Resistance Media

06/18/2025

Beyond the craven January spectacle of tech CEOs, clutching seven figure checks and groveling at the inaugural altar of MAGA, lurks a darker, Silicon Valley vanguard. Inspired by Curtis Yarvin’s techno-authoritarian “Dark Enlightenment,” figures like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, JD Vance, and venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and David Sacks have formed a kind of ideological power bloc that feels less like innovation and more like a MAGA/Valley axis of evil.

Vance’s close connection to PayPal co-founder, Facebook investor, crypto currency booster and anti-democracy advocate Thiel is a clear indicator of the deep influence and reach of this authoritarian sea change. He is one quarter pounder with cheese away from the presidency.

Upon his acquisition of Twitter, Musk orchestrated the rapid re-platforming and algorithmic promotion of hate speech, immediately transforming X into a powerful disinformation weapon in the 2024 presidential election.

Musk launched impulsive lawsuits against such watchdog organizations as the Center for Countering Digital Hate and Media Matters, and threatened the Anti-Defamation League and Southern Poverty Law Center. The Twitter acquisition, backed by personal shares of Tesla and several prominent valley venture capital firms, was also financed by investments provided by Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal (X’s second largest shareholder), the sovereign wealth fund of Qatar and Vy Capital, a Dubai investment firm.

Musk’s rampage through the federal agencies of the American government is not about finding waste and fraud. It is a digital coup—tanks did not roll and rebels did not seize the television station. Rather, the target is data, the most valuable commodity in a digital economy, systematically and illegally seized by his handpicked cadre of young hackers. Will American citizen’s most confidential and private personal information find its way to Musk’s “Colossus,” xAI’s mega AI data center that animates GROK? To Palantir’s Foundry database? Much of the funding for the continuing buildout of the Memphis data center (the largest in the world) will also come from sovereign wealth funds, primarily from the Middle East.

The era of techno-fascism has arrived. Wired broke it down well:

In the days and weeks that followed, DOGE hit one part of the federal government after another. The Departments of Agriculture, Defense, Education, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development, Justice, and Veterans Affairs; the Federal Aviation, General Services, Social Security, and National Oceanic and Atmospheric administrations; the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Internal Revenue Service; the US Agency for International Development and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; the National Park Service and the National Science Foundation—all fell under Musk’s control. An estimated tens of thousands of federal employees were effectively fired or resigned. “This is a digital coup,” one USAID source told WIRED at the time.

Along the way, DOGE also gained access to untold terabytes of data. Trump had given Musk and his operatives carte blanche to tap any unclassified system they pleased. One of their first stops: a database previously breached more than a decade ago by alleged Chinese cyberspies that contained investigative files on tens of millions of US government employees. Other storehouses thrown open to DOGE may have included federal workers’ tax records, biometric data, and private medical histories, such as treatment for drug and alcohol abuse; the cryptographic keys for restricted areas at federal facilities across the country; the personal testimonies of low-income-housing recipients; and granular detail on the locations of particularly vulnerable children.

What did DOGE want with this kind of information? None of it seemed relevant to Musk’s stated aim of identifying waste and fraud, multiple government finance, IT, and security specialists told WIRED. But in treating the US government itself as a giant dataset, the experts said, DOGE could help the Trump administration accomplish another goal: to gather much of what the government knows about a given individual, whether a civil servant or an undocumented immigrant, in one easily searchable place.

With such an AI driven database, the capacity for mass surveillance and highly targeted repression on an unsuspecting public would be possible on an unprecedented scale.

The Threats

No American resistance movement will be able to succeed without the free flow of information to and from pro-democracy sources inside and outside of the country.

Technology is the front line in protecting those voices. Essential to maintaining a resistance media capacity will be the ability to successfully wage a running battle with those entities that would seek to surveil, disrupt, censor and destroy opposition voices.

This battle is already well underway in political hot spots and societies governed by autocrats around the world. Journalists in dozens of countries face online threats, harassment, censorship, doxing, surveillance, hacking, troll farms, and flooding. Many have been victims of arrest and violence.

This battle, in one form or another, is coming to American journalists.

