Investigative journalist Daniel Boguslaw uncovers collusion between law enforcement, Corporate America and academics to create new targets for the expanding US security state.

Transcript

Chris Hedges:

In the wake of the attacks on CEOs, a nationwide protest movement targeting data centers and increasing concerns about AI job replacement, federal intelligence agencies and domestic law enforcement are circulating reports with a new domestic target in mind, “Anti-technology Extremists,” writes Daniel Bogaslaw in Wired. Boguslaw examined more than 1,000 pages of unpublished reports from the Department of Homeland Security, FBI, and Fusion Centers. These unpublished reports show a national shift taking place to surveil this new and worrying broad category of people and activities deemed as an emerging threat.

The surveillance of the so-called ‘anti-technology extremism’ follows on the heels of National Security Presidential Memo 7, which instructs the Department of Justice to target anyone holding anti-American, anti-Christian, and anti-capitalist beliefs. Sebastian Gorka , Trump’s counter-terrorism czar, claims that left-wing extremists are one of the three top counter-terrorism priorities now facing the United States. The administration’s focus on anti-technology extremism is a direct response to widespread protests over the building of these massive data centers and the increasing intrusion into our lives as well as their destructive power of artificial intelligence. The targeting of so-called ‘left-wing extremists’ who oppose the AI industry adds an unreported category to those being criminalized by the Trump White House.

Joining me to discuss two of his reports, “U.S. Law Enforcement Warns of Anti Tech Extremism as AI Hatred Grows,” and “Homeland Security is Monitoring Activists Building Anti-Flock Tech,” is the investigative reporter Daniel Bogaslaw, whose work has also appeared in The Intercept, The New Republic, Rolling Stone, Jacobin, The Nation, Vice, and the American Prospect. And I just have to say, Daniel, I believe it was you who leaked those internal memos from my former employer, the New York Times, on all the words they weren’t allowed to say about Gaza. Is that correct?

Daniel Boguslaw:

Yes, that’s correct. That that was that was a couple of years ago now. I’ve never been published there and I probably never will, so.

Chris Hedges:

Yes, well that’s all right. I won’t anymore either. All right, let’s talk a little bit about what’s been happening. So, you went through one thousand pages of these unpublished reports. What’d you find?

Daniel Boguslaw:

Well, if it’s all right, maybe I could start with a bit of a history lesson to give some context of what I found. Before 9/11, something that a lot of people don’t realize is that the FBI and the national security apparatus was already on high alert, trying to look for ways to encircle American citizens exercising their right to free speech and assembly using the language and ideology of counterterrorism. So, before 9/11, the biggest domestic threat on the FBI’s leaderboard was not radical jihadi terrorism, it was not radical Salafist terrorism, it was also not radical right-wing terrorism or white superior supremacist gangs, it was in fact ecological and eco-resistance extremism.

So, before 9/11 that was the biggest terrorist priority for the FBI. And obviously we know how the story goes after 9/11 with the advent of the Patriot Act and the increasing criminalization first of Muslim Americans, but then a sort of metastasization of seeing enemies lurking everywhere domestically. There was an effort to create first, domestic violent extremists, and then just simply domestic extremists, and threat categories for everything and anyone under the sun proliferated, whether that was animal rights extremism, whether that was vegan extremism, whether that was eco-extremism. And even in both right-wing and left-wing administrations, political extremism, right? There are threat categories for right-wing violent extremism. There are categories for left-wing violent extremism. These are very broad categories but have generally been applied with some marginal degree of precision to anarchist groups or militia groups, both of whom often are still protected in their actions and words under the Constitution.

