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surveillance
'Masked Engagement': Leaked Docs Reveal DHS Infiltrating Private Online Spaces
One senior DHS official said the program "is just the first step in breaching people’s privacy settings in ways that they are not even aware of.”
Feb 13, 2026
US Department of Homeland Security agents are increasingly infiltrating social media platforms to monitor users, collect intelligence, and target people, according to new reporting based on leaked documents.
Ken Klippenstein exposed the open source monitoring program, which DHS calls "masked engagement," with new reporting Thursday that details how agents "assume false identities and interact with users—friending them, joining closed groups, and gaining access to otherwise private postings, photographs, friend lists, and more."
"A senior [DHS] official tells me that over 6,500 field agents and intelligence operatives can use the new tool, a significant increase explicitly linked to more intense monitoring of American citizens," Klippenstein wrote.
The so-called "masked engagement" by DHS operatives online comes as actual masked federal agents are engaged in the Trump administration's deadly deployments in communities nationwide.
Important to note that "Authorized" here means that DHS/ICE have given *Themselves* permission to do this "masked engagement" bullshit, not that either congress or the courts say it's okay.Challenge this everywhere & every way possible, & in the meantime, keep ourselves & each other safe as we can
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— Dr. Damien P. Williams can't think of a fun display name right n (@wolvendamien.bsky.social) February 12, 2026 at 4:46 PM
Masked engagement adds a new level to DHS' open source intelligence (OSINT) collection regime, which previously consisted of overt engagement, overt research, overt monitoring, masked monitoring, and undercover engagement. Masked engagement, in which agents conceal their government affiliation without assuming a false identity while interacting with a target, is a step below undercover engagement, in which DHS operatives use false identities and cover stories.
According to Klippenstein:
Masked monitoring allows officers at agencies like [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] and Border Patrol to use alias accounts to passively observe public online activity. Crucially, this level of monitoring bars DHS representatives from interacting with other users directly. Under masked monitoring, officers are not allowed to ask an admin for entry into a private group or to “friend” a target to see non-public posts.
But with masked engagement (separate from masked monitoring), that firewall has now been dismantled. The only restriction imposed on masked engagement is that DHS officers [note] the threshold of “substantive engagement”—a term the rules leave conveniently ill-defined.
"By labeling this a 'middle ground' between monitoring and full-blown undercover work, the DHS allows agents to infiltrate private digital spaces without the rigorous internal approvals and legal checks required for a formal undercover 'sting,'" Klippenstein explained.
Sources told Klippenstein that DHS has been using masked engagement tactics to infiltrate pro-Palestine groups in the United States and to compile databases of suspected Mexican and Mexican American transnational criminals.
“Open source monitoring has become so ubiquitous that we even have databases of identities used by the department to track our own online engagements,” the senior DHS official said.
“Yes, we have safeguards against violating people’s privacy, but masked engagement is just the first step in breaching people’s privacy settings in ways that they are not even aware of," they added.
Rachel Levinson-Waldman, director of the Brennan Center for Justice's Liberty and National Security Program, told Klippenstein that “CBP’s expansion into what they’re calling ‘masked engagement’ is cause for real concern."
“This new capability is being shoehorned in one step below undercover engagement (which already allows for a lot of overreach), it appears CBP believes that friending someone, following them, or joining a group is not as invasive as directly engaging or interacting with individuals," she continued.
“In addition, doing so through an alias account—an account that doesn’t reveal the user’s CBP affiliation, and pretends to be someone else—will weaken trust in government and weaken the trust that is critical to building community both online and off,” Levinson-Waldman added.
A DHS spokesperson told Klippenstein that the agency "has utilized its congressionally directed undercover authorities to root out child molesters and predators for years."
“We will continue using every tool at our disposal to protect the American people as our agents and officers Make America Safe Again," they added.
Those tools include an error-plagued mobile facial recognition application, mass phone surveillance technology, data broker platforms that allow operatives to circumvent warrant requirements, forensic extraction to bypass phone locks, artificial intelligence and predictive analytics, and more.
