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The Surveillance State Is Making A Naughty List—And You're On It
By Jogn and Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute | December 18, 2025
Government bureaucrats might think that they have some control over the surveillance state, but they would be dead wrong. The technology and infrastructure drive all data into the hands of Technocrats. Our book, The Final Betrayal, makes it abundantly clear that arch-Technocrats like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, David Sacks, Marc Andreessen, Howard Lutnick, Russ Vought, Michael Kratsios, etc., have invaded Washington, DC, with the intent to turn America into a post-1984 dystopia. Along the way, they are destroying the historical government infrastructure and replacing functionality with AI. ⁃ Patrick Wood, Editor.
"He sees you when you're sleeping.
He knows when you're awake.
He knows if you've been bad or good,
So be good for goodness' sake."
— "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town"
For generations, "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town" has been treated as a playful reminder to children to be good because someone, somewhere, is watching.
Today, it reads less like a joke and more like a warning.
The Surveillance State is making a naughty list, and we're all on it.
Long before Santa's elves start loading his sleigh with toys for good girls and boys, the government's surveillance apparatus is already at work—logging your movements, monitoring your messages, tracking your purchases, scanning your face, recording your license plate, and feeding it all into algorithmic systems designed to determine whether you belong on a government watchlist.
Unlike Santa's naughty list, however, the consequences of landing on the government's "naughty list" are far more severe than a stocking full of coal. They can include heightened surveillance, loss of privacy, travel restrictions, financial scrutiny, police encounters, or being flagged as a potential threat—often without notice, explanation, or recourse.
This is not fiction. This is not paranoia.
This is the modern surveillance state operating exactly as designed.
Santa Claus has long been the benign symbol of omniscient surveillance, a figure who watches, judges, and rewards. His oversight is fleeting, imaginary, and ultimately harmless.
The government's surveillance is none of those things—and never was.
What was once dismissed as a joke—"Santa is watching"—has morphed into a chilling reality. Instead of elves, the watchers are data brokers, intelligence agencies, predictive algorithms, and fusion centers. Instead of a naughty-or-nice list, Americans are sorted into databases, risk profiles, and threat assessments—lists that never disappear.
The shift is subtle but profound.
Innocence is no longer presumed.
Everyone is watched. Everyone is scored. Everyone is a potential suspect.
This is the surveillance state in action.
Today's surveillance state doesn't require suspicion, a warrant, or probable cause. It is omnipresent, omniscient, and inescapable.
Your smartphone tracks your location. Your car records your movements. License plate readers log when and where you drive. Retail purchases create detailed consumer profiles. Smart speakers listen to everything you say. Home security cameras observe not just your property, but your neighbors, delivery drivers, and anyone who passes by.
The government's appetite for data is insatiable.
In a dramatic expansion of surveillance reach, the Transportation Security Administration now shares airline passenger lists with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, enabling ICE to identify and arrest travelers at airports based on immigration status.
In one incident, ICE arrested and immediately deported a college student with no criminal record who was flying home to spend Thanksgiving with her family.
What was once routine aviation security data has been transformed into an enforcement tool—merging civilian travel records with the machinery of deportation and demonstrating how ordinary movements can be weaponized by the state.
Even the most personal acts—like Christmas shopping—are now tracked in real time. Every item you buy, where you buy it, how you pay, and who you buy it for becomes part of a permanent digital record. That data does not stay confined to retailers. It is shared, sold, aggregated, and folded into sprawling surveillance ecosystems that blur the line between corporate data collection and government intelligence.
Companies like Palantir specialize in fusing these data streams into comprehensive behavioral profiles, linking financial activity, social media behavior, geolocation data, and government records into a single, searchable identity map.
The result is not merely a government that watches what you’ve done but one that claims the power to predict what you will do next.
It is a short step from surveillance to pre-crime.
While predictive policing and AI-driven risk assessments are marketed as tools of efficiency and public safety, in reality, they represent a dangerous shift from punishing criminal acts to policing potential behavior.
Algorithms—trained on historical data already shaped by over-policing, bias, and inequality—are now used to predict who might commit a crime, who might protest, or who might pose a "risk." Even the way you drive—where you came from, where you were going and which route you took—is being analyzed by predictive intelligence programs for suspicious patterns that could get you flagged and pulled over.
Once flagged by an algorithm, individuals often have no meaningful way to challenge the designation. The criteria are secret. The data sources opaque. The decisions automated.
Accountability disappears.