But what my reporting showed is a kind of astronomical broadening of these so-called threat categories in an era where a majority of Americans are freaked out by artificial intelligence, by the proliferation of data centers in their neighborhood and their communities. And so, these documents describe a sort of mutation of this domestic surveillance web that is now focusing on vast categories that could include anyone from a rowdy college student attending a protest to a senior citizen showing up their local city council meeting to oppose a data center. These categories use terms like ‘anti-technology extremism.’ New terms I’m seeing include “anti-surveillance extremism,’ so, anyone who’s been involved in in the response to Flock safety cameras. But this is a new level, I would say, in the 21st century of encirclement of vast swaths of the population.

Chris Hedges:

You quote from the report, I believe this is in the Intelligence Bureau assessment, “The chaotic atmosphere that may result from emergent AI technology in the next five years may fuel large scale protests that devolve into civil unrest and anti-tech violent extremist activity, especially in large urban areas such as New York City.” “The term anti-tech violent extremism,” this is you writing, “does not appear in any publicly available DHS or FBI domestic extremism reports or guides and represents a novel grouping of a wide range of ideologies under a single extremist category.” What they’re really talking about is anybody who identifies with the Left.

Daniel Boguslaw:

Yes, but I think it goes beyond that. I mean certainly National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 was very explicitly targeted, I would say at the Left and anyone in the center or right as well who opposes the Trump administration’s policies. And we know that NSPM-7, the reporting has borne out that this memo, which really instructed the entirety of the federal law enforcement and intelligence community to focus on these sort of left-wing threats, was really a response to the assassination of Charlie Kirk. I mean, that happened and basically the response was that the White House, they lost their mind, and they started to really believe that this wasn’t the action of one kind of psychotic individual but represented the culmination of a sort of burgeoning underbelly. And as you mentioned, this has been spurred on by people like Counterterrorism Czar Sebastian Gorka. But you know, I would say that it certainly envelops a lot of the Left and certainly names and narrows in on left-wing groups. But as we’ve seen with both Flock and the data centers, I mean, there’s also a right-wing populist element here, right, that’s been stoked by people like Steve Bannon , who also have a very strong anti-technology skepticism, and I see no reason why those people aren’t also going to be swept up into this. This is a sort of thing where once that threat category gets released, right, and once those terms start to circulate, anyone who can be grouped into that category is going to be.

Chris Hedges:

Let’s talk about, which I didn’t know anything about ‘til I read your article, Ziz LaSota .

Daniel Boguslaw:

Sure. So, this is very strange, to me this is sort of like the interface between the FBI and the sort of 90s housewife satanic panic, right? The FBI gets ahold of something, a sort of cult or a small group that is completely outrageous and insane, and then they use an instance of truly extreme but hyper-localized violence or extremism to then extrapolate, “Okay, this type of thing has to be hiding everywhere, right? They’re in the shadows.”

So, Ziz was a sort of what they called a rationalist cult that was a group of sort of Bay Area and highly educated individuals with ties to the sort of rationalist movement, and specifically the side of this San Francisco movement that is hyper afraid of AI, who truly believe that you know AI is going to take over the world, it’s going to become fully sentencing sentient and is going to you know destroy anyone and everyone who hasn’t taken preemptive action to sort of placate this future AI god. So, this is a pretty out there theory. There’s certainly some more mainstream adherence to parts of it in Silicon Valley, I think. But these people went on a killing spree, essentially. One of them killed their landlord with a samurai sword. Another one got into a firefight with a border patrol officer. But again, this was just a crazy psychotic group of three or four people who are in a cult.

But what we see now in the threat reports that I obtained is that the government is trying to use this localized instance of crazy people to draw a larger conclusion about others, other people subscribing and being radicalized by this ideology. And taking one element of their beliefs, which is a fear of technology destroying the world, right, and extrapolating that into a much broader, vaguer category that can then be applied to all sorts of people who have not stated any intention to commit violence, who have not committed any violence, and who are perhaps just expressing their ideas or organizing protests against these companies, which they’re seriously concerned are going to have a serious impact, if not on the environment, if not on the workforce, then in our day-to-day lives and human society.