The use of Artificial Intelligence has increased the speed, scale and efficiency of digital repression. Automated systems have enabled sophisticated surveillance applications that rapidly trawl social media for signs of dissent; huge datasets are being cross referenced with facial scans to identify and track protesters.

Peter Thiel’s facial recognition firm Clearview is one such AI application which, according to the BBC, has already run over a million searches for US law enforcement. According to Mother Jones, it is providing the foundation for a biometric dragnet currently being deployed by ICE and the FBI to target immigrants, protestors and other “enemies of the state.”

Another Thiel company, Palantir, is emerging as a cornerstone of the Trump administration’s efforts to assemble a nationwide database of citizen’s personal and confidential information held by the federal government.

A May 30 New York Times report “Trump Taps Palantir to Compile Data on Americans,” describes the deepening alignment of Palantir with U.S. national security and intelligence priorities.

The Trump administration has expanded Palantir’s work across the federal government in recent months. The company has received more than $113 million in federal government spending since Mr. Trump took office, according to public records, including additional funds from existing contracts as well as new contracts with the Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon. (This does not include a $795 million contract that the Department of Defense awarded the company last week, which has not been spent.)

Creating detailed portraits of Americans based on government data is not just a pipe dream. The Trump administration has already sought access to hundreds of data points on citizens and others through government databases, including their bank account numbers, the amount of their student debt, their medical claims and any disability status.

Mr. Trump could potentially use such information to advance his political agenda by policing immigrants and punishing critics, Democratic lawmakers and critics have said. Privacy advocates, student unions and labor rights organizations have filed lawsuits to block data access, questioning whether the government could weaponize people’s personal information.

Palantir’s selection as a chief vendor for the project was driven by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, according to the government officials. At least three DOGE members formerly worked at Palantir, while two others had worked at companies funded by Peter Thiel, an investor and a founder of Palantir.

Palantir also recently began helping Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s enforcement and removal operations team, according to two Palantir employees and two current and former D.H.S. officials. The work is part of a $30 million contract that ICE signed with Palantir in April to build a platform to track migrant movements in real time.

The mobile spyware industry, estimated to be a $12 billion a year business, is providing cutting edge technologies for intelligence agencies and law enforcement. The problem is that these applications have been increasingly adopted by authoritarian governments. Instead of using these tools to target organized crime and criminal activity, they have deployed the spyware against their own citizens to monitor and target dissent. They are increasingly being used to surveil, harass and intimidate journalists and activists and those close to them.

The Israeli NSO Group’s spyware product Pegasus is one such tool. Pegasus can silently infect devices such as mobile phones, even penetrating highly encrypted communication apps such as WhatsApp and Signal. It is able to compromise a wide spectrum of content including text messages, photographs, videos and calls, as well as transform mobile phone microphones and cameras into recording devices.

Predator, developed by the European-based Intellexa Alliance, is another widely deployed and pervasive cyber weapon. A 2023 Amnesty International/European Investigative Collaborations (EIC) investigation found Intellexa Alliance spyware products in at least 25 countries in Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Africa, including Switzerland, Austria, Germany, Congo, Jordan, Kenya, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Singapore, United Arab Emirates and Vietnam. Targets include journalists in exile, public figures and intergovernmental officials.

The Chinese Model

The People’s Republic of China has implemented one of the most advanced and comprehensive uses of the internet as a tool for repression in the world. Beyond mere censorship, it is a sophisticated system of control, surveillance, and psychological conditioning. It integrates cutting-edge technology with centralized political authority to suppress dissent, manage social behavior, and shape public discourse, both domestically and increasingly, abroad. The results have been a nightmare for press freedom.

According to Reporters Without Boarders (RSF) “The People’s Republic of China (PRC) is the world’s largest prison for journalists, and its regime conducts a campaign of repression against journalism and the right to information worldwide.”

The building blocks of this state of the art, evolving digital-authoritarian model include:

The Great Firewall: In a word—censorship. It uses keyword blocking, deep packet inspection, and IP filtering to prevent access to information deemed politically sensitive. China’s internet filters domestic content and blocks foreign websites including Google, Facebook, Wikipedia, YouTube, Instagram, WhatsApp, The New York Times and BBC.

