Connexion
The recent release of Anthony Fauci’s diaries, followed by his refusal to answer questions in an appearance before a US Senate committee by invoking the Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination 111 times, highlighted a stark divide in how the Covid pandemic was handled by public health authorities. This is as true of Australia as of the US.
Repeatedly, against certainty expressed in public to justify official statements on the origins of the virus and on lockdown, mask, and vaccine policies, their private contemporaneous conversations confirm that even the top scientists were making decisions based on scientific uncertainty.
Consequently, one of the key legacies of the public-private gap is growing distrust of official claims. That scepticism should extend to the future pandemic agenda. We rely on the World Health Organisation to coordinate among countries to prevent scourges such as pandemics reaching our shores, or at least mitigate their effects. In doing so, we must defer to an army of international bureaucrats who work in such institutions. A deference that relies on trust.
Their salaries and careers depend on convincing us to part with more of our money to support their work. Yet, according to a new article on international pandemic financing in the Cambridge journal Health Economics, Policy and Law, the WHO and World Bank rely on dubious assumptions to calculate the return on investment case on which all major international efforts to mitigate future pandemics rely.
This should alarm governments. Mitigation is worth investing in, as pandemics will occur from time to time. But the article shows that current investments will have an overall detrimental effect on global health. Most starkly, it suggests a deep rot in the quality of institutions we rely on as stewards of this commonly accepted global good.
The WHO and World Bank report, produced at the request of the G20 in 2022, proposes an annual $31.1 billion budget for pandemic preparedness and prevention, about $10.5 billion of which would come through foreign aid (including Australia). About $26 billion would come from low and middle-income countries already struggling with economic issues including burgeoning Covid debt. For context, the entire WHO budget for 2024-25 was just $3.8 billion a year.
The point of the WHO and World Bank’s argument is that if we spend such resources on preparing for pandemics, we will reap orders of magnitude greater return on investment down the road, more than a thousandfold in some wealthy countries – a bargain difficult to refuse if true.
The article from Leeds University shows that the financial arguments are based on smoke and mirrors. They rely on assumptions on the quality-adjusted life years lost to pandemics as against the big three global infectious diseases of HIV-AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria; on the share of global funds to be devoted to pandemics in comparison to the other three per life saved in each case; and on the benefits to be gained from investments in vaccines and other pharmaceutical products instead of in the more basic determinants of health resilience in the population such as nutrition, sanitation, water, and hygiene. These are the factors, along with antibiotics and gains in medical advances, that have reduced the mortality toll from pandemics since the Spanish flu of 1918.
Furthermore, the WHO and World Bank also discount the adjustments made to human behaviour to mitigate health risks as they become obvious, collateral costs of the pandemic response measures, and the likely benefits of investing in those measures.
This matters because our government has signed on to the amended International Health Regulations, is expecting to sign the proposed WHO Pandemic Agreement, and looks set to sign a UN political agreement this September advocating for yet more money for the authors and beneficiaries of the growing pandemic industry. They are promising a lot of money based on the WHO’s costings.
It matters because most Australians assumed that we could trust international institutions and that they valued rigour rather than engage in false accounting and subterfuge.
Unfortunately, incentives without accountability are a poor basis for health governance. It matters because funds to finance the pharmaceutical corporations, research institutions, and bureaucrats who stand to benefit from the pandemic agenda will have to be diverted from programs that work. International funding for the big endemic diseases and basic priorities such as nutrition is already falling, while the pandemic agenda expands. The Leeds authors call for simple transparency and honesty in assessing global health priorities, and in paying for them. Not a big ask. The Australian government has a choice to be constructive on behalf of its taxpayers and require better, or through blind acquiescence remain part of the problem.
Republished from The Australian
The post WHO’s High-Price Pandemic Plan appeared first on Activist Post.
One site is near the military’s main chemical and biological weapons testing range. Another parcel is a half-mile from civilian housing.
At Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, on ground the Army’s own contracting documents describe as previously used for grazing, a company owned by two of the largest investment firms in the world is preparing to build a data center.
That site sits about an hour’s drive from the nearest community, on the installation where the U.S. military conducts its primary chemical and biological weapons testing. Three parcels there total roughly 3,466 acres. One of them, about 1,201 acres, is already spoken for.
It is one of at least a dozen military installations the Army and the Department of the Air Force have opened to commercial data center developers over the past year and a half. Two of those deals are real; the rest are still proposals.
In late March, the Army conditionally selected two companies to enter exclusive negotiations to build and operate commercial hyperscale data centers on Army land.
Carlyle, the global investment firm, was picked for roughly 1,384 acres at Fort Bliss, Texas. CyrusOne, a data center operator jointly held by funds managed by KKR and BlackRock, was picked for the parcel at Dugway. Each project is estimated to cost about $2 billion, according to the Financial Times.
The companies will be responsible for financing, building, operating, maintaining and eventually decommissioning the facilities, the Army said, on what it called “underutilized but non-excess Army land at no upfront cost to taxpayers.” In exchange for the land, the service gets access to computing power.
It all runs through the Army’s Enhanced Use Lease program, driven by a Trump executive order directing agencies to open non-excess federal land to data center development. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is handling lease negotiations and environmental review.
“AI is a strategic asset for the Army,” Army Secretary Dan Driscoll said in the March announcement. “It is a force multiplier, supports future transformation and requirements, keeps the Army ahead of our adversaries, and generates resiliency across the force.” Driscoll told the Wall Street Journal that the Fort Bliss facility would be “the first hyper-scale data center that the Pentagon has ever done.”
Only Fort Bliss and Dugway have been awarded so far, and even those remain conditional, pending negotiation. Beyond them, federal contracting documents show the Army considering data centers at Fort Hood, Texas, and Fort Bragg, N.C.
The Department of the Air Force put out its own call in 2025 for private AI data center projects on unused land at Arnold Air Force Base, Tenn., Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, N.J., Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, Ariz., and Robins Air Force Base, Ga.
More recently, it sought bidders for facilities at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Eielson Air Force Base and Clear Space Force Station in Alaska. Acreage varies enormously; for example, Fort Hood has 207 acres on offer. Fort Bliss has nearly seven times that.
Dugway is remote by design, although not every site is. Contracting documents show the Army weighing a parcel at Fort Hood within a half-mile of residential and commercial property, and several potential locations at Fort Bragg within one mile of civilian areas and a half-mile of civilian housing.
Proximity to the population is what has made data centers a heated topic in the civilian world. Nearly $156 billion in projects nationwide have been delayed or canceled after local opposition, according to Data Center Watch.
In Virginia, which holds the world’s highest concentration of the facilities, a state-funded study found residents’ monthly energy bills could rise by $14 to $37 by 2040.
“So I think the difference between us, the Army, doing a data center, and say Meta or Google, is we’re part of the communities that are there, and we are going to engage with them on a routine and regular basis to look for solutions that work for everyone, right?” Col. John Oliver, executive officer for Deputy Army Under Secretary Dave Fitzgerald, told Defense One. “Because, yes, we understand that there’s been consternation with data centers.”
Two requirements attached to these projects do not apply to commercial builds off base. Proposals must include net-zero water usage and a power plan that does not draw on the local electrical grid. Bidders were also required to describe plans for “local outreach and engagement” and to assess “any risks or opposition” to the project.
The Defense Department’s own procurement documents, obtained by the trade publication Data Center Dynamics, rate the water risk for the El Paso area as “Extremely High.” Data centers consume water to cool their servers. Fort Bliss is where the Army wants its flagship.
Army officials want the project to be a net contributor rather than a net drain. In the spring, Fitzgerald traveled to Fort Bliss for a listening session with the commander of the 1st Armored Division, community members, El Paso Water, El Paso Electric and Carlyle. One idea on the table is having the developer drill a new well to feed the city’s desalination plant, offsetting what the data center uses.
“We are encouraging Carlyle to do that, so actually make it net-positive,” Oliver told Defense One. “We don’t know if that’s an engineering solution that we can actually get to yet, but we’re actively working toward that as a part of the process.”
Darrell M. West, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who studies data center development, said the approach is sound, and that communities which have accepted the facilities tend to be the ones told the full details in advance.
“People want to know up-front, you know, where the energy is coming from, how much water is being used, how much the overall cost is going to be, and what the noise levels are,” West said.
Rep. Cory Mills, a Florida Republican, secured a provision in the House version of the fiscal 2027 defense authorization bill. This bill bars the Defense Department from leasing land for data centers unless developers agree not to install equipment containing components made in China, Russia, Iran or North Korea. The restriction covers certain printed circuit boards, advanced semiconductors and chipsets the department considers a security risk.
“Honored to pass this amendment to protect our military installations from Chinese components being used in data centers on our installations,” Mills wrote on X.
The Army objected. The measure would create a “federal land penalty,” a service official told Federal News Network, imposing rules on companies building on installations that would not apply to identical projects built anywhere else. “We want Congress to incentivize companies to build on secure federal land, rather than creating barriers that drive them away,” the official said.
Rep. John Garamendi, a California Democrat, proposed requiring the Pentagon to evaluate a data center’s energy and water consumption, noise and light pollution, and effects on security and supply chains before finalizing any deal. House Armed Services Republicans rejected it.
“We’re not opposed to data centers,” Garamendi said. “We just want to make sure that if we’re going to put a data center on a federal facility, that federal facility is not going to be degraded by the data center.”
His questions were installation questions. “Is there encroachment on training and operations and the physical and supply chain of security?” he asked.
