Digital Authoritarianism

Perfectionism is a plague on my writing and must be fought off. I may not address all issues comprehensively, and I may change my mind given new information. I may be wrong. As my friend here in Valencia says, tiempo a tiempo or time will tell, but I need to start somewhere. More voices, however small mine is, are better. We all seek the comfortable in our lives and while this is normal, in the face of some changes, such as climate change or the creep of authoritarian rule, it is not good to rest in that comfortable space. As John Harris points out:

These days, that kind of thinking reflects how people deal with just about every aspect of our ever-more troubled world: if we can avert our eyes from ecological breakdown, then everything else can be either underestimated or ignored. There is a kind of moment, I would wager, that now happens to all of us. We glance at our phones or switch on the radio and are assailed by the awful gravity of everything, and then somehow manage to instantly find our way back to calm and normality. This, of course, is how human beings have always managed to cope, as a matter of basic mental wiring.¹

In my own effort to fend off becoming a boiled frog, I am tracking closely the slow creep of authoritarianism. It is a sprawling topic. How sprawling becomes evident as I capture most of what I am reading and jot down my thoughts on these various articles. It does not easily fit in a single post. In light of that, I am today focusing on the question of digital authoritarian tools.

My tracking of this phenomenon was much in advance of the actual rise of direct authoritarian rule under The Trump Regime. For some time I have been concerned about the surveillance economy in the US. When, however, the Senate of The Regime approved the appointment of Kash Patel² to the office of Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI),³ I began to severely curtail our digital footprint and bring the majority of our data over to European encryption systems.⁴

In April I read a piece by journalists at The Atlantic about the development of the American Panopticon.⁵ The word panopticon was new to me, and it is an interesting concept.

The panopticon is a design of institutional building with an inbuilt system of control, originated by the English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century. The concept is to allow all prisoners of an institution to be observed by a single prison officer, without the inmates knowing whether or not they are being watched.⁶

There is some clarity in understanding The Regime as a prison. And we are being watched. As Bogost and Warzel state in their opening paragraph,

If you were tasked with building a panopticon, your design might look a lot like the information stores of the U.S. federal government—a collection of large, complex agencies, each making use of enormous volumes of data provided by or collected from citizens.

As they go on to explain, our daily life generates an enormous amount of data. Our devices are usually connected to multiple networking technologies and they remain connected at all times for our convenience. We generate data as we move through our day. Every time we change location we report that information to GPS mapping systems, touching wifi access points even if not connected, changing mobile phone carrier towers, and checking on information via email, social media, and websites. All this creates a mountain of data that does not even include the intentional reporting that we do when we sign up at a website, be it civilian or governmental. The Regime is working to consolidate that data.⁷

This perspective takes on a more specific application in the weaponisation of data using tools developed by the Peter Thiel firm Palantir. As Juan Sebastian Pinto lays out for us in The Guardian, the Palantir data is only one of many systems that form Istar systems (intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition and reconnaissance).⁸ The Istar systems raise an enormous number of questions. There are ways to use them that are ethical and in alignment with law and democratic societies, but for that to be true, we must, as Pinto writes, address the “significant ethical questions regarding civil rights, data collection, data quality, bias, discrimination, accuracy, automation and, most importantly, accountability.”

Alas, these questions are not being addressed by The Regime. Today the data held by the government is being combined with the data held by commercial data systems to target individuals.⁹ Everyday tasks are leading the government, without judicial oversight, without warrants, often with questionable charges against the accused. These ICE forces are already using data to find the people they have decided to persecute today.

Who among us will they target next?

Footnotes

1. Harris, John. 2025-05-11. “Want to know how the world really ends? Look to TV show Families Like Ours.” The Guardian. Accessed 2025-05-12 at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/may/11/families-like-ours-tv-danish-drama-climate-crisis-authoritarians. ↩︎
2. Snyder, Timothy. 2025-02-18. “Kash Patel’s Plots.” Thinking About… Accessed 2025-02-21 at https://snyder.substack.com/p/kash-patels-plots. ↩︎
3. “Today, in a 51–49 vote, all but two Republican senators voted to confirm Kash Patel as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Senators Susan Collins (R-ME) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) voted with all the Democrats and Independents to oppose Patel’s confirmation. In a 2023 book, Patel published a list of more than 50 current or former U.S. officials that he claims are members of the ‘deep state’ and are a ‘dangerous threat to democracy.’”
   Richardson, Heather Cox. 2025-02-21. “February 20, 2025.” Letters from an American. Accessed 2025-08-25 at https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/february-20-2025 ↩︎
4. Wright Gibson, David. 2025-05-02. “Police State Proofing.” Wright Adventures. Accessed at https://wrightgibson.es/police-state-proofing/. ↩︎
5. Bogost, Ian and Charlie Warzel. 2025-04-27. “American Panopticon.” The Atlantic. Accessed 2025-04-27 at https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/04/american-panopticon/682616/. ↩︎
6. Wikipedia contributors. 2025-08-10. “Panopticon.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 2025-08-25 from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Panopticon&oldid=1305116288 ↩︎
7. Reich, Robert. 2025-06-30. “Peter Thiel’s Palantir poses a grave threat to Americans.” The Guardian. Accessed 2025-08-25 at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jun/30/peter-thiel-palantir-threat-to-americans. ↩︎
8. Pinto, Juan Sebastian. 2025-08-24. “Palantir’s tools pose an invisible danger we are just beginning to comprehend.” The Guardian. Accessed 2025-08-24 at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/aug/24/palantir-artificial-intelligence-civil-rights ↩︎
9. Musgrave, Shawn. “ICE Hunts Down Immigrants by Spying on Their Wire Transfers.” The Intercept. Accessed 2025-08-25 at https://theintercept.com/2025/08/21/ice-immigrants-wire-transfers-remittances-surveillance/. ↩︎