calls, said in a Thursday statement that "intelligence agencies, the White House, and their allies in Congress have tried every trick in the book from fearmongering to misinformation, but they still can't get their warrantless FISA reauthorization across the finish line."
"The reason we keep ending up at this point is congressional leaders' refusal to allow votes on overwhelmingly popular, bipartisan reforms," she continued. "This 'my way or the highway' approach needs to stop."
According to Politico, US Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) told reporters on Thursday that he and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) discussed the short-term extension during a closed-door meeting the previous day.
"I think there's already a pretty substantial dialog going on" between key Democrats and Republicans in both chambers, Thune added. "We're interested in looking at some ways in which it can be reformed... So we're entertaining those ideas at the moment."
Hammado declared that "when Congress returns, Speaker Johnson and Leader Thune must allow votes on amendments for real privacy protections or we'll keep repeating this farce over and over again. Our bipartisan movement in defense of civil liberties is holding strong, and we won't accept anything less."
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a longtime defender of privacy rights who had threatened to block the extension, highlighted on social media Thursday that he "secured a commitment that the FISA court opinion revealing abuses of Americans' rights will be DECLASSIFIED before Congress votes on reauthorization."
"The more Americans know about these abuses," he said, "the more they'll demand real reforms."
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'Dangerous and Shameful': 42 House Democrats Help GOP Send Trump Spying Bill to Senate
"It was these Democrats' responsibility to stand up against this administration, and they voted to stand down instead," said one campaigner.
Apr 29, 2026
Dozens of Democrats in the Republican-controlled US House of Representatives helped the GOP send a key spying bill to the Senate on Wednesday, earning sharp condemnation from the diverse movement that has called for privacy reforms.
The House voted 235-191 in favor of the bill released last week by Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), who has been trying for months to get an extension of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to President Donald Trump's desk.
FISA's Section 702 allows the US government to surveil electronic communications of noncitizens located outside the United States to acquire foreign intelligence information, without a warrant. However, Americans' data is also swept up, and civil society, along with some lawmakers from both major parties, has demanded reforms to prevent further abuse by federal agencies.
In the lead-up to the vote, progressives such as Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) warned that "this bill has no meaningful reforms to stop warrantless surveillance, directly undermining the Fourth Amendment" to the US Constitution, which is supposed to protect Americans against unreasonable searches and seizures.
Another "Squad" member, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), took to the House floor to blast Section 702 as "a dangerous mass surveillance tool" that "has been used to spy on Black Lives Matter protesters, members of Congress, journalists, and more."
However, 42 Democrats—including House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Ranking Member Jim Himes (Conn.)—still joined most House Republicans in advancing the legislation.
In addition to Himes, the Democrats who voted for the bill are Pete Aguilar (Calif.), Ami Bera (Calif.), Sanford Bishop (Ga.), Nikki Budzinski (Ill.), Janelle Bynum (Ore.), Ed Case (Hawaii), Kathy Castor (Fla.), Gil Cisneros (Calif.), Herb Conaway (NJ), Henry Cuellar (Texas), Don Davis (NC), Lois Frankel (Fla.), Laura Gillen (NY), Jared Golden (Maine), Vicente Gonzalez (Texas), Josh Gottheimer (NJ), Josh Harder (Calif.), Chrissy Houlahan (Pa.), Steny Hoyer (Md.), Greg Landsman (Ohio), Susie Lee (Nev.), Kristen McDonald Rivet (Mich.), Jared Moskowitz (Fla.), Frank Mrvan (Ind.), Donald Norcross (NJ), Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (Wash.), Scott Peters (Calif.), Mike Quigley (Ill.), Josh Riley (NY), Brad Schneider (Ill.), Kim Schrier (Wash.), Terri Sewell (Ala.), Eric Sorensen (Ill.), Darren Soto (Fla.), Marilyn Strickland (Wash.), Tom Suozzi (NY), Derek Tran (Calif.), Gabe Vasquez (NM), Marc Veasey (Texas), Debbie Wasserman Schultz (Fla.), and George Whitesides (Calif.).