Senate Armed Services Republicans defeated a separate Democratic amendment that would have blocked leasing until the Pentagon finalizes a data center strategy. House appropriators, meanwhile, adopted language acknowledging that data centers “place significant strain on energy and water resources and communities have resisted such projects.”
For anyone stationed at or living near one of these installations, several things are known for sure. Only two projects have been awarded, and both remain conditional. Fort Hood, Fort Bragg and the Air Force sites are solicitations, not commitments.
Initial operating capability at Fort Bliss is projected for fiscal 2027 and at Dugway for fiscal 2029. That is when the first capability comes online, not when a finished campus exists. Oliver has described the long-term vision as a campus with a commercial side, a classified military data side, and onsite power generation.
The Army Corps of Engineers is conducting the environmental review at both awarded sites. Developers must build independent power that does not tap the local grid and meet net-zero water usage. Excess power generated on base could potentially be sold back to civilian grids.
The Association of Defense Communities has scheduled further discussion of military data center development at its Installation Innovation Forum in October 2026.
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A major showdown on the House floor seemed imminent. An amendment, advanced by the Rules Committee, was poised to force a rare and telling record vote on stripping Israel of $3.3 billion in annual US military aid.
Brought forward by Republican Representative Thomas Massie and drawing support from key progressive Democrats like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Greg Casar, the measure was set to put every lawmaker’s stance on unconditional foreign assistance under a public microscope.
However, the high-stakes vote never actually happened. On June 30, the entire legislative package collapsed under the weight of Washington’s internal political warfare. In a dramatic procedural twist, a coalition of Democrats and disgruntled conservative Republicans voted down the mandatory ‘rule’ required to even begin debating the underlying State Department spending bill.
But even if the vote on Massie’s amendment had occurred, the result would have been entirely predictable. It would have been defeated, as support for Israel on both sides of the congressional aisle remains structurally entrenched – even as the American public shifts against Israeli policy in historic numbers.
According to a watershed Gallup poll published on February 27, a plurality of Americans now sympathize more with the Palestinians than the Israelis, leading by a margin of 41 percent to 36 percent. This marked the first time since Gallup began tracking the metric over two decades ago that Israel did not hold the upper hand in public sympathy.
Yet the shift is part of a broader, undeniable trend. A nationwide survey published in late June 2026 by Quinnipiac University revealed that an unprecedented 48 percent of American voters now think the United States is “too supportive” of Israel – the highest percentage recorded since the pollster first began tracking the question in 2017.
This is precisely why Massie’s amendment carries such profound weight. It is significant not because US politicians have suddenly developed a collective moral conscience, but because recent election cycles represented the first time in modern American history where Palestine factored as a major, decisive variable in how citizens cast their ballots.
For years, conventional political analysts dismissed pro-Palestinian mobilization, claiming Americans only vote based on immediate socioeconomic interests and rigid party loyalties. That assessment has since proven faulty.
The political cost of Washington’s complicity became undeniable following the fallout of the 2024 presidential race, a reality later confirmed by those within the inner sanctums of power. In the post-election debates, senior administration insiders admitted that the handling of the Gaza genocide alienated core voter blocks.
The political cost of Washington’s complicity became undeniable after the 2024 presidential race. According to Axios, top Democratic strategists conducting the party’s post-election audit explicitly admitted to advocacy groups that internal party data proved the administration’s Gaza policy was a “net-negative” on the ballot.
This finding – disclosed during internal briefings by DNC autopsy author Paul Rivera – confirmed that the party’s unconditional backing of Israel directly fractured its base, and ultimately contributed to its loss of the elections.
The upcoming November elections are expected to be fiercely contested, and Gaza will, once more, be on the ballot. Following a series of progressive, anti-war victories in local primaries, The Guardian reported that US foreign policy toward the conflict has effectively “turned into something of a litmus test for the left.”
This historic transformation in the popular American perception of Palestine and Israel does not indicate that a political rupture is soon to follow, as US politicians are notorious for their moral flexibility and their ability to spin language in whatever way is necessary to remain in power.
Indeed, the evolution of the language used by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez regarding the word ‘genocide’ in Gaza tells the entire story of how the Democratic establishment is never compelled by genuine moral urgency, but rather by sheer political expediency.
In the early months of the genocide, Ocasio-Cortez hesitated to adopt the term, acutely aware of the deep sensitivities surrounding such language in US media and mainstream society.
“The fact that this word is even in our discourse… demonstrates the mass inhumanity that Gaza is facing,” she stated, attempting to navigate an acceptable rhetorical middle ground in January 2024 during an appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press.
Yet, under the relentless weight of pressure from an increasingly mobilized progressive constituency, she systematically upgraded her language in March of the same year, declaring on the House floor: “If you want to know what an unfolding genocide looks like, open your eyes. It looks like the forced famine of 1.1 million innocents.”
This linguistic shift continued to intensify until it reached the Munich Security Conference last February, where Ocasio-Cortez finally deployed the term without any qualification. Unconditional US aid, she flatly argued, “enabled a genocide in Gaza.”
Ocasio-Cortez is just one of many Democratic progressives who carefully filtered their vocabulary to avoid the political fallout of using the term genocide too early, or too late. Her position was eventually corrected not because of a sudden moral awakening or the discovery of new information regarding the “unfolding genocide,” but because the margins of error allowed by a newly conscious American public have completely closed.
Therefore, the strategic focus must remain on reaching out to the public, who hold the true power to influence – and even coerce – politicians into making the right choices.
Ultimately, the current movement serves as a crucial barometer, proving that sustained, grassroots, anti-war pressure is successfully destabilizing Israel’s traditionally unquestioned shield in Washington.
The post Israel Debated: Why Palestine Is Rewriting the Rules of Domestic US Politics appeared first on Activist Post.
For those unfamiliar with the intricate machinery of Israeli politics, the unanimous 110-0 vote to dissolve the Knesset on May 20 appears to be an earth-shattering event. On the surface, it looks as if the days of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his coalition of far-right extremists are numbered. The reality, however, is far more complex.
Israel’s current political implosion is fundamentally tied to its failure to escape the ghosts of October 7. When the country’s military defenses collapsed on that day, Israel was transformed from a state with a formidable reputation as an invincible regional superpower into one trapped with a struggling army, structurally incapable of decisively winning a single war.
Since the launch of the devastating genocide in Gaza, neither the Israeli government nor the military establishment has been able to answer two fundamental questions:
One, how did the world’s self-proclaimed “invincible army” collapse in a matter of hours, leaving the entire Southern Command – whose sole job was to keep Gazans besieged – in total shambles?
Two, why has that same heavily funded military machine failed to achieve a decisive victory despite the near-total destruction of the Strip and the unprecedented slaughter and wounding of much of its population?
Complicating the matter is Benjamin Netanyahu’s pathological refusal to honestly investigate either the October 7 intelligence failure or the subsequent conduct of the Gaza war. Instead, he focused entirely on domestic damage control and image management, aggressively marginalizing or firing intelligence official, or high-ranking bureaucrats who challenged his narrative. Rather than pursuing a viable exit strategy, Netanyahu treated the defense apparatus as a public relations shield.
Consequently, opposition voices – initially led by Yair Lapid and his Yesh Atid party – began demanding Netanyahu’s resignation and snap elections. What began as predictable political fallout quickly evolved into a sweeping popular movement.
Public confidence in the government continues to plummet. Recent opinion polls consistently show that a vast majority of Israelis believe Netanyahu acts out of personal political survival rather than national interest. Data suggests that if elections were held today, his right-wing bloc would suffer a catastrophic defeat at the hands of a newly consolidated opposition – namely Beyachad (‘Together’), the newly formed unified list established by Naftali Bennett and Lapid.
Netanyahu, whose legacy as Israel’s longest-serving prime minister is now defined by strategic failure, subsists in a profound personal and political crisis. His deliberate escalations of regional conflict served no distinct military purpose; instead, they merely highlighted his desperation, turning his rhetorical pledges of “total victory” into a hollow attempt to prevent his coalition from fracturing.
Meanwhile, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich exploited Netanyahu’s vulnerability to advance their own extremist agendas. Bent on rapid colonial expansion, they accelerated West Bank annexation, pushed draconian laws to execute Palestinian prisoners, and tightened the siege on occupied East Jerusalem.
Under normal circumstances, the sheer scale of the domestic, economic, and diplomatic harm engineered by this coalition should have removed it from power. Yet Netanyahu survived by exploiting deep social fractures and relying on unconditional support from Washington.
This survival shield was further fortified by the initial impotence of a fragmented political opposition and a perpetual wartime atmosphere that Netanyahu cultivated to freeze dissent. Not even his corruption trials derailed his career; he adapted state institutions into instruments of personal survival.
Yet the ultimate irony of Israeli politics is that pressure came not from mounting casualties or international isolation, but from compulsory military conscription of the ultra-Orthodox, or Haredim.
For decades, secular Israelis complained about the sweeping draft exemptions granted to yeshiva students, but the political elite routinely shrugged it off as a secondary culture war that could be managed via backroom political dealings.
Israel’s overextended, multi-front war of attrition completely smashed that equilibrium. The issue was violently pushed back to the surface because the military quite literally ran out of bodies. The true gravity of this manpower crisis was exposed when the army Chief of Staff, Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir, explicitly broke ranks during a closed-door security cabinet meeting to warn that “the IDF is going to collapse in on itself.”
Zamir reportedly raised “ten red flags” before the political leadership, stating bluntly that after months of intensive combat across Gaza, the northern border, and regional theaters, the military was facing an immediate, unsustainable deficit of over 12,000 combat soldiers.
