Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - Are You On A Govt Watchlist? Cops Are Tracking Anyone Who Hates AI

Starting point is 00:00:00 I would not be surprised if that is a direction where this goes into of trying to just basically sneak into, you know, close conversations and infiltrate activists organizations. Have you been critical of data centers online? Have you expressed skepticism or anger about the tech industry? Well, if so, the government might be watching you. This week, the Intercept published a big story that revealed that Philadelphia police officers admitted that they were tracking legitimate First Amendment activity of people critical of AI. A law enforcement document obtained by the Intercept showed that police were scanning social media looking for posts opposing AI data centers.

Starting point is 00:00:36 So to talk about what's going on and how the government is increasingly monitoring anti-technology and anti-AI speech, I have one of the co-authors of the article Sam Biddle here. Hi, Sam. Welcome. Thanks for having me, Taylor. So you wrote this great story in The Intercept this week with Matt Sledge, and it's titled Philly Cops admit that they're tracking First Amendment activity critical of AI. Can you tell me a little bit about what this story says? and what you found?

Starting point is 00:01:00 Yeah, so we obtained a memo that was published by the Delaware Valley Intelligence Center, which is a fusion center. It's basically a specialized office within the Philly Police Department that focuses on counterterror and major crimes and public threats and things like that. The memo was sort of an overview of what the office had sort of determined to be high-risk rhetoric, you know, speech online espousing anti-Data Center, anti-AI sentiments. You know, these were posts on message boards, posts on Facebook, blog posts, sort of a broad variety of online content. It seems like as there is more and more anger about AI, we're seeing the government increasingly

Starting point is 00:01:46 interested in policing speech and policing speech about technology. When did the government really start tracking online speech in this way? Well, they've been tracking online speech in this way. Well, they've been tracking online speech in this way since there's really been online speech. Fusion centers are a post-9-11 thing. They were spun up after 9-11 as sort of a, you know, how can we avoid this? How can we stop this from happening the next time? There's at least one in every state. And the idea is that they do intelligence analysis and circulate and create a whole lot of documents

Starting point is 00:02:19 and circulate them with each other. And with the FBI, with the Department of Homeland Security, with other federal agencies. It's just a ton of paperwork and documents about anything that they perceive to be a threat. But I think that something that has become a primary function of fusion centers in the year 2026 is monitoring online discussions. Data centers, AI, or those are both hot button topics right now. So I think that's why there's a focus at the moment. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:02:44 I feel like I first became familiar with fusion centers back in 2020 when the Black Lives Matter protests were taking off. You know, obviously the government has been monitoring speech as long as we've had the internet, but it does seem like there was this escalation and this expansion of a lot of infrastructure, which was then maybe expanded, you know, sort of over the following years, but especially in campus protests against, you know, the genocide in Palestine. More recently, it seems like they're targeting AI and sort of speech about technology. So when do you think like anti-tech sentiment really got on their radar? Because this seems to be like a more recent thing in terms of the speech that they're tracking.

Starting point is 00:03:24 Right. anti-data center discourse five years ago, right? Like, there was an anti-AI discourse five years ago. I mean, if I had to guess, I think that like the infrastructure for monitoring speech like this has been around for a long time. And it was created to, you know, find and stop terrorists, right? To monitor someone saying, you know, planning like a bombing or an airplane hijacking. That doesn't really happen very much. Terrorism is extremely rare. Exceedingly rare. So there isn't really much to find. But you have this apparatus that set up to find something that's very rare. there isn't much of it defined.

Starting point is 00:03:55 So they focus on other things people are talking about. And I think it's a good question. Like, was there a precipitating incident? Like, was it the, you know, Molotov cocktail, someone threw at Sam Allman's house? Or was it the Tesla protests or, you know, who knows? I think that that is an open question and a really good one. But I do think that the broader issue is that fusion centers will just focus on whatever people are talking about.

