Yves here. We have embedded the specifications for the ICE request for proposal to engage in social media surveilance at the end of this post. While this scheme is clearly intended to chill anti-orthodox discourse, note that is appears to be limited to “social media platforms” as in ginormous sites like Facebook that are not lialbe for the user statements posted on their “interactive computer services” ues thanks to Section 230. However, it supplements another surveillance program, SocialNet. 404 Media summarized its scope:
What is SocialNet?
SocialNet is a surveillance tool developed by ShadowDragon, giving OSINT (Open-source intelligence) professionals and governments tools to search and collect publicly available information across more than 200 websites, social networks, and online services simultaneously.
According to recent reporting by 404 Media, the tool creates comprehensive profiles of individuals by aggregating their digital footprints across various platforms, enabling analysts to map connections, track activities, and visualize relationships between people of interest.
Which Platforms Are Being Monitored?
The list of monitored platforms is extensive and includes:
- Major social networks: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Bluesky
- Messaging platforms: WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord
- Content platforms: OnlyFans, JustForFans, TikTok
- Payment services: PayPal, Cash App, BuyMeACoffee
- Gaming platforms: Roblox, Chess.com
- Demographic-specific sites: Black Planet<
- Special interest networks: FetLife, cigar review sites, hobby forums
Are cigar review sites unduly Cuba positive?
Although the officialdom can obviously extend the reach of this data sweep down the road, the focus now is venues they deem to be influential and not the comments sections of indpendent publishers.
But the bigger issue is that the overwhelming majorty of Americans have fallen for the business propostion that Matt Stoller warned about many years ago, “If your media is free, you are the product.” This is true of “free” communications services like Skype, WhatsApp, and Line, and “free” information sharing sites like Facebook. Some of these providers make clear what they are about. For instance, Line, which is very widely used in Southeast Asia, does not allow users to set up Line-only contacts, which I could limit to a few not-informative people here. It wants to access your Contacts list. Mind you, my Contacts are not in Contacts (I fragment them across applications, which are not contact programs) but I found the premise so offensive that I refuse to use Line (and annoy people here as a result).
Another official fixation is tracking location data. I find it disappointing how few use Faraday bags. But that’s a testament to how addicted most are to looking that their phones when bored and thinking they need to be reachable all the time. Unless you are a medical or other professional who in the old normal would have had a pager, you are over-estimating your importance.
By Nicole M. Bennett, Ph.D. Candidate in Geography and Assistant Director at the Center for Refugee Studies, Indiana University. Originally published at The Conversation
When most people think about immigration enforcement, they picture border crossings and airport checkpoints. But the new front line may be your social media feed.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has published a request for information for private-sector contractors to launch a round-the-clock social media monitoring program. The request states that private contractors will be paid to comb through “Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Tumblr, Instagram, VK, Flickr, Myspace, X (formerly Twitter), TikTok, Reddit, WhatsApp, YouTube, etc.,” turning public posts into enforcement leads that feed directly into ICE’s databases.
The request for information reads like something out of a cyber thriller: dozens of analysts working in shifts, strict deadlines measured in minutes, a tiered system of prioritizing high-risk individuals, and the latest software keeping constant watch.
I am a researcher who studies the intersection of data governance, digital technologies and the U.S. federal government. I believe that the ICE request for information also signals a concerning if logical next step in a longer trend, one that moves the U.S. border from the physical world into the digital.
A New Structure of Surveillance
ICE already searches social media using a service called SocialNet that monitors most major online platforms. The agency has also contracted with Zignal Labs for its AI-powered social media monitoring system.
The Customs and Border Protection agency also searches social media posts on the devices of some travelers at ports of entry, and the U.S. State Department reviews social media posts when foreigners seek visas to enter the United States.
ICE and other federal law enforcement agencies already search social media.
What would change isn’t only the scale of monitoring but its structure. Instead of government agents gathering evidence case by case, ICE is building a public-private surveillance loop that transforms everyday online activity into potential evidence.
Private contractors would be tasked with scraping publicly available data to collecting messages, including posts and other media and data. The contractors would be able to correlate those findings with data in commercial datasets from brokers such as LexisNexis Accurint and Thomson Reuters CLEAR along with government-owned databases. Analysts would be required to produce dossiers for ICE field offices within tight deadlines – sometimes just 30 minutes for a high-priority case.