Chris Hedges:

I want you to talk about fusion centers and I just want to throw in that I spent a lot of time in Zuccotti with the Occupy movement. We were very aware that there was a fusion center with the NYPD and corporate security. They were working out of the same office to monitor Occupy activists. When I was arrested in front of Goldman Sachs, you couldn’t tell because they all knew each other by name, you couldn’t tell who were the security officials from Goldman Sachs and who was the NYPD. They were all one unit. But talk about that and talk about the extent of the surveillance.

Daniel Boguslaw:

Sure. There’s a lot to unpack on this subject. I mean, I would say first just to explain what fusion centers are. In the wake of 9/11, there was a lot of finger-pointing, right? I mean, whether it was the FBI or the CIA or even the NSA, almost every federal intelligence agency had some piece of the puzzle prior to the attack. In the case of the FBI, there were field agents in Minneapolis who had tried to warn senior bureau leadership that there were these guys taking flight lessons. There was intelligence from the CIA showing other pieces of the puzzle, showing Saudi involvement. And so, basically, as part of the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and also an effort to, at least the way it was justified was an effort to close these so-called intelligence sharing gaps. There was this idea that those gaps could be closed by basically integrating the Department of Homeland Security into state and local police offices. And they built these hubs really, which were like these, they call them ‘fusion cells,’ where you have state police sitting with local police sometimes sheriffs, and then you have representatives from the FBI and from the Department of Homeland Security, all in there. And so, you get reports from local cops talking about stuff they saw on the street getting fed in there. And then you’ve got stuff coming down from the feds, right, from DHS, from the FBI, going into the field. But then there’s a third element, which is not just the feds and the locals, but as you mentioned, there’s a corporate element here, which is that the integration of corporate America into the Department of Homeland Security and into the FBI has been seamless.

And we got one picture of that during Occupy, where there were literally reports of these financial firms writing up their own dossiers, right, of in-person surveillance of protesters and then sending them into these fusion centers. And so, everything gets completely mixed up. There are almost half a dozen named information sharing networks connecting corporate America to the FBI and to DHS whether that’s InfraGard , whether that’s DSAC , whether that’s a number of corporate intelligence councils, which they have where they put CEOs on these boards that meet with leadership from FBI and DHS. And so, when it comes to artificial intelligence corporations, right, there’s this serious concern that these firms’ internal security – they’re often called GSOC’s, Global Security Operations Centers – are going to be sending their concerns to federal law enforcement. So, basically, they get a straight pipeline to advocate for their own corporate interests with the federal government. Of course, the documents that I obtained, those are not public. So, corporations have a front row view of everything that the feds are doing, but the average citizen trying to advocate for a democratic process to govern this new technology is completely cut out of that process.

Chris Hedges:

You write, “A report from the Northern Virginia Regional Intelligence Center warned that AGAAVES….” They love acronyms. Okay, you can’t make this up. “Anti-government, anti-authority violent extremists, influenced by government related grievances and conspiracy theories, have engaged in pre-operational planning, targeting data centers and other critical infrastructure facilities to disrupt government operations, but in the breakdown of suspicious activity reporting indicators, the intelligence report lists activities that could easily be carried out by peaceful protesters, legal experts say.” You go on, “These intelligence reports are part of a long tradition.” You’re quoting Spencer Reynolds, who’s a senior counsel at the NAACP. “These reports are part of a long tradition of agencies identifying protest or even simply having strong opinions as precursors to violence. Suspicious activity reports are incredibly unreliable, often about vague or innocent behavior issued under permissive standards. These reports, often received in large volumes, allow officers to inject their own biases and see what they want to see in the facts.” What you’re really talking about is, in their eyes, it’s a preemptive strike and justified because they have essentially labeled these groups as potentially violent even when they’ve actually carried out no violent activity.

Daniel Boguslaw:

Yeah, that’s right. And you can imagine all of those instances of walking around a data center, driving by a data center, as something activists might do to check out how to conduct a protest safely. They might not be trying to even cause any damage or disruption, just figure out, “Where are we going to go stand? Where are we going to go sit?”