Starting point is 00:04:17 And, you know, like you said, it was Black Lives Matter years back. That is not really a big topic anymore. Now it's data centers. Now it's anti-AI rhetoric. Yeah, it seems like they're really focused on any speech that challenges the government's maybe initiatives or government policy, whether those are policies around like foreign policy issues or, I mean, the Trump administration seems like has really intertwined itself with the tech industry and almost made AI into this issue of national security. Is that part of how they're kind of like able to justify maybe surveilling this kind of speech?

Starting point is 00:04:49 As you point out, this kind of stuff is bipartisan, right? It would happen under every administration would have happened under a Harris administration. But I do think you're right that there has been a really big push to integrate the White House with, you know, like you get, you see like David Sachs, right, as a White House advisor or like things like that. You know, I mean, I think the U.S. has always been a country that is extremely friendly to business interest, to say the least. But I think it's happening in a way that is so out in the open under the Trump administration, you know, crypto and AI lobbyists just basically saying, hey, we want this stuff. And then the government delivering it out in the open. So yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot of the government.

Starting point is 00:05:22 probably a factor of the AI industry data center initiatives being pretty cozy with the government and this being a priority. If you're watching this video and you like my work, please support me on Patreon via the link below or buy a paid subscription to my tech and online culture newsletter at usermag.com. That's usermag.com. I don't have any long-term brand partnerships and a lot of my content is effectively demonetized. I've lost major brand deals for speaking out on certain issues and for challenging power. As you can imagine, advertisers are not exactly eager to work with somebody who covers a lot of the topics that I cover and talks about the things that I talk about.

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Starting point is 00:06:31 I want to dig back into kind of what's going on in Philly and this Fusion Center that you focused on. What sort of things were they looking into and what kind of content online were they determining was sort of domestic extremism? So we don't know what they were looking for. They probably pulled a few examples out of a much broader set of posts that they were monitoring or had, you know, saved for later analysis or investigation. It's a great question. Like, are they just reading every tweet that mentions data centers or, you know, I'm probably using a tool like data miner or some other sort of, you know, sentiment analysis stuff to do like a pretty broad search? I don't know. But what they flagged in the memo is a pretty wide range.

Starting point is 00:07:10 Some of it was stuff that I think is pretty common hyperbolic comments. Like I, like, want to burn down data centers. I think there's a strong argument to be made that that's not like a credible threat of violence. It's hyperbolic speech, which has pretty strong First Amendment protections. If you say, God, I hate Walmart, I wish a tornado would blow my local Walmart away. Or, you know, I wish the Walmart would explode. Like, that's not like a credible threat that you are planning to perpetrate a active planned violence against that place. So, on the other hand, they flagged some discussion of people who were sort of speculating about ways to sabotage data centers.

Starting point is 00:07:43 Some of that was maybe more credible, people talking about, like, could you bomb the data center? Could you set it on fire? Some of the discussion, though, I think was pretty ridiculous. Like, they had flagged some discussion, except some suggestion that maybe would be possible to use an electromagnetic pulse to stop a data center, which would require like, I mean, it's like a science fiction trope. It's like how they kill the big robots in the matrix, right? Like, I don't think that your average person who's pissed off about AI on blue sky is going to build an EMP, you know? They also, the memo raises the possibility of chemical, biological,

Starting point is 00:08:17 and nuclear weapons as a potential risk to data centers, which is, again, just nonsense, right? Like, I mean, I guess in the sense that anything is possible, that's possible, but there's absolutely no evidence that anyone, even outside of the country, is, you know, contemplating nuking data centers. So to say that people online who hate the things might be somehow wrapped up in that is just nonsensical. Yeah, that's very silly. I mean, I don't know. I found there was this fake account pretending to be an anti-AI activist that was actually being run by one of the pro-AI super PACs that another independent journalist and I were reporting on. But they were talking about mailing Lynch to the data center because it would like get

Starting point is 00:08:55 into the HVAC system and take down the servers and this is something that like people were falling for as if that would really work. It's all very like nonsensical and same thing with the nuclear bomb stuff. I mean I think that the way that most people are going to thwart data centers is by doing what they're doing now, which is like protesting and communities voting against them and like, like referendums against them. Like I think that is the threat. I think only in like the war in Iran have you seen actual attacks on data centers using like explosives. And that's in the context of a war, not in the context of political activism or demonstrations or anything like that.