"It's incredibly disappointing the House approved this measure," said Jake Laperruque, deputy director of the Center for Democracy and Technology's Security and Surveillance Project, in a statement. "This bill is empty calories through and through. It contains no warrant for querying Americans' messages, and no meaningful reforms of any kind. The razor-thin procedural vote this afternoon makes clear that there's an appetite for reform, but House leadership took meaningful reforms off the menu."
"There is nothing in this bill that would have prevented the abuses of FISA 702 we've already seen—snooping on lawmakers, protesters, and campaign donors—and there is nothing that would stop even worse abuses in the future. A vote for this bill was a vote to give the FBI and other intelligence agencies a three-year blank check for surveillance abuse."
Hajar Hammado, senior policy adviser at Demand Progress—which helped convene over 100 artificial intelligence, civil rights, and other progressive groups pressuring Congress to include privacy protections in any renewal bill for the spying power—took aim at the House Democrats who supported the legislation.
"The 42 Democratic votes to advance Speaker Johnson and Donald Trump's surveillance agenda are dangerous and shameful," she declared.
"These Democrats defied their constituents and common sense to undercut meaningful privacy reforms in the House and instead voted to hand over sweeping spy powers to the Trump administration," she stressed. "This means continuing warrantless backdoor searches and allowing an increasing number of federal agencies to exploit the data broker loophole to supercharge AI and fuel mass domestic surveillance."
Hammado said that "their vote today has major consequences, as even 22 Republicans put principles over politics and voted against renewing FISA without warrant protections. It was these Democrats' responsibility to stand up against this administration and they voted to stand down instead."
While stressing that "no administration should have these powers," Free Press Action advocacy director Jenna Ruddock directed attention at "the champions for a clean extension of Section 702 in the Trump administration in particular," including the president's homeland security adviser, Stephen Miller.
"Stephen Miller has advocated against reforms to Section 702, claiming it is critical to his and Trump’s homeland security agenda, even as members of the administration refer to political opponents as 'enemies within,'" she noted. "Today, 42 Democrats joined 192 Republicans to co-sign Donald Trump and Stephen Miller's domestic surveillance agenda, jeopardizing the civil rights and liberties of every person in the United States."
Zeteo News reporter Prem Thakker pointed out that House "Democratic leadership did not whip their members, enabling them to vote with Republicans and give Trump the surveillance powers."
While calling out the House Democrats who backed the bill, campaigners also set their sights on the Senate, where Punchbowl News reporter Anthony Adragna predicted that "it's DOA," or dead on arrival. Republicans have a slim majority in the chamber and, due to its rules, need at least some Democratic support to pass most bills, including this one.
A key issue is the central bank digital currency ban included in the House bill. Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) told reporters on Wednesday that he may try to pass a 45-day extension instead. After a recent short-term extension, the spying authority is set to expire Thursday night.
"Now the fight moves to the Senate, where privacy champions in both parties are gearing up to try and stop this reckless giveaway to the surveillance state," Hammado said. She urged members of the upper chamber to join "bipartisan reformers" like Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Mike Lee (R-Utah), Rand Paul (R-Ky.), and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) "in voting against any FISA measure that lacks real reforms like a warrant requirement to close the backdoor search and data broker loopholes."
Laperruque similarly said that "we hope senators will stand strong and reject this dangerous proposal."
Ruddock highlighted that "there is bipartisan legislation already introduced in both the House and Senate that would make desperately needed reforms to government surveillance powers."
"The Senate should reject the fake reforms in the current House bill and demand a vote on real reforms to Section 702, including a warrant requirement, and closing the data broker loophole," she said. "Our constitutional rights depend on it."
This article has been updated to include the names of the Democrats who voted for the bill.
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Key Democrats Under Pressure to Reject House GOP's New 3-Year FISA Extension
"Donald Trump and Stephen Miller want unfettered surveillance powers without any chance to enact protections, and Democrats must not give it to them," one campaigner warned.