Those files don’t exist in isolation. They feed directly into Palantir Technologies’ Investigative Case Management system, the digital backbone of modern immigration enforcement. There, this social media data would join a growing web of license plate scans, utility records, property data and biometrics, creating what is effectively a searchable portrait of a person’s life.
Who Gets Caught in the Net?
Officially, ICE says its data collection would focus on people who are already linked to ongoing cases or potential threats. In practice, the net is far wider.
The danger here is that when one person is flagged, their friends, relatives, fellow organizers or any of their acquaintances can also become subjects of scrutiny. Previous contracts for facial recognition tools and location trackinghave shown how easily these systems expand beyond their original scope. What starts as enforcement can turn into surveillance of entire communities.
What ICE Says and What History Shows
ICE frames the project as modernization: a way to identify a target’s location by identifying aliases and detecting patterns that traditional methods might miss. Planning documents say contractors cannot create fake profiles and must store all analysis on ICE servers.
But history suggests these kinds of guardrails often fail. Investigations have revealed how informal data-sharingbetween local police and federal agents allowed ICE to access systems it wasn’t authorized to use. The agency has repeatedly purchased massive datasets from brokers to sidestep warrant requirements. And despite a White House freeze on spyware procurement, ICE quietly revived a contract with Paragon’s Graphite tool, software reportedly capable of infiltrating encrypted apps such as WhatsApp and Signal.
Meanwhile, ICE’s vendor ecosystem keeps expanding: Clearview AI for face matching, ShadowDragon’s SocialNet for mapping networks, Babel Street’s location history service Locate X, and LexisNexis for looking up people. ICE is also purchasing tools from surveillance firm PenLink that combine location data with social media data. Together, these platforms make continuous, automated monitoring not only possible but routine.
Lessons from Abroad
The United States isn’t alone in government monitoring of social media. In the United Kingdom, a new police unit tasked with scanning online discussions about immigration and civil unrest has drawn criticism for blurring the line between public safety and political policing.
Across the globe, spyware scandals have shown how lawful access tools that were initially justified for counterterrorism were later used against journalists and activists. Once these systems exist, mission creep, also known as function creep, becomes the rule rather than the exception.
The Social Cost of Being Watched
Around-the-clock surveillance doesn’t just gather information – it also changes behavior.
Research found that visits to Wikipedia articles on terrorism dropped sharply immediately after revelations about the National Security Agency’s global surveillance in June 2013.
For immigrants and activists, the stakes are higher. A post about a protest or a joke can be reinterpreted as “intelligence.” Knowing that federal contractors may be watching in real time encourages self-censorship and discourages civic participation. In this environment, the digital self, an identity composed of biometric markers, algorithmic classifications, risk scores and digital traces, becomes a risk that follows you across platforms and databases.
What’s New and Why It Matters Now
What is genuinely new is the privatization of interpretation. ICE isn’t just collecting more data, it is outsourcing judgment to private contractors. Private analysts, aided by artificial intelligence, are likely to decide what online behavior signals danger and what doesn’t. That decision-making happens rapidly and across large numbers of people, for the most part beyond public oversight.
At the same time, the consolidation of data means social media content can now sit beside location and biometric information inside Palantir’s hub. Enforcement increasingly happens through data correlations, raising questions about due process.
ICE’s request for information is likely to evolve into a full procurement contract within months, and recent litigationfrom the League of Women Voters and the Electronic Privacy Information Center against the Department of Homeland Security suggests that the oversight is likely to lag far behind the technology. ICE’s plan to maintain permanent watch floors, open indoor spaces equipped with video and computer monitors, that are staffed 24 hours a day, 365 days a yearsignals that this likely isn’t a temporary experiment and instead is a new operational norm.
What Accountability Looks Like
Transparency starts with public disclosure of the algorithms and scoring systems ICE uses. Advocacy groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union argue that law enforcement agencies should meet the same warrant standards onlinethat they do in physical spaces. The Brennan Center for Justice and the ACLU argue that there should be independent oversight of surveillance systems for accuracy and bias. And several U.S. senators have introduced legislation to limit bulk purchases from data brokers.
Without checks like these, I believe that the boundary between border control and everyday life is likely to keep dissolving. As the digital border expands, it risks ensnaring anyone whose online presence becomes legible to the system.