And another element of this that I think is really poorly understood and poorly covered by my colleagues in the media is this push that’s happening right now for AI and also data centers to receive something called a ‘critical infrastructure designation,’ right? This is the idea that’s been applied to all types of corporate American industries from mono-agriculture to really, like, you name it, telecommunications giants. And this is really the idea that every part of corporate America is an essential national security element, right? And so, the data centers and the AI firms have been lobbying the government to designate them in the same way. And what that would do would not only give them more access to government grants and to government protections and to government intelligence, but it also creates a whole new series of laws for anyone caught doing civil disobedience near or around any of these structures or facilities, right? Because if all of a sudden, you can say that that data center is a critical national security asset, or that AI office building is a critical piece of national security infrastructure, all of a sudden, you’re operating no longer under normal criminal or civil statute, but you’re entering the realm of national security and national secrets. And so that’s also been a big push by these companies to sort of envelop themselves, enshrine themselves in one more cloak of the state to give them more powers to persecute dissent.

Chris Hedges:

Let’s talk about surveillance, which you do in your first article, by these fusion centers. I think earlier in the article you talk about how they monitor all sorts of communications, like including Signal, but it’s clear from what you uncovered that they’re keeping tabs, as you write, on in-person assemblies. The Northern Virginia Center generated a report about demonstrations at local civic events, including the Arlington County budget meeting and the Fairfax County School Board meeting. “Across the country,” you write, “town halls, budget committee meetings have been among the chief forums for local residents to express their dissent with data centers being built in their neighborhoods.” But these fairly innocuous meetings are now being certainly infiltrated and watched by these fusion centers.”

Daniel Boguslaw:

Yeah, and it’s a very nefarious logic, right? I mean, if you look at these confidential threat reports, they know that sometimes these things are going to surface or they’re going to get leaked. And so, there was always affixed to them these types of statements like, “We acknowledge that no crime has been committed and that these activities are protected First Amendment and constitutionally protected assembly.” And they’ll also make statements on these documents basically justifying them by saying, “We’re just playing referee. We’re just watching this city council meeting to make sure that no one commits any violence on either side.” And this is the same logic, by the way, they use all the time for protests, right? They say, “We’re not surveilling protesters on an ideological basis. We’re protecting both sides by surveilling both sides who are attending this protest.”

And it’s a logic that has no end, right? I mean, why shouldn’t they surveil me when I go grocery shopping to make sure that someone doesn’t cut in line or take the last non-fat yogurt? I mean, it’s a logic that could be extended and applied in any condition. And the terrifying thing is that in the age we live in, these fusion centers and the federal government by extension have unfettered access to open source tools, right, to monitor hundreds and millions of social media posts to look for patterns, to look for individuals, to look for associations between people and groups. And increasingly, when I talk to sources inside of the intelligence community, even the people who are still working inside of DHS and FBI have said to me that they find it very concerning that a lot of the statutory safeguards that exist within the Bureau and DHS to prevent warrantless searches of individuals are basically thrown to the wayside because these agencies are able to just buy everything they need from the data brokers.

So, we are living in an age where neither these intelligence firms nor fusion centers have adequate regulations or oversight in in this age of mass data consumption. And simultaneously the corporations are also completely unregulated. I mean, I think it’s every year that Wired or the New York Times does a story about… I mean, hell, we’re talking about protesters, but they do stories about CIA officials and senior DOD officials having their data bought and tracked by foreign intelligence services. So, if those guys’ data are exposed, you can imagine what the average US citizen is dealing with. So yeah, we’re just living in a world where there is just no oversight on what these fusion centers are capable of accessing.

Chris Hedges:

And as you make clear, in California, Illinois, Indiana, New Jersey, Oklahoma, and Wisconsin, state and local police have removed or arrested speakers at town halls who criticize data centers, in one case before they were even allowed to speak.

