It is not necessary to make an end-run around the U.S. Constitution to thwart terrorism and other crimes.
Those claiming otherwise have been far from candid – especially since June 2013, when Edward Snowden revealed gross violations of the Fourth Amendment by NSA’s bulk electronic collection. U.S. citizens have been widely misled into believing that their Constitutional right to privacy had to yield to a superseding need to combat terrorism.
The choice was presented as an Either-Or conundrum. In what follows, we will show that this is a false choice. Rather, the “choice” can be a Both-And.
The Coalition in Defense of Journalism (CDJor), which the Committee to Protect Journalists is a member, strongly condemns the 2019-2022 Bolsonaro administration’s use of the Brazilian Intelligence Agency to surveil journalists, media outlets, and civil society organizations.
Details on the depth of administration’s surveillance of journalists came to light after Brazil’s Federal Supreme Court unsealed a final investigative report filed by the Federal Police, which included names of media outlets and journalists targeted.
CDJor calls for all information about the monitoring be disclosed and that those responsible are held accountable swiftly, transparently, and independently.
Read the full statement in English here and Portuguese here.
The Coalition in Defense of Journalism (CDJor), which the Committee to Protect Journalists is a member, strongly condemns the 2019-2022 Bolsonaro administration’s use of the Brazilian Intelligence Agency to surveil journalists, media outlets, and civil society organizations.
Details on the depth of administration’s surveillance of journalists came to light after Brazil’s Federal Supreme Court unsealed a final investigative report filed by the Federal Police, which included names of media outlets and journalists targeted.
CDJor calls for all information about the monitoring be disclosed and that those responsible are held accountable swiftly, transparently, and independently.
Read the full statement in English here and Portuguese here.
When a long train of abuses and usurpations… evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government.
—Declaration of Independence (1776)
We are now struggling to emerge from the wreckage of a constitutional republic, transformed into a kleptocracy (government by thieves), collapsing into kakistocracy (government by the worst), and enforced by a police state algogracy (rule by algorithm).
Against such a backdrop of government-sponsored cruelty, corruption and shameless profiteering at taxpayer expense, what, to the average American, is freedom in an age when the government plays god—determining who is worthy of rights, who qualifies as a citizen, and who can be discarded without consequence?
What are inalienable rights worth if they can be redefined, delayed, or revoked by executive order?
His question was a searing indictment not just of slavery but of a government that proclaimed liberty while denying it to millions—a hypocrisy that persists in a system still governed by institutions more committed to power than principle.
Every branch of government—executive, legislative, and judicial—has, in one way or another, abandoned its duty to uphold the Constitution. And both parties have prioritized profit and political theater over justice and the rights of the governed.
The founders of this nation believed our rights come from God, not government. That we are born free, not made free by bureaucrats or judges. That among these rights—life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—none can be taken away without destroying the very idea of government by consent.
And yet that is precisely what’s happening.
We now live under a government that has become judge, jury, and executioner—writing its own laws, policing its own limits, and punishing those who object.
Your property can be taken, your speech censored, and your life extinguished without due process?
Your life can be ended without a trial, a warning, or a second thought, because the government views you as expendable?
The answer is stark: they mean nothing—unless we defend them.
When the government—whether president, Congress, court, or local bureaucrat—claims the right to determine who does and doesn’t deserve rights, then no one is safe. Individuals become faceless numbers. Human beings become statistics. Lives become expendable. Dignity becomes disposable.
It is a slippery slope—justified in the name of national security, public safety, and the so-called greater good—that leads inevitably to totalitarianism.
Unfortunately, we have been dancing with this devil for far too long, and now, the mask has come off.
This is what authoritarianism looks like in America today.
Imagine living in a country where government agents crash through doors to arrest citizens merely for criticizing government officials. Where police stop and search you on a whim. Where carrying anything that resembles a firearm might get you arrested—or killed. Where surveillance is constant, dissent is criminalized, and loyalty is enforced through fear.
If you’re thinking this sounds like America today, you wouldn’t be far wrong.
But this scenario isn’t new. It’s the same kind of tyranny that drove American colonists to sever ties with Great Britain nearly 250 years ago.
Back then, American colonists lived under the shadow of an imperial power and an early police state that censored their speech, surveilled their movements, taxed their livelihoods, searched their homes without cause, quartered troops in their towns, and punished them for daring to demand liberty.
It was only when the colonists finally got fed up with being silenced, censored, searched, frisked, threatened, and arrested that they finally revolted against the tyrant’s fetters.
The Declaration of Independence—drafted by Thomas Jefferson and signed on July 4, 1776, by 56 men who risked everything—was their response. It was more than a list of grievances. It was a document seething with outrage over a government which had betrayed its citizens, a call to arms against a system that had ceased to represent the people and instead sought to dominate them.
Labeled traitors, these men were charged with treason, a crime punishable by death, because they believed in a radical idea: that all people are created to be free. For some, their acts of rebellion would cost them their homes and their fortunes. For others, it would be the ultimate price—their lives.
Yet even knowing the heavy price they might have to pay, these men dared to speak up. They understood that silence in the face of tyranny is complicity. So they stood together, pledging “our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor” to the cause of freedom.
Even after they had won their independence from Great Britain, these new Americans worked to ensure that the rights they had risked their lives to secure would remain secure for future generations.
The result: our Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the Constitution.
The Constitution and Bill of Rights were meant to enshrine the liberties they fought for: due process, privacy, free speech, the right to bear arms, and limits on government power.
Now, nearly two and a half centuries later, those freedoms hang by a thread.
Imagine the shock and outrage these 56 men would feel were they to discover that almost 250 years later, the government they had risked their lives to create has been transformed into a militaristic police state in which exercising one’s freedoms—at a minimum, merely questioning a government agent—is often viewed as a flagrant act of defiance.
In fact, had Jefferson and his compatriots written the Declaration of Independence today, they would almost certainly be labeled extremists, placed on government watchlists, targeted by surveillance, and prosecuted as domestic threats.
Read the Declaration of Independence again, and you’ll see the grievances they laid at the feet of King George—unjust laws, militarized policing, surveillance, censorship, and the denial of due process—are the very abuses “we the people” suffer under today.
Had Jefferson written the Declaration about the American police state in 2025, it might have read like a criminal indictment of the crimes perpetrated by a government that:
treating constitutional limits as optional and the presidency as a personal fiefdom.
These are not isolated abuses.
They are the logical outcomes of a government that has turned against its people.
They reveal a government that has claimed the god-like power to decide who gets rights—and who doesn’t. Who counts as a citizen—and who doesn’t. Who gets to live—and who becomes expendable.
All along the spectrum of life—from the unborn child to the elderly—the government continues to treat individuals endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights as if they are criminals, subhumans, or enemies of the state.
That is not freedom. It is tyranny.
And it must be called by its true name.
The truth is hard, but it must be said: the American police state has grown drunk on power, money, and its own authority.
The irony is almost too painful to articulate.
On the anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence—a document that rebuked government corruption, tyranny, and injustice—we find ourselves surrounded by its modern-day equivalents.
This week’s spectacle—protest barricades, legislation to benefit the rich, and Trump’s appearance at Alligator Alcatraz, a.k.a. “Gator Gitmo”—shows how completely we have inverted the spirit of 1776.
That a president would celebrate the Fourth of July while inaugurating a modern-day internment camp—far from the reach of the courts or the Constitution—speaks volumes about the state of our nation and the extent to which those in power now glorify the very forms of tyranny the Founders once rose up against.
This is not law and order.
This is political theater, carceral cruelty, and authoritarianism in plain sight.
It is what happens when a nation that once prided itself on liberty now builds monuments to its own fear and domination.
The spectacle doesn’t end with detention camps and barricades. It extends into commerce, corruption, and self-enrichment at the highest levels of power.
This is not governance. This is kleptocracy—and it is happening in plain sight.
In the nearly 250 years since early Americans declared their independence from Great Britain, “we the people” have worked ourselves back under the tyrant’s thumb—only this time, the tyrant is one of our own making.
The abuses they once suffered under an imperial power haven’t disappeared. They’ve evolved.
We are being robbed blind by political grifters and corporate profiteers. We are being silenced by bureaucrats and blacklists. We are being watched by data miners and digital spies. We are being caged by militarized enforcers with no regard for the Constitution. And we are being ruled by presidents who govern not by law, but by executive decree.
Given the fact that we are a relatively young nation, it hasn’t taken very long for an authoritarian regime to creep into power.
Unfortunately, the bipartisan coup that laid siege to our nation did not happen overnight.
The architecture of oppression—surveillance, militarism, censorship, propaganda—was built slowly, brick by brick, law by law, war by war.