For over two years, Netanyahu postponed a legal verdict on the Haredi draft. But mounting military setbacks, particularly on the Lebanese front, made further delays impossible.
The opposition seeks elections while Netanyahu engages in legislative theater, using loyalists and parliamentary procedures to slow the process.
Yet this political drama is secondary to the deeper crisis. No coalition maneuvering can salvage a state facing structural decline. Nothing will heal Israel’s fractures until it confronts the root cause of its crisis: endless, unwinnable military campaigns that have devastated Gaza and the wider region.
The crisis engulfing Israel is self-inflicted – and there can be no lasting peace until the state’s deep-seated criminality and ongoing genocide and wars against Palestinians and the wider Arab world come to an end.
The post Self-Engineered Decay: Why Israel’s Political Collapse Cannot Be Separated from Its War Crimes appeared first on Activist Post.
When it was reported that Wegmans grocery stores were utilizing facial recognition technology (FRT) to collect data on their customers, the company declined to disclose the software-end of its surveillance machine. Their reticence may be related to the FRT industry’s deep ties to the national security state — leaving consumers’ data just a knock away from American intelligence agencies.
As far back as the 1970s, CCTV cameras have decorated private businesses and public buildings — providing a means of deterring theft for property owners and keeping records of activity through omnipresent VCR and later digital cameras. At its inception, there was virtually no backlash or critique against the new technology’s surveillance potential, allowing for a smooth implementation over the years. Now, decades later, it has become ubiquitous. Shoppers accept its existence and, consciously or not, adjust their behavior around it. For almost all, it is not a problem, but a fact of life.
Why, then, was there such an uproar when a popular East Coast supermarket chain revealed they are not only surveilling their customers with CCTV — but using their cameras to collect shoppers’ biometric data?
Gothamist, the NYC-fixed blog, reported in January that Wegmans grocery stores in Manhattan and Brooklyn had put up signs that read “biometric identifier information collected at this location,” including facial recognition, eye scans and voiceprints.
The story caught wind — multiple New York State legislators and an NYC assembly member wrote letters to Wegmans disapproving of the practice. Some even proposed laws to make it mandatory for the chain to disclose these new surveillance systems in their areas outside of the city.
The resulting P.R. crisis pressured the grocery chain into a response. Though the company assured the media that the sole purpose of the technology is to keep their “stores secure and safe,” it admitted that their “system collects facial recognition data” in order to “identify individuals who have been previously flagged for misconduct.” In other words, Wegmans is building privately owned profiles of its customers, and categorizing some of them as potential criminals.
The statement claimed that “[i]mages and video are retained only as long as necessary for security purposes and then disposed of,” likening the technology to 20th century localized CCTV recordings — i.e. contained securely in one place and easily destroyed. The following sentence, however, casts an eerie ambiguity on this data retainment time frame: “For security reasons, we do not disclose the exact retention period, but it aligns with industry standards.” Without an “exact retention period” codified, Wegmans’ publicly-issued policy effectively gives them carte blanche to store biometric data for as long as they please, so long as the company deems it “necessary for security purposes.”
A Wegmans spokesperson told the Buffalo-based Investigative Post that the company shares data collected from facial recognition technology (FRT) with law enforcement. When asked whether Wegmans shares information with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), she refused to comment.
The cameras that Wegmans uses come from a Swedish company called Axis Communications, which has contracted with the Department of War (DoW) and actively works with law enforcement. Wegmans, however, has declined to disclose the software-end of their system.
The Investigative Post was told by a Wegmans spokesperson that: “[…] in-store cameras ‘are simply getting video of our stores’ and said the company does not use AI camera programs to track customers.” The Post also noted that“[t]he company privacy policy, however, states Wegmans ‘collect[s] information about you in a number of ways’ including ‘through in- store technology, such as … video cameras.’”
The statement Wegmans released in response to the controversy further compounded its contradictory statements, as the company had previously stated that “the system collects facial recognition data.” Furthermore, Wegmans claimed that “[p]ersons of interest are determined by our asset protection team based on incidents occurring on our property and on a case-by-case basis, on information from law enforcement for criminal or missing persons cases.”
Thus, if AI programs are not being used to track customers, then how is Wegmans collecting facial recognition data on its customers and linking that data to previous incidents where individuals were “flagged for misconduct,” as well as to the information they receive from law enforcement?
Furthermore, an examination into the law that required the popular chain to post the signage disclosing their biometric data collection brings to light further inconsistencies in Wegmans’ public remarks. N.Y.C. Administrative Code § 22-1204 (Local Law 2021/003) states that a business is exempt from disclosing collection, use, and retention of biometric identifier information if:
“the images or videos collected are not analyzed by software or applications that identify, or that assist with the identification of, individuals based on physiological or biological characteristics [and . . .] the images or video are not shared with, sold or leased to third-parties other than law enforcement agencies.”
Therefore, the mere act of disclosing their use of the technology strongly suggests that they are engaged in either one of these practices.
Wegmans, in their statement, however, explains that they “do not share facial recognition scan data with any third party.” However, their privacy policy counters this by stating that the “security information” they collect, which includes facial recognition data, “is only accessible to a limited number of Wegmans employees, third-party service providers, and/or law enforcement…”
The contradictions here amalgamate into something deeply concerning. It appears that Wegmans is obfuscating the press’s inquiries into the totality of its digital surveillance infrastructure, likely to avoid disclosing the software being used to collect, analyze and share the biometric data it is collecting on its customers. Why?
Perhaps their reticence to comment on whether they share biometric data with ICE — which is increasingly becoming an unaccountable, biometric-surveillance-powered police force — illuminates their motive. As reports continue to emerge of ICE utilizing invasive apps developed by the CIA-funded company Palantir to make its arrests, and as Americans’ disapproval of the deportation authorities skyrockets, the unveiling of such a collaboration would thrust the company into an even worse P.R. crisis.
Shareholders of Home Depot, for example, are pressuring the company to “evaluate and report the risks associated with sharing data with third-party surveillance vendors” after it was revealed that that Flock Safety, a surveillance company with whom Home Depot partners, was giving federal officers “side-door access” to its trove of license plate data for immigration-related investigations.
Flock Safety’s entanglement with ICE is particularly worth noting. Even though ICE does not directly contract with Flock, “the agency sources data from Flock’s cameras by making requests to local law enforcement.” Such an arrangement is indicative of the hall of mirrors that sensitive data enters when it is obtained by private companies — bouncing across the public and private sector with ease and little transparency.
Though Wegmans seems intent on hiding the software it uses for its biometric surveillance – an author of this article asked customer service employees at the Manhattan location to disclose this information, and was quickly referred to corporate, where his questions received answers analogous to other coverage of the story — an inquiry into the most prominent software providers of facial recognition technology in retail/grocery stores uncovers an industry wound up in the ties between Silicon Valley and the national security state, including federal agencies such as ICE.
While Wegmans’ software provider remains unclear, its biometric surveillance policy is not an anomaly, but rather a more recent development in the expansion of public-private mass surveillance. A deeper investigation into the most prominent software providers of facial recognition technology in retail/grocery stores uncovers an industry enmeshed in the intersection between Silicon Valley and the national security state, including federal agencies such as ICE.
Silicon Valley, in conjunction with the Intelligence Community and the Pentagon, have constructed the pillars of our digital ecosystem — the roots of which can be found all the way back in Pentagon projects of counterinsurgency from the Cold War, and now in the expansion of ICE. As the origins and connections of the proceeding companies make clear, facial recognition technology is only one of the more recent — and technologically advanced — iterations of this apparatus’ inventions of control.
Situated in the private sector, however, the surveillance applications of facial recognition have also been used to serve the direct business interests of the tech companies’ clients. Deployed as part of the profit-building agendas of massive retail and grocery corporations, this technology is thus utilized for multiple purposes — both as a weapon of the security state, and as a dystopian tool of profit extraction for corporate behemoths.
These uses, however, are not isolated from one another. In the pursuit of each, by deploying this technology for different intents and purposes, both the corporate and public sectors shore up their respective power and ability to further the class interests of the American oligarchy, which dominates American politics. This is most clearly demonstrated by the official partnerships and agreements between these sectors which, though the details of their activities remain scant, are a window into the structural enmeshment of these ostensibly isolated entities.
To begin to grasp the structural functions of this network, an understanding of the way in which this technology has been deployed in the private sector is necessary. The first section of this article will detail these uses. This exploration will inevitably entangle the public sector into the mix, as a major function of corporate surveillance technology involves collaboration with the U.S. government, its security agencies and law enforcement. From there, this article will recount the origins of two specific companies — Clearview AI and Oosto — to further demonstrate this point, and also reveal some of the specific political milieus within American politics that have accumulated significant surveillance capabilities by hitching their wagons to the ever-expanding partnership between the national security state — what the late academic Michael Parenti described as a “mostly secret unit of misgovernment that is capable of the most unspeakable crimes, crimes that are perpetrated against people all around the world and dissidents at home” — and its private sector collaborators.
What is uncovered is a seemingly inescapable panopticon that is dedicated, not to the vague promises of “security” that its owners promise through press releases and media comments, but to hyper-capitalist power from every angle — from maximizing profits to criminalizing anyone who challenges their right to rule.
Ultimately, facial recognition technology is aimed at building sophisticated profiles of individuals — profiles that, with faces attached to them, can provide an ostensibly undeniable link between data-driven insights and particular people. In other words, it acts as a tool of intelligence gathering, capable of putting a face to — not the name — but the data. From there, the ways in which the owners of this intelligence may utilize this data are seemingly limitless. Almost all of these uses, however, are dedicated to furthering the class interests of those deploying it, as well as those creating it (since the two parties, customer and vendor, are dependent on each other in this scenario for different reasons).