Apr 23, 2026
A week after four Democrats helped Republicans pass a short-term extension of a controversial spying power with a dead-of-night vote in the US House of Representatives, Speaker Mike Johnson on Thursday released a bill that would renew the authority for three years—double the amount of time the Louisiana Republican and President Donald Trump were previously pushing.
As that bill text circulated, Demand Progress—one of the scores of civil society groups calling for privacy reforms to be included in any renewal of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)—took aim at those Democrats: Reps. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (Wash.), Jared Golden (Maine), Josh Gottheimer (NJ), and Tom Suozzi (NY).
"Just like last time, Speaker Johnson's latest proposal lacks any meaningful privacy reforms, but this time, they're trying to renew FISA for three more years—twice as long as the Trump administration asked for," said Demand Progress senior policy adviser Hajar Hammado in a statement.
"Donald Trump and Stephen Miller want unfettered surveillance powers without any chance to enact protections, and Democrats must not give it to them," Hammado argued, referring to Trump's deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security adviser.
"We need Reps. Gottheimer, Suozzi, Golden, and Gluesenkamp Perez to stand with the rest of Democrats and hold Donald Trump accountable," the campaigner emphasized. "A vote in support of this FISA bill, especially procedural votes to advance it, is both a vote to allow Donald Trump to continue invasive, warrantless surveillance of private American citizens, and to sabotage even the chance of protecting privacy."
FISA's Section 702 allows the US government to surveil electronic communications of noncitizens located outside the United States to acquire foreign intelligence information, without a warrant. However, it's been abused at least hundreds of thousands of times by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) alone—which has fueled calls for reforms, including closing the data broker loophole that agencies use to buy their way around the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution.
"Speaker Johnson wants to pretend this bill is reform, but it's the same type of empty-calorie proposal that failed last week," warned Jake Laperruque, deputy director of Center for Democracy and Technology's Security and Surveillance Project. "There is nothing in this bill that would have prevented the abuses of FISA 702 we've already seen—snooping on lawmakers, protesters, and campaign donors—and there is nothing that would stop even worse abuses in the future."
"Members of Congress have a clear choice: They can support this proposal and give the FBI and other intelligence agencies a three-year blank check, or they can stand strong and demand real reforms to protect the American people," he said.
Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the Brennan Center for Justice's Liberty and National Security Program, similarly stressed how the latest bill is "almost identical to the one that failed last week," explaining on social media that "the main 'reform' in Johnson's first proposal was a provision that merely restated existing law, under which the government may not 'target' Americans under Section 702 but may do so with a warrant or FISA Title I order."
"That provision was titled 'warrant requirement,' even though it imposed no new warrant requirement whatsoever. And it had zero relevance to the issue at the heart of the debate over Section 702, namely, backdoor searches," she noted. "Backdoor searches are not considered to be 'targeting' Americans for surveillance. Rather, they are searches of collected communications of foreign targets outside the United States for Americans' communications that were 'incidentally' swept in."
"Astonishingly, Johnson has chosen to feature this same do-nothing provision in his new proposal. This time, the drafters have dropped any pretense of creating new law and titled the provision 'Fourth Amendment Requirement for Targeting United States Persons,'" Goitein continued. "This is not a reform bill, and it's not a compromise. It's a straight reauthorization with eight pages of words that serve no serious purpose other than to try to convince members that it's NOT a straight reauthorization."
According to her: "House members didn't fall for it last week, and they shouldn't fall for it now. Speaker Johnson must allow the House to vote on the reforms that members and the American people are demanding, including a warrant requirement to access Americans' communications."
The GOP narrowly has the numbers to pass legislation with a party-line vote in the House, but some of the chamber's Republicans have joined in the calls for privacy reforms. Libertarian leaders, including Justin Amash, a former Republican congressman from Michigan, have forcefully spoken out against Johnson's efforts.
"House Republicans are spitting on the Constitution and spitting in all our faces," Amash said of the bill unveiled Thursday.
Calling out the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and vast US Intelligence Community, Patrick Eddington, a senior fellow in homeland security and civil liberties at the libertarian Cato Institute, declared that "this is an HPSCI, SSCI, IC Trojan horse bill masquerading as something Fourth Amendment-compliant."