Civil liberties groups, digital rights advocates, and some Democratic lawmakers are pushing back.
Last week, Sens. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) introduced the ICE Out of Our Faces Act, legislation that would ban ICE and Customs and Border Protection "from acquiring and using facial recognition technology and other biometric identification systems."
The bill would "also require the deletion of all data collected for use in or by biometric identification systems and allow individuals and state attorneys general to seek civil penalties for violations."
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The Military’s AI Strategy Threatens Everything We Love
While it’s hard to take Musk and Hegseth seriously when they talk about making Star Trek real, I don’t doubt for a minute that they can find many new ways to violate our rights and destroy what we love about the natural world.
Feb 07, 2026
As did many fellow Americans, I chuckled when President Trump announced the creation of the US Space Force on December 20, 2019. I even remember laughing heartily while taking in the late-night circuit’s many Star Trek jokes that day. Yet, I had mostly forgotten that the Space Force still exists until last week when Secretary of War Pete Hegseth started a policy speech alongside Elon Musk at SpaceX’s headquarters by flashing the Vulcan salute and affirming Musk’s desire to “make Star Trek real.”
The absurdity of Musk’s introduction—in which he spoke of “going beyond our star system to other star systems, where we may meet aliens or discover long dead alien civilizations” as if this could happen in any of our lifetimes—belied the seriousness of the new U.S. Military Artificial Intelligence strategy that Secretary Hegseth proceeded to announce.
Before an audience of Pentagon leadership and SpaceX employees, Hegseth outlined the structures, initiatives, and objectives in place to bring about what he called “America’s military AI dominance,” with his remarks largely following the plan documented in the July 2025 report “America’s AI Action Plan.”
A core goal Hegseth specified was “becoming an AI-first warfighting force across all domains.” He elaborated that AI will be deployed in three ways: for “warfighting, intelligence, and enterprise missions.”
Hegseth shared that the military’s generative AI model, known as genai.mil, launched last month for all three million Department of War (DOW) employees and will run on “every unclassified and classified network throughout our department.” The initial model was developed with Google Gemini and will soon incorporate xAI’s Grok. In its first month, one-third of DOW’s workforce (one million people) has used the generative AI model.
In the speech, Heseth repeated phrases such as “removing red tape,” “blowing up bureaucratic barriers,” and “taking a wartime approach” to the people and policies that he called “blockers.” Specifics he voiced disdain for included regulations in “Title 10 and 50"–referring to Title 10 of the U.S. Code (the legal bedrock of the armed forces, including the configuration of each branch) and Title 50 of the U.S. Code (the laws which govern national security, intelligence, defense contracts, war powers, and more). These don’t sound like the types of data, processes, and policies to treat with a ‘move fast and break things’ approach.
How genai.mil might be used is even more frightening, especially as we learn how other AI programs are already being used to direct intelligence, surveillance, and warfare.
An April 2024 report from +972 unveiled an Israeli military AI program known as “Lavender,” which was used to generate kill lists of Palestinians. Despite the program reportedly having a known 10 percent false identification rate, no human validation was required before launching air strikes on the AI-identified targets. Another system, known as “Where’s Daddy?,” employed AI to locate targeted individuals. The program was often most confident in a target being at a specific location when they were at home, so the air strikes regularly killed entire families instead of just the targeted individual.
Hegseth eagerly addressed the need for “responsible AI,” but this proved to be another instance of doublespeak. His description was as follows: “We will not employ AI models that won't allow you to fight wars.” Perhaps the reason he needs to state this is that, in theory, a properly trained AI model would not likely recommend military action in most instances—especially if built upon the data of recent US—involved wars.
Furthermore, Hegseth echoed President Trump, promising that the military’s AI will not be ‘woke’ or ‘confused by DEI and social justice.’ Such declarations raise the question of whether this could mean military AI models will be designed with explicit white supremacist biases. A July 2025 incident involving xAI’s Grok offers a prescient case study: After Elon Musk claimed to remove ‘political correctness’ and ‘wokeness’ from Grok, the program proceeded to praise Hitler, claim to be “MechaHitler,” and spew a series of antisemitic tropes.