00 ICE RFP specifications
I’m puzzled by your experience with LINE. When I set up my LINE account, giving access to my contacts was not mandatory, and there is no problem revoking the permission on my Android device at any time.
The access is primarily for auto discovery, which honestly is a huge time saver for me.
You can definitely maintain contacts on LINE who aren’t in your device’s general phone contacts. In fact, this is one of the core ways LINE is designed to work. I use this feature myself.
Not on an iPhone. Line requires access to your Contacts (an Apple pre-installed app). There is no way to either a new set of contacts in Line or simply use Line for individual calls entered manually. See here for confirmation: https://www.wikihow.tech/Make-Calls-on-the-Line-App-on-iPhone-or-iPad
The only way to call is from Contacts or Chat, as in pre-existing #s you’ve chatted with, as in “known” to the phone.
I just took my company iPhone, uninstalled LINE, and then reinstalled it.
There was a message during the reinstall that made it look like you need to grant access but then it asked for confirmation of granting the access and I said no, and I confirm it doesn’t see the contacts.
I was also able to contact another phone just now by adding myself via shared QR code. This contact currently exists only inside my iPhone LINE and I just double confirmed that it has no access to my contacts.
It may be different in your country but I doubt it.
I spent an inordinate amount of time about 2 years ago with my tech woman trying to get Line to let me install contacts manually and not use Contacts. It was a non-starter. Perhaps they have changed since then. Regardless, I believe in paying for my communications. I do not want to be the product.
I do not use QR codes. I do not want to have to look at the URL every time to see if it is legit.
I would suggest that there would be another program for voice identification. A few words spoken on a phone or a mobile or maybe even a public place and they would probably have your identity. Having computers, tablets, mobiles and home devices in always listening mode would make things much easier. Those conversations would then be recorded and transcribed and linked to those people’s files. I seem to remember there being conversation after 9/11 about how much info to record and the consensus came out – ‘Record it all’
I talked to people in Poindexter’s TIA afterwards and the constant refrain I got from all of them was they had their minds semi-blown by how much data the commercial data collection corps like Acxiom already had.
But yes. Collect it all.
I am reminded of a recent phone scam, where the caller asks, “Is this so-and-so?”
If the respondent answers ‘Yes’, then the voice recording is used to obtain premission
for whatever the scammer wanted or needed to sell you. That’s not counting what
AI is capable of doing. AI could sell your vocal ‘permission’ to other entities,
So that you inadvertently sign up for who knows what.
This jumps out of the page. Why not Steam? Roblox is popular but with younger people, and is it really a hotbed of political disstent?
And chess.com? Really? In the security sphere? Really? How many people even log in?
Something else is going on here. An excuse for an entirely commerical operation. Maybe these are just the companies who volunteered or were made to volunteer to provide access, or demands for access are related to ulterior motives.
You can see posts in Cyrillic right there next to English on Steam forums, but Palantir aren’t interested? Will it take Arabic posts, or Steam being run by fools?
You may have a point to be honest. Chess.com is very popular, I can undersrand it strictly from a numbers pov as with Roblox. Maybe Steam just refused? Apart from what you suggested I can’t think of another reason.
Roblox, however, is very much not a children-only platform at all and has a huge, largely unaddressed, well-known predator problem, not that those are even the only adults playing. Roblox has been considered to be a social media platform depending on who you’re talking to and they want to take it a step further and create an online dating service, which, on a side note, their CEO tried very hard to insist on being for persons 17+
Sorry to be quietly thinking: without a robust counter-movement we are the fools.
“Search assist” produced:
The phrase “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety” suggests that sacrificing fundamental freedoms for the sake of security is misguided and ultimately detrimental. This quote, attributed to Benjamin Franklin, emphasizes the importance of maintaining liberty even in the face of threats.
Since so many people put their actual personal photos on their profile, this is wide open biometric surveillance, and extremely disturbing.
Like Line, Whatsapp also needs access to the iOS Contacts app to allow you to chat and make calls with an iPhone, so this is likely an Apple sandboxing issue. In India, literally everyone in a service role uses Whatsapp so good luck getting stuff done without it. We’re way too dependent on this stuff.
Absolutely that last point, what do you do when it’s get Whatsapp or get another job?