Last month, WIRED published a chilling exposé into the surveillance operations headed by the owner of Madison Square Garden (MSG), James Dolan, and his head of security, John Eversole. The story demonstrates one particular way facial recognition technology (FRT) shores up the power of those able to access its vast digital eyes; it can be used to identify agitators, perceived delinquents and political enemies of the technology owners. From there, after identification via FRT, these subjects can be handled accordingly.
The rampant and unabashed private surveillance apparatus being run out of Dolan’s multiple stadium empire has targeted cheeky fans, former players, celebrity super fans as well as litigators deemed hostile to MSG and whom Dolan has placed on his “legal” blacklist. The new exposé, however, gives readers a closer peek through the curtain shielding MSG’s executive offices — revealing that Dolan has effectively constructed a rogue, privately owned intelligence agency within MSG. WIRED referred to this as Dolan’s “own deep state.”
Beyond surveilling perceived adversaries of Dolan at the stadiums themselves, the CEO’s mini-intelligence agency allegedly enacted spying operations aimed at enemies outside of his stadiums, for purposes ranging from the collection of blackmail to keeping tabs on potentially litigious adversaries.
FRT played an undeniably important role in the covert operations of this private intelligence agency. Beyond allowing Dolan to enforce his blacklist by detecting enemy lawyers upon their entering MSG, it also enabled them to track persons of interest as they moved through the stadium. WIRED uncovered a telling example, utilizing inside sources and court documents, in which extremely detailed tabs were kept on a transgender woman with a prominent social media following named Nina Richards (alias) as she navigated the stadium.
The surveillance team kept minute by minute tabs of her every activity, attempting to constrict her movements to ensure that she didn’t interact with players despite the fact that she posed “no threat,” according to Donnie Ingrasselino, a disgruntled former security staffer of MSG whose lawsuit against Dolan is heavily cited in the WIRED exposé.
Eversole, the head of security, saw her as a different kind of threat—one who, solely by existing and enjoying the services of MSG, could “damage MSG’s reputation” because she was an “openly” transgender woman. His concern continued to fuel the surveillance campaign, and eventually accumulated in the banishment of Richards from the Garden. WIRED noted that, according to Ingrasselino’s suit, “Mr. Eversole [f]abricated a stalking allegation to justify banning.”
Furthermore, it seems that the effects of quelling Richards’ presence went beyond her removal from stadium grounds. According to WIRED, “Richards used to have an active, vibrant presence online. Today, Richards has functionally erased herself from the internet. Her 44,000-follower Instagram account has been nuked.”
This anecdote mirrors another noted in the WIRED exposé. When Donnie Ingrasselino was seeking out a lawyer to pursue his lawsuit against MSG, three firms refused to represent him “because they were not willing to subject their firm to the ‘lawyer ban,’” he alleged in a court document. “In other words,” WIRED notes, “Dolan’s face-recognition tech had the effect of serving as a proactive deterrent, a warning shot for lawyers and disgruntled employees not to fuck with him.”
These two incidents — along with others — illustrate how Dolan’s mini surveillance empire reinforces MSG’s status through forceful coercion. Utilized in this fashion, FRT becomes a weapon of intimidation and a tool to manufacture pretexts for the punishment of enemies.
WIRED importantly notes, however, that Dolan’s indulgence in corporate espionage is not anomalous, but “a model” of private surveillance operations at large. While the outwardly hostile and offensive tinge of Dolan’s surveillance team is not the most common style employed by corporate entities, the baseline tactics of MSG — most notably, using facial recognition technology to compile privately owned lists of customers and suspected “terrorists” or agitators — are utilized throughout the corporate and retail sectors.
Target, for example, runs a crime lab that is so sophisticated it helps solve cases for police departments and the Federal Bureau of Intelligence (FBI). It is called “Target Forensic Services,” and was started by the company to combat shoplifting — a problem that results in billions of dollars in lost revenue annually for U.S. retailers, who have enjoyed immense growth this century as wealth inequality has hit its widest gap in more than three decades.
In 2008, the lab had already worked with at least 136 police departments, the FBI and the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms (ATF).
Beyond solving murder cases for public agencies, it “can hack cell phones,” and utilizes devices that can “keep cell phone data from being erased so that Target investigators can mine that information, including audio and text messages, images and telephone logs, from cell phones that are turned over to them by police.” Infringing on the civil liberties of its customers, Target appears to believe, is a necessary step in its battle against shoplifters.
Target’s forensics department began in 2003 with the hiring of experts such as Brent Pack, “a former criminal investigator with the US Army who had retrieved and analyzed evidence in the abuse of detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad.” The current director is Rick Lautenbach who, according to his LinkedIn, formerly worked in Military Police for the US Army.
These state connections are not unique. Like Dolan’s operation — which is composed of “Veterans of the FBI, CIA, DEA, and NYPD” and is led by John Eversole, a former US Marine and Army warrant officer who previously held senior positions at the CIA-created intelligence contractor Oracle — these surveillance structures are closely linked to the world of national security and shadow governance.
Protestors that disrupted Target’s daily operations during the Minnesota ICE raids earlier this year were vaguely clued into this reality, as detailed in an article by The Guardian. Enraged at Target’s silence in response to ICE forcefully detaining two Target employees, they “planted themselves in the atrium of the store” and chanted “Something ’bout this isn’t right – why does Target work for ICE?”
The activists’ chant, though catchy and potent, appears hyperbolic. Target opting to not comment on the abuse of its workers by ICE agents does not actually mean the company works for ICE. It turns out, however, that a much closer relationship between Target and the deportation authorities does indeed exist. The string that ties them together reveals not just Target being linked to America’s domestic security apparatus, but multitudes of major retailers and grocers.
Take, for example, the public-private partnership program called the Retail and Hospitality Information Sharing and Analysis Center (RH-ISAC). ISACs are Department of Homeland Security (DHS) information sharing initiatives. According to a Government Accountability Office report, ISAC partners participate in “information sharing exercises—including regularly scheduled daily or biweekly meetings.” As a core member of RH-ISAC, it is thus highly likely that Target is much more involved in the operations of ICE — a DHS agency — than the Guardian article that reported on the Minnesotan protests detailed.
Indeed, another partner of RH-ISAC includes the FBI, which Target already has a history of working with. It also partners with the Secret Service, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency and the National Cyber Security Center.
Furthermore, a huge amount of other retailers are likely involved in similar collaborative measures as core members of RH-ISAC, including Albertsons, Costco, Cracker Barrel, CVS, Darden (the parent company of restaurants like Olive Garden and Red Lobster), Dollar Tree, Fareway, Gap, Home Depot, JCPenney, Kroger, Lowe’s, Starbucks, Wendy’s and more.
The actual functions of this near industry-wide public-private partnership can be partially discerned by RH-ISAC’s participation in the DHS Cyber Information Sharing and Collaboration Program (CISCP), the agency’s most important program for “public-private information sharing” in which “DHS and participating companies share information about cyber threats, incidents, and vulnerabilities.”
This collaboration works both to reinforce the state’s ability to expand its surveillance capabilities, allowing it to more effectively pacify enemies of American financial power, and also to expand the abilities of private corporations to engage in their own intelligence operations (be they profit-focused or security-focused). DHS neatly explains the interconnected nature of this alliance on its website:
“Information shared via CISCP allows all participants to better secure their own networks and helps support the shared security of CISCP partners. Further, CISCP provides a collaborative environment where analysts learn from each other to better understand emerging cybersecurity risks and effective defenses.”
Indeed, every April leaders of cybersecurity and partner organizations gather at the annual RH-ISAC summit to participate in “sessions delivered by prominent thought leaders and experts, along with collaborative workshops, cybersecurity exercises, and exceptional networking opportunities.”
Despite this collaboration with government security services, much of this technology’s usage is still situated in the private sector. When put to use by profit-driven corporations, surveillance technology is not only deployed to make lists of suspected criminals and petty thieves. In fact, it is primarily used to compile lists on an entirely different segment of the population: consumers.
This has manifested itself most notoriously in the practice of “surveillance pricing,” a method that utilizes the collection of maximal amounts of data on both individuals and retail/grocery locations to find the “optimal” price point for any given product. The goal is clearly to maximize profit extraction per customer.
Surveillance pricing is usually launched as a honeypot, designed to lure customers into a surveillance trap. Corporations launch loyalty programs, often in the form of online apps, replete with personalized profiles that contain special discounts and perks, enticing customers to join. Often, all they must do to acquire these dividends is surrender their personal information to the corporation. Many don’t think twice.
In reality, however, these digital cost-saving schemes are effectively fronts for a more sinister agenda. As More Perfect Union revealed in collaboration with Consumer Reports, this surveillance is conducted in order to gather behavioral data on consumers, determining how they shop in order to most optimally price items for maximum profit extraction.
Even Kirat Anand, former VP of Pricing at Walmart, admitted that “[m]erchants, pricing teams, they all rely on technology and algorithms to safeguard their profits.” Indeed, there is an entire industry “built around optimizing grocery prices.”
A patent owned by grocery delivery company Instacart reviewed by More Perfect Union and Consumer Reports clues us into the deeper objectives of these supposed loyalty programs. While surveillance pricing utilizes methods such as “personalized pricing,” which uses behavioral data to set different prices for individuals, and “dynamic or surge pricing,” which uses “non-customer-specific variables to change prices” during specific events like “rainy weather, last-minute flight prices increasing, [etc.],” the patent suggested a system of corporate profiteering.