Mass Digital Surveillance: The PRC has created a highly centralized surveillance state using facial recognition and AI-linked CCTV networks in cities and public spaces, real-name registration for internet and phone usage and the monitoring and archiving of online conversations via platforms like WeChat and Weibo. This surveillance data is used to punish dissent, track activists, or suppress ethnic minorities.

Social Media Censorship & Propaganda:
Platforms are monitored and regulated to remove “rumors” or “harmful information,” with both state-employed censors and algorithms enforcing compliance. The government deploys the “50 Cent Army,” a network of state-affiliated online commentators and influencers, to flood the internet with pro-government messages and drown out criticism.

The Social Credit System:
This system uses digital behavior to assess citizens’ “trustworthiness.” Poor online behavior such as criticizing the government, conducting “anti-social” keyword searches, organizing or joining activities seen as threatening social harmony and spreading false information can result in real-world consequences like travel bans, loss of access to public services, job loss or blacklisting.

RSF has stated “In the eyes of the regime, the media’s function is to be the party’s mouthpiece and to impart state propaganda. Independent journalists and bloggers who dare to report “sensitive” information are often placed under surveillance, harassed, detained, and, in some cases, tortured. To receive and renew their press cards, journalists must download the Study (Xi) The Great Nation propaganda application (the little red app) that can collect their personal data.”

China is actively promoting its surveillance and censorship technologies abroad—selling hardware, tools and providing training to authoritarian governments.

According to Michael Caster, Asia Digital Programme Manager at ARTICLE 19, “Through its Digital Silk Road partnerships, China is seeking to create a China-centric global alternative to current technological standards and digital governance norms. By expanding its authoritarian model, China aims to ultimately supplant the tenets of internet freedom and rights-based principles of global digital governance.”

In 2024, the United Nations developed the Global Digital Compact, which aims to “outline shared principles for an open, free and secure digital future for all.”

Counter Measures

Whether inside the country or in exile, American pro-democracy media will require the ability to conduct reporting in a way that allows sources to share information securely, for editorial content to be effectively distributed and for citizens to safely access this content without fear of being identified and targeted.

There are a growing number of digital rights organizations around the world actively working to counter the actions of authoritarian enemies of press freedom, human rights, and social justice movements. These efforts can be essential resources in protecting and projecting an American resistance media eco-system capable of supporting and informing the fight for democracy.

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) Collateral Freedom Project is one of the world’s most sophisticated and far reaching censorship circumvention operations. The program, operating since 2015, currently hosts over 100 censored news websites in 24 countries via a global network of servers out of the reach of the authoritarian governments attacking them.

It mirrors censored news sites in real time, hosting them on major cloud services so that blocking would require broad collateral damage (hence the name). The initiative combines technical tactics (mirrors, onion services, archive preservation) with strategic use of cloud infrastructure to force censors into a dilemma: allow access or block widely used services, risking backlash.

RSF describes their project this way:

A website mirror is an exact replica of the original website, but hosted on a different domain (so its URL changes and is often long and complicated). It allows users to simply visit an alternative site that “mirrors” the censored content, so it is always up-to-date. There is no need to install or configure any software such as a Virtual Private Network (VPN) or Tor, but this technology only works for websites and not for Facebook pages or YouTube channels.

Governments that monitor the internet can easily find and block website mirrors. The effectiveness of mirror links therefore lies in the ability of the organiser such as RSF to continuously provide new mirrors as old ones may be shut down.

A solution to the precariousness of website mirrors is to use the principle of “collateral damage”: host them within services that are so wide-reaching and essential that the cost of blocking such services would deter censors from doing it.

Hosting a website mirror on something like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure means that if the censors want to block access to the mirror site, they may have to block the entire cloud service. The potential disruption to services and communication, and the likely backlash from the public stemming from blocking the entire cloud service of a popular platform, will force the censors to leave the mirror accessible.

Meduza editor Ivan Kolpakov said: “After [24 February 2022], Russia established military censorship. Russian authorities blocked all independent media outlets. But in the case of Meduza, the Kremlin failed. We can still broadcast in Russia for millions of our readers, and the infrastructure provided by RSF for our mobile app is an important part of this achievement”

According to RSF, “More than a billion requests* have been sent to the various Meduza mirror sites since February 2022. This has set a record in terms of use of Operation Collateral Freedom.”