Daniel Boguslaw:

Yeah, I mean it’s very strange. In my lifetime, I have never seen either of these phenomena. I have never seen this level of activation at the sort of city level of civic participation of people really standing up in their communities and exercising their constitutional rights. And at the same time, the level of brutality and backlash from the police, oftentimes around these Flock and similar brands, like Axion cameras, in their communities. And it’s a picture that lays bare the relationship here, where you have people peacefully speaking at assemblies of their elected officials and the police who use this technology arresting them. And I think that there’s just really not a good picture yet of how the federal government is egging this stuff on. We do know that they’re formulating an anti-surveillance threat category that could be applied to opponents of Flock, but I think because of the way that these fusion centers try to shield and classify their documents, the American public is unfortunately kept in the dark about how this ideology attacking this new wave of civic participation is evolving.

Chris Hedges:

I want you to talk about Mario Lubrano and the way they tie him to all sorts of extremist groups, far right fascists, and Luigi Mangioni , who assassinated United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson with a Unabomber . I mean, talk about that kind of nexus.

Daniel Boguslaw:

Yeah, so one thing I’ve kind of observed in the past year is that there’s a very toxic, I would say, incentive structure and relationship between academic extremism researchers and federal intelligence and law enforcement. And, as with unfortunately so much of academia, there’s a sort of publish or parish mentality, which means that if you’re in the field of so-called ‘extremism research,’ then you’re kind of competing with other academics to perpetually invent new threat categories to slot law-abiding Americans into.

And in the case of this new anti-technology extremism, I mean I’ve talked to this Lubrano guy. He’s a very nice guy. He’s not really that connected to the intelligence agencies as far as I can tell but quickly, as soon as this new wave of resentment developed, it was as if they were activated to scramble and find a new term. And he had written this book about anti-technology extremism five or six decades ago. And it was looking at these niche sideshow freaks, right? It was looking at Kaczynski and it was looking at these fringe European groups that were sort of blending deep ecology with the sort of Viking ruins and fascism. But it was almost like a curiosity show, right? And then all of a sudden what you see is the George Washington program on extremism, right, which is partially funded by the Department of Homeland Security, which is constantly sending its students into the FBI and to DHS, taking his book, inviting him to do a lecture, pumping out these white papers. And as soon as you see that, you kind of know, right, that the government is about to pick up on this. And, in a lot of ways, these think tanks and these sort of quasi-academic institutions that are completely aligned with the intelligence agencies, they have a lot more freedom to invent these new categories than the feds do. And then they’re allowed to basically just throw this stuff in. I keep saying it, but again, just a couple of weeks ago, I saw one of these academics use the term ‘anti-surveillance extremism,’ and it’s kind of like bingo, okay, here we go again. And I’ve contacted my sources to let me know as soon as they see that term surfacing in in these reports.

So, I think that there’s just one other thing I would add to that, which is I think a lot of people imagine people in the Bureau and people in DHS as kind of these uniformly McCarthyist characters, right, who kind of all have their eyes set on destroying the Left and this or that. But I would actually wager that a lot more of them are far less pointed than that. It’s sort of like they’re kind of groping in the dark for anything that could potentially be conceived of as a threat, and they don’t really have any good metric or idea of how serious these threats are. It’s almost like they’re trying to patch a million holes in a sinking ship and they’re just furiously throwing everything up against the wall to see what sticks; and hence, the sort of exponentially increasing invention of these of these new terms.

Chris Hedges:

Well, they better create a threat, otherwise they’re out of a job. It’s largely what the FBI did with the Communist Party, as if the Communist Party posed an existential threat to the American way of life. Of course, it was ridiculous and everybody from Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement suddenly became an agent of communism. But there’s a self-fulfilling prophesy. I covered the Stasi state in East Germany. I’m not making this up. They were infiltrating stamp groups of retirees to see if anybody made a joke about Honecker . So, these institutions perpetuate themselves and so they manufacture threats in order to continue not just their existence but their expansion.