As More Perfect Union asked, “Would you rather charge $10 for a bottle of water during a single hurricane? Or 20 cents more every day?”
The patent “described an infrastructure for constant in-store price testing. Take dozens of stores, cluster them together, test different prices in different clusters. The purpose? Find out the most profitable price point.”
While Instacart denied that they utilize this price optimization infrastructure, More Perfect Union found it listed as a feature on their website. After More Perfect Union asked if Instacart uses the feature, the company took it off their site. Subsequent evidence documented in their report strongly suggests that Instacart indeed was utilizing these methods despite their denial.
While this larger system of price optimization is geared towards organizing individual data into collective trends, the individual profiling of customers is still an indispensable node within this broader system of surveillance-driven profiteering. The implications are grave for the protection of individual civil liberties against giant corporations and their government collaborators.
For example, grocery giant Kroger utilizes electronic shelf labels (ESL) to change prices in real time from an app. They have also partnered with Microsoft to install facial recognition technology throughout their stores — sparking concern from outlets like The Nation that companies like Kroger could combine FRT with ESL pricing to adjust prices based on people’s faces. While Kroger denied these insinuations, the prospect is not unthinkable.
Yet, what Kroger has admitted to doing with this technology is equally disturbing, and still ultimately aimed at using surveillance to increase the amount of money spent by each customer. In its press release, it described the “EDGE shelf” as enabling “Kroger to generate new revenue by selling digital advertising space to consumer packaged goods (CPGs) brands. Using video analytics, personalized offers and advertisements can be presented based on customer demographics” (emphasis added).
According to reporting from business magazine Fast Company:
“The digital displays will be placed with special product offers at the ends of aisles. A camera at each display will determine through facial recognition AI the gender and age of the shopper passing by. If the person has not already opted in through the Kroger app, the display will show ads or coupons based only on age and gender and will use no personally identifiable information for targeting, Microsoft says. However, if the shopper has opted in, the displays may do some truly Minority Report-style customization. When the shopper comes into the vicinity of the display, they may see or hear something like, ‘Hello Mr. Sullivan, would you like to buy some more of the Pepsi you got last weekend?’”
The possibility that this data will seep into public sector data pools or into the data troves of other companies once it is acquired by Kroger and its subsidiaries should not be lost on anyone. This is especially true considering that Kroger is a core member of RH-ISAC — making it an open collaborator with U.S. intelligence and law enforcement — and Microsoft contracts directly with ICE, powering its surveillance infrastructure, as well as with the Pentagon, the CIA and the General Services Administration (GSA) as part of the Trump administration’s effort to “advance AI adoption across the Federal government.”
From all angles, the entire American retail and grocery industry is exercising the power granted to it by surveillance technology, profiling its customers to increase its ever-expanding profits and build out the ubiquity of the panopticon powered by Big Tech and the national security state. The technology, in other words, is not separate from political power but a tool of it, both within the confines of corporate empires as well as the grander borders of America’s domestic and foreign policy objectives.
The revolving door between the national security state and the private sector detailed in the next section make this claim evident. By examining the origins of the most prominent FRT companies, the line between the state and the private sector becomes so blurred that it elucidates the actual function of this technology, as well as the ostensibly independent industries wound up in its development and usage. All are vessels of oligarchic power, working to construct a surveillance system that empowers the wealthy and marginalizes its opponents by rendering their civil liberties obsolete.
The most telling example is the history of a company with deep ties to the current presidential administration, and underpinned by many of the same financial power brokers and Trump-adjacent media propagandists.
In March of 2020, The New York Times reported a story about John Catsimatidis, the heavy-set and droopy-faced billionaire owner of the Gristedes grocery chain, spying on his daughter at an Italian restaurant in Manhattan. The story, presented as a playful father and daughter moment, involved Catsimatidis asking a waiter to go over to his daughter’s table and take a picture of her date.
“I wanted to make sure he wasn’t a charlatan,” Catsimatidis said. He scanned the picture of the man’s face through an app — available only to those who’ve been granted access by the company — and found that his daughter’s suitor was a venture capitalist from San Francisco. The app Catsimatidis had used was Clearview AI — a surveillance product powered by facial recognition technology as well as a vast database of over 70 billion images scoured from public web sources “including news media, mugshot websites, public social media, and other open sources.”
This playful spying, in reality, is a microcosm of how Clearview is often used. Its tools are often employed unofficially and unannounced by the powerful institutions and individuals who have been granted access to the company’s software, resulting in persistent rogue and unchecked usage.
It also demonstrates the regulatory environment (or lack thereof) in which products like Clearview exist; currently, facial recognition technology is entirely unregulated at the federal level, its vast power only sparsely held back by minimal state-level restrictions. As a result, the limits on the ways in which facial recognition technology is deployed bears almost no limits, and requires no transparency.
Indeed, the only reason we know of Catsimatidis’ personal usage of Clearview, as well his grocery chain using it to identify “shoplifters or people who had held up other stores,” is because the billionaire himself told the Times. The only reason we know that Clearview has been deployed by a myriad of grocery chains, retail stores, federal agencies and police departments is because of a leaked tranche of documents reported on by Buzzfeed in 2020.
While Clearview advertises itself as being a tool of law enforcement and government agencies, its usage in Gristedes was not a one-off; its tech was significantly piloted in the private sector. In Buzzfeed’s investigation, they found that a myriad of retail and grocery stores had utilized the technology.
Walmart had nearly 300 searches in the ever growing annals of Clearview’s database, Best Buy had more than 200, grocer Albertsons had more than 40, and Rite Aid had about 35 searches. Kohl’s and Macy’s combined carried out nearly 10,000 searches. Buzzfeed also found that Madison Square Garden, EventBrite, Las Vegas Sands, Pechanga Resort Casino, the NBA, Equinox and Coinbase were among the private companies that composed Clearview’s client list, though some of these companies, like the NBA and Madison Square Garden (MSG), told Buzzfeed that they had only utilized Clearview via a trial period.
Two years after this claim, however, The New York Times reported on Dolan’s aforementioned use of FRT to enforce his “attorney exclusion list.” This resulted in a personal injury lawyer from Bergen County, N.J. being barred from seeing the Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall and another attorney from her firm being denied entry to a New York Rangers game at Madison Square Garden.
A lack of an official partnership with Clearview, however, does not indicate whether an institution utilizes its software or not. Buzzfeed found that police departments, schools and government agencies have utilized the technology without any formal agreement between parties. This has created a company culture in which, at times, employees of institutions may be utilizing Clearview, while the institutions themselves “have no idea the tool is being used…”
The dynamic works to shield Clearview and these institutions from transparency, sewing a veil of secrecy that obfuscates inquiry into the depth of Clearview’s role in their surveillance infrastructure. Professor Nolan Higdon, co-author of Surveillance Education, told Unlimited Hangout that this is not an anomaly exclusively applicable to Clearview, but rather “a pathology of the industry” resulting from “the lack of legislation to say where expectations of privacy should exist.”
Yet, the rogue and unofficial usage of Clearview by institutional actors is not only concerning for the threats it poses to civil liberties and privacy, but because the company is deeply tied to the American national security state. Clearview’s links to the American Empire’s covert governance are most pronounced through its longstanding relationship with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Dating back to the company’s origins, when it was still called Smartcheckr, ICE was always one of its main intended clients.
According to Mother Jones, in 2017, Clearview’s founder, the self-proclaimed descendant of Vietnamese royalty, Hon Ton-That, “envisioned using facial recognition to compare images of migrants crossing the border to mugshots to see if the arrivals had been previously arrested in the United States.” He proposed screening migrants for “sentiment about the USA,” which he reportedly conflated with support for Donald Trump, as part of his larger effort to build “algorithms to ID all the illegal immigrants for the deportation squads.”
The blatantly fascistic proposals of Ton-That were out of the ordinary at the time for an up and coming Big Tech player — during this period, the industry had fostered an aesthetic of liberalism, concerning itself with “hate speech” and “misinformation,” eventually resulting in the banishment of President Donald Trump from most social media platforms. But Ton-That, on the other hand, was ingrained in an alt-right, neo-Nazi milieu that has since emerged as the most prominent private sector coterie of businessmen and thinkers in the age of Trump 2.0.
In 2015, according to Mother Jones, he was communicating online with far-right activists such as Milo Yiannopoulos, Mike Cernovich and formerly open neo-Nazi Andrew “weev” Aurenheimer, who has a swastika tattoo inked across his left breast. In these radical surroundings he discovered the neoreactionary movement — an “intellectual” framework characterized by an embrace of dictatorship via corporate governance, spearheaded most notoriously by the Peter Thiel-linked Curtis Yarvin. During this period, a friendly relationship between Yarvin and Ton-That reportedly blossomed — bringing Ton-That closer into the orbit of Thiel-funded alt-right proxies.
This continued in 2016, when he met federal informant and Thiel-ally Chuck Johnson (who is also an advocate for pardoning convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell). Johnson soon introduced Ton-That to Thiel at the Republican National Convention. That year, Johnson also introduced Ton-That to Richard Schwartz, a former top aide to Rudy Giuliani, at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, the conservative think tank founded by former CIA director William Casey. Soon after, Ton-That, Schwartz and Johnson launched the company that would become Clearview — Smartcheckr — with seed money from Peter Thiel’s venture capital firm Founder’s Fund.
A cadre of white supremacists and eugenicists, as Mother Jones reported, went on to fill the ranks of Smartcheckr.