@Yves
There are other Actors (with direct ties to Palantir) who have been exploiting recent events, in order to wholly bypass any congressional authorization or judicial review (as to lawfulness), while offering their de facto Precrime “solutions” directly to Law Enforcement across America.
One such individual is Aaron Cohen, and Ex-IDF special operations soldier, who, in collaboration with Palantir engineers, created a Precrime suite GIDEON.
Here’s the Promo that was created shortly before the Minnesota Church shooting
He’s NOT registered as a Foreign Agent, but plans on offering his Black Box product to law enforcement across America.
This man was curiously embedded with LAPD to “disrupt” the UCLA student protesters.
Immediately after the Charlie Kirk murder, and the nebulous “Antifa” hysteria fomented by the Trump administration, Cohen jumped into action to exploit the events.
Aaron Cohen
Trump acolytes like Laura Loomer have already called for Palantir Tech rollout, on the streets of America.
We had MELANIA TRUMP calling for the same thing + Pre-crime.
The Grayzone just revealed that Gaza-tested Drones have already been deployed across America.
START SUING THESE POLICE DEPARTMENTS and filing FOIAs.
Here’s suggesting that the true “high risk individuals” are not so dumb as to be discussing their plots on Facebook and that has always been the challenge for a panopticon that–famously–failed to prevent 9/11.
Some of us, the low risk individuals, are acutely aware of the spybot problem and have always seen the web as a bit of a party line with Uncle Sam and would be marketing outfits. But if the point of the dragnet is to corral everyone who complains about the government then they are going to need bigger gulags.
*Sigh*
This is about identifying their networks.
Yup.
9/11 was designed by the very same entities that have used Gaza/West Bank to battle test their surveillance, control and elimination systems. This is just another phase in the plan to make us all Palestinians. There are no ‘high-risk’ individuals, only the masses they seek to subjugate.
I’ve never used faraday bags, have always just left my phone at home when engaging in hijinx.
I used to move in activist circles where everyone was asked to leave their phones in a basket at the door for opsec. Several problems with this – you’re still being tracked to a location, you’re putting your phone somewhere out of view where someone else could tamper with it, and those phones still have mics.
Anyway, activists should avoid social media altogether, and leave their phones at home, do their organizing warm and wet. The forces of evil don’t have the resources to do oldskool low/no tech surveillance or to visually track everyone. This is the wannabe activist’s one significant advantage – use it, or use some combination/hybrid approach which mistrusts tech/social media on principle as always compromised.
I don’t like the idea of being tracked at all. And I go just about nowhere.
This video on why you should never speak to the police shows how innocent-seeming disclosures can be made to look guilty: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE
If you were a mere observer of a demonstration, GPS could arguably serve to depict you as being at it. I know there is fetishization about how accurate it is, but I have doubts. That certainly is not the case here. The ride hail app I use here regularly puts me at the wrong pickup spot, requiring me to put in the address manually. Sometimes the app takes issue with that, asking if the ride is for me. It also asks me to enable WiFi so as to locate me more accurately.
I agree with prioritizing in person communication when organizing.
I learned during my long career in the criminal justice system that for nearly two decades each and every internet page view has been logged and stored in searchable format, although presumably subject to the necessity of a warrant to be actionable. Ed Snowden revealed a decade ago that our phones and smart devices are capable of listening to us even when ostensibly turned off. We have been living in a panopticon of our own making all along.
The GWOT taught companies such as Palantir that there is money to be made by ginning-up febrile imaginings of a “threat” lurking under every bed. In my view, the biggest danger is that there is a clear profit motive for these private businesses to utilize the panopticon to provoke “opposition” in the same way that Shin Bet appears likely to have guided Hamas toward a hostage-taking attack on Labour-Zionist kibbutzim and the secular Supernova rave in order to unleash a murderous mass-Hannibal as a false justification for the liquidation of Gaza — as has been hinted-at in the left-leaning Israeli press.
You can’t assert the defense of “entrapment” when you’re already dead. I suspect that there has already been a chilling effect on free association and peaceable assembly to redress grievances against our governments.
As has been mentioned by others, the mass surveillance may be a response of the elites to concerns about future civil unrest in response to the USA rentier economy.
That the US government never mentions “employer sanctions/fines” in response to illegal immigration, may buttress this case.
So build up a large surveillance industry to protect the upper class in the near future under the guise of “border protection”.