It snuck in under our radar, hiding behind the guise of national security, the war on drugs, the war on terror, the war on immigration, political correctness, hate crimes and a host of other official-sounding programs aimed at expanding the government’s power at the expense of individual freedoms.
The building blocks for the bleak future we’re just now getting a foretaste of—police shootings of unarmed citizens, profit-driven prisons, weapons of compliance, a wall-to-wall surveillance state, pre-crime programs, a suspect society, school-to-prison pipelines, militarized police, overcriminalization, SWAT team raids, endless wars, etc.—were put in place by government officials we trusted to look out for our best interests.
The result is an empire in decline and a citizenry under siege.
But if history teaches us anything, it’s that the power of the people—when awakened—is stronger than any empire.
For decades, the Constitution has been our shield against tyranny.
But today, it’s under siege. And now we must be the shield.
Surveillance is expanding. Peaceful dissent is being punished. Judges are being targeted. The presidency is issuing decrees and bypassing the rule of law.
Every institution meant to check power is being tested—and in some cases, broken.
This is the moment to stand in front of the Constitution and defend it.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the fight for freedom is never over. But neither is it lost—so long as we refuse to surrender, refuse to remain silent, and refuse to accept tyranny as the price of safety.
It is time to remember who we are. To reclaim the Constitution. To resist the march toward authoritarianism. And to reassert—boldly and without apology—that our rights are not up for negotiation.
As the second Trump administration is dispatching its minions to stalk US streets, smashing citizens’ First Amendment rights, in partnership with unregulated Big Tech, it also surveils online, helping itself to citizens’ personal identifiable information (PII).
In the age of surveillance capitalism, information is a hot commodity for corporations and governments, precipitating a multi-billion-dollar industry that not only profits from the collection and commodification of citizens’ PII, but also puts individuals, businesses, organizations, and governments at risk for cyberattacks and data theft.
Social security numbers, location details, health information, student loan and financial data, purchasing habits, library borrowing and internet browsing history, and political and religious affiliations are just some of the personal information that data brokers buy and sell to advertisers, banks, insurance companies, mortgage brokers, law enforcement and government agencies, foreign agents, and even spammers, scammers, and stalkers. Over time, that information often ends up changing hands again and again.
As an example, and to the alarm of civil liberties experts, the Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC), “a shady data broker” owned by at least eight US-based commercial airlines, including Delta, American, and United, has been collecting US travelers’ domestic flight records and selling them to Customs and Border Protection, and the Department of Homeland Security; and as part of the deal, government officials are forbidden to reveal how ARC sourced the flight data.
Online users should know that many data brokers camp out on Facebook and at Google’s advertising exchange, drawing from such sources as credit card transactions, frequent shopper loyalty programs, bankruptcy filings, vehicle registration records, employment records, military service, and social media posting and web tracking data harvested from websites, apps, and mobile and wearable biometric devices to “craft customized lists of potential targets.” Even when gathered data is de-identified, privacy experts warn that this is not an irreversible process, and the risk of re-identifying individuals is both real and underestimated.
Government’s misuse and abuse of citizens’ privacy
Many Americans do not realize that the United States is one of the few advanced economies without a federal data protection agency. If the current administration continues on its path of eroding citizen privacy, the scant statutory protections the United States does have may prove meaningless.
The Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) of 1970 was enacted to protect consumers from government overreach into personal identifiable data, and has been promoted as the primary consumer privacy protection. However, in 2023, attorney and internet privacy advocate Lauren Harriman warned how data brokers circumvent the FCRA, for instance, “pay[ing] handsome sums to your utility company for your name and address.” Data brokers then repackage those names and addresses with other data, without conducting any type of accuracy analysis on the newly formed dataset, before then selling that new dataset to the highest third-party bidder.
Invasion of the data snatchers
Though the “gut-the-government bromance” between the president and Elon Musk appears to be on the rocks just six months into Trump 2.0, the Department of Government Efficiency’s unfettered access to data is concerning, especially after the June 6, 2025, Supreme Court ruling that gave the Musk-led DOGE complete access to confidential Social Security information irrespective of the privacy rights once upheld by the Social Security Act of 1935. The act prohibits the disclosure of any tax return in whole or in part by officers or employees of the Social Security Administration and the Department of Health and Human Services.
Nevertheless, DOGE has commandeered the Social Security Administration (SSA) and Department of Health and Human Services systems and those of at least fifteen other federal agencies containing Americans’ personal identifiable information without disclosing “what data has been accessed, who has that access, how it will be used or transferred, or what safeguards are in place for its use.”
Since DOGE infiltrated the Social Security Administration, the agency’s website has crashed numerous times, creating interruptions for beneficiaries. In June, Senators Elizabeth Warren and Ron Wyden issued a letter to the SSA’s commissioner, detailing their concerns about DOGE’s use of PII. Warren toldWired that “DOGE staffers hacking away Social Security’s backend tech with no safeguards is a recipe for disaster…[and] risks people’s private data, creates security gaps, and could result in catastrophic cuts to all benefits.”
Likewise, the Internal Revenue Code of 1939 (updated in 1986) was enacted to ensure data protection, prohibiting—with rare exceptions—the release of taxpayer information by Internal Revenue Service employees. According to the national legal organization Democracy Forward, “Changes to IRS data practices—at the behest of DOGE—throw into question those assurances and the confidentiality of data held by the government collected from hundreds of millions of Americans.”
Equally troubling is that Opexus, a private equity-owned federal contractor, maintains the IRS database. Worse still is that two Opexus employees—twin brothers and skilled hackers with prison records for stealing and selling PII on the dark web—Suhaib and Muneeb Akhter, had access to the IRS data, as well as to that of the Department of Energy, Defense Department, and the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General.
In February 2025, approximately one year into their Opexus employment, the twins were summoned to a virtual meeting with human resources and fired. During that meeting, Muneeb Akhter, who still had clearance to use the servers, accessed an IRS database from his company-issued laptop and blocked others from connecting to it. While still in the meeting, Akhter deleted thirty-three other databases, and about an hour later, “inserted a USB drive into his laptop and removed 1,805 files of data related to a ‘custom project’ for a government agency,” causing service disruptions.
That investigations by the FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies are underway does little to quell concerns about the insecurity of personal identifiable information and sensitive national security data. And although the Privacy Act of 1974, the Fourth Amendment, the Fifth Amendment, and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986 were all established to protect PII, the June Supreme Court ruling granting DOGE carte blanche data access dashes all confidence that laws will be upheld.
Americans don’t know what they don’t know
Perhaps most disconcerting in this whole scenario is that too few citizens realize just how far their online footprints travel and how vulnerable their private information actually is. According to internet culture reporter Kate Lindsay, citizen ignorance comes not only from a lack of reporting on how tech elites pull government strings to their own advantage, but also from fewer corporate news outlets covering people living with the consequences of those power moves. Internet culture and tech, once intertwined topics for the establishment press, are now more separately focused on either AI or the Big Tech power players, but not on holding them to account.
The Tech Policy Press argues that the government’s self-proclaimed need for expediency and efficiency cannot justify flouting data privacy policies and laws, and that the corporate media is largely failing their audiences by not publicizing the specifics of how the government and its corporate tech partners are obliterating citizens’ privacy rights. “To make matters worse, Congress has been asleep at the switch while the federal government has expanded the security state and private companies have run amok in storing and selling our data,” stated the senator from Silicon Valley, Ro Khanna.
A 2023 Pew Research Center survey of Americans’ views on data privacy found that approximately six in ten Americans do not bother to read website and application policies. When online, most users click “agree” without reading the relevant terms and conditions they accept by doing so. According to the survey, Americans of all political stripes are equally distrustful of government and corporations when it comes to how third parties use their PII. Respondents with some higher education reported taking more online privacy precautions than those who never attended college. The latter reported a stronger belief that government and corporations would “do the right thing” with their data. The least knowledgeable respondents were also the least skeptical, pointing to an urgent need for critical information literacy and digital hygiene skills.
Exploitation of personal identifiable information
After Musk’s call to “delete” the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), approximately 1,400 staff members were fired in April, emptying out the agency that was once capable of policing Wall Street and Big Tech. Now, with the combined forces of government and Big Tech, and their sharing of database resources, the government can conduct intrusive surveillance on almost anyone, without court oversight or public debate. The Project on Government Oversight has argued that the US Constitution was meant to protect the population from authoritarian-style government monitoring, warning that these maneuvers are incompatible with a free society.