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) "is threatening to take over negotiations if the House GOP can’t resolve differences quickly," according to Politico. In the upper chamber, Republicans need at least some Democratic support to pass a reauthorization bill.
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When Thought Becomes Record in the Age of AI
How a court footnote, retention orders, interagency data sharing, and the government's own words reveal what happens when we pour private thought into a chatbot.
Apr 18, 2026
Last month, a sentence went viral claiming that if you type into a chatbot, the FBI can get everything. The claim was too broad. The truth may be narrower, and worse.
Worse, because what is at stake is not some dramatic collapse of privacy. It is a daily practice so ordinary that most people do not even register it as exposure. Thought leaves a protected setting, enters a consumer platform, becomes a record, and then falls under rules the user did not write and will almost never see. Catastrophes announce themselves. Habits do not. Habits become infrastructure before the public notices what has changed.
This essay walks through six documents: a footnote, two preservation orders, an executive order on interagency sharing, a national security memorandum, and a budget request. Read one by one, each can be minimized. Read together, they describe an apparatus already in motion, and a desk already inside it.
A conversation is something you have. A record is something someone else keeps. The text box in front of you now performs both functions at once. It feels like conversation. It can become record.
I. The First Shift: When Thinking Starts Looking Like Disclosure
In United States v. Heppner, decided in the Southern District of New York on February 17, 2026, Judge Jed S. Rakoff wrote in a footnote: "But even if certain information that Heppner input into Claude was privileged, he waived the privilege by sharing that information with Claude and Anthropic, just as if he had shared it with any other third party."
Read that again, slowly. Speed helps disguise the act.
What happens when the record no longer belongs to the person who created it?
The footnote does not say the attorney-client relationship dissolves because a chatbot exists. It says something narrower, and more unsettling. Whatever Heppner himself carried out of a protected setting and voluntarily shared with Claude could lose privilege the way material shared with any other third party can lose privilege. The room remains protected. What leaves the room may not.
That is old doctrine meeting a new habit. The danger lies in the habit's ordinariness. A doctrine once applied to deliberate disclosure becomes harsher when the third party is a text box millions of people treat as an extension of private thought.
People use consumer chatbots to think through problems, including legal ones. They paste in memos, summaries, draft language, and questions they cannot yet frame in legal terms. Some of that material originated with counsel. Some did not. Not every exchange is privileged. That is not the point. The point is that the text box does not sort those categories for the user, and the user often does not sort them either. The platform feels intimate, immediate, and close enough to thought that the act often does not register as disclosure.
That is the shift. Most users do not believe they are sharing protected material with a third party. They believe they are working privately through a problem. The platform may not honor that distinction. The court may not honor it. The state may not honor it either.
The Heppner footnote may not survive appeal, but the pattern it marks does not depend on its survival. Carpenter v. United States points in a different direction on digital third-party records. A split among district courts is already visible. But appellate uncertainty is not protection in the meantime. Courts sort doctrine on one timetable. Institutions build systems on another. Retention practices, routing rules, and interagency structures can harden before doctrine settles.
The legal tracks must stay distinct. Privilege is not work product. Work product is not Fourth Amendment privacy. Privacy is not retention. Retention is not acquisition. Acquisition by warrant is not acquisition by administrative subpoena or interagency sharing. The sequence that follows does not require those categories to collapse. It requires only that, in practice, they begin to converge in ways that steadily weaken user control.
A ruling declaring that every chatbot exchange destroys privilege would trigger immediate alarm. A footnote this quiet does not. That is why the narrower reading is worse. It marks an ordinary act, repeated every day by people who think they are thinking privately when, in legal effect, they may be disclosing.
The public paraphrase overstated the law. The law understated the habit. Once that shift comes into view, the next question follows: What happens when the record no longer belongs to the person who created it?
II. The Record Leaves Your Hands
The Heppner footnote did not arrive alone. It arrived inside a pattern. The pattern matters more than the sentence.
