THE SET-UP: The United Nations General Assembly meets this week in New York against the backdrop of an increasingly authoritarian world. The authoritarian impulse is being fed by rapidly-spreading technologies often produced by private firms and their governmental partners. These firms sell their surveillance technologies to state security agencies. And they, in turn, often to use them on citizens and journalists and political enemies. NSO Group’s “Pegasus” software is perhaps the best-known example, but the Israeli firm founded by “former” Israeli intelligence operatives is just one of a growing roster of private spies that make up a burgeoning, globe-spanning Surveillance-Industrial Complex.
The concurrent rise authoritarianism and the Surveillance-Industrial Complex is not coincidental. And it’s more than just cooperative. It’s co-evolutionary. More capabilities breed more opportunities to be more authoritarian. This self-reinforcing machine is practically self-perpetuating and, according to Konstantinos Komaitis, it is effecting a quiet “Internet Coup.”
Komaitis is a Senior Director at the Internet Society. Founded in 1992, its main goal is to keep the the internet “open, globally connected, secure, and trustworthy” and, therefore, “a force for good in society.” The internet Komaitis describes in Tech Policy Press is far afield from that goal:
What leaked documents and recent investigations have revealed is the capture of the network that once embodied openness and connection, now being repurposed, commercialized, and exported as a tool of repression. The InterSecLab’s Internet Coup report and Follow the Money’s exposé on how China is exporting its censorship technologies read like dispatches from the front lines of this takeover. They show how China’s system of digital control, perfected at home through the Great Firewall, is being turned into a global business. Companies like Geedge Networks are packaging the very DNA of censorship — deep packet inspection, real-time surveillance, traffic throttling, VPN blocking — into neat modules with innocuous names like Secure Gateway or Network Zodiac. And governments across Africa, Asia, and beyond are buying in. Even in democracies, this pattern shows up in chillingly familiar forms: consider recent revelations about New York City, where the police are using the city’s “free internet” program in public housing not to liberate, but to surveil, hooking public WiFi and CCTV into central systems without residents’ knowledge or oversight.
While it’s true that tech-based surveillance seems to be an inescapable fact of life, many are as yet unaffected by the real-world consequences that stretch well-beyond an ad for Doritos showing up in your Instagram feed an hour after you mention a craving for tortilla chips to a friend.
[I]magine being a student in Myanmar trying to organize a protest, only to find that your messages never arrive. Imagine being a journalist in Ethiopia whose reporting is monitored in real time by security forces. Imagine being an activist in Kazakhstan, discovering that every VPN you try has been systematically disabled. This is not science fiction; it is the daily reality produced by systems sold, installed, and serviced under the banner of “network security.”
This “quiet coup” is being fomented by the usual suspects.
What should chill us further is that Western technology often lurks inside these systems. The InterSec Lab report states how hardware components, licensed software, international financing — the supply chain of repression is global. So when leaders at UNGA declare their support for a free and open internet, they are often speaking from behind the convenient veil of complicity. Democracies condemn authoritarian control while their companies help provide the machinery. The hypocrisy is breathtaking and it is corrosive.
But now those chickens are coming home to roost.
As you will see in OUR DAILY THREAD, Trump’s increasingly authoritarian regime is working with the Surveillance-Industrial Complex to do to Americans what Americans and Israelis have helped other countries do to their citizens. Companies like Palantir, Paragon Solutions (Israeli), Clearview AI and Flock are poring over our personal information, tracking social media accounts, accessing (hacking) the cameras on our phones or mounted on our door frames or embedded into the so-called smart devices we’ve willingly surrounded ourselves with.
And yes, of course this type of surveillance is not new.
It began in earnest with the Total Information Awareness network during the Global War On Terror. It was incubated by DARPA’s Information Awareness office under the guidance of former Iran-Contra mugshot model Adm. John Poindexter … and it was up and running within months of the 9/11 attack. And, as IEEE Spectrum explained at the time, it did exactly what its name implied … it achieved “total information awareness” by mining “credit card, medical, travel, police, and other governmental data” to discover terrorists and their plots. Reuters described it as a “massive surveillance database containing oceans of vital information about everybody in the United States.”
A barrage of “bad press” and the program’s “Orwellian name, mission, and origin as the brainchild of … a prominent figure in the ”Irangate” scandal” made it problematic. Congress responded by (supposedly) defunding the program in September of 2003. But the program just went incognito and continued under the codename “Basketball” for years to come, it’s capabilities spread around the alphabet soup of national security agencies.
That was 22 years ago.
Since then—and in the wake of Edward Snowden’s big reveal—many of those capabilities are now available on the other side of the revolving door in the so-called “private” sector. It’s an added layer of plausible deniability that keeps the Internet Coup just quiet enough to keep it rolling until it is too late. - jp
The Strongman’s Surveillance State
https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/the-strongmans-surveillance-state/
Trump’s ICE Expands Surveillance Tech for Deportation Crackdown
https://www.itsecuritynews.info/trumps-ice-expands-surveillance-tech-for-deportation-crackdown/
"ICE Spent $3.75 Million On Face Hunting": This Government Agency's Orwellian Surveillance Arsenal That Tracks Every Immigrant While You're Not Looking
https://visegradpost.com/en/2025/09/23/ice-spent-3-75-million-on-face-hunting-this-government-agencys-orwellian-surveillance-arsenal-that-tracks-every-immigrant-while-youre-not-looking/
Documents offer rare insight on Ice’s close relationship with Palantir
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/sep/22/ice-palantir-data
Palantir, ICE, and the quiet expansion of a biometric dragnet
https://www.biometricupdate.com/202509/palantir-ice-and-the-quiet-expansion-of-a-biometric-dragnet
Predator drones are monitoring anti-ICE protests
https://www.salon.com/2025/09/22/predator-drones-are-monitoring-anti-ice-protests/
That Drone in the Sky Could Be Tracking Your Car
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/09/drone-sky-could-be-tracking-your-car
Crime fighter or mass surveillance? In Colorado, license plate readers are high-tech and widespread
https://www.cbsnews.com/colorado/news/crime-fighter-mass-surveillance-colorado-license-plate-readers/
OPINION: Denver City Council Votes to Cease Using ‘Flock’ Surveillance Cameras
https://pagosadailypost.com/2025/09/22/opinion-denver-city-council-votes-to-cease-using-flock-surveillance-cameras/
Residents protest against surveillance cameras in Springfield
https://kval.com/news/local/protesters-rally-against-surveillance-cameras-in-springfield-oregon-license-plate-readers-police-surveillance-community-concerns-data
Debate heats up in Sanford over new surveillance cameras and potential ICE connections
https://wgme.com/news/local/debate-heats-up-in-sanford-over-new-surveillance-cameras-and-potential-ice-connections
New plan would give Congress another 18 months to revisit Section 702 surveillance powers
https://therecord.media/fisa-section-702-legislation-sen-tom-cotton-plan
Critics Warn the TikTok Deal Swaps Chinese Surveillance for U.S. Surveillance
https://time.com/7319281/tiktok-trump-surveillance-china/
Billionaire surveillance enthusiast set to acquire TikTok's US operations
https://popular.info/p/billionaire-surveillance-enthusiast