Sia: He's right! We must ramp up our protests to get a constituonal amendment, not just an easily changed law!
The Surveillance State and You
By Rick Wilson - Jan 29
Everything is fine. Really. Put down the coffee, ignore the twitch in your eyelid, and repeat after me: We do not live in a police state. We live in the “Land of the Free,” a place where the Constitution is a sacred shield and the Fourth Amendment is the bedrock of our privacy.
We’re told this every day by the flag-pin-wearing performance artists in Congress and the Federalist Society monks who retreat to their mountain fastnesses to contemplate the “original public meaning” of eighteenth-century legal prose and then contort it into a modern interpretation to conform with the diktats of Stephen Miller and Donald Trump.
It’s a beautiful story.
It’s also a lie so massive, so brazen, and so technologically sophisticated that it would make the most hardened Stasi officer weep with envy before reaching for a notebook to take tips.
While we were arguing about whatever outrage-of-the-hour was trending on the platform formerly known as Twitter, a de facto police state has been erected in our backyard. Its name is ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, but its reach is universal. It is a surveillance Panopticon that doesn’t just watch “the others”; it watches everyone.
It is the realization of every dystopian nightmare, funded by your tax dollars and fueled by the unholy alliance of government overreach and Silicon Valley’s bottomless greed.
Let’s talk about the Stasi. In East Germany, the Ministry for State Security employed one informant for every 6.5 citizens, if you count the part-timers. They had warehouses full of paper files. They had steamed-open letters and bugged apartments. They were the gold standard for state-sponsored paranoia.
But the Stasi had a problem: humans are fallible. Informants lie. Paper gets lost. Tapes degrade. Physical surveillance is expensive and labor-intensive.
ICE has solved the human problem. They don’t need a neighbor to rat you out when they can simply buy your life’s history from a data broker for the price of a mid-range Starbucks order. As the Washington Post recently detailed, ICE has built a “surveillance dragnet” that bypasses the pesky requirements of the Bill of Rights by simply pulling out a credit card.
They have access to utility records, DMV photos, and real-time location data harvested from the apps on your phone. They have used facial recognition on millions of law-abiding Americans who thought they were just getting a driver’s license. They track your car with Flock cameras and location data from your phone’s GPS. They are operating a domestic intelligence agency under the guise of “border security,” and they are doing it with a level of granular detail that J. Edgar Hoover couldn’t have imagined in his most fevered, paranoid dreams.
J. Edgar Hoover was a man who understood the power of the “file.” He used his dossiers to blackmail presidents, crush civil rights leaders, and maintain a grip on the American psyche for decades. But Hoover’s power was limited by the technology of his time. He needed wiretaps. He needed “black bag jobs.” He needed a physical presence.
ICE doesn’t need to break into your office. They are already in your pocket.
Through third-party data brokers, the digital scavengers who pick through the carcasses of our online lives, ICE buys access to your movement patterns, your associates, and your habits. They are building a digital duplicate of the American populace.
And unlike Hoover’s FBI, which at least had to maintain a veneer of law enforcement protocol, ICE operates in a murky legal twilight where the “border” is defined as anywhere within 100 miles of a coastline, an area where two-thirds of the American population lives. You’re under the eye, unless you’re in a handful of cities in the heartland.
This isn’t just about deportation. It’s about the infrastructure of control. When you build a machine that can track anyone, anywhere, at any time, without a warrant, you haven’t built a tool for immigration enforcement. You’ve built the hardware for a dictatorship.
Where are my Pocket Constitution bros? Where are the FedSoc constitutional purists in all of this? Where are the defenders of liberty who screamed “tyranny” on a hundred YouTube channels because someone asked them to wear a mask mask during a pandemic?
They are, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, remarkably quiet.
The American conservative movement, once defined by a healthy (and sometimes unhealthy) skepticism of state power, has undergone a lobotomy. The new MAGA-fied GOP doesn’t fear the police state; they want it, provided the right people are being stepped on. They have traded the Fourth Amendment for a “Thin Blue Line” flag and a sense of grievance.
And the courts? The Supreme Court, currently dominated by “Originalists” who claim to care deeply about the intent of the Founders, has been an active collaborator. They have maintained the “Third-Party Doctrine”…a legal relic from the 1970s that says you have no “reasonable expectation of privacy” in information you voluntarily give to a third party.
