The FBI Wants to Track What We Think About

FBI Director Kash Patel

​As Ken Klippenstein reports, the FBI is planning to create a new center to proactively track the social media posts of Americans who may be “domestic terrorists.” The dangers to privacy and the Fourth Amendment associated with such extensive surveillance are obvious. But when one considers the list of proposed categories, George Orwell’s notion of “thoughtcrime” leaps to mind rather than anything resembling actual terrorism.

The FBI’s suspect categories include:

• Three varieties of “anti”: anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity
• Three varieties of extreme: concerning migration, race, and gender
• Three varieties of hostility: toward traditional American families, religion, and morality

It’s a perfectly malleable list, capable of being repurposed according to what antagonizes whoever is in power. Today it’s atheists, agnostics, and Bernie Sanders supporters. (Good thing Thomas Paine, the anti-Christian patriot who helped spark the American Revolution, did not live to fall under suspicion from this list.) But tomorrow the government could just as easily cast suspicion on gun owners or perhaps once again target “radical traditional Catholics.”

According to the budget request that Klippenstein highlighted, airing your opinions on social media seems like the best way to get included in the new database:

“Domestic terrorists exploit a variety of popular social media platforms, smaller websites with targeted audiences, and encrypted chat applications. They use these platforms to recruit new adherents, plan and rally support for in-person actions, and disseminate materials encouraging radicalization and mobilization to violence.”

Terrorists do, in fact, use social media. They also use mobile phones, get around in cars, and eat at restaurants. Similarly, most of us use social media, and often use encrypted apps to protect our privacy. Once again, the government is using the broadest of brushes to make everyone a potential suspect.

In other words, warns Klippenstein, under such a regime we should all be officially “on notice.” The Biden administration had convinced itself that the First Amendment did not protect speech it regarded as disinformation or misinformation. Now the Trump administration is ready to use nebulous categories to render people suspect, from your local atheist to the anti-ICE protester.
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More than ever before in our history, the federal government seems ready to demonize what citizens think. These are the times that try men’s souls.

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