Maybe 25 years ago on an Amtrak train ride, I remember overhearing two self-identified conservatives discuss privacy.
One told the other, “I don’t care if the government listens in, I have nothing to hide.”
That may be the case with many USians.
ICE isn’t raiding meat-packing plants, dairies, orchards, truck farms — or construction sites. They also haven’t touched a single employer. Did the 13th Amendment make it a crime to be a slave? It’s all cosplay and theater directed at deterring the urban poor and the young from political participation through intimidation.
Our Billionaire Overlords are terrified of the poors — with good reason. Their “immigrant/narco-terrorist” internet panopticon will soon be transformed into a dragnet for pre-crime. “Nothing to hide” will morph into “nowhere to hide.”
As Philip Marlowe told the district Attorney in “The Big Sleep”: “Everyone has something to hide.”
….And even if you’re not paranoid, they’re after you!
When I read about these gigantic surveillance efforts, I always wonder if anything useful comes out of them (“useful” meaning something that the state can use to do something it wants to do or prevent something from happening).
Surveilling people who are of no particular interest to the state doesn’t seem like it’s going to lead to much value. People who realize their activities may be of interest to the state are not going to use surveillable platforms for their communications and either confine themselves to innocuous postings (“the owl hoots at midnight”!) or else rely on face-to-face communications.
The people who really have an interest in thinking this all adds up to something worthwhile are the thousands of private contractors who are trying to sell their services to deep-pockets governments. Much like weapons contractors who make weapons that turn out to be useless in wartime, surveillance contractors have no incentive to deliver a worthwhile product once the check clears. I have never heard the term “surveillance industrial complex,” but it seems like something that applies here.
Back in the War on Terror Mission Accomplished days, there was a case where “some guy” tried to do something naughty with a home-made explosive device. I think this might have been “the” underwear bomber (tried to blow up a plane with a bomb hidden in his underwear, but ended up burning himself instead), but maybe it was a different case. It was around the same time as the “underwear bomber”, in any event.
So the detonator malfunctioned, and the nefarious plot did not come to be. At which point, the press started digging, just a little, and the NSA ended up disclosing that 5-7 months previous they did, in fact, intercept a communication from the guy where he disclosed every detail of the plot he was hatching, but no-one at the NSA had actually read this communication until after he’d failed and was caught.
In other words, the point of gathering all this data at the time wasn’t to proactively find “bad guys”. It was – if you draw our attention to yourself, then we can look back through our archives and find some more info on you. Or your contacts.
Now, “draw attention” does a lot of work here. I imagine that in the modern ICE context, it means starting out with some search parameter (find me a hispanic immigrant with a parking ticket, then give me all his hispanic contacts), but I think the overall concept still stands. These are not SURVEILLANCE tools, they are REPRESSION tools, and by the way, teaching a section of the populace (e.g. Chinese user base) not to say certain things on public platforms is also a form of repression.
89 year-old John Poindexter seeing his dreams come true, 23 years after his initial meeting with the Palantir boys.
Related to this is the widespread adoption of Flock AI cameras. Do this and suggest to everyone you know that that they do the same!
https://youtube.com/watch?v=xSs3rL58g6A
For those of you who are unaware a Flock camera is an AI-powered camera that is part of a network that automatically reads the license plate and details of any vehicles that pass by it and then automatically sends it to local law enforcement. It does all of this without a warrant and several people have already been falsely arrested from the bad data collected from these cameras.
The biggest obstacle to fighting back against mass surveillance is that a lot of people do not grasp the implications of their passivity. As a talking point, explain to them then they should give a random stranger the numbers of all of your debit and credit cards, your bank account information and pin, and then send them the keys to your home so they can enter whenever they please and dig through your stuff at any time.
The constant data breaches that occur with all of these Big Tech platforms alone should be raising red flags.
Couple of puzzling things about that list of monitored platforms in the first part of the post.
1. Payment services.
Paypal, for instance, so far as I know, is not a social media site. The data Paypal has on you – and says it collects on you – is essentially the equivalent of a bank statement, i.e. your PII info like address plus your list of transactions. [And if you have the app, the basic data on your phone like geolocation and screen resolution.]