On May 15, 2025, the CFPB, against the better judgment of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and wider public, quietly withdrew a rule, proposed in 2024, that would have imposed limits on US-based data brokers who buy and sell Americans’ private information. Had the rule been enacted, it would have expanded the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) data protections for citizens. However, in February, Russell Vought, the self-professed White nationalist and Trump 2.0 acting director of the Office of Management and Budget and the CFPB, demanded its withdrawal, alleging the ruling would have infringed on financial institutions’ capabilities to detect and prevent fraud. Vought also instructed employees to cease all public communications, pending investigations, and proposed or previously implemented rules, including the proposal titled “Protecting Americans from Harmful Data Broker Practices.”
The now-gutted CFPB lacks both the resources and authority needed to police the widespread exploitation of consumers’ personal information, says the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the privacy rights advocacy agency.
Double standards for data privacy
Although the government’s collection of PII has always been a double-edged sword, with Big Tech on the side of Trump 2.0, data surveillance of law-abiding citizens has soared to worrying heights. Across every presidency since 9/11, government surveillance has become increasingly more extensive and elaborate. Moreover, Big Tech is all too willing to pledge allegiance to whichever party happens to be in power. According to investigative journalist Dell Cameron, the US Defense Intelligence Agency, Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency, and Customs and Border Protection are among the largest “federal agencies known to purchase Americans’ private data, including that which law enforcement agencies would normally require probable cause to obtain.”
Meanwhile, it’s a Big Tech and data broker free-for-all. DOGE’s and the feds’ activities are shrouded in secrecy, often facilitated by the Big Tech lobbying money that seeks to replace legitimate privacy laws with “fake industry alternatives.” Banks, credit agencies, and tech companies must adhere to consumer privacy laws. “Yet DOGE has been granted sweeping access across federal agencies—with no equivalent restrictions,” said business reporter Susie Stulz.
Know your risks
Interpol has warned that scams known as “pig butchering” and “business email compromise” and those used for human trafficking are on the rise due to an increase in the use of new technologies, including apps, AI deepfakes, and cryptocurrencies. Hacking agents, humans, and bots are becoming more sophisticated, while any semblance of data privacy guardrails for citizens has been removed.
Individual choices matter. At minimum, when using technology, consider if a website or app’s services are so badly needed or wanted that you are willing to give up your personal identifiable information. Standard advice to delete and block phishing and spam emails and texts remains apropos, but only scratches the surface of online protection.
Privacy advocates assert that DOGE’s access to personal identifiable information escalates the risk of exposure to hackers and foreign adversaries as well as to widespread domestic surveillance. Trump’s latest contract with tech giant Palantir to create a national database of Americans’ private information raises a big red flag for civil rights organizations, “that this could be the precursor to surveillance of Americans on a mass scale.” Palantir’s involvement in government portends to be the last step “in transforming America from a constitutional republic into a digital dictatorship armed with algorithms and powered by unaccountable, all-seeing artificial intelligence,” wrote constitutional law and human rights attorney John W. Whitehead.
A longtime J.D. Vance financial backer, Palantir’s Peter Thiel, the South African, White nationalist billionaire and right-wing donor, is credited with catapulting Vance’s political career. Unsurprisingly, the Free Thought Project reported that since Trump’s return to the White House, “Palantir has racked up over $100 million in government contracts, and is slated to strike a nearly $800 million deal with the Pentagon.” Palantir, incidentally, is also contracted with the Israeli government, as is Google.
Know your rights
The right to privacy is enshrined in Article 12 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. “No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honor and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.” Article 17 of the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights asserts the same, and in 1992, the United States ratified the treaty, thereby consenting to its binding terms.
But is privacy actually a protected civil right in the United States? According to legal scholars Anita Allen and Christopher Muhawe, the history of US civil rights law shows limited support for conceptualizing privacy and data protection as a civil right. Nonetheless, civil rights law is a dynamic moral, political, and legal concept, and if privacy is interpreted as a civil right, privacy protection becomes a fundamental requirement of justice and good government.
Protection from surveillance needs to be top-down through legal and policy limits on data collection, and bottom-up by putting technological control of personal data into the hands of consumers, i.e., the targets of surveillance.
As long as the public is uninformed and the corporate press remains all but silent, the more likely it is that these unconstitutional practices will not only continue but will become normalized. Until the United States is actually governed by and for the people, we the people can start practicing surveillance self-defense now. Although constitutional lawyers are typically considered the first responders to assaults on the Constitution and privacy rights, a constellation of efforts over time is required to, as much as possible, keep private data private.
Ultimately, though, the safeguarding of data cannot be left to the government or corporations, or even the lawyers. For that reason, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s tips and tools for customizing individualized digital security plans are made available to everyone. By implementing such plans and possessing strong critical media and digital literacy skills, civil society will be better informed and more empowered in the defense of privacy rights.
Sometime in the late 1980s, I was talking with a friend on my landline (the only kind of telephone we had then). We were discussing logistics for an upcoming demonstration against the Reagan administration’s support for the Contras fighting the elected government of Nicaragua. We agreed that, when our call was done, I’d call another friend, “Mary,” to update her on the plans. I hung up.
SPECIAL REPORT: By Saige England in Ōtautahi and Ava Mulla in Cairo
Hope for freedom for Palestinians remains high among a group of trauma-struck New Zealanders in Cairo.
In spite of extensive planning, the Global March To Gaza (GMTG) delegation of about 4000 international aid volunteers was thwarted in its mission to walk from Cairo to Gaza to lend support.
The land of oranges and pyramids became the land of autocracy last week as peace aid volunteers — young, middle-aged, and elderly — were herded like cattle and cordoned behind fences.
Their passports were initially seized — and later returned. Several New Zealanders were among those dragged and beaten.
While ordinary Egyptians showed “huge support” for the GMTG, the militant Egyptian regime showed its hand in supporting Israel rather than Palestine.
A member of the delegation, Natasha*, said she and other members pursued every available diplomatic channel to ensure that the peaceful, humanitarian, march would reach Gaza.
Moved by love, they were met with hate.
Violently attacked
“When I stepped toward the crowd’s edge and began instinctually with heart break to chant, ‘Free Palestine,’ I was violently attacked by five plainclothes men.
“They screamed, grabbed, shoved, and even spat on me,” she said.
Tackled, she was dragged to an unmarked van. She did not resist, posed no threat, yet the violence escalated instantly.
“I saw hatred in their eyes.”
Egyptian state security forces and embedded provocateurs were intent on dismantling and discrediting the Global March activists. Image: GMTG screenshot APR
Another GMTG member, a woman who tried to intervene was also “viciously assaulted”. She witnessed at least three other women and two men being attacked.
The peacemakers escaped from the unmarked van the aggressors were distracted, seemingly confused about their destination, she said.
It is now clear that from the beginning Egyptian State forces and embedded provocateurs were intent on dismantling and discrediting the GMTG.
Authorities as provocateurs
The peace participants witnessed plainclothed authorities act as provacateurs, “shoving people, stepping on them, throwing objects” to create a false image for media.
New Zealand actor Will Alexander . . . “This is only a fraction of what Palestinians experience every day.” GMTG
New Zealand actor Will Alexander said the experience had inflated rather than deflated his passion for human rights, and compassion for Palestinians.
“This is only a fraction of what Palestinians experience everyday. Palestinians pushed into smaller and smaller areas are murdered for wanting to stand on their own land,” he said.
“The reason that ordinary New Zealanders like us need to put our bodies on the line is because our government has failed to uphold its obligations under the Genocide Convention.
“Israel has blatantly breached international law for decades with total impunity.”
While the New Zealanders are all safe, a small number of people in the wider movement had been forcibly ‘disappeared’,” said GMTG New Zealand member Sam Leason.
Their whereabouts was still unknown, he said.
Arab members targeted
“It must be emphasised that it is primarily — and possibly strictly — Arab members of the March who are the targets of the most dramatic and violent excesses committed by the Egyptian authorities, including all forced disappearances.”
Global March to Gaza activists being attacked . . . the genocide cannot be sustained when people from around the world push against the Israeli regime and support the people on the ground with food and healthcare. Image: GMTG screenshot APR
This did, however, continuously add to the mounting sense of stress, tension, anxiety and fear, felt by the contingent, he said.
“Especially given the Egyptian authorities’ disregard to their own legal system, which leaves us blindsided and in a thick fog of uncertainty.”
Moving swiftly through the streets of Cairo in the pitch of night, from hotel to hotel and safehouse to safehouse, was a “surreal and dystopian” experience for the New Zealanders and other GMTG members.
The group says that the genocide cannot be sustained when people from around the world push against the Israeli regime and support the people on the ground with food and healthcare.