Starting point is 00:09:34 Another one that really stood out was they expressed some concern over a like really kind of boomer Facebook meme. And it was something along the lines of like, I feel that I have a moral obligation to burn down data centers or something like that. And it's just like, you know, like a text over a picture. And again, like to interpret that as a credible threat of violence or somehow like indicative of a plan to burn down a data center, first of all, I don't think people who are actually going to like burn down a building post memes about burning down that building. But I don't know. I'm not a cop. But just an example of how it sort of captures the way that people express opposition to anything, which is like sharing a stupid meme, right? But you know,

Starting point is 00:10:14 That's all it might take to come across the radar of a fusion center or other police. Yeah, then you're on a government watch list or something, which is terrifying. I mean, you mentioned kind of the ways that people are actually thwarting these data centers, and it is a lot of like procedural stuff. It's showing up to the community council meeting or whatever. It's kind of quite boring work, which an increasing number of people are getting engaged in, and that does seem like some sort of threat to the administration. And I'm curious, you know, with this effort to track this like extremism, like, can you talk about

Starting point is 00:10:40 why the Trump administration is trying to frame this, I would say really like sort of very, like actually public sort of civics-minded group of people as like extremists and specifically violent extremists because it seems like the people that I've, you know, that are actually using the more violent language or more like the existential risk people maybe that are nervous about like AI taking over the world. It's not like these like people that are like,

Starting point is 00:11:02 I've looked at the permitting documents for this, and I think we can stop the data center through this sort of like niche loophole. Like those people just have never seen them sort of make violent rhetoric. I completely agree that it's probably more likely to find actual like serious thoughts about destroying data centers among like the sort of more fringe effective altruist ex-risk people like you point out like those are the people who actually think that like sky net is going to happen most people just don't want these things in their neighborhoods or their communities right or they just or they don't want AI taking their jobs they're not worried about like the terminator which i think is how you actually get people to contemplate like real extremism as far as your question about like motive there wasn't any evidence this was something that was being dictated from the federal government down to the fusion centers but But I think that it serves the interests of both the government and industry. Whenever you conflate normal political advocacy that is unfriendly to the state and to industry with extremism or with terrorism,

Starting point is 00:11:58 that's an old tactic going back a very long time in American history. But you brought up like campus activism, right, anti-genocide protests and organizing. If you can paint all those kids as terrorist sympathizers, then you might make it easier to discredit legitimate political opposition to Israel or to American aid to Israel or to the war. And I think similarly, if you can sort of in the popular imagination convince people that there's overlap between people doing the boring work, like you say, I'm just like showing up to meetings and raising your hand and voting or, you know, distributing petitions or whatever, if you can conflate those people with people who are going to, you know, throw a bomb or a

Starting point is 00:12:37 Molotov cocktail or put lint at an HVAC system or whatever, like engage in sabotage, I think it helps discredit the broader movement. And, you know, like, what is motivating that or whether it just sort of happens on its own, I think is a good question. But I think that's sort of the bigger dynamic here is, like, paint people who are organizing as extremists and makes it easier to either criminalize what they're doing or marginalize what they're doing. I mean, I feel like the companies and their lobbyists have played a role in this as well. I mean, I know you wrote about how these corporate entities have cracked down on speech or claimed that Antifa is, like, violent. I think you wrote a story about like meta restricting that language. But it seems like

