Three bizarre stories caught my eye this weekend, all insane and all pointing to the same thing: national security's war on American daily life.
Here they are:
Flock cameras. The AI-fueled license plate reading network is conquering America at an alarming pace, having found an ingenious end-run around our right to privacy: selling to the neighbors instead of the cops.ICE is acquiring robot dogs. The most hated agency in America is shopping for Boston Dynamics quadrupeds to take another bite out of the quaint notion that this country isn’t a battlefield.WNBA Embraces Counterterrorism. The league is in the news this month not for its playoffs but for hiring a threat intelligence firm — one built to fight ISIS — to handle a supposed "extremist" menace to its players.
National security has colonized American culture so completely that none of this registers as creepy. Flock cameras become a cranky privacy controversy. ICE’s robo-dogs become a zany story you roll your eyes at. A counterterrorism firm for basketball players becomes a friendly write-up on NPR about the importance of combating extremism in sports.
Flock Safety, whose AI-powered license plate readers now sit on poles in thousands of American towns, has become the poster child for the surveillance state. But the state is only half the problem. The other half of Flock's revenue comes from private clients: homeowners associations, apartment complexes, strip-mall owners.
The Fourth Amendment restrains the govenrment. It has nothing to say about your HOA — and there is no fascist entity in America more powerful than the HOA. So through no fault of your own, your vehicle's make, model, and driver get fed continuously into a massive database of movements.
ICE, meanwhile, is buying Boston Dynamics' quadrupedal (four-legged, sheesh) robot dogs for "public safety," on the solemn theory that the danger to its agents has grown too grave to face on two legs. Strip away the breathless talk and one stubborn fact remains: not a single ICE agent was killed in the line of duty this past year. Not one. Yet to hear the agency tell it, there's an epidemic.
Perhaps ICE should examine its own behavior and leash itself.
The WNBA story is stranger still: a basketball league retaining a national security threat intelligence firm to counter a supposed “extremist” threat. Pointing to the rivalry between Angel Reese and Caitlin Clark, NPR laments the online threats and abuse directed at Reese, then hands the ball to Moonshot — an outfit founded to disrupt ISIS recruitment and the spread of jihadism online.
Working with Google’s tech incubator Jigsaw, Moonshot built the “Redirect Method” during the war on terror: algorithmic search-ad targeting that steered people looking for terrorist propaganda toward curated de-radicalization content. It is the height of naïveté to think a man drawn to violent jihad can be search-added into the Boy Scouts. But that is now the methodology being deployed against people who are rude about basketball on the internet.
As Elizabeth Neumann, Moonshot’s chief strategy officer, told NPR:
“It says a lot that here we are, 10 years later, taking that same technology, the methodologies that we use to help governments counter terrorism and other targeted violence, and we are now having to apply it to sports entertainment,”
It does say a lot — though not in the sense that she means.
Neumann personifies the revolving door between the federal homeland security apparatus and the private threat-monitoring industry. A veteran of the Bush White House’s Homeland Security Council and the Obama-era Office of the Director of National Intelligence, she went on to serve as Donald Trump’s Assistant Secretary for Counterterrorism and Threat Prevention at the Department of Homeland Security before transitioning to cable news and corporate counter-extremism consulting.
Treating social media hostility (a redundancy if ever there was one!) as a national security contingency requiring counter-extremism methodologies is institutional mission creep at its finest. Once you reframe internet vitriol through the lens of counter-radicalization, every toxic fan looks like an insurgent-in-training, and every corporate PR headache demands a defense contractor to manage it.
This brings us back to Flock Safety. The genius of modern surveillance is that it doesn’t require an authoritarian decree from Washington to carpet the country in a movement tracking system. It just needs bottom-up panic, which of course national security and its corporate adjuncts happily create.
When Flock launched, it didn’t start by grinding through municipal red tape, contentious city council votes, or public procurement debates. It pitched directly to suburban HOA boards. By selling automated vehicle tracking to neighborhood Karens who monitor their cul-de-sacs with more vigilance than the Pentagon does the Strait of Hormuz, Flock bypassed the very ideals that make America, America in the first place.
Local police departments then partner with the HOAs, gaining real-time access to a sprawling, privately financed surveillance dragnet that taxpayers never had to approve. Then the network of cameras expands, you know, to respond to Amber alerts, and then to kids on electric bikes, and then pretty soon, through the wonders of AI, the entire country is ruled by the big HOA on the lamppost.
This is what permanent war looks like when it comes home.
It’s not rogue CIA officers or shadowy federal plots; it’s a culture that fully accepts the premise that everyday life requires continuous threat modeling, automated surveillance, and preemptive counterinsurgency. The mainstream media meanwhile misses the point, at best trotting out some civil liberties expert who puts you to sleep with an undergraduate seminar on the Fourth Amendment.
In my own reporting, I’ve moved away from the term “national security state” because it’s not just a government phenomenon. Now I just say “national security.”
— Edited by William M. Arkin