“For 20 months our hearts have raced and our eyes have filled in unison with the elderly, men, women, and children, and the babies in Palestine,” said Billie*, a participant who preferred, for safety reasons, not to reveal their surname.
“If we do not react to the carnage, suffering and complete injustice and recognise our shared need for sane governance and a liveable planet what is the point?”
Experienced despair
Aqua*, another New Zealand GMTG member, had experienced despair seeing the suffering of Palestinians, but she said it was important to nurture hope, as that was the only way to stop the genocide.
“We cling to every glimmer of hope that presents itself. Like an oasis in a desert devoid of human emotion we chase any potential igniter of the flame of change.”
Activist Eva Mulla . . . inspired by the courage of the Palestinians. Image: GMTG screenshot APR
Ava Mulla, said from Cairo, that the group was inspired by the courage of the Palestinians.
“They’ve been fighting for freedom and justice for decades against the world’s strongest powers. They are courageous and steadfast.”
Mulla referred to the “We Were Seeds” saying inspired by Greek poet Dinos Christianopoulos.
“We are millions of seeds. Every act of injustice fuels our growth,” she said.
Helplessness an illusion
The GMTG members agreed that “impotence and helplessness was an illusion” that led to inaction but such inaction allowed “unspeakable atrocities” to take place.
“This is the holocaust of our age,” said Sam Leason.
“We need the world to leave the rhetorical and symbolic field of discourse and move promptly towards the camp of concrete action to protect the people of Palestine from a clear campaign of extermination.”
Saige England is an Aotearoa New Zealand journalist, author, and poet, member of the Palestinian Solidarity Network of Aotearoa (PSNA), and a contributor to Asia Pacific Report.
*Several protesters quoted in this article requested that their family names not be reported for security reasons. Ava Mulla was born in Germany and lives in Aotearoa with her partner, actor Will Alexander. She studied industrial engineering and is passionate about innovative housing solutions for developing countries. She is a member of the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA).
New Zealand and other activists with Tino Rangatiratanga and Palestine flags taking part in the Global March To Gaza. Will Alexander (far left) is in the back row and Ava Mulla (pink tee shirt) is in the front row. Image: GMTG screenshot APR
This isn’t about national security. It’s about control.
According to news reports, the Trump administration is quietly collaborating with Palantir Technologies—the data-mining behemoth co-founded by billionaire Peter Thiel—to construct a centralized, government-wide surveillance system that would consolidate biometric, behavioral, and geolocation data into a single, weaponized database of Americans’ private information.
This isn’t about protecting freedom. It’s about rendering freedom obsolete.
What we’re witnessing is the transformation of America into a digital prison—one where the inmates are told we’re free while every move, every word, every thought is monitored, recorded, and used to assign a “threat score” that determines our place in the new hierarchy of obedience.
The tools enabling this all-seeing surveillance regime are not new, but under Trump’s direction, they are being fused together in unprecedented ways, with Palantir at the center of this digital dragnet.
Palantir, long criticized for its role in powering ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) raids and predictive policing, is now poised to become the brain of Trump’s surveillance regime.
Under the guise of “data integration” and “public safety,” this public-private partnership would deploy AI-enhanced systems to comb through everything from facial recognition feeds and license plate readers to social media posts and cellphone metadata, cross-referencing it all to assess a person’s risk to the state.
This isn’t speculative. It’s already happening.
Palantir’s Gotham platform, used by law enforcement and military agencies, has long been the backbone of real-time tracking and predictive analysis. Now, with Trump’s backing, it threatens to become the central nervous system of a digitally enforced authoritarianism.
As Palantir itself admits, its mission is to “augment human decision-making.” In practice, that means replacing probable cause with probability scores, courtrooms with code, and due process with data pipelines.
In this new regime, your innocence will be irrelevant. The algorithm will decide who you are.
To understand the full danger of this moment, we must trace the long arc of government surveillance—from secret intelligence programs like COINTELPRO and the USA PATRIOT Act to today’s AI-driven digital dragnet embodied by data fusion centers.
Building on this foundation of historical abuse, the government has evolved its tactics, replacing human informants with algorithms and wiretaps with metadata, ushering in an age where pre-crime prediction is treated as prosecution.
Every smartphone ping, GPS coordinate, facial scan, online purchase, and social media like becomes part of your “digital exhaust”—a breadcrumb trail of metadata that the government now uses to build behavioral profiles. The FBI calls it “open-source intelligence.” But make no mistake: this is dragnet surveillance, and it is fundamentally unconstitutional.
Already, government agencies are mining this data to generate “pattern of life” analyses, flag “radicalized” individuals, and preemptively investigate those who merely share anti-government views.
This is not law enforcement. This is thought-policing by machine, the logical outcome of a system that criminalizes dissent and deputizes algorithms to do the targeting.
Nor is this entirely new.
For decades, the federal government has reportedly maintained a highly classified database known as Main Core, designed to collect and store information on Americans deemed potential threats to national security.
Trump’s embrace of Palantir, and its unparalleled ability to fuse surveillance feeds, social media metadata, public records, and AI-driven predictions, marks a dangerous evolution: a modern-day resurrection of Main Core, digitized, centralized, and fully automated.
What was once covert contingency planning is now becoming active policy.
What has emerged is a surveillance model more vast than anything dreamed up by past regimes—a digital panopticon in which every citizen is watched constantly, and every move is logged in a government database—not by humans, but by machines without conscience, without compassion, and without constitutional limits.
This is not science fiction. This is America—now.
As this technological tyranny expands, the foundational safeguards of the Constitution—those supposed bulwarks against arbitrary power—are quietly being nullified and its protections rendered meaningless.
What does the Fourth Amendment mean in a world where your entire life can be searched, sorted, and scored without a warrant? What does the First Amendment mean when expressing dissent gets you flagged as an extremist? What does the presumption of innocence mean when algorithms determine guilt?
The Constitution was written for humans, not for machine rule. It cannot compete with predictive analytics trained to bypass rights, sidestep accountability, and automate tyranny.
And that is the endgame: the automation of authoritarianism. An unblinking, AI-powered surveillance regime that renders due process obsolete and dissent fatal.
Still, it is not too late to resist—but doing so requires awareness, courage, and a willingness to confront the machinery of our own captivity.
Make no mistake: the government is not your friend in this. Neither are the corporations building this digital prison. They thrive on your data, your fear, and your silence.
To resist, we must first understand the weaponized AI tools being used against us.
We must demand transparency, enforce limits on data collection, ban predictive profiling, and dismantle the fusion centers feeding this machine.
We must treat AI surveillance with the same suspicion we once reserved for secret police. Because that is what AI-powered governance has become—secret police, only smarter, faster, and less accountable.
We don’t have much time.
Trump’s alliance with Palantir is a warning sign—not just of where we are, but of where we’re headed. A place where freedom is conditional, rights are revocable, and justice is decided by code.
The question is no longer whether we’re being watched—that is now a given—but whether we will meekly accept it. Will we dismantle this electronic concentration camp, or will we continue building the infrastructure of our own enslavement?
As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, if we trade liberty for convenience and privacy for security, we will find ourselves locked in a prison we helped build, and the bars won’t be made of steel. They will be made of data.
This month, President Trump announced a deal with Saudi Arabia that would provide the country with advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chips. The deal sees industry leader Nvidia provide Humain, a sovereign wealth fund-owned AI startup, with 18,000 of its new GB300 Blackwell chips. The massive deal makes Saudi Arabia a potential leader in AI data centers within the region and offers the opportunity to become a high-tech economic powerhouse.The deal comes as a reversal of former-president Biden’s policy that limited the spread of advanced AI chips out of fears of unchecked AI diffusion.
The AI market of Saudi Arabia remains unregulated in its nascency, with the authorities preferring a laissez-faire approach. Saudi Arabia has yet to pass any legislation or regulations that limit the use of AI in an effort to attract investment in its burgeoning AI economy. Instead, the country merely issued unenforceable guidelines on the topic. This, in turn, does far too little to protect citizens’ privacy rights.
The deal highlights ongoing concerns about the power of AI in the hands of authoritarians. Saudi Arabia is already known to use other digital technologies to spy on dissidents. This willingness to violate citizens’ privacy rights coupled with the possibility of a more robust understanding of AI, due to the new deal, offers Saudi authorities with more advanced means of spying on its citizens.
One such application of the technology comes in the form of facial recognition technologies. The technology allows for AI to determine an individual’s identity by simultaneously scanning an individual’s face and comparing their features to others in a database. AI performs these actions much faster and efficiently than law enforcement officers can. This technology is already being used in cities throughout the world. A greater familiarity with the technology would allow Saudi authorities to not only identify individuals through surveillance cameras but also to use the technology to be used in the digital sphere to identify individuals through other means, such as social media posts.