Regardless of how genai.mil is ultimately used, it will require extraordinary computing power. While hyperscale data centers are already massive environmental risks, Executive Order 14318, “Accelerating Federal Permitting of Data Center Infrastructure,” signed by President Trump on July 23, 2025, exempts qualifying projects from virtually all federal environmental regulations.
Department of Energy Secretary Chris Wright is ‘all-in’ with the development of federal data centers and the required energy infrastructure. He’s joyfully referred to such initiatives as “the next Manhattan Project” on multiple occasions. As of July 2025, four national lab sites have been selected for data center and energy infrastructure development: Idaho National Laboratory (Idaho), Oak Ridge Reservation (Tennessee), Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant (Kentucky), and Savannah River Site (South Carolina).
On the same day as Hegseth’s SpaceX speech, a report revealed that the first four military bases to add data centers will be Fort Hood (Texas), Fort Bragg (North Carolina), Fort Bliss (Texas), and Dugway Proving Ground (Utah). Hegseth said these facilities will be developed through private partnership agreements with companies such as Google, Amazon Web Services, Oracle, SpaceX, and Microsoft.
These same companies are frequently the driving force behind commercial data centers popping up in municipalities across the nation. Regardless of where data centers are located—municipalities, national lab sites, or military bases—the environmental costs are massive. Aaron Kirshenbaum, CODEPINK’s War is Not Green Campaigner, documents power consumption, water usage, noise pollution, toxic waste, and rare mineral extraction among the many negative local impacts of data centers in our communities. “They must be fought against at all costs,” Kirshenbaum says.
For Hegseth, the tech bros, and technofascists who have infiltrated the government, all of the above represent the best of American innovation. For them, innovation is a pseudonym for constant surveillance, never-ending warfare, and widespread environmental destruction.
Yet, some wisdom never ages. George Manuel in The Fourth World: An Indian Reality speaks of the destructive tendencies of innovations developed by settlers: “Europe’s most important contributions that are still of value today seem either to be means of transport or instruments of war: ships, wagons, steelware, certain breeds of horses, guns. Most of the other things that were brought to North America by Europeans came from other parts of the world: paper, print, gunpowder, glass, mathematics, and Christianity.”
So many science fiction classics are rooted in the truth of Manuel’s observation—that western industrial development fuels a lust for warfare and environmental destruction. The authors of these sci-fi classics—unlike our technofascist ‘geniuses’—are true visionaries who are concerned with the future of humanity, and who feel compelled to warn of what might become if we follow these dangerous ideologies that have fueled centuries of colonialism, imperialism, and white supremacy to their logical conclusions.
Even Star Trek itself famously depicts a utopian future where humankind has moved beyond racism, beyond conquest, and beyond capitalism itself. “There simply couldn’t be a more anti-Trek idea than an ‘AI-first warfighting force across all domains,” says Gerry Canavan, a professor of English at Marquette University specializing in science fiction studies. “Watch just one episode of the show, and you’ll see.”
While it’s hard to take Musk and Hegseth seriously when they talk about making Star Trek real, I don’t doubt for a minute that they can find many new ways to violate our rights and destroy what we love about the natural world.
But we aren’t without hope. “For every science fiction narrative about a new technological means for violence and oppression,” Canavan says, “there’s another about what happens when the people suffering under the machine finally unite together to smash it, and take the future back for themselves.”
Just as the protagonists in our favorite science fiction stories actively struggle for and create the world they want to live in, so can we.
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Trump's DHS Using Secretive Subpoenas to Demand Critics’ Personal Data: Report
"These types of abusive subpoenas are designed to intimidate and sow fear of government retaliation," said a lawyer for the ACLU.