Courts are sorting several adjacent questions the public keeps collapsing into one. One week before Heppner, in Warner v. Gilbarco, the Eastern District of Michigan rejected the claim that using ChatGPT to work through litigation material automatically destroyed work-product protection. Roughly six weeks later, Morgan v. V2X in the District of Colorado widened the split rather than closing it, recognizing Rule 26(b)(3) protection for AI-assisted material prepared by a pro se litigant while still imposing disclosure obligations and cautioning against uploading confidential information into mainstream AI systems.
Read together, these cases do not settle AI in the abstract. They suggest that courts are sorting channels, control, supervision, and institutional setting. Where the law sees counsel, protective orders, and defined litigation materials, it can still imagine a protected path. Where it sees voluntary disclosure into a consumer platform outside counsel's direction, the protection thins. A law firm inside a controlled environment gets one reading. A person at a kitchen table with a monthly subscription gets another. Ordinary users behave as though the boundary were settled in their favor. It is not. Uncertainty does not reduce the risk. It enlarges it.
Then the preservation orders deepen the problem. Once material becomes platform record, the user no longer controls the baseline that governs how long it exists or when it can be reached.
People still imagine their chat history exists inside a promise. It does not.
On May 13, 2025, in New York Times v. OpenAI, Judge Ona Wang entered a preserve-and-segregate order covering a vast population of user logs. On January 5, 2026, Judge Sidney Stein affirmed production of a 20 million de-identified log sample. His reasoning matters as much as the scale. He wrote that users' privacy interests in that material were weaker than in wiretapped phone calls because the users had voluntarily disclosed the contents to a platform that retained them in the ordinary course of business.
The point is not that one company lost a fight. The point is that deletion baselines can change outside the user's control. They can change in litigation the user is not party to, in a courtroom the user has never heard of, without notice to the person whose records are being kept. The later announcement that the broad preservation obligation ended does not erase that point. It confirms it. The baseline moved once. It can move again.
Even if the Heppner footnote falls on appeal, the preservation and retention architecture does not fall with it. Privilege doctrine is one track. Retention defaults are another, governed by platform terms, contract law, litigation holds, and administrative process. The constitutional fight may proceed in one courtroom while the records keep being kept in another.
Retention exposure is not uniform across users. When OpenAI's broad preservation obligation was in effect, it excluded Enterprise accounts, Edu accounts, and API customers who had contracted for Zero Data Retention. The organizations and professionals with resources to buy safer configurations could obtain them. Ordinary users on consumer accounts could not.
That stratification is a structural feature of the platform layer, not an accident of one lawsuit. Law firms can buy protected configurations. A person at a kitchen table with a monthly subscription cannot. Before the first subpoena arrives, before the first interagency route opens, before any category written into National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7) is applied to anyone, the exposure is already stratified by who can afford which tier. That stratification will track the sorting that follows.
Retention is not government acquisition. It is the prior condition that makes acquisition possible. People still imagine their chat history exists inside a promise. It does not. It exists inside a current default, and defaults are fragile. A judge can change them. A litigation hold can change them. A production order can change them. The user often learns that only after the fact, if at all. Once a record can be kept, the next question is how it begins to move.
III. The State Has Already Built the Routes
On March 20, 2025, the White House issued an executive order with a title that sounds like office management: "Stopping Waste, Fraud, and Abuse by Eliminating Information Silos." The word "silo" sounds bureaucratic and dull. That is part of its function. It makes a structural change sound merely administrative. The key word is "eliminating."
Taken on its own, the order does not compel any single disclosure. Yet it plainly directs movement. It tells agency heads to ensure that designated officials receive full and prompt access to unclassified records, data, software, and IT systems. It authorizes sharing and consolidation within and across agencies. It calls for unfettered access to comprehensive data from state programs that receive federal funding, to the maximum extent consistent with law. The order treats the seams between agencies not as safeguards, but as obstacles. Boring language often carries the heaviest load because it is designed to pass without alarm. Usually, it does.