Daniel Boguslaw:

Absolutely. And sometimes it’s really scary but sometimes it’s also just ludicrous. It’s like sometimes you read these threat reports and it’s like there is something to me that is darkly comical sometimes about how out of touch these people are with reality and with the way people talk on the internet. I mean, I got one a couple of months back that I just wrote up for my own Substack where a Department of Homeland Security intelligence analyst was disseminating a threat report about teenagers putting a water bottle in their pants and taking a video next to their school pretending to squirt out water and pee on their on their high school as if this was like on the level of Al-Qaeda, like high school kids doing pranks and they’re like, “It’s spreading. This prank is spreading across the globe.” I mean, it’s like, what kind of Principal Skinner lunatic do you have to be sitting in your little skiff watching high schooler kids post TikTok videos. I mean, it’s a logic that is very scary in some ways and then oftentimes also delves into just the absurd, I would say, the Kafkaesque.

Chris Hedges:

Homeland Security is monitoring activists building anti-Flock tech. This is your second story. So why don’t you lay out what you found?

Daniel Boguslaw:

So, yeah, this was a really interesting one because it was sort of a twofer. I discovered a really interesting activist project that I did not previously know about through some leaked government documents. And basically, this was, again, a sort of so-called ‘open source threat report’ that was compiled in a Massachusetts Fusion Center, right? And then it was re-disseminated. I believe that one was re-disseminated by a Minnesota Fusion Center. And basically, they were monitoring the discussion around this really cool project called “ Sparrow Map ,” which basically tried to reverse engineer Flock cameras by creating a downloadable program that you can plug into a city public surveillance camera, an old cell phone that you have glued to your window. And basically, what it does is it uses unique identifiers to identify federal law enforcement vehicles and then upload them to a map that anyone can monitor in real time. And so, you can basically drive around, have this on your dashboard and it will take a picture of a law enforcement vehicle, it’ll identify it, and then any other non-law enforcement data it will wipe from its device and then upload this to the map.

So, what I found was that these fusion centers were monitoring people discussing using this app. They were monitoring people on Reddit. They were monitoring people on hacker news forums. And again, they plastered all over this report, “At this time, we have no information showing any credible threat. We don’t believe that this group is breaking the law.” But I think the irony is pretty apparent that in the same way that normal everyday Americans do not like these Flock automated AI cameras watching their every move, the federal government also, it turns out, really doesn’t like having automated cameras monitor the location of all of their cars for the public and anyone who wants to access. And so, this report really kind of, I don’t know, I just felt like really laid bare this irony, right, of why can’t this all be public, right? The police are supposed to be there to protect us, the federal government is supposed to be there to protect us, so why shouldn’t we know where their cars are at all times? Why shouldn’t we know who and what they’re monitoring? And so, this report was pretty funny and surprising to me.

Chris Hedges:

And talk about how these fusion centers immediately conflated this activity with, and you talk about this in your first article, immediately conflate it with other terrorist activities.

Daniel Boguslaw:

Yeah, I mean this is the only lens they know how to view things through increasingly, right? It’s as you said at the very beginning of our discussion, it’s a real shift from the idea of stopping specific crimes, right, or identifying criminals and prosecuting them to this idea of total omniscience. The idea of pre-crime and the idea that literally any group of any kind could be a potential threat actor and therefore needs to be monitored. And again, it’s just you look back at the history and the evolution of this again, and it’s very easy, I think, in the turn of the century to say, “Okay, these eco-environmentalist guys, they’re real fringe actors,” or to say, “These animal liberation guys, okay, well, everyone eats meat and these guys are real fringe actors.” But it feels like we’re reaching some kind of breaking point when they’re saying that anyone who’s tired of technology degrading our lives and our social interactions, anyone expressing those values is now a new potential threat. I mean, I just don’t see how these categories can continue expanding when we know that people are going to get swept up in this, and then people like me are going to make that public. I mean, there has to be some kind of tipping point.