Saudi Arabia has proven through its pervasive surveillance of its own people that it is not a responsible actor and should not be allowed access to cutting-edge AI chips. The authorities refuse to regulate the market in an effort to attract investment into its AI market; a gamble that has apparently worked given the new US-Saudi partnership. Without proper regulations, Saudi authorities will undoubtedly use their country’s advancing expertise with the technology as a means of further suppressing dissent and violating the privacy of its citizens.
Collecting and connecting information on people enables an understanding of who a person is and in what activities they engage. Typically, such efforts have been focused on criminals and those persons seen as real or possible enemies of the government.
Over recent years, however, we have seen the U.S. Government weaponize intelligence agencies to focus on American citizens for political reasons, as you are well aware from personal experience. Many such activities are unconstitutional and violations of other law.
Congressional and judicial oversight has been ineffective. Indeed, no one in government has been prosecuted for engaging in the exploitation of information illegally collected on American citizens. No one.
Some states’ departments of corrections are outsourcing to private companies their decision-making about who can and who cannot communicate with people in their prisons. These decisions cut families and loved ones off, sometimes permanently. The Washington State Department of Corrections (DOC) has said it does not maintain any records of who has been blocked from communications with people…
Despite the release of several activists and human rights defenders, transitional justice in Bahrain remains unfulfilled.
In its newly published report, Americans for Democracy & Human Rights in Bahrain (ADHRB) reveals a systematic policy by Bahraini authorities designed to restrict the freedoms of released individuals and deprive them of their basic rights.
The attached report identifies a consistent pattern of post-release violations, illustrated through four emblematic cases. These cases demonstrate how released activists continue to face restrictions on employment, housing, and movement, as well as repeated security summonses and veiled threats—rendering their freedom conditional and tightly monitored. The report documents the following cases:
Naji Fateel: A human rights defender who spent 11 years in prison and endured torture. Since his release, he has been barred from employment and travel, and has faced repeated security summonses.
Mohamed AlSankis: A former government employee and prisoner of conscience. Despite serving 11 years in prison, he has not been reinstated to his position and continues to face harassment for peacefully demanding his right to work and receive a pension.
Ali AlHajee: A human rights defender released under Bahrain’s Alternative Sentencing Law. He remains under a travel ban and was re-arrested after requesting a clearance document. He has been charged under vague legal provisions, apparently in retaliation for his activism.
Najah Yusuf: A former civil servant and activist imprisoned over Facebook posts, with confessions extracted under torture. Following her release, she received no compensation, was unjustly dismissed from her job, and remains under ongoing security surveillance.
The documented cases make clear that release does not signify freedom for Bahraini activists and human rights defenders, but rather extends the cycle of punishment. In the absence of a transitional justice process—one that guarantees accountability, redress, and compensation for past abuses—they remain subject to security targeting and restrictions on freedom of expression through summonses and harassment. These practices violate both the Bahraini Constitution and international human rights law.
Husain Abdulla, Executive Director of ADHRB: “This isn’t reintegration – it’s retaliation, just dressed up to look nice for the international community. The reality is that stripping activists of their rights post-release isn’t reform. It’s just punishment by another name.”
In concluding its report, ADHRB stresses that meaningful reform must begin with the removal of these restrictions, the full restoration of rights, and the provision of effective remedies and reparations—paving the way for real transitional justice for those released.
By removing checks on borders between European countries while hardening those on the edges of Europe, the EU has redrawn borders along civilizational lines.
TAIPEI, Taiwan – The Philippines has arrested a Chinese man for operating a surveillance device near the offices of its election commission, less than two weeks before the country’s midterm polls, adding further strain to relations between the two countries.
Tensions have been rising between Manila and Beijing, fueled by rival flag-raising displays on the disputed Sandy Cay in South China Sea.
“When we made the arrest, that was the third time he had come to Comelec,” said Philippine National Bureau of Investigation spokesman Ferdinand Lavin on Wednesday, referring to the country’s election commission.
The man, a Macau passport holder, was allegedly using an “IMSI catcher,” a device capable of mimicking a cell tower and snatching messages from the air in a 1 to 3 kilometer radius.
The arrested man also visited other locations, including the Philippine Supreme Court, the Philippine Department of Justice and the U.S. embassy, according to Lavin.
China denied any attempt to tamper with Philippine elections.
“We will not and have no interest in interfering in such internal affairs of the Philippines,” Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Guo Jiakun said on Wednesday when asked about the arrest at a news conference.
“We also advise individual politicians in the Philippines not to take the chance to hype up issues related to China, make something out of nothing and seize the opportunity to profit.”
On April 3, China said it had detained three Filipinos for espionage, prompting the Philippines to claim it was retaliation for Manila’s arrest of five Chinese nationals a week earlier.
The latest arrest came as Manila signed an agreement with New Zealand allowing the deployment of troops on each other’s territory, a move aimed at bolstering security in a “deteriorating” strategic environment, and one likely to further antagonize China.
New Zealand Minister of Defence Judith Collins said that the deal reflected a commitment based on understanding “the risks to the international rules-based order.”
Both countries had “a real understanding that the strategic environment that we are operating in is deteriorating,” Collins said.
“There are those who follow international law and there are those who want to redefine it,” Teodoro said, referring to China’s so-called “nine-dash line” in the South China Sea.
Beijing claims nearly the entire sea under its “nine-dash line,” a claim rejected by an international tribunal in 2016, which ruled in favor of the Philippines’ assertion that China’s claims were unlawful.
Despite the ruling, China has continued to assert its presence through patrols, island-building, and militarization, while the Philippines has sought to defend its claims through diplomatic protests and military partnerships.
“We need to deter this kind of unwanted behavior,” he said, adding that Manila and Wellington would work toward “military-to-military training.”
The agreement with New Zealand serves as the latest example of the Philippines strengthening defence and diplomatic ties with like-minded partners, as Chinese-Philippine relations continue to be tested by repeated confrontations between their coastguard vessels in the disputed South China Sea.
The Philippines and Japan pledged on Tuesday to deepen security ties, agreeing to begin talks on a defense pact and enhance intelligence sharing, while jointly opposing efforts to change the status quo in the East and South China Seas by force.
Manila is also reportedly in talks with Canada and France to establish potential defense agreements.
Edited by Mike Firn.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Taejun Kang for RFA.
The U.S. government is activating a suite of algorithmic surveillance tools, developed in concert with major tech companies, to monitor and criminalize immigrants’ speech.
A new report from human rights experts urges the United Nations to condemn the “evaporation of fundamental rights” in the United States, where the Trump administration is using high-tech surveillance tools and a nebulous “anti-terrorism” legal framework that has ballooned since 9/11 to weaponize law enforcement against social movements that challenge state power. While the legally dubious…
Google recently announced it would acquire Israeli-American cloud security firm Wiz for $32 billion. The price tag — 65 times Wiz’s annual revenue — has raised eyebrows and further solidified the close relationship between Google and the Israeli military.
In its press release, the Silicon Valley giant claimed that the purchase will “vastly improve how security is designed, operated and automated—providing an end-to-end security platform for customers, of all types and sizes, in the AI era.”
Yet it has also raised fears about the security of user data, particularly of those who oppose Israeli actions against its neighbors, given Unit 8200’s long history of using tech to spy on opponents, gather intelligence, and use that knowledge for extortion and blackmail.
The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has rapidly positioned itself as a leader in artificial intelligence (AI), integrating advanced technologies across various sectors to drive economic growth and enhance governance. Central to this strategy is the deployment of AI-driven surveillance systems aimed at increasing national security and public safety. However, the extensive use of such technologies raises significant human rights concerns, particularly regarding privacy, freedom of expression, and the potential for governmental overreach.
AI Surveillance Infrastructure in the UAE
The UAE’s commitment to becoming a global AI hub is evident through substantial investments and strategic initiatives. Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed al Nahyan, the national security adviser and brother to President Mohamed bin Zayed al Nahyan, oversees assets exceeding $1.5 trillion and is leading efforts to transform Abu Dhabi into an AI superpower. Through entities like the tech conglomerate G42, the UAE aims to secure a leading role in the global AI industry, aligning more closely with U.S. technology firms to mitigate geopolitical risks associated with Chinese collaborations.
In urban centers like Dubai and Abu Dhabi, the implementation of AI-powered surveillance is extensive. Dubai’s Oyoon program integrates over 300,000 cameras with facial recognition capabilities, enabling real-time monitoring of residents and visitors. Similarly, Abu Dhabi’s Falcon Eye system provides comprehensive surveillance across the city, enhancing the government’s ability to track individuals’ movements.