I’ve scanned Paypal’s privacy statement just now, and while I might have missed some clever legalese somewhere, basically, outside of explicit requests from law enforcement there is supposed to be no way for an outside entity to get at the bulk of this data. You CAN provide them with a list of your contacts, and they explicitly tell you that they’ll only grab that data if you give it to them, but even then it shouldn’t go further than their financial partners.
So how does ShadowDragon get a user’s transaction data from Paypal, which, presumably, is what they would need for their dossier?
a) I’ve missed some creative legalese, or else Paypal just ignores the terms of its own user agreement. In which case ShadowDragon would still have to pay Paypal something for specific user data.
b) ShadowDragon is full of it, and cannot get anyone’s Paypal data except in some very niche edge cases, but don’t tell that to the marketing people.
c) ShadowDragon has found some illicit way to get at the Paypal data. The article from which the “monitored platforms” list above was taken – which I found – mentions that “many platforms” believe this data collection violates their policies, and Cash App specifically said something about “unauthorized scraping”. I am not sure off hand how you would scrape Paypal, but perhaps there is a way. Though as a peer-to-peer financial transaction list should not be exposed in this manner, or, rather, I cannot think of a use case where it would make sense for it to be. Maybe it’s just too early in the morning.
2. The gaming platforms that ShadowDragon gathers info from. Notice anything missing?
Like, the three most popular, by far, gaming platforms in existing? Steam, PlayStation Network, X-box Live. There’s metric megatons of user data on each of them, and yet…ShadowDragon mentions Chess.com instead. I mean – Chess.com. Because that is going to be the likelier place for a communist-jihadist-terrorist-mild-mannered-Keynesian to go.
Either that means ShadowDragon has not come to any kind of understanding with Steam, etc. about getting at their user data, or, quite possibly, their tech boys haven’t figured out a way to scrape it. Chess.com, again back to the 404 Media reporting, is specifically mentioned among companies that complain about unauthorized scraping of their data. Or maybe 404 Media just got an incomplete list of platforms ShadowDragon trawls through.
So many questions…
One more post. The trifecta!
So in recent days, literally, there’s been a hoo-haa in the Russian segment of the Internet.
Background. A couple of months ago, the Duma adopted a new “anti-extremist-materials” law that is supposed to deter Internet users in Russia from searching out things like the text of “Main Kampf”, or anything else declared to be similarly “extremist”. This led to a long public debate, including from the standpoint of – no-one, including law enforcement, understands how this law is actually supposed to work in practice – but that isn’t the point.
The point is that now we have the first test case. Some 20-year old twit in the Sverdlovsk region, while riding the bus to work, goes on his phone and searches out a couple of articles on “Azov” and RDK (the “Russian” military unit the Ukrainians tried to use a couple of times with disastrous results). His ISP duly reports these searches to the local police department, and the guy is finally hauled into court for a misdemeanor violation of said new law (fine of something like $200-equivalent).
There have now been at least two court sessions, the second of which closed with the case being referred back to the police for, err, “improvements”. Meanwhile the kid’s lawyer has been all over the news saying “how was my client supposed to know”, “no-one actually checks the list of extremist materials before browsing the net”, and, the one I wholeheartedly agree with but relates in no way to the specific case, “what if a researcher were writing an article about Azov – would he be hauled into court too”. To which the nationalist bloggers in the room responded with leaked info (wonder who by) about the kid’s social media preferences and previous browsing profile, painting him as a Ukrainian-regime-loving stooge.
My broader point though is that any expectations any of us has for privacy has gone the way of the dodo, I would argue, decades ago. We can tinker around the edges, and I am all in favor of this, but ultimately all electronic data exists somewhere (until it doesn’t, of course), and ultimately can and will be gotten at. The only difference is – will it be a government entity seeking to police discent, or a private entity seeking to make some coin, or maybe a bit of both. And, of course, whether the rules of the game are clear enough for everyone to understand and to follow, which is basically the crux of the public debate in Russian media – not whether there should be an expectation of privacy, but what specific things do or should trigger un-privacy. Which is a debate I just do not see taking place in the Bastion-of-Democracy-US at nearly the same level (i.e. mainstream rather than independent media).
It’s like that mini-scene in “Minority Report” where Tom Cruise runs into a store, and the sensor at the door scans his eyes and proclaims “Welcome back, Mr. Minamoto, would you like to see the jeans from last time”. Except we’re living in that world now.