Feb 03, 2026
The Department of Homeland Security is using a little-known legal power to surveil and intimidate critics of the Trump administration, according to a harrowing report published Tuesday by the Washington Post.
Experts told the Post that DHS annually issues thousands of "administrative subpoenas," which allow federal agencies to request massive amounts of personal information from third parties—like technology companies and banks—without an order from a judge or a grand jury, and completely unbeknownst to the people whose privacy is being invaded.
As the Post found, even sending a politely critical email to a government official can be enough to have someone's entire life brought under the microscope.
That is what Jon, a 67-year-old retiree living in Philadelphia, who has been a US citizen for nearly three decades, found out after he sent a short email urging a DHS prosecutor, Joseph Dernbach, to reconsider an attempt to deport an Afghan asylum seeker who faced the threat of being killed by the Taliban if he was forced to return to his home country.
In the email, Jon warned Dernbach not to "play Russian roulette" with the man's life and implored him to “apply principles of common sense and decency.”
Just five hours after he sent the email, Jon received a message from Google stating that DHS had used a "subpoena" to request information about his account. Google gave him seven days to respond to the subpoena, but did not provide him with a copy of the document; instead, it told him to request one from DHS.
From there, he was sent on “a maddening, hourslong circuit of answering machines, dead numbers, and uninterested attendants,” which yielded no answers.
Within weeks of sending the email, a pair of DHS agents visited Jon's home and asked him to explain it. They told Jon that his email had not clearly broken any law, but that the DHS prosecutor may have felt threatened by his use of the phrase "Russian Roulette" and his mention of the Taliban.
Days later, after weeks of hitting a wall, Google finally sent Jon a copy of the subpoena only after the company was contacted by a Post reporter. It was then that Jon learned the breadth of what DHS had requested:
Among their demands, which they wanted dating back to Sept. 1: the day, time, and duration of all his online sessions; every associated IP and physical address; a list of each service he used; any alternate usernames and email addresses; the date he opened his account; his credit card, driver’s license, and Social Security numbers.
Google also informed him that it had not yet responded to the subpoena, though the company did not explain why.
But this is unusual. Google and other companies, including Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon, told the Post that they nearly always comply with administrative subpoenas unless they are barred from doing so.
With the ACLU's help, Jon filed a motion in court on Monday to challenge the subpoena issued to Google.
"In a democracy, contacting your government about things you feel strongly about is a fundamental right," Jon said. "I exercised that right to urge my government to take this man's life seriously. For that, I am being investigated, intimidated, and targeted. I hope that by standing up for my rights and sharing my story, others will know what to do when these abusive subpoenas and investigations come knocking on their door."
As the Trump administration uses DHS and other agencies to compile secret watchlists and databases of protesters for surveillance, targets people for deportation based solely on political speech, and asserts its authority to raid residences without a judicial warrant, administrative subpoenas appear to be another weapon in its arsenal against free speech and civil rights.
According to “transparency reports” reviewed by the Post, Google and Meta both received a record number of administrative subpoenas during the first six months of the second Trump administration. In several instances, they have been used to target protesters or other dissidents for First Amendment-protected activity:
In March, Homeland Security issued two administrative subpoenas to Columbia University for information on a student it sought to deport after she took part in pro-Palestinian protests. In July, the agency demanded broad employment records from Harvard University with what the school’s attorneys described as “unprecedented administrative subpoenas.” In September, Homeland Security used one to try to identify Instagram users who posted about [US Immigration and Customs Enforcement] raids in Los Angeles. Last month, the agency used another to demand detailed personal information about some 7,000 workers in a Minnesota health system whose staff had protested Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s intrusion into one of its hospitals.
“These types of abusive subpoenas are designed to intimidate and sow fear of government retaliation," said Stephen A. Loney, a senior supervising attorney for the ACLU of Pennsylvania. "If you can’t criticize a government official without the worry of having your private records gathered and agents knocking on your door, then your First Amendment rights start to feel less guaranteed. They want to bully companies into handing over our data and to chill users’ speech. This is unacceptable in a democratic society.”
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