Human Rights Implications
Privacy Concerns
The pervasive deployment of AI surveillance technologies in public spaces poses significant threats to individual privacy. The ability of these systems to continuously monitor and analyze personal behaviors without consent infringes upon the right to privacy as established in international human rights standards. Such extensive surveillance can lead to self-censorship, as individuals may alter their behavior due to the awareness of being constantly watched.
Freedom of Expression and Association
The UAE’s stringent cybercrime laws further exacerbate concerns related to AI surveillance. The Federal Law No. 34 of 2021 on Combatting Rumors and Cybercrime criminalizes online activities that oppose the fundamental principles of governance or offend foreign states, with penalties extending to life imprisonment. This legal framework has been utilized to suppress dissent, leading to the imprisonment of academics, journalists, and activists for peaceful online expressions deemed as undermining government authority.
Misuse of Surveillance Technologies
Reports indicate that the UAE has employed sophisticated spyware, such as the Pegasus software developed by Israel’s NSO Group, to monitor dissidents and perceived opponents both domestically and internationally. Notably, human rights defender Ahmed Mansoor was sentenced to 10 years in prison based on information extracted from his Pegasus-infected device. This misuse of surveillance tools underscores the potential for AI technologies to be leveraged in ways that violate human rights and suppress legitimate criticism.
International Scrutiny and Response
The UAE’s surveillance practices have attracted global attention, particularly in the context of international events hosted within its borders. For instance, during the 28th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP28) held in Dubai, concerns were raised about the extensive surveillance measures potentially infringing upon participants’ rights to privacy and freedom of assembly. The presence of pervasive monitoring technologies was seen as a threat to open dialogue and the overall success of the conference.
Journalistic investigations have also highlighted the broader implications of such surveillance. Ronan Farrow’s documentary “Surveilled” delves into the global proliferation of spyware and its impact on democracy and freedom, emphasizing the need for international regulations to govern the use of these intrusive technologies.
Balancing Technological Advancement with Human Rights
While the UAE’s pursuit of technological advancement through AI offers potential benefits in areas like urban planning, healthcare, and security, it is imperative to balance these developments with the protection of fundamental human rights. Establishing transparent legal frameworks, ensuring accountability for misuse, and engaging with international human rights bodies are crucial steps toward mitigating the adverse effects of AI surveillance.
Conclusion
The integration of AI surveillance technologies in the UAE reflects a broader global trend where states adopt advanced tools to enhance governance and security. However, without adequate safeguards, such practices can lead to significant human rights violations, including infringements on privacy, freedom of expression, and freedom of association. As the UAE continues its trajectory toward becoming a leader in AI, it holds the responsibility to implement these technologies in a manner that respects and upholds the rights of its citizens and the international community.
The law enforcement breed can be a pretty dark lot. To be paid to think suspiciously leaves its mark, fostering an incentive to identify crimes and misdemeanours with instinctive compulsion. Historically, this saw the emergence of quackery and bogus attempts to identify criminal tendencies. Craniometry and skull size was, for a time, an attractive pursuit for the aspiring crime hunter and lunatic sleuth. The crime fit the skull.
With the onset of facial recognition technologies, we are seeing the same old habits appear, with their human creators struggling to identify the best means of eliminating compromising biases.
Two people familiar with the use of technology by Elon Musk’s DOGE team told Reuters that the team has setup artificial intelligence to spy on employees at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
The objective, according to the two media sources, is to look for “language in communications considered hostile” to Musk or President Donald Trump.
“Trump-appointed officials who had taken up EPA posts told managers that DOGE was using AI to monitor communication apps and software, including Microsoft Teams, which is widely used for virtual calls and chats,” the sources additionally claimed.
Staff with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency fear that billionaire and presidential adviser Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is spying on them using artificial intelligence, according to reporting from Reuters, The Guardian, and Crooked Media’s newsletter What a Day. According to Reuters reporting published Tuesday, Trump administration officials told some managers at…
Long before October 7, 2023, Israel has weaponized surveillance and advanced targeting technology against Palestinians. This includes snuffing out dissent and preemptively arresting Palestinians before holding them for years without formal charges, access to legal representation, or sentencing.
Similar technologies are now being used in the United States to criminalize dissent, target marginalized communities, and suppress mutual aid efforts. This brings us to the theme of this week’s episode. Today, we’re sharing excerpts from Shareable’s Mutual Aid 101 Learning Series‘ third session.
Iranian police are using digital tools to identify and punish women who defy the Islamic state’s harsh dress code
Like many women in Iran, Darya is used to feeling under surveillance. Yet in recent months, the 25-year-old finance analyst from northern Tehran says that she never knows who could be watching her every move.
She says she has received messages from the police before warning her of suspected violations of the country’s strict hijab laws, but last November she was sent an SMS message containing her car registration plate that stated the exact time and place that she had been recorded driving without her head properly covered. Next time it happened, the SMS warned, her car would be impounded.
A joint operation between the Fiji Police Force, Republic of Fiji Military Force (RFMF), Territorial Force Brigade, Fiji Navy and National Fire Authority was staged this week to “modernise” responses to emergencies.
Called “Exercise Genesis”, the joint operation is believed to be the first of its kind in Fiji to “test combat readiness” and preparedness for facing civil unrest, counterinsurgency and humanitarian assistance scenarios.
It took place over three days and was modelled on challenges faced by a “fictitious island grappling with rising unemployment, poverty and crime”.
The exercise was described as based on three models, operated on successive days.
The block 1 scenario tackled internal security, addressing civil unrest, law enforcement challenges and crowd control operations.
Block 2 involved humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, and coordinating emergency response efforts with government agencies.
Block 3 on the last day dealt with a “mid-level counterinsurgency”, engaging in stabilising the crisis, and “neutralising” a threat.
Flash flood scenario
On the second day, a “composite” company with the assistance of the Fiji Navy successfully evacuated victims from a scenario-based flash flood at Doroko village (Waila) to Nausori Town.
“The flood victims were given first aid at the village before being evacuated to an evacuation centre in Syria Park,” said the Territorial Brigade’s Facebook page.
“The flood victims were further examined by the medical team at Syria Park.”
Fiji police confront protesters during the Operation Genesis exercise in Fiji this week. Image: RFMF screenshot APR
On the final day, Thursday, Exercise Genesis culminated in a pre-dawn attack by the troops on a “rebel hideout”.
According to the Facebook page, the “hideout” had been discovered following the deployment of a joint tracker team and the K9 unit from the Fiji Corrections Service.
“Through rigorous training and realistic scenarios, the [RFMF Territorial Brigade] continues to refine its combat proficiency, adaptability, and mission effectiveness,” said a brigade statement.
Mock protesters in the Operation Genesis security services exercise in Fiji this week. Image: RFMF screenshot APR
It said that the exercise was “ensuring that [the brigade] remains a versatile and responsive force, capable of safeguarding national security and contributing to regional stability.”
However, a critic said: “Anyone who is serious about reducing crime would offer a real alternative to austerity, poverty and alienation. Invest in young people and communities.”
BANGKOK – Chinese officials escorted Thai journalists during a tightly controlled visit to Xinjiang this week, insisting on viewing their photos and deleting any they didn’t approve of before they could be sent back to Thailand, said a journalist, who was a part of delegation invited by Beijing to showcase the well-being of Uyghurs from deported from Thailand.
Thailand put 40 Uyghur men on a plane to Xinjiang on Feb. 27, saying China had given assurances that they would not be mistreated and no third country had committed to take them. Officials later admitted the U.S. and other countries had offered to give the Uyghurs a home. They were part of more than 300 Uyghurs who fled persecution in Xinjiang but were caught and jailed in Thailand for more than a decade.
The move was heavily criticized by Western governments and human rights organizations, with the United States restricting visas for unnamed Thai officials involved in the deportation process.
Amid criticism, China invited Thai Deputy Prime Minister Phumtham Wechayachai along with a group of journalists on a three-day trip to Kashgar, Xinjiang, from Tuesday aimed at showcasing the well-being of the deportees and others who were deported in 2015.
But a Thai journalist, who was part of the delegation, said they were watched closely by Chinese security officials during their visit.
“Thai journalists were escorted by security personnel, who also requested to vet the images before allowing them to be sent back to Thailand,” said Pranot Vilapasuwan, news director at Thai-language daily Thairath on Facebook.
Pranot added that journalists were asked to blur the faces of Uyghurs and their families as well as Chinese officials or to avoid taking pictures of Chinese officials at all.
He also said journalists were vetted before the trip in interviews with Thai authorities.