Amnesty international’s Security Lab is another leader in this battle. A multi-disciplinary team of researchers, hackers, coders, campaigners and advocates, it works to protect civil society from unlawful digital surveillance, spyware and other human rights abuses enabled by technology.

Through technical investigations and digital forensics, the Lab conducts in-depth reviews of spyware like Pegasus, Predator, Candiru, and FinFisher—revealing how activists, journalists, and political opponents are targeted. It builds tools and services to help protect activists from attacks, as well as collaborating with the wider digital activist community to help them identify and respond to digital threats, from spyware to internet shutdowns.

As Amnesty International explains:

Targeted surveillance can include the use of hidden cameras, recording devices, or being physically followed or monitored. Here at Amnesty’s Security Lab, we focus on uncovering targeted digital surveillance including spyware, phishing and other digital attack techniques.  
 
Governments across the world are buying and allowing the sale of advanced highly invasive spyware that can compromise anybody’s digital devices and monitor their activity. These tools are made and sold by private companies who are profiting from human right abuses.  
 
Governments and companies say that these surveillance tools are necessary to target ‘criminals and terrorists’. But in reality, scores of human rights defenders, journalists and many others – including Amnesty International staff members – have instead been unlawfully targeted with spyware.  

In its first half-decade, the Lab has become an indispensable ally to frontline journalists, providing technical, strategic, and legal resources that meaningfully enhance media resilience against digital repression.

The Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) has pioneered a secure whistleblower submission system used around the globe. SecureDrop, an open source platform that fosters secure communication between journalists and sources, empowers whistleblowers to share sensitive information while safeguarding their anonymity. Installed by news outlets on their premises, it protects journalists from surveillance and aims to make governments more transparent and accountable.

According to the FPF, SecureDrop uses the Tor network for anonymity, strong encryption for privacy, and additional protections to prevent malware attacks. It’s in use by more than 60 media organizations worldwide and available in 22 languages. The Guardian, The New York Times, The Washington Post, ProPublica, The Globe and Mail, and The Intercept are among those using this tool.

With Attorney General Pam Bondi announcing in April that reporters will be aggressively pursued in government leak investigations and could be subject to arrest if they refuse to comply, Secure Drop is of critical value.

The memo, “Updated Policy Regarding Obtaining Information From, or Records of, Members of the News Media” outlines changes to the DOJ’s internal “news media guidelines” that governs the use of subpoenas, court orders, and search warrants targeting journalists, their third-party communications or other service providers.

According to FPF:

In many of the recent leak prosecutions in the United States, sources have been investigated because authorities are able to retrieve both metadata and content of communications from third parties like email and phone providers in secret. SecureDrop attempts to completely eliminate third parties from the equation so that news organizations can challenge any legal orders before handing over any data.

SecureDrop also substantially limits the metadata trail that may exist from journalist-source communications in the first place. In addition, it attempts to provide a safer environment for those communications than regular corporate news networks, which may be compromised.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has produced a comprehensive tool-kit of “tips, tools and how-tos for safe online communication. This “surveillance self-defense” package covers such areas as developing a digital security plan, attending a protest, to a deep dive on end-to-end encryption.

From the Tool-Kit:

If you’ve ever worried about protecting the privacy of your digital data or your conversations with others, we’re here to help.

Surveillance Self-Defense is a digital security guide that teaches you how to assess your personal risk from online spying. It can help protect you from surveillance by those who might want to find out your secrets, from petty criminals to nation states. We offer guides to the best privacy-enhancing tools and explain how to incorporate protecting yourself against surveillance into your daily routine.

If you’re ready to take the first steps, our series of basic guides (below) will help you to understand what digital surveillance is and how you can fight it. We suggest starting with the Your Security Plan guide.

Creating Strong Passwords
Keeping Your Data Safe
What Should I Know About Encryption?
Your Security Plan
Communicating With Others
Choosing Your Tools
Seven Steps To Digital Security
Animated Overview: How Strong Encryption Can Help Avoid Online Surveillance
Animated Overview: Using Password Managers to Stay Safe Online
Animated Overview: Protecting Your Device From Hackers
Animated Overview: How to Make a Super-Secure Password Using Dice
Why Communication Metadata Matters