American Stasi – Our 21st Century DigiDystopia

The Inflection Point: State Surveillance or Freedom?

By Tim Boivin

Lead Writer, 50501 Veterans

In 1987, I was on Active Duty, serving as the Wuerzburg Bureau Chief for European Stars & Stripes. My job was to report on the 3^rd Infantry Division and the 11^th Armored Cavalry Regiment, which were responsible for defending the Fulda Gap – the expected main invasion route if the USSR and its East Bloc allies decided to move against NATO.

A captain from the 3rd ID took me on a jeep trip to a town where the barbed wire demarking the border went right through it. Up on the ridge above the town, we got out of the jeep, he in his field gear and me in my civvies with my camera. (Stripes reporters who were in the military didn’t wear their uniforms.)

The East German observation tower, seen in the distance at left, and the American tower, on the right, stand almost face to face across what was once the inner-German border during the Cold War. Today, both are part of the Point Alpha Memorial. (Michael Abrams/Stars and Stripes)

The captain pointed to someone in a trenchcoat straight out of a 1960s Cold War B movie thriller in a tower with a camera with a long lens on the East German side of the border. He was taking a picture of us.

“They must think you’re someone important,” the captain said. “You’re going to be in the Stasi files now.”

It’s Not Funny Anymore

At the time, I thought it was funny. Here I was, an E-5 in disguise, being mistaken for a spy.

I’m not laughing anymore. Why? Because that level of state surveillance has now come to our own shores, from our own government.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Patrol, and most of the rest of the Department of Homeland Security, not to mention the FBI, NSA and military troops deployed in our cities, have been transformed into America’s version of the Stasi. If you don’t see it, you’re blind.

Spawned by the Patriot Act, they are shaking the very core of our free and open society – one that is founded on the ideal that we as citizens have certain inalienable rights. The Patriot Act that spawned this digidystopia is abhorrent and needs to be rethought. It is truly an abomination to a free and open society which supposedly follows the rule of law.

We are a society that until now has strived to follow the rule of law. No longer.

Instead, the fascists running our government now value power over law. ICE operates outside our laws at will: arresting, detaining and deporting people, including veterans, without due process; preying and killing innocent people – on our streets in LA, in Minneapolis, in Houston, most recently in Biddeford, Maine; and through the horror of their concentration camps spreading quickly across this nation.

All with no accountability.

The Tip of the ICEberg

But it is the digital infrastructure that enables this wanton fascism to fester across our nation that is the most frightening. Oxymoronically named Flock Safety cameras are used by local police departments, with images from them being fed into a federal database.

Creative Commons photo

At the same time, Israel surveillance company Cognyte is selling $1-million+, tricked-out spy vans to American law enforcement agencies. Those come with cell-site simulators designed to trick as many as 10,000 phones at a time within a certain radius to connect to that device instead of a tower – a staggering violation of the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure without a warrant.

ICE uses social media surveillance tools, including a social media monitoring platform called Zignal Labs that can analyze more than 8 billion posts a day. It also uses monitoring tools from Penlink to gather information from social media platforms, the Dark Web, and databases of location data.

ICE agents use Mobile Fortify to scan thousands of immigrants’ – and undoubtedly protesters – faces. And that’s just the tip of this ICEberg. DHS admits it uses more than 10 AI-enabled facial recognition tools. And DHS is also looking to use emerging biometric technology to develop smart glasses for ICE and others to use in real time.

In fact, ICE and CPB contracts with 11 surveillance technology companies more than doubled in just the first six months of 2026 over the entire year of 2025, according to a report just published by Mijente, Just Futures Law and the Surveillance Resistance Lab (a project of the Collaborative Research Center for Resilience).

That includes contracts with AI database giant Palintir and Anduril, a defense company that builds AI-powered surveillance systems, tech-infused border towers, drones and sensors.

And ICE is now by far the highest-funded law enforcement agency, to the tune of a staggering $85 billion over the next four years, thanks to the One, Big, Beautiful Bill Act. From The Guardian newspaper:

ICE is directing these taxpayer funds towards multimillion-dollar federal contracts for a diverse group of tools and services. They include money for data brokers, analytics software, social media scrapers, facial recognition technologies, hacking devices and spyware to break into phones, external contractors that the study’s authors characterize as “bounty hunters” and “autonomous” border towers and drones.

The Inflection Point

This is all straight out of the Stasi playbook writ large. The captain was joking when he said I’d end up in a Stasi file. Nobody’s joking now.

Having been the lead organizer for the D-Day protests last year, having marched carrying the American Flag in distress on Labor Day, Veterans Day and elsewhere, having done Smoke Pit podcasts and written endless commentaries against these fascist bastards here and elsewhere…I have no doubt my name is in the American Stasi database.

How long until there’s a knock at my door?

The digital infrastructure is built. The contracts are signed. The only thing left undecided at this inflection point in our country’s history is whether we let it run…or whether enough of us say no while saying no still means something.

Which is it going to be?