The United States of Surveillance

As the dollar crashes and authoritarians unite, your every move is being watched, stored, and weaponized

Just one year ago, a U.S. green card holder returning from abroad would flash their ID, answer a few questions, and walk through border control. Today, before you even board your flight home, Palantir algorithms produce a comprehensive profile of your entire life so its ready for CBP officers to interrogate you by the time you touch down.

As you step into the airport terminal, facial recognition cameras capture your biometric data at one of 163 land ports of entry. Your phone could gets searched—part of 47,047 device searches in 2024—not to gather information they don't have, but to catch you in lies they can prosecute under false disclosure laws.

The Palantir algorithms had already surfaced everything, cross-referencing your face against databases that would shame the Stasi, consolidating tax records, immigration data, and surveillance feeds into what civil liberties advocates call an American social credit system.

The nation that sprang to life out of a yearning to be free, has built itself a digital panopticon that is so thorough it can instantly profile any citizen. The playbook is very familiar: Stalin's secret police maintained detailed files on 20 million Soviet citizens. Hitler's regime required population registration and deployed 160,000 informants. The Stasi monitored one-third of East Germans through 91,000 employees and 189,000 collaborators. Today's American surveillance state has surpassed them all—not with human spies, but with digital omniscience that captures every click, location, transaction, and conversation of 330 million Americans.