“This means security agencies were filtering the media,” said Pranot during a program on Thairath online.
Sunai Phasuk, senior researcher at Human Rights Watch said everything about the Thai government’s Xinjiang visit was “staged” and “managed” by China.
“Thailand is parroting China’s propaganda and collaborating in the crimes against Uyghurs,” Sunai lamented.
‘Living a normal life’
Thairath cited Phumtham as saying that he had video calls with six Uyghurs who had returned from Thailand, one of whom was deported in 2015.
“He explained that after returning 10 years ago, he had been living a normal life, got married, and now has a one-month-old baby,” Phumtham said. “Upon his return, the authorities helped build a house for him.”
“I came to visit and wanted answers. We know that Xinjiang has changed a lot, which should be good for them, and good for both countries that made this decision,” he said.
Thailand’s Deputy Prime Minister Phumtham Wechayachai visits one of the 40 Uyghurs at the Uyghur’s home in Kashgar, Xinjiang Autonomous Region, March 19, 2025.(Thailand Ministry of Defense)
Qi Yanjun, China’s vice minister for public security, called the cooperation between Thailand and China “normal.”
“Some countries criticize the cooperation between Thailand and China, even though it’s just normal law enforcement, saying it’s not good that both countries are taking such intensive action,” said Qi.
“Therefore, both countries, Thailand and China, must strongly oppose this criticism,” he added.
“What the U.S. and European Union claimed about inappropriate treatment of Uyghurs is not true. Truth is truth, and everyone will see it.”
Qi’s view was echoed byTawee Sodsong, Thailand’s justice minister, who said the decision to deport Uyghurs was made on Beijing’s promise they would not be tortured.
“Today, those third countries, which are large nations, may say whatever they want, but we prefer to rely on the truth. We believe both governments are sincere,” he said. “We saw that he is living with his family. He expressed gratitude to both governments for taking care of him.”
Edited by Taejun Kang and Mike Firn.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Kunnawut Boonreak for BenarNews and Pimuk Rakkanam for RFA.
Australia is caught in a jam, between an assertive American ally and a bold Chinese trading partner. America is accelerating its pivot to the Indo-Pacific, building up its fighting forces and expanding its military bases.
As Australia tries to navigate a pathway between America’s and Australia’s national interests, sometimes Australia’s national interest seems to submerge out of view.
Admiral David Johnston, the Chief of the Australia’s Defence Force, is steering this ship as China flexes its muscle sending a small warship flotilla south to circumnavigate the continent.
He has admitted that the first the Defence Force heard of a live-fire exercise by the three Chinese Navy ships sailing in the South Pacific east of Australia on February 21, was a phone call from the civilian Airservices Australia.
“The absence of any advance notice to Australian authorities was a concern, notably, that the limited notice provided by the PLA could have unnecessarily increased the risk to aircraft and vessels in the area,” Johnston told Senate Estimates .
Johnston was pressed to clarify how Defence first came to know of the live-fire drill: “Is it the case that Defence was only notified, via Virgin and Airservices Australia, 28 minutes [sic] after the firing window commenced?”
To this, Admiral Johnston replied: “Yes.”
If it happened as stated by the Admiral — that a live-fire exercise by the Chinese ships was undertaken and a warning notice was transmitted from the Chinese ships, all without being detected by Australian defence and surveillance assets — this is a defence failure of considerable significance.
Sources with knowledge of Defence spoken to by Declassified Australia say that this is either a failure of surveillance, or a failure of communication, or even more far-reaching, a failure of US alliance cooperation.
And from the very start the official facts became slippery.
Our latest investigation –
AUSTRALIA’S DEFENCE: NAVIGATING US-CHINA TENSIONS
We investigate a significant intelligence failure to detect live-firing by Chinese warships near Australia, has exposed Defence weaknesses, and the fact that when it counts, we are all alone.
— Declassified Australia (@DeclassifiedAus) March 7, 2025
What did they know and when did they know it The first information passed on to Defence by Airservices Australia came from the pilot of a Virgin passenger jet passing overhead the flotilla in the Tasman Sea that had picked up the Chinese Navy VHF radio notification of an impending live-fire exercise.
The radio transmission had advised the window for the live-fire drill commenced at 9.30am and would conclude at 3pm.
We know this from testimony given to Senate Estimates by the head of Airservices Australia. He said Airservices was notified at 9.58am by an aviation control tower informed by the Virgin pilot. Two minutes later Airservices issued a “hazard alert” to commercial airlines in the area.
The Headquarters of the Defence Force’s Joint Operations Command (HJOC), at Bungendore 30km east of Canberra, was then notified about the drill by Airservices at 10.08am, 38 minutes after the drill window had commenced.
When questioned a few days later, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese appeared to try to cover for Defence’s apparent failure to detect the live-fire drill or the advisory transmission.
“At around the same time, there were two areas of notification. One was from the New Zealand vessels that were tailing . .. the [Chinese] vessels in the area by both sea and air,” Albanese stated. “So that occurred and at the same time through the channels that occur when something like this is occurring, Airservices got notified as well.”
But the New Zealand Defence Force had not notified Defence “at the same time”. In fact it was not until 11.01am that an alert was received by Defence from the New Zealand Defence Force — 53 minutes after Defence HQ was told by Airservices and an hour and a half after the drill window had begun.
The Chinese Navy’s stealth guided missile destroyer Zunyi, sailing south in the Coral Sea on February 15, 2025, in a photograph taken from a RAAF P-8A Poseidon surveillance plane. Image: Royal Australian Air Force/Declassified Australia
Defence Minister Richard Marles later in a round-about way admitted on ABC Radio that it wasn’t the New Zealanders who informed Australia first: “Well, to be clear, we weren’t notified by China. I mean, we became aware of this during the course of the day.
“What China did was put out a notification that it was intending to engage in live firing. By that I mean a broadcast that was picked up by airlines or literally planes that were commercial planes that were flying across the Tasman.”
Later the Chinese Ambassador to Australia, Xiao Qian, told ABC that two live-fire training drills were carried out at sea on February 21 and 22, in accordance with international law and “after repeatedly issuing safety notices in advance”.
Eyes and ears on ‘every move’ It was expected the Chinese-navy flotilla would end its three week voyage around Australia on March 7, after a circumnavigation of the continent. That is not before finally passing at some distance the newly acquired US-UK nuclear submarine base at HMAS Stirling near Perth and the powerful US communications and surveillance base at North West Cape.
Just as Australia spies on China to develop intelligence and targeting for a potential US war, China responds in kind, collecting data on US military and intelligence bases and facilities in Australia, as future targets should hostilities commence.
The presence of the Chinese Navy ships that headed into the northern and eastern seas around Australia attracted the attention of the Defence Department ever since they first set off south through the Mindoro Strait in the Philippines and through the Indonesian archipelago from the South China Sea on February 3.
“We are keeping a close watch on them and we will be making sure that we watch every move,” Marles stated in the week before the live-fire incident.
“Just as they have a right to be in international waters . . . we have a right to be prudent and to make sure that we are surveilling them, which is what we are doing.”
Around 3500 km to the north, a week into the Chinese ships’ voyage, a spy flight by an RAAF P-8A Poseidon surveillance plane on February 11, in a disputed area of the South China Sea south of China’s Hainan Island, was warned off by a Chinese J-16 fighter jet.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry responded to Australian protests claiming the Australian aircraft “deliberately intruded” into China’s claimed territorial airspace around the Paracel Islands without China’s permission, thereby “infringing on China’s sovereignty and endangering China’s national security”.
Australia criticised the Chinese manoeuvre, defending the Australian flight saying it was “exercising the right to freedom of navigation and overflight in international waters and airspace”.
Two days after the incident, the three Chinese ships on their way to Australian waters were taking different routes in beginning their own “right to freedom of navigation” in international waters off the Australian coast. The three ships formed up their mini flotilla in the Coral Sea as they turned south paralleling the Australian eastern coastline outside of territorial waters, and sometimes within Australia’s 200-nautical-mile (370 km) Exclusive Economic Zone.
“Defence always monitors foreign military activity in proximity to Australia. This includes the Peoples Liberation Army-Navy (PLA-N) Task Group.” Admiral Johnston told Senate Estimates.
“We have been monitoring the movement of the Task Group through its transit through Southeast Asia and we have observed the Task Group as it has come south through that region.”
The Task Group was made up of a modern stealth guided missile destroyer Zunyi, the frigate Hengyang, and the Weishanhu, a 20,500 tonne supply ship carrying fuel, fresh water, cargo and ammunition. The Hengyang moved eastwards through the Torres Strait, while the Zunyi and Weishanhu passed south near Bougainville and Solomon Islands, meeting in the Coral Sea.