In 1979, that meant your phone records. In 2024, it means your GPS coordinates, your heart rate, your search history, and your private messages. By refusing to update this doctrine for the digital age, the Court has essentially handed the government a skeleton key to every American’s life. They are originalists when it comes to the Second Amendment, but they are “living document” pragmatists when it comes to the state’s right to spy on you. It’s a grift, and we’re the marks.
We must also reserve a special circle of hell for the tech firms. Companies like LexisNexis, Palantir, and a host of obscure data brokers are the quartermasters of this new police state. They have turned the American citizen into a commodity, selling our private data to the highest bidder, and often, that bidder is a government agency looking to skirt the Fourth Amendment.
These firms wrap themselves in the language of “innovation” and “safety,” but they are nothing more than digital mercenaries. They know exactly what ICE is doing with their data. They know that their algorithms are being used to tear families apart and build a surveillance architecture that will eventually be used against any group the government deems “problematic.”
They have sold our privacy for a boost in their quarterly earnings, and they have done it with the smug self-assurance of people who believe they are too rich to ever be the ones in the back of the van.
When I speak of “public executions,” I’m not just talking about the physical violence that occasionally erupts at the hands of an unchecked paramilitary force. I’m talking about the public execution of the American Idea.
The Idea is that the individual is sovereign. The Idea is that the government works for us, not the other way around. The Idea is that our homes, our papers, and our effects, even our digital effects, are sacrosanct.
Every time an ICE agent pulls location data without a warrant, the Idea dies a little more. Every time a court looks the other way, the Idea is strangled. We are witnessing the slow-motion murder of the Fourth Amendment in the town square, and half the country is cheering because they think the gallows aren’t for them.
Newsflash: The Panopticon doesn’t care about your politics. Once the infrastructure is in place, it is a weapon waiting for a hand to grip it.
We cannot wait for the courts to find their spine. We need a legislative scorched-earth policy to dismantle this apparatus.
First, we need the “Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act.” Congress must pass legislation that explicitly prohibits government agencies, including DHS and all its constellation of agencies, particularly ICE, the FBI, and the NSA, from purchasing data from third-party brokers that would otherwise require a warrant to obtain.
If you need a warrant to get my phone records from Verizon, you should need a warrant to buy them from a data broker in Virginia. Period. No exceptions. No workarounds.
Second, we need to dismantle the “100-mile border zone” legal fiction. The Constitution does not have a “buffer zone” where rights go to die.
But legislation can be repealed. We need something more permanent. We need to bridge the gap between 1791 and today. It is time for a 28th Amendment…a Digital Fourth Amendment that reflects the reality of the twenty-first century.
Here is my first non-lawyer pass at the wording:
“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, including all digital data, electronic communications, and metadata pertaining thereto, shall not be violated. No government entity shall acquire, through purchase, seizure, or any other means, the digital information of any person held by a third party without a warrant supported by probable cause, particularly describing the data to be searched and the person to whom it belongs. The ‘Third-Party Doctrine’ shall have no force or effect regarding the privacy rights of the people in the digital realm.”
As always, I’m not a lawyer, but any legal minds are free to improve my idea.
We are at a crossroads. We can continue down the path we’re on…a path of “convenient” surveillance, corporate complicity, and the steady erosion of the individual. We can keep pretending that the ICE dragnet is only for “those people,” until the day the knock comes for us.
Or, we can recognize that a police state is a police state, whether it’s run by a guy in a gray uniform with a clipboard or a guy in a tactical vest with an ATAK and an iPad.
The Stasi had to build a wall to keep their people in. We’re building a digital cage and calling it “security.” It’s time to stop the theater. It’s time to stop the surveillance. It’s time to remind the ghouls in the data centers and the apparatchiks in the government that we are citizens, not data points.
And if that makes the “constitutional purists” uncomfortable?
Good. They should be. Because while they were busy looking back, the future arrived.
And it’s wearing a badge, holding a warrantless data dump, and watching every move if American citizens, with not a warrant in sight
WE need updated legislation for sure. But when congress has membership from 1791 still holding office it makes it harder to make it in the 21st century.
You'd think it was the opposite.
But like Science, Government changes one death at time. So it's SssssLllllOoooWwww. And follow the money.
It's mind boggling how legislators who are afraid of internet tech they don't understand will ban a phone app but pass crypto currency regulation to buy it on your phone.
Most of them never read a word of anything they vote on too. It's not a mountain to climb it's a shear cliff with no hand or toe holds if we want change for all.
A Jack of all trades is master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one.
... And many thanks for the masters in skill for setting our standard of work to instill.
on January 29, 2026, 1:11 pm