The political origins of Clearview cast a looming shadow on the company’s extensive relationship with ICE. By 2020, the agency had already engaged in thousands of searches, including as a component of its Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) — the sect of ICE responsible for the detainment and deportation of undocumented immigrants.
While in 2020, ICE attempted to distance itself from the technology by telling Buzzfeed that ICE ERO officers only “occasionally used the technology…on human trafficking investigations,” ICE in the age of Trump 2.0 acts unabashedly by comparison; it openly uses its own facial recognition app called Fortify to scan its subjects, including American citizens who film deportation officers. From there, those scanned can be entered into any number of over a dozen databases, and may be flagged as a “domestic terrorist,” according to two senior national security officials who spoke to reporter Ken Klippenstein.
This political environment is perfect for Clearview’s business model.
Indeed, privately developed technological surveillance has fueled Trump’s surveillance-driven deportation agenda. A slew of reports from 404 Media have revealed a significant expansion of contracts with the Thiel-founded Palantir since Trump took office, including building the agency a master database and sophisticated tools to track down targets by collating digital data points from a seemingly endless array of sources.
While Clearview is directly involved in this surveillance infrastructure construction, to what degree and extent remains obscured by the haze of government classification and the vague nature of government-corporate press releases. Contracts the company has scored in recent months elucidate important dynamics of the company’s role in current ICE operations, however. In February, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) contracted with Clearview for a year of access to the surveillance tech company’s database — this is on top of the $9 million contract it secured with ICE last fall to, in part, “support cases involving assaults on law enforcement officers.”
These recent contracts raise the question of whether Clearview, whose database has in part been built up via its expansive client list in the retail and grocery sectors, is helping power ICE’s facial recognition app Fortify along with Palantir. When asked whether or not Clearview played a role in helping develop Fortify, ICE and CBP did not respond to a request for comment. If Clearview has been used towards this end, however, it would only be the realization of Ton-That’s initial vision for the company.
Indeed, this prospect only becomes more likely — though still speculative — when considering that Thiel, Clearview’s initial backer, is extensively tied to the current presidential administration, as Unlimited Hangout and other outlets have documented extensively (see here, here, here, and here).
Furthermore, some of Ton-That’s friends that he made early on in his path to radicalization, such as Mike Cernovich and Milo Yiannopoulos, who helped churn this right wing radicalism into reality, are tied to Thiel as well. These figures have, importantly, become some of the most viral proponents of The Great Replacement Theory — the idea that there is a slow motion genocide of the white race through unfettered mass immigration — on the Elon Musk-owned X, seeding a pretext for Trump’s racist domestic securitization agenda — and by extent, the use of Clearview’s “product,” and the surveillance technology owned by Thiel — by stoking fear on the social media platform. These very figures have reportedly been bankrolled by Peter Thiel via his longtime associate Jeff Giesea — The Sparrow Project was told as much by an anonymous source, and the account was partially corroborated by a subsequent Buzzfeed report that discovered Thiel had hosted Cernovich and Yiannopoulos for dinner at his house back in 2016.
Elon Musk’s own ties to Thiel are especially worth noting in this context. While heading the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Musk, who was deeply involved in the founding of PayPal with Peter Thiel and is a major U.S. security contractor, installed multiple Palantir employees in prominent positions at government agencies and also recruited Palantir to build a “mega-API” for the IRS. DOGE as an operation was thus critical to stacking the Trump administration with officials directly linked to Thiel. It also helped to make government data “interoperable,” or, more simply, making computers spread across different institutions “talk to each other.” Palantir, whose software acts as a window into giant datasets, is a major advocate for data interoperability, which it describes as “Connect[ing] your systems and operations to drive automation across the enterprise.”
All of this implies that Clearview may be one within a complex of companies that have coordinated their efforts to expand the power of the national security state, and position a particular faction within it extremely close to the most influential centers of government in the U.S. Whether or not this is true, this inter-institutional enmeshment is a unique attribute of Silicon Valley’s newfound dominance of the military-industrial-complex. In addition to producing the technological infrastructure that the state depends on for its military expansionism and domestic counterinsurgency, Silicon Valley also directly controls much of the world’s knowledge production through social media and algorithmic ownership. Thus, this web of Thiel-linked influencers and defense contractors were integral to Clearview’s rise — and now, its increasing success.
Clearview’s new co-CEO Hal Lambert “is already in business with both Elon Musk’s SpaceX and the Department of Defense through a separate satellite company,” positioning the startup at arms length from other lucrative contracts in America’s security industry. Indeed, the company has long positioned itself as a prospective candidate to enjoy the spoils of the war economy. For instance, in 2022, it supplied Ukraine’s American-funded defense ministry with free use of its technology to “uncover Russian assailants, combat misinformation and identify the dead.”
Furthermore, while the company has come to embrace its relationship with ICE, it also contracts with elements of the federal government less amenable to the MAGA base. The Department of Justice, the FBI and the Army have all made use of Clearview’s technology. Perhaps most revealingly, it was utilized by police departments to crack down on participants of the January 6 riots that protested the 202o election results. The persecution of these people notoriously infringed significantly on their civil liberties, including by holding some for years in solitary confinement as part of pretrial detention, despite the fact that “the vast majority of those caught up in the incursion of the Capitol did not commit serious crimes, engage in violence or know what they would do in Washington other than protest the election results.”
This bipartisan deployment of Clearview is evidence that the technology and its owners are not loyal to one political party or the other. Instead, their product is a weapon of oligarchic power and a tool of counterinsurgency, aimed at criminalizing populations to justify the expansion of the public-private surveillance panopticon.
Clearview’s history, and its central role in the buildup of the government’s domestic surveillance machine, make it a clear example of a facial recognition firm whose product is not separate from imperialist power, but entirely enmeshed within it. Yet, these ties are anything but anomalous; they are symptomatic of the facial recognition industry at large, and exemplify the ethos of the types of companies retail corporations contract to spy on their customers.
In 2011, the idea for a company that came to be known as AnyVision took shape when an Israeli businessman and a British professor/defense executive began working on a facial recognition project.
The British professor, Neil Robertson, had started his career at the UK Ministry of Defense’s Defense and Evaluation Research Agency (DERA), a conglomeration of military technological research centers, shortly before its assets were balkanized and a majority of them were incorporated into an entity called QinetiQ. In 2002, the Carlyle Group purchased a significant stake in QinetiQ, and the company became a public-private partnership. By this point, Robertson had a position at the company, familiarizing the professor with the profitable opportunities that are situated at the intersection of the public and private sectors of the defense industry.
The Israeli that approached Robertson was named Eylon Etshtein, a scruffy-faced “serial entrepreneur” who previously served in a commando recon unit of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), according to Crunchbase. Robertson, his colleague and Etshtein soon formed a “very strong working relationship,” and, according to Robertson, “the rest [was] history.”
They soon bestowed a name upon their facial recognition product — “Better Tomorrow.” It was named this because, in Eylon’s words, its creators “actually want[ed] a better tomorrow.”
In reality, however, AnyVision, similar to the aforementioned British company QinetiQ, was likely the product of a concerted effort to transition government intelligence work into the private sector. Though conceived in 2011, the company was founded in 2015, just three years after it became official Israeli government policy to transfer “cyber-related and intelligence projects that were previously carried out in-house in the Israeli military and Israel’s main intelligence arms” to private front companies.
Indeed, beyond Etshtein — who just recently gave a talk to Israeli Special Forces soldiers on “step[ping] into civilian life after finishing their service” — much of the company’s leadership boasted prestigious positions within the world of Israeli intelligence. It counted among its advisory board members Tamir Pardo, the former head of Mossad. The company’s president, Amir Kain, was the head of the Israeli Defense Ministry’s security department for eight years up until AnyVision’s founding. In 2019, NBC found that several employees did their Israeli military service at the “elite cyberspy agency Unit 8200, equivalent to the NSA or the United Kingdom’s GCHQ.”
The startup secured funding from the Bill Gates-founded Microsoft, a company that has long advertised itself as committed to protecting democratic rights and, via Gates, is associated with the ostensibly humanitarian philanthropic endeavors of the massively endowed Gates Foundation. Yet NBC found that, contrary to upholding democracy, AnyVision’s technology was actually powering a “secret military surveillance project” throughout Palestine’s occupied West Bank.
The secret project’s nickname, then, appeared to more accurately reflect Better Tomorrow’s use than its Orwellian advertising. It was reportedly called “Google Ayosh” in Israel — “Ayosh” being a Hebrew acronym for the land of Judea and Samaria, and “Google” alluding to the software’s capacity to “search for people.”
The tech’s surveillance powers were expansive; it allowed users to “identify individuals and objects in any live camera feed, such as a security camera or a smartphone, and then track targets as they move between different feeds.” It proved so effective that the Israeli Ministry of Defense awarded it with “its top defense prize” in 2018. According to NBC, Israel’s defense minister praised the startup during the presentation for “preventing ‘hundreds of terror attacks’ using ‘large amounts of data.’”
NBC’s exposé engulfed the company in controversy, damaging its reputation to such a degree that Microsoft withdrew its investment in 2019. This pressured its leadership into a 2021 rebrand for the startup. The company was renamed “Oosto” and began a collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University’s CyLab Biometric Research Center.
The year prior, in 2020, Macy’s got hit with a class action lawsuit after a Chicago woman alleged that the retail store was violating Illinois’ biometric privacy law by sending “pictures of customers captured by store video surveillance to Clearview to identify them and obtain their personal information” and “actively profiting” from doing so (emphasis added).