Administrative routing does not require a courtroom. It does not require a warrant. It requires an interagency agreement and a technical connection. Once that connection exists, records move under rules the user does not see, into hands the user did not anticipate, for purposes the user was never asked to weigh. Quietly at first. Then routinely. Then as a matter of course.
Once a state can create records, keep them, and move them with reduced friction, it no longer waits passively for events to arrive in fully formed cases.
That matters more when other forms of process reduce friction further. Washington Post reporting in February 2026 described the Department of Homeland Security's use of administrative subpoenas at volumes that experts and former staff estimated in the thousands or tens of thousands. American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) litigation, including Doe v. DHS, added specific challenged cases to that pattern. Administrative subpoenas are not new. What matters is their operational use: speed, breadth, and limited front-end judicial review.
A system that can demand material quickly behaves differently from one that must persuade a judge before the process begins. A system that does not require a judge at the front end is not meaningfully slowed when a judge at the back end issues a clarifying opinion three years later. By then, the records have moved, and the institutional lesson has been learned.
The warrants aimed at journalist Hannah Natanson reveal the same pattern from another angle. Their significance is not that journalists are uniquely vulnerable. It is that Natanson's case was legible. She had a national byline. Her case could be read, tracked, and contested in public.
Most cases will not look like that. Most people caught in expanding process will be organizers, students, immigrants, and members of communities sorted first under every previous expansion of federal attention. They will not have a national employer or a legal defense fund. Their names will not trend. Their records will still move. The unreadable cases are the condition. The visible ones are the narrow window through which the rest of us glimpse it.
Names matter less than architecture. Replace any one official and the route still exists the next morning. The Information Silos order still stands. The subpoena posture still matters. The warrant machinery still works. Personnel matter. Architecture matters more.
Once a state can create records, keep them, and move them with reduced friction, it no longer waits passively for events to arrive in fully formed cases. It gains the practical ability to sort, correlate, and escalate before the public sees any full story. From there, the next question is unavoidable: What kinds of people has the state already told itself to look for?
IV. The Categories Are Already on the Page
The most revealing documents in this essay are not leaked. They are posted. The apparatus does not need secrecy for the first stages of this work. It can describe itself in public because the public rarely reads primary documents until the output becomes undeniable.
Start with NSPM-7, issued on September 25, 2025, under the title "Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence." Read that title carefully. "Domestic terrorism" is one phrase. "Organized political violence" is another. The memorandum joins them into a single operational field. A category this wide gives agencies room to sort more conduct, posture, and association than the public usually imagines when it hears the word "terrorism."
The FBI's Fiscal Year 2027 Budget Request, submitted in March 2026, translates that field into administrative appetite. On page 13, the request states that violent conduct in the United States commonly relates to views associated with anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the US government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility toward those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality. That ideological enumeration is the budget's own language. NSPM-7 supplies the broader "investigate, prosecute, and disrupt" frame within which it operates. The categories are framed in terms of political disposition and affiliation rather than completed acts.
Broad security language rarely falls evenly. It reaches certain communities first, long before the public agrees on what the category means or whom it is for.
Appetite alone does not move records. A vehicle does. The same request names it: the NSPM-7 Joint Mission Center, composed of personnel from 10 agencies, which the budget says will integrate intelligence, operational support, and financial analysis to proactively identify networks and prosecute domestic terrorist and related criminal actors.
That phrase matters. Proactive identification of networks is not the same as investigating a specific act after a complaint, a tip, or an arrest. The language moves upstream, away from completed acts and toward recurrent motivations, indicia, and network mapping. When the categories guiding that work are framed in ideological and cultural terms, network mapping does not remain confined to the individuals at any given node. It extends outward. That is how categories begin to function as engines. Broad markers, interagency routes, and a budget request for advance identification: That is the combination now on the page.
These documents do not prove that every citizen who holds one or more of these views is already under active federal investigation. They prove something serious enough. They show that the administration has formalized a broader operational category than most citizens realize, paired it with interagency movement of information, and requested funding for proactive identification under that category. The concern is not a proven dragnet. The concern is that the categories, routes, and funding streams are now broad enough to normalize sorting before a complete individualized case exists.