And I think that the Trump administration’s goading of the intelligence agencies and direction of them to narrow in on activist groups to prosecute protesters under NSPM 7, and now, as he just announced, the Foreign Agent Registration Act, I think this is going to call for a reckoning in the same way that there was a reckoning after the COINTELPRO revelations and the CHAOS revelations in the 70s.

What I hope is that we get it right this time. I mean, as I’m sure you know, and I’m sure your listeners know, there were the Church Committee hearings, the heads of the FBI and CIA were hauled into Congress and interrogated, commitments were made for reform. And yet when you look out at the landscape of what’s happening today, I don’t think anyone could say that those reforms created effective safeguards with what’s going on in the Bureau now.

Chris Hedges:

Yeah, 9/11 kind of obliterated all of those reforms, including assassinations of foreign nationals. We don’t have a Frank Church, and we don’t have a functioning Congress. And, as you point out, “Both political parties have scrambled to introduce legislation curbing or eliminating automated license plate readers altogether, at the same time that police associations hold secret briefings in Washington attempting to stem the anti-surveillance tide. Wholesale surveillance has bipartisan support as we saw with the Snowden revolutions and under Obama.”

Daniel Boguslaw:

Yeah, I got my hands on a document a couple months ago showing that the heads of all the major police chief associations in America, a week before the congressional hearings on Flock, on the automated license plate readers, were going to try to swoop in and secretly brief members on why they need Flock, why they need ALPRs, in the same way that the intelligence community often uses so-called ‘near misses’, right, to try to scare members of Congress into giving them more and more money. This seemed to be a similar tactic from these police chiefs, but if that’s the hyper-localized efforts from American police chiefs to maintain Flock, there’s another effort that also has really failed to get enough attention in my mind, which is the Trump administration’s coercion of foreign intelligence agencies to aid America and its crackdown on the Left.

In July, Secretary of State Marco Rubio held a ministerial on left-wing political violence in Washington, D.C. that brought together intelligence chiefs from I think over 40 different countries. And this was part of this concerted effort to brand left-wing groups as terrorists. Months before that ministerial was assembled, the State Department designated four new foreign terrorist organizations across Europe, in Germany, Italy, and Greece. And what this did, which a lot of people didn’t realize, was it opened up the sort of network analysis tying anyone related to these left-wing groups, which are now foreign terrorist organizations. It opened up all sorts of new authorities under FISA, under 702, the Treasury Department authorities for tracking money laundering to foreign terrorist organizations, potential prosecution under material support clauses about providing material support.

In response to these designations, a huge left-wing bail fund in Germany, a huge nonprofit that counts like 20,000 members, was shut down because all of a sudden they had a potential tie to one of these so-called foreign terrorist organizations. But specifically tying this back to my reporting, there’s also been a concerted effort working with the German government on this anti-technology extremist issue. In Germany, there was a very serious attack on the power grid by an organized group. There’s a lot of questions about who really that group is and who was backing that group and if the manifesto they released was accurate. But what we do know for sure is that the Trump administration has zeroed in on this group attacking a power grid as an example of anti-technology extremism. And in fact, during Marco Rubio’s assembly of all these foreign intelligence leaders, he used the term ‘anti-technology leftist extremism’ multiple times. So, we can see this trend both locally with local domestic law enforcement trying to circle in on left-wing groups and anyone opposing this novel technology. But at the same time, we can see American soft power trying to coerce our so-called ‘foreign allies’ to aid in the domestic prosecution, because as we know, it’s much easier to go after Americans who are tied to foreign groups with those powers that we talked about that were unleashed after 9/11 and through the Patriot Act.

Chris Hedges:

Great, thank you, Daniel.

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