While Macy’s never publicly admitted it was using Clearview, or announced that it had stopped using their services, presumably sometime in between that lawsuit and now, under ostensible public pressure from the negative P.R., the retail store adopted Oosto as a client — switching its facial recognition capacities from one military- industrial- complex-linked outfit to another (or, potentially, retaining the services of both).
Furthermore, while the litigation concluded in a settlement in which Clearview agreed to pay out $51.75 million, the suit’s conclusion “preserv[ed] Clearview’s business model” and “insulat[ed] Clearview from subsequent or parallel regulatory investigations without requiring the company to jeopardize the liquidity necessary for continued growth,” according to Regulatory Oversight. Professor Higdon said deals like these are par for the course in the surveillance tech industry. He claimed that these kinds of fees that data barons are often forced to pay out are inexpensive in the grand scheme of their business models. “Data keeps some value forever,” he said, “so a small fine here or there for collecting data is irrelevant, and that’s general in the entire industry.”
Macy’s is only one of the corporate entities counted amongst Oosto’s client list; Deloitte, Morgan Stanley, Ford, and Verizon all utilize the company’s apartheid-tested technology, according to a report from Biometric Update. Other clients or partners listed on their website include Honeywell, NVIDIA, the New Orleans Saints and the Santa Fe Independent School District.
In 2025, Oosto was purchased by the American AI-based parking lot operator Metropolis Technologies after investors “[threw] in the towel,” “replac[ed] the management” and fired “more than half the employees.” The once-hyped company was sold off for $125 million — not even turning a profit— because of its pathetic generation of only $10 million in annual revenue despite it having raised more than $350 million from investors.
Despite the firing of its original leadership and the relocation of its main office to New York, the company is still closely tied to Israel. Nikunj Mistry, Oosto’s VP of finance, previously was the VP of finance for the American drone company Skydio — whose drones have been widely used to carry out the genocide in Gaza. The former COO of Oosto, who has a lengthy work history in Israel including as a project manager for the IDF, Michal Braverman Finkelshtein, notably began working at Metropolis almost two years before its acquisition of Oosto, according to her LinkedIn. At Metropolis, her tasks include “Business Development — Growth & Partnerships” as well as “Corporate Business — Commercial Strategy & Scale,” suggesting she may have played a role in Metropolis’ acquisition of Oosto. Metropolis responded to a request for comment on Finkelshtein’s potential role in the acquisition with a request for further information, and upon receiving a more detailed inquiry from Unlimited Hangout, did not answer our question.
Contextualized with the background of its founders and the timing of the company’s incorporation, Oosto may still be serving an ulterior function — albeit secondary or tertiary — as a vehicle for Israeli economic interests.
As the Brookings Institute has noted, because “the export basket of Israel has consistently moved towards high-technology goods…that are not easily replaceable,” and “banning Israeli goods would affect consumers in countries that currently import those goods” — a movement like the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement could be “broken before it begins.” Whether Brookings was correct in its analysis, the more companies like Oosto are utilized in the U.S., the more the U.S. and Israel become intertwined and thus, the more potent this description of the American-Israeli economic relationship becomes.
The purpose here of Israeli tech as a bulwark against targeted disruption of Israel’s financial entanglement abroad demonstrates that surveillance technology — despite being increasingly deployed in centers of civilian life — is enmeshed with imperial power. Indeed, according to Gaza Humanitarian Foundation whistleblower Anthony Aguilar, while he was overseeing the distribution of aid to Gazans during Israel’s genocidal bombardment last year, Israeli security cameras would utilize facial recognition technology to profile starving Palestinians at aid checkpoints — sometimes targeting them for assassination at later points.
Aguilar told Unlimited Hangout that, like the surveillance technology launched in the private sector, the facial recognition software used in Gaza was advertised under a benign pretense. Contractors were told that “the facial recognition and data collection was to make the distribution sites more efficient…What’s the best way to conduct site distribution? That was the benign reason we were told. [But] that wasn’t why it was being used.” In reality, he says, they were “field testing” the technology — and using it for “targeting” potential members of Hamas.
The commercial deployment of this technology, he says, draws a stark parallel. “The excuse will be a benign offering,” Aguilar told Unlimited Hangout. “But in actuality, you’re training, so all AI or artificial intelligence…refines itself through machine learning…all you have to then do is give it a simple input to get the information you want out of it, whether it’s benign or nefarious.”
Aguilar warns that enticing offers such as this technology paving the way to enhanced shopping experiences are merely a front. To him, the commercial presence of this technology is directly intertwined with its wartime usage.“It is the further implementation, and the organic progression, of the Patriot Act.”
This “dual-use” function of Western technological enterprise — that which allows its products to flow between government and corporate environments with ease — comes from a long lineage of military research that elucidates the contradictions of the ostensibly “free market” that the tech industry is situated in.
It goes back to the privatization of the internet. The person tasked with this historical mission was a military man named Stephen Wolff who worked on early iterations of the internet for the Department of Defense. Later, as Yasha Levine notes in Surveillance Valley, Wolff transferred the tech he helped develop for the Pentagon into a new structure — creating with public funds “a dozen network providers out of thin air” that were then spun off into the private sector, “building companies…that would become integral parts of the media and telecommunications conglomerates we all know and use today — Verizon, Time-Warner AT&T, Comcast” and more.
This transformation, which produced the modern Internet, embedded in civilian society a dependency on what was actually a weapon of the national security state. It would soon become ubiquitous, extending the reach of this surveillance infrastructure into virtually every sector of public life. That legacy lives on today, as the line between the public and private sectors of technological development continuously proves to be virtually nonexistent — only officially separating entities that, in reality, are intimately connected.
Facial recognition technology — whose development was funded by the U.S. government, and is rumored to have been funded by the CIA — emerged out of this very context. Indeed, beyond Clearview and Oosto, a variety of additional facial recognition firms boast their own ties to the national security state.
FaceFirst, which uses its software for “airport security, retail theft deterrence, VIP customer recognition, and counter-terrorism,” is Airborne Biometrics Group’s facial recognition product. Airborne Biometrics Group, according to Security Info Watch, was a “venture-funded spin-off” of Airborne Technologies, Inc., “a worldwide supplier of precision structural components and assemblies for military and commercial use for more than a quarter-century.” Like Clearview, the system works by linking pictures to “existing image databases” for individual identification.
Clarifai, which advertises itself to retail buyers, partners with NVIDIA and Amazon — both of whom contract with the U.S. military. Their CEO is Matthew Zeiler, a colleague of Yann LeCun, Meta’s Chief AI Scientist that was once in communication with Epstein to work on a research project nicknamed the “Epstein brain.” In 2020, the company was working on a secret Pentagon project that utilized “machine-learning algorithms to interpret drone-surveillance imagery” on a Project Maven contract. Those working on the operation, notably, were strictly prohibited from discussing the project with other employees.
Then, there is the case of the facial recognition firm Raptor Vision, which has been used at Kroger and Albertsons. Its president, Paul Gain, was the founder of the CMStat Corporation, which “delivered enterprise systems to NASA, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Rolls-Royce, and the U.S. Military,” according to Gain’s LinkedIn.
Veesion, which has been used by Key Food, Food Town and Ace Hardware, is a French company founded by Benoît Koenig, Thibault David and Damien Ménigaux. The trio were students from the graduate program at École Polytechnique, which is “supervised” by the French Ministry of Armed Forces and has partnered with Google.
Lexius, an AI-powered security software that connects to existing cameras, detects “suspicious behavior in real time, such as item concealment in aisles,” and immediately sends alerts to “security team’s mobile devices, enabling discreet, proactive responses…” The software is used by the luxury grocery store Erewhon in Beverly Hills — and has already made its leadership “addicted” to surveilling customers through the software. Lexius came to fruition with seed capital from Y Combinator, the Sam Altman- and Peter Thiel-linked startup accelerator and venture capital firm.
Though companies often pitch their facial recognition technology as commercial products — manipulatively erecting a barrier between their ostensible civilian usage and military applications — virtually the entire industry is tied to America’s security apparatus.
As ICE utilizes facial recognition technology to store the records of dissidents and perceived enemies of the state in secret databases, this technology’s function, whether situated in the toolkit of federal agents or in the security room at Wegmans, becomes even more evident. By empowering the owners of technology and their collaborators to profile average people wherever they go, the elite class is carefully studying, and exercising control over, an increasingly unsatisfied population.
While legal reforms, such as those being enacted by legislators like Shahana K. Hanif and Linda B. Rosenthal, are important battlegrounds for change, the intention of the ruling class to reinforce the conditions of their own power will certainly not dwindle. As this struggle for power persists, the Tech class and its allies will make use of the tools in its arsenal — surveilling, profiling and tracking us, and everything we do, along the way.
The post The Rise of the Military Retail Industrial Complex appeared first on Activist Post.
If there is one job that no Austrian Economist will take up at this juncture, it would be that of the Federal Reserve Chair. The road ahead seems to be set in stone, and in a society that has been sold the idea that “printing currency units is a panacea to all problems” for nearly 45 years, doing the opposite is an invitation to get lynched. It is near certain that Kevin Warsh would go down in history as the Fed Chair who presided over the demise of the dollar. Perhaps as infamous as Gideon Gono, who presided over the Zimbabwean dollar’s hyperinflation.
Can anything be done at this point to prevent the imminent demise of the dollar? Of course, yes, and the advice would be no different from what the then Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon suggested to Herbert Hoover in 1929: “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate. It will purge the rottenness out of the system”.