Kash Patel's name appears on a cover page. Stephen Miller, Russell Vought, and Todd Blanche occupy familiar nodes of power. Those offices matter. But the signature is not the explanation. It is the citation. The explanation is the architecture written into policy, budget language, and routing authority. That architecture will outlast the current roster, and most of the litigation currently aimed at one footnote inside it. Once categories are written, routes are built, and funding is requested, somebody meets them first.
V. Broad Powers Never Land Evenly
In American practice, that somebody is rarely random. Broad security language rarely falls evenly. It reaches certain communities first, long before the public agrees on what the category means or whom it is for. That is not incidental to the history. That is the history.
The recent treatment of students and faculty involved in campus Palestine solidarity shows the first mechanism clearly: label before case. Visa revocations, detention, and removal proceedings have moved ahead of any settled public showing of unprotected conduct. The label comes first. The individualized case comes later, if it comes at all. That is what proactive identification looks like when policy language leaves the page and lands on a life.
The Stop Cop City prosecutions show the second mechanism: association widening exposure. Protest activity, bail funds, and mutual aid networks were drawn into racketeering and domestic terrorism frames that stretched beyond any single completed act. Once the state begins to map relation, exposure no longer stops where conduct stops. It moves through contact, support, and nearness itself.
The newest entry point into an old machinery does not arrive with sirens or boots at the door. It arrives as invitation. It arrives as convenience. It arrives as a blinking cursor.
Standing Rock shows the third mechanism: records and suspicion moving across institutions. Federal agencies, state police, and private contractors shared surveillance functions across the very seams liberal legal culture likes to treat as safeguards. The point is that, in practice, observations, records, and suspicions moved across a cooperative field. The Information Silos order does not invent that logic. It removes more of its friction.
The post September 11 surveillance of Muslim American communities shows the oldest mechanism: population sorting before any specific act. Whole communities were subjected to preemptive scrutiny because of religion, association, and presumed risk. That template did not disappear when the emergency rhetoric faded. It remained ready for new technologies, new authorizations, new words, and new enemies.
Taken together, these examples reveal recurring forms, not isolated abuses: label before case, association widening exposure, records moving across institutions, populations sorted in advance. None of this depends on a future court adopting the broadest possible reading of Heppner. The apparatus already knows how to work on bodies, files, and communities.
What is new is not the appetite to sort, but the route by which sorting begins. The newest entry point into an old machinery does not arrive with sirens or boots at the door. It arrives as invitation. It arrives as convenience. It arrives as a blinking cursor.
VI. The Text Box Is the Last Voluntary Step
That cursor sits in a text box. That is where the sequence begins, not in a courtroom, not in a budget request, not in a raid after the fact. It begins here, at the tips of your fingers.
Once the record leaves your hands, the rest unfolds elsewhere: in retention policies you did not write, in orders you will never see, in routes built to reduce friction, in agencies already widening the categories through which they read the public. What felt private a moment ago enters systems that are not private at all.
By this point, the sequence should be visible. Ordinary use turns thought into record. Record is kept under terms the user does not control. Kept records travel along routes designed to reduce friction. They enter a state that has already begun defining, in public, the kinds of subjects it intends to sort before complete individualized stories arrive. None of those steps depends on whether one district court footnote survives appellate review. Each proceeds under its own authority and on its own timetable.
Once thought becomes record, and record becomes retainable, movable, sortable, the problem is no longer private. It is structural.
That is why civic literacy now matters at a different level. It is one of the few ways a citizen can see the structure before its output reaches him in a form he can no longer mistake. By the time most people encounter the apparatus as event, surprise is no defense. The route already existed. The category already existed. The records already existed.
That is also why the answer cannot be private caution alone. No defensive posture at one desk can interrupt an architecture built at the level of routes, retention, and category. The venues where architecture is contested are collective: civil liberties litigation at organizations like the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation; investigative reporting willing to read the documents before the output reaches the front page; and legislative pressure aimed at retention, at sharing, and at the scope of process. That is where the sequence can still be slowed. That is where it can still be narrowed. That is where it can still be broken.