This map indicates the routes taken by the three Chinese Navy ships on their “right to freedom of navigation” voyage in international waters circumnavigating Australia, with dates of way points indicated — from 3 February till 6 March 2025. Distances and locations are approximate. Image: Weibo/Declassified Australia
As the Chinese ships moved near northern Australia and through the Coral Sea heading further south, the Defence Department deployed Navy and Air Force assets to watch over the ships. These included various RAN warships including the frigate HMAS Arunta and a RAAF P-8A Poseidon intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance plane.
With unconfirmed reports a Chinese nuclear submarine may also be accompanying the surface ships, the monitoring may have also included one of the RAN’s Collins-class submarines, with their active range of sonar, radar and radio monitoring – however it is uncertain whether one was able to be made available from the fleet.
“From the point of time the first of the vessels entered into our more immediate region, we have been conducting active surveillance of their activities,” the Defence chief confirmed.
As the Chinese ships moved into the southern Tasman Sea, New Zealand navy ships joined in the monitoring alongside Australia’s Navy and Air Force.
The range of signals intelligence (SIGINT) that theoretically can be intercepted emanating from a naval ship at sea includes encrypted data and voice satellite communications, ship-to-ship communications, aerial drone data and communications, as well as data of radar, gunnery, and weapon launches.
There are a number of surveillance facilities in Australia that would have been able to be directed at the Chinese ships.
Australian Signals Directorate’s (ASD) Shoal Bay Receiving Station outside of Darwin, picks up transmissions and data emanating from radio signals and satellite communications from Australia’s near north region. ASD’s Cocos Islands receiving station in the mid-Indian ocean would have been available too.
The Jindalee Operational Radar Network (JORN) over-the-horizon radar network, spread across northern Australia, is an early warning system that monitors aircraft and ship movements across Australia’s north-western, northern, and north-eastern ocean areas — but its range off the eastern coast is not thought to presently reach further south than the sea off Mackay on the Queensland coast.
Of land-based surveillance facilities, it is the American Pine Gap base that is believed to have the best capability of intercepting the ship’s radio communications in the Tasman Sea.
Enter, Pine Gap and the Americans The US satellite surveillance base at Pine Gap in Central Australia is a US and Australian jointly-run satellite ground station. It is regarded as the most important such American satellite base outside of the USA.
The spy base – Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap (JDFPG) – showing the north-eastern corner of the huge base with some 18 of the base’s now 45 satellite dishes and covered radomes visible. Image: Felicity Ruby/Declassified Australia
The role of ASD in supporting the extensive US surveillance mission against China is increasingly valued by Australia’s large Five Eyes alliance partner.
A Top Secret ‘Information Paper’, titled “NSA Intelligence Relationship with Australia”, leaked from the National Security Agency (NSA) by Edward Snowden and published by ABC’s Background Briefing, spells out the “close collaboration” between the NSA and ASD, in particular on China:
“Increased emphasis on China will not only help ensure the security of Australia, but also synergize with the U.S. in its renewed emphasis on Asia and the Pacific . . . Australia’s overall intelligence effort on China, as a target, is already significant and will increase.”
The Pine Gap base, as further revealed in 2023 by Declassified Australia, is being used to collect signals intelligence and other data from the Israeli battlefield of Gaza, and also Ukraine and other global hotspots within view of the US spy satellites.
It’s recently had a significant expansion (reported by this author in The Saturday Paper) which has seen its total of satellite dishes and radomes rapidly increase in just a few years from 35 to 45 to accommodate new heightened-capability surveillance satellites.
Pine Gap base collects an enormous range and quantity of intelligence and data from thermal imaging satellites, photographic reconnaissance satellites, and signals intelligence (SIGINT) satellites, as expert researchers Des Ball, Bill Robinson and Richard Tanter of the Nautilus Institute have detailed.
These SIGINT satellites intercept electronic communications and signals from ground-based sources, such as radio communications, telemetry, radar signals, satellite communications, microwave emissions, mobile phone signals, and geolocation data.
Alliance priorities The US’s SIGINT satellites have a capability to detect and receive signals from VHF radio transmissions on or near the earth’s surface, but they need to be tasked to do so and appropriately targeted on the source of the transmission.
For the Pine Gap base to intercept VHF radio signals from the Chinese Navy ships, the base would have needed to specifically realign one of those SIGINT satellites to provide coverage of the VHF signals in the Tasman Sea at the time of the Chinese ships’ passage. It is not known publicly if they did this, but they certainly have that capability.
However, it is not only the VHF radio transmission that would have carried information about the live-firing exercise.
Pine Gap would be able to monitor a range of other SIGINT transmissions from the Chinese ships. Details of the planning and preparations for the live-firing exercise would almost certainly have been transmitted over data and voice satellite communications, ship-to-ship communications, and even in the data of radar and gunnery operations.
But it is here that there is another possibility for the failure.
The Pine Gap base was built and exists to serve the national interests of the United States. The tasking of the surveillance satellites in range of Pine Gap base is generally not set by Australia, but is directed by United States’ agencies, the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) together with the US Defense Department, the National Security Agency (NSA), and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
Australia has learnt over time that US priorities may not be the same as Australia’s.
Australian defence and intelligence services can request surveillance tasks to be added to the schedule, and would have been expected to have done so in order to target the southern leg of the Chinese Navy ships’ voyage, when the ships were out of the range of the JORN network.
The military demands for satellite time can be excessive in times of heightened global conflict, as is the case now.
Whether the Pine Gap base was devoting sufficient surveillance resources to monitoring the Chinese Navy ships, due to United States’ priorities in Europe, Russia, the Middle East, Africa, North Korea, and to our north in the South China Sea, is a relevant question.
It can only be answered now by a formal government inquiry into what went on — preferably held in public by a parliamentary committee or separately commissioned inquiry. The sovereign defence of Australia failed in this incident and lessons need to be learned.
Who knew and when did they know If the Pine Gap base had been monitoring the VHF radio band and heard the Chinese Navy live-fire alert, or had been monitoring other SIGINT transmissions to discover the live-fire drill, the normal procedure would be for the active surveillance team to inform a number of levels of senior officers, a former Defence official familiar with the process told Declassified Australia.
Inside an operations room at the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) head office at the Defence complex at Russell Hill in Canberra. Image: ADF/Declassified Australia
Expected to be included in the information chain are the Australian Deputy-Chief of Facility at the US base, NSA liaison staff at the base, the Australian Signals Directorate head office at the Defence complex at Russell Hill in Canberra, the Defence Force’s Headquarters Joint Operations Command, in Bungendore, and the Chief of the Defence Force. From there the Defence Minister’s office would need to have been informed.
As has been reported in media interviews and in testimony to the Senate Estimates hearings, it has been stated that Defence was not informed of the Chinese ships’ live-firing alert until a full 38 minutes after the drill window had commenced.
The former Defence official told Declassified Australia it is vital the reason for the failure to detect the live-firing in a timely fashion is ascertained.
Either the Australian Defence Force and US Pine Gap base were not effectively actively monitoring the Chinese flotilla at this time — and the reasons for that need to be examined — or they were, but the information gathered was somewhere stalled and not passed on to correct channels.
If the evidence so far tendered by the Defence chief and the Minister is true, and it was not informed of the drill by any of its intelligence or surveillance assets before that phone call from Airservices Australia, the implications need to be seriously addressed.
A final word In just a couple of weeks the whole Defence environment for Australia has changed, for the worse.
The US military announces a drawdown in Europe and a new pivot to the Indo-Pacific. China shows Australia it can do tit-for-tat “navigational freedom” voyages close to the Australian coast. US intelligence support is withdrawn from Ukraine during the war. Australia discovers the AUKUS submarines’ arrival looks even more remote. The prime minister confuses the limited cover provided by the ANZUS treaty.
Meanwhile, the US militarisation of Australia’s north continues at pace. At the same time a senior Pentagon official pressures Australia to massively increase defence spending. And now, the country’s defence intelligence system has experienced an unexplained major failure.
Australia, it seems, is adrift in a sea of unpredictable global events and changing alliance priorities.
Peter Cronau is an award-winning, investigative journalist, writer, and film-maker. His documentary, The Base: Pine Gap’s Role in US Warfighting, was broadcast on Australian ABC Radio National and featured on ABC News. He produced and directed the documentary film Drawing the Line, revealing details of Australian spying in East Timor, on ABC TV’s premier investigative programme Four Corners. He won the Gold Walkley Award in 2007 for a report he produced on an outbreak of political violence in East Timor. This article was first published by Declassified Australia and is republished here with the author’s permission.
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