This isn't law enforcement as envisioned by the Founders. This is pre-crime enforcement—punishing people not for what they’ve done, but for what an AI machine predicts they might do.
At the same time, President Trump has openly threatened states that attempt to regulate artificial intelligence in order to protect citizens from its discriminatory and intrusive uses—seeking to clear the way for unchecked, nationwide deployment of these systems.
No government initiative has done more to normalize, expand, and entrench mass surveillance than the Trump administration’s war on immigration.
The Trump administration's war on immigration has become the laboratory for the modern surveillance state.
Under the guise of border security, vast stretches of the country have been transformed into Constitution-free zones—places where the Fourth Amendment is treated as optional and entire communities are subjected to constant monitoring.
The federal government has transformed immigration policy into a proving ground for authoritarian surveillance tactics—testing tools, technologies, and legal shortcuts could be deployed with minimal public resistance and quietly repurposed for use against the broader population. As journalist Todd Miller warned, these areas have been transformed into "a ripe place to experiment with tearing apart the Constitution, a place where not just undocumented border-crossers, but millions of borderland residents have become the targets of continual surveillance."
Through ICE and DHS, the government fused immigration enforcement with corporate surveillance technologies—facial recognition, license-plate readers, cellphone tracking, and massive data-sharing agreements—creating a sprawling digital dragnet that now extends far beyond immigrants.
What began as a policy aimed at undocumented immigrants has now become a model for nationwide surveillance policing.
"What's new," reports the Brennan Center for Justice, "is that the federal government now openly says it will use its supercharged spy capabilities to target people who oppose ICE's actions. Labeled as 'domestic terrorists' by the administration, these targets include anti-ICE protesters and anyone who allegedly funds them—all of them part of a supposed left-wing conspiracy to violently oppose the president's agenda."
Please go to Technocracy News & Trends to continue reading.
For generations, "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town" has been treated as a playful reminder to children to be good because someone, somewhere, is watching.
Today, it reads less like a joke and more like a warning.
The Surveillance State is making a naughty list, and we're all on it.
Long before Santa's elves start loading his sleigh with toys for good girls and boys, the government's surveillance apparatus is already at work—logging your movements, monitoring your messages, tracking your purchases, scanning your face, recording your license plate, and feeding it all into algorithmic systems designed to determine whether you belong on a government watchlist.
Unlike Santa's naughty list, however, the consequences of landing on the government's "naughty list" are far more severe than a stocking full of coal. They can include heightened surveillance, loss of privacy, travel restrictions, financial scrutiny, police encounters, or being flagged as a potential threat—often without notice, explanation, or recourse.
This is not fiction. This is not paranoia.
This is the modern surveillance state operating exactly as designed.
Santa Claus has long been the benign symbol of omniscient surveillance, a figure who watches, judges, and rewards. His oversight is fleeting, imaginary, and ultimately harmless.
The government's surveillance is none of those things—and never was.
What was once dismissed as a joke—"Santa is watching"—has morphed into a chilling reality. Instead of elves, the watchers are data brokers, intelligence agencies, predictive algorithms, and fusion centers. Instead of a naughty-or-nice list, Americans are sorted into databases, risk profiles, and threat assessments—lists that never disappear.
The shift is subtle but profound.
Innocence is no longer presumed.
Everyone is watched. Everyone is scored. Everyone is a potential suspect.
This is the surveillance state in action.
Today's surveillance state doesn't require suspicion, a warrant, or probable cause. It is omnipresent, omniscient, and inescapable.
Your smartphone tracks your location. Your car records your movements. License plate readers log when and where you drive. Retail purchases create detailed consumer profiles. Smart speakers listen to everything you say. Home security cameras observe not just your property, but your neighbors, delivery drivers, and anyone who passes by.
The government's appetite for data is insatiable.
In a dramatic expansion of surveillance reach, the Transportation Security Administration now shares airline passenger lists with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, enabling ICE to identify and arrest travelers at airports based on immigration status.
In one incident, ICE arrested and immediately deported a college student with no criminal record who was flying home to spend Thanksgiving with her family.
What was once routine aviation security data has been transformed into an enforcement tool—merging civilian travel records with the machinery of deportation and demonstrating how ordinary movements can be weaponized by the state.
Even the most personal acts—like Christmas shopping—are now tracked in real time. Every item you buy, where you buy it, how you pay, and who you buy it for becomes part of a permanent digital record. That data does not stay confined to retailers. It is shared, sold, aggregated, and folded into sprawling surveillance ecosystems that blur the line between corporate data collection and government intelligence.
Companies like Palantir specialize in fusing these data streams into comprehensive behavioral profiles, linking financial activity, social media behavior, geolocation data, and government records into a single, searchable identity map.
The result is not merely a government that watches what you’ve done but one that claims the power to predict what you will do next.
It is a short step from surveillance to pre-crime.
While predictive policing and AI-driven risk assessments are marketed as tools of efficiency and public safety, in reality, they represent a dangerous shift from punishing criminal acts to policing potential behavior.
Algorithms—trained on historical data already shaped by over-policing, bias, and inequality—are now used to predict who might commit a crime, who might protest, or who might pose a "risk." Even the way you drive—where you came from, where you were going and which route you took—is being analyzed by predictive intelligence programs for suspicious patterns that could get you flagged and pulled over.
Once flagged by an algorithm, individuals often have no meaningful way to challenge the designation. The criteria are secret. The data sources opaque. The decisions automated.
Accountability disappears.
This isn't law enforcement as envisioned by the Founders. This is pre-crime enforcement—punishing people not for what they’ve done, but for what an AI machine predicts they might do.
At the same time, President Trump has openly threatened states that attempt to regulate artificial intelligence in order to protect citizens from its discriminatory and intrusive uses—seeking to clear the way for unchecked, nationwide deployment of these systems.
No government initiative has done more to normalize, expand, and entrench mass surveillance than the Trump administration’s war on immigration.
The Trump administration's war on immigration has become the laboratory for the modern surveillance state.
Under the guise of border security, vast stretches of the country have been transformed into Constitution-free zones—places where the Fourth Amendment is treated as optional and entire communities are subjected to constant monitoring.
The federal government has transformed immigration policy into a proving ground for authoritarian surveillance tactics—testing tools, technologies, and legal shortcuts could be deployed with minimal public resistance and quietly repurposed for use against the broader population. As journalist Todd Miller warned, these areas have been transformed into "a ripe place to experiment with tearing apart the Constitution, a place where not just undocumented border-crossers, but millions of borderland residents have become the targets of continual surveillance."
Through ICE and DHS, the government fused immigration enforcement with corporate surveillance technologies—facial recognition, license-plate readers, cellphone tracking, and massive data-sharing agreements—creating a sprawling digital dragnet that now extends far beyond immigrants.
What began as a policy aimed at undocumented immigrants has now become a model for nationwide surveillance policing.
"What's new," reports the Brennan Center for Justice, "is that the federal government now openly says it will use its supercharged spy capabilities to target people who oppose ICE's actions. Labeled as 'domestic terrorists' by the administration, these targets include anti-ICE protesters and anyone who allegedly funds them—all of them part of a supposed left-wing conspiracy to violently oppose the president's agenda."
Please go to Technocracy News & Trends to continue reading.
________
Editor's note: Now what? Ray Cohn mentored Donald Trump. Trump's early professional relationship with Roy Cohn (The Apprenticeship) functioned less as a traditional attorney–client arrangement than as an informal mentorship, through which Cohn modeled an aggressive, confrontational style of law, media engagement, and power-building (rumors circulated that Cohn who was a well known homosexual, compromised J. Edgar Hoover) that emphasized counterattack, loyalty over convention, and the strategic use of publicity. Trump would later incorporate these tactics into his own public and political persona. Trump and his family have profited significantly from cryptocurrency ventures by launching and selling politically branded tokens (like the $TRUMP meme coin), holding large stakes in crypto platforms such as World Liberty Financial (WLFI), and earning income from token sales and fees. Trump personally reported tens of millions of dollars in crypto income in 2024, and broader reporting estimates the family's combined crypto profits have exceeded $1 billion, highlighting how his political brand and business activities intersect in the digital asset space.
Zak Folkman and Chase Herro are the crypto entrepreneurs who co-founded World Liberty Financial (WLFI). The Trump-backed decentralized finance project tied to Trump's cryptocurrency ventures. Both men had previously worked together on other crypto and online businesses, including the now-defunct DeFi platform Dough Finance, and ran various online ventures before joining the WLFI project; Herro has described himself as a longtime crypto entrepreneur and Folkman previously founded a dating-advice company, and they were introduced to the Trump family through mutual associates before helping launch and develop the WLFI token and ecosystem.
It's not Sam Altman, he's just the slick front man (he's the bad cop while Elon Musk is the good cop) playing his part...
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