Starting point is 00:13:15 there's this effort also from the companies, like as the government is framing these tech-critical activists as like violent and extreme, it also seems like it's giving the company's liberty to frame people that are, you know, resisting systems as well as like violent and extreme. I mean, it'll be really interesting to see whether meta, for example, does, does add something to like community standards or start enforcing along those lines. I mean, obviously they have a huge financial interest to do so, right? Like, because, you know, meta's in the data center business and the AI business, it would certainly be in their interest to get rid of that speech. I think you've been covering content moderation stuff probably more than I ever have. But my impression has been that

Starting point is 00:13:54 they sort of just, A, do whatever they want and B, do whatever they think they can get away with at any given time and sort of change the rules accordingly. I'm sure they would love to get rid of anti-datacenter content across Instagram and Facebook. I think maybe at the moment, if they started actually censoring that stuff, like they have to weigh the backlash. against what they get out of it. But yeah, no, there's absolutely an alignment of interest between the platforms where this stuff is being posted and the data center construction companies,

Starting point is 00:14:20 the AI firms, and the government. I mean, it seems like this is going to become quite a defining issue in the midterms. You're seeing the Democrats and Republicans both kind of like grapple with how to handle AI, but a lot of Democrats seem to be like feeding the, I mean, like Bernie Sanders has been really outspoken. It seems to be this issue that mobilizes a lot of their voters. And so how do you see?

Starting point is 00:14:41 this kind of system evolving and how widespread is this monitoring of online speech by data centers by these fusion centers? So, I mean, they monitor a ton of speech that is not criminal in any way. And they'll even say that like these fusion center memos often have some sort of disclaimer that like just because something is mentioned here doesn't mean that it's illegal. There's a difference between like an enforcement or a crackdown on the speech and surveillance of that speech. I think both are big problems and you know, certainly there's a chilling effect from just knowing that what you're saying could wind up in a fusion center memo or worse,

Starting point is 00:15:15 that leads people to self-censor. In terms of where it goes from here, police, even at the local level, have the ability to conduct pretty comprehensive social media surveillance. You know, through a tool like I mentioned, like, data miner, you know, that's relatively inexpensive, pretty accessible. If you have the resources of the FBI or DHS or a fusion center, you, you know, obviously you have even more at your disposal. I think that one thing that would be maybe more worrying than just, you know, searching through tweets and Instagram posts is infiltration of closed groups, like signal groups, places where people are able to organize in private.

Starting point is 00:15:52 I mean, I think that that's something that has already become a problem in terms of anti-ice organizing, which, you know, a lot of that has taken place on signal. Police have pretty broad latitude to infiltrate anything, right? And there's no way to protect against that other than just being very careful about who you led into a group. I would not be surprised if that is a direction where this goes into of trying to just basically sneak into, you know, close conversations and infiltrate activist organizations. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think either way, there's just a lot more awareness and monitoring of speech and concern about backlash to big tech. Like, that seems to be this sort of like growing concern from both the companies and the government.

Starting point is 00:16:28 And I mean, I think that's so much of why Zuckerberg had this complete 180 after Trump was reelected, right, of like doing a hard pivot to the right and dressing like a Joe Rogan producer is because, you know, Trump is so transactional. It doesn't take much to get him on your side, right? And I think that if these companies become increasingly concerned about anti-tech sentiment, again, there's like an alignment of interest between the White House and industry, people who are willing to kiss his ass, and, you know, where they have common ground and wanting these things to get built. Well, Sam, thank you so much for joining me to talk about all of your reporting. It's been great. My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Starting point is 00:17:06 All right. That's it for the show. If you like my work, please, please support me on Patreon via the link below or buy a paid subscription to my substack newsletter at usermag.com. That's usermag.com. I currently have zero sponsors on this show. Every single dollar of your support makes such a difference. It keeps my reporting alive. The best way to support my reporting is to buy a paid subscription to my substack newsletter or support me on Patreon. I'll be back next Friday with a brand new episode of Free Speech Friday.

Starting point is 00:17:32 See you then.

Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - Are You On A Govt Watchlist? Cops Are Tracking Anyone Who Hates AI

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