The point is no longer just to be cautious at the desk. The point is to understand what the desk now connects to. Once thought becomes record, and record becomes retainable, movable, sortable, the problem is no longer private. It is structural.
The text box may feel like a place to think. It is also becoming a place where thought changes hands.
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Rights and Tech Coalition Calls On Congress to End Warrantless Mass Surveillance
"The American people do not want the government to bypass the courts and buy our private information in bulk from data brokers."
Mar 19, 2026
With Republican leadership in the US House of Representatives aiming for "a straightforward extension of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, next week," a diverse coalition on Thursday renewed calls for Congress to impose "much-needed privacy protections against government agencies' warrantless mass surveillance of people in the United States."
Section 702 empowers the US government to spy on electronic communications of noncitizens located outside the United States to acquire foreign intelligence information, without a warrant. However, Americans' data is also collected, and advocates and lawmakers have long demanded reforms to the abused authority, which is set to expire next month unless reauthorized.
As President Donald Trump's White House—including Stephen Miller, his pro-spying deputy chief of staff—pushes for a "clean" reauthorization, 133 artificial intelligence, civil rights, and other progressive groups convened by Demand Progress and the Project On Government Oversight sent a Thursday letter to Republican and Democratic leaders in both chambers of Congress.
The coalition's letter argues that "FISA's sunsets were designed to prompt Congress to consider privacy protections" and calls for "closing the data broker loophole" that intelligence and law enforcement agencies use to buy their way around the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution, which is supposed to protect Americans against unreasonable searches and seizures.
"Data brokers sell private information about all Americans, often surreptitiously obtaining that data from our phones and other internet-connected devices," the letter explains. "This information paints a mosaic of each and every American's life, which exposes where we sleep, what we believe, whom we vote for, and a staggering amount more."
The loophole "facilitates mass surveillance and circumvents FISA reforms Congress enacted in 2015 to prohibit domestic bulk data collection," the missive continues. Closing it "would ensure government agencies obtain judicial approval before buying information about people in the United States from data brokers if it would otherwise require a court order to seize."
"This would establish a critical legal process to protect privacy before such warrantlessly acquired information is fed into artificial intelligence surveillance systems, and help avert looming and unprecedented threats to Americans' civil liberties," it adds, citing a poll that shows 80% of Americans think the government should have to obtain a warrant before being able to buy such data.
The letter also highlights recent reporting from The New York Times that the US Department of Defense wants AI companies to "allow for the collection and analysis of unclassified, commercial bulk data on Americans, such as geolocation and web browsing data," and appears to have already secured one agreement that could permit any use the government deems lawful.
Demand Progress executive director Sean Vitka warned in a Thursday statement that "by rushing to renew FISA without any reforms, Congress is poised to allow AI companies and government agencies to supercharge mass domestic surveillance systems with our location and web browsing data—all without a warrant or any involvement from the courts."
"The American people do not want the government to bypass the courts and buy our private information in bulk from data brokers," Vitka stressed. "To protect Americans' privacy, our Fourth Amendment rights and the fundamental liberties that privacy protects, Congress must close the data broker loophole before renewing the government's surveillance power."
The letter—whose other signatories include the ACLU, Amnesty International US, Center for Democracy & Technology, Consumer Action, Electronic Privacy Information Center, Fight for the Future, Friends of the Earth US, MoveOn, No Tech for Apartheid, Peace Action, Progressive Democrats of America, Reporters Without Borders, and more—points out that "several already introduced pieces of legislation both reauthorize Section 702 and effectively close the data broker loophole."
Among them is the bipartisan Security and Freedom Enhancement (SAFE) Act, introduced last month by Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Mike Lee (R-Utah), and backed by organizations including Demand Progress.
"Section 702 is a valuable tool to help keep our nation safe," Durbin said at the time. "However, it's being used to conduct thousands of warrantless searches of Americans' private communications. That's unacceptable. Our bipartisan SAFE Act is a commonsense solution to continue protecting our country from foreign threats—while safeguarding Americans' civil liberties and privacy."
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