Of course, Hoover ignored Mellon’s sensible advice and turned what ought to have been a short, severe recession into the prolonged Great Depression of 1929 to 1946. Hoover pursued the most interventionist policies after the 1929 stock market crash, though by the standards set by subsequent U.S. presidents, Hoover might appear like a Laissez-faire Economist. Forget the Federal Reserve or the US Treasury, we don’t have an Andrew Mellon anywhere in the US administration today. The one Republican in the House of Representatives who understands these issues is Thomas Massie, and Trump is desperately trying to get him defeated in the primary. Not that one person can make a difference in the grand scheme of things. But this suggests that Trump is likely to adopt a policy framework equivalent to “Hoover on steroids”. Given the problems and the likely solution that would be pursued, the end result cannot be anything other than a high-inflationary economic depression.
The Inflationary Spike Ahead
Make no mistake – the price inflationary spike that lies ahead is a structural phenomenon that has been in the works for a few decades. Perhaps even from 1971 onwards. Attributing this to the Iran War or even Biden / Trump 1.0, notwithstanding the culpability, would be a genuine understatement of the problem.
The monetary pipeline, as outlined above, ultimately leads to galloping price inflation and a loss of confidence in the currency. While with most currencies the translation of a weak fiscal policy into higher consumer prices occurs within a few years, in the case of the US, by virtue of its status as the world’s reserve currency, the translation has indeed taken a while. The US was able to export its monetary inflation, thereby giving its citizens a much higher standard of living than what their production ought to have enabled. This also necessarily meant that the standards of living of the non-US residents were suppressed by an artificially strong US dollar. That this narrative is nearing its end must be obvious to most.
The structural issues, i.e., the National debt, the trend of increasing fiscal deficits, and the money supply, have been extensively described in the media, and so I am not going to expand on them here. That said, a line on the recent increases in M2 might be worth recording. By March 2026, the US Money Supply M2 had recorded 25 straight monthly increases, which cannot bode well for the future purchasing power of the US Dollar.
What is of greater interest are the near-term factors that are aligning with the structural tailwinds of a loose fiscal and monetary system.
Even these two factors – DXY and the CRB Index – while more often than not translate into higher consumer prices, could still take 6 to 12 months to take effect. Better leading indicators are increases in the producer price index and import/export prices. These are also not subject to the usual CPI tweaks (hedonic adjustments, substitutions, etc.). And this is where the evidence is most damaging on what lies immediately ahead.
These numbers are monthly changes and clearly point towards substantially higher consumer prices in the next few months. We should not be surprised by double-digit, or at least high single-digit, consumer price increases by Q3 2026, even with all the juggling in the CPI calculations.
What Will Warsh Do?
What can he do? Can he hike interest rates by several hundred basis points to combat the surging price inflation? What will that do to the multi-asset hyper bubbles in housing, bonds, and AI stocks? I don’t think there’s any chance of doing anything close to what is necessary. And even a couple of hundred basis point hikes may not be sufficient at this juncture. Remember, Volcker had to offer a real interest rate of 8% to combat the price inflation of the 1970s. Even a nominal 8% yield on the Fed funds rate is not even under theoretical consideration for the US today.
Kevin Warsh is walking into an Inflationary Tsunami armed with nothing more than an Umbrella.
The Gold Redemption
The treasury market had it correct. The 30-year treasury rate crossed 5% for the first time in nearly 20 years. Although the rates are much too low for what lies ahead, Treasury rates are at least moving in the right direction. Albeit much too slowly, as bond investors will soon realize.
Gold is, however, moving in the wrong direction as compared to what the fundamentals ought to dictate. Both the structural and near-term factors point towards substantially higher gold prices. What Kool-Aid the gold traders have drunk, we will never know. But the current low prices are temporary, and the redemption is just months away. If not weeks.
We will witness much higher than $6000/oz later this year and multiples thereof in the years ahead.
The post Kevin Warsh – Walking into an Inflationary Tsunami appeared first on Activist Post.
A respected human rights activist has spoken repeatedly against the US-Israeli aggression on Iran. She recognizes the illegality of the war and does not shy away from condemning it in clear terms. Yet, almost invariably, she feels compelled to qualify her position, reminding her audience that Iran has killed “tens of thousands of protesters” during recent anti-government demonstrations.
The number itself is highly questionable. Even widely cited figures from international reporting – such as Reuters coverage in January 2026 – place the death toll of the protests in the thousands, not tens of thousands. But the issue here is not the exact number, nor even the complex context of those protests, which began as genuine expressions of discontent but were later exploited by various external and internal actors seeking to destabilize the country.
The issue is the qualification itself.
Many who consider themselves progressive, anti-war, liberal, or even leftist seem unable to take a clear moral position on US and Israeli actions in the Global South without inserting these qualifications. The habit may appear harmless, even responsible, but in reality, it is deeply damaging. It is not a sign of nuance – it is a symptom of a deeper moral hesitation.
By qualifying their condemnation, these voices neutralize their own position. They suggest, whether intentionally or not, a form of moral equivalence: the US-Israeli war on Iran is wrong, but Iran is also guilty; the genocide in Gaza is horrific, but Palestinians are also to blame. The result is not balance – it is paralysis.
Compare this to the moral clarity of those who support war. Their position is never qualified. It is assertive, absolute, and often built on exaggeration or outright falsehoods, yet it carries conviction because it does not undermine itself.
This pattern is not new. It is deeply rooted in the history of Western political discourse. From the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, which was justified as a necessary act to save lives, to the Cold War military interventions in places like Guatemala in 1954, where regime change was framed as a defense against communism, the language of morality has consistently been used to legitimize violence.
The invasion of Iraq in 2003 offers one of the clearest examples. Saddam Hussein was presented as the ultimate embodiment of evil – the “new Hitler” – while the United States and its allies were cast as liberators.
Indeed, American officials spoke openly of being “greeted as liberators,” even as the country was plunged into chaos and extreme violence. A few years later, then-US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice described the devastation created by the Israeli war on Lebanon in 2006 as “the birth pangs of a new Middle East,” reducing immense human suffering to a necessary step in a grand geopolitical transformation.
This tradition extends even further back, to the era of colonialism, when European powers justified conquest through supposedly humanitarian missions. The abolition of slavery, for example, was frequently invoked as a moral justification for colonial expansion in Africa, recasting domination as benevolence and violence as a civilizing duty. Killing, in this paradigm, happens in the name of saving; destruction is presented as progress.
Israel has long operated within this same framework. Its wars have consistently been presented as existential and necessary for the survival of democracy and civilization itself.
Long before the emergence of Hamas, Palestinian resistance was framed through shifting labels that served the same purpose. During the 1936–39 revolt, Palestinian fighters were described in British and Zionist discourse as “terrorists,” “brigands,” and “gangs.” In later decades, the label shifted – from nationalist fighters to communists to Islamists – but the underlying logic remained unchanged: the enemy is always illegitimate, and therefore any violence against them is justified.
Many of us recognize this pattern, yet instead of exposing its fallacies, some continue to operate within it, searching for a “balanced” position while still presenting themselves as anti-war or even pro-Palestinian. They acknowledge Israeli crimes but feel compelled to condemn Palestinian “terrorism.” They oppose Israeli policies yet insist on distancing themselves from Hamas and the others, as if Palestinian resistance exists outside the historical and political reality that produced it. They speak of “extremists on both sides,” as though figures like Itamar Ben-Gvir and a Palestinian fighter in Gaza can be meaningfully compared.
Such positions may seem defensible in isolation, but they become far less convincing when viewed in other contexts. Following the attacks of September 11, 2001, the United States demanded – and received – unconditional solidarity. The same was true after the July 7, 2005, bombings in London and the January 7, 2015, attack on Charlie Hebdo in Paris. In those moments, there was no expectation that victims first be contextualized or that solidarity be qualified. Millions expressed support without hesitation, without disclaimers, without the need to prove moral balance.
This standard does not apply to others. It does not apply to Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Venezuela, or certainly not to Gaza.
In case you are wondering: the US-Israeli war on Iran has already killed 3,753 people and wounded around 26,500 since February 28, 2026. If Americans were to experience this at the same scale, it would amount to roughly 12,000 dead and 85,000 wounded – equivalent to four 9/11s in terms of deaths alone, and injuries on a scale far exceeding that tragedy.
In Gaza, the scale is even more staggering. Over 72,000 Palestinians have been killed, more than 172,000 wounded, and at least 10,000 remain missing—many likely buried beneath the rubble. The true number is widely believed to be significantly higher. Scaled to the United States population, this would translate to approximately 10.2 million dead, over 24.4 million wounded, and more than 1.4 million missing – around 3,400 separate 9/11 attacks
And yet, even in the face of such overwhelming numbers, the impulse to qualify remains.
For many Western activists, this qualification functions as a form of protection. It allows them to maintain a sense of moral authority within their own societies without risking their professional or social standing. By condemning violence while simultaneously distancing themselves from the victims, they occupy a safe middle ground – one that appears principled but ultimately changes nothing.
This is not merely a question of rhetoric; it reflects a deeper structural problem. Even those who oppose war often do so within a framework shaped by the very systems of power they claim to challenge. Their language, however critical it may sound, still echoes the moral grammar of empire.
As the late Palestinian intellectual Edward Said wrote in his essay “The Essential Terrorist”, “terrorism” has “acquired an extraordinary status in American public discourse” and has “displaced Communism as public enemy number one,” providing a flexible label through which enemies are constructed and violence against them normalized.
In the same vein, critics of so-called “humanitarian intervention” have long argued that the language of human rights itself has been repeatedly mobilized to justify war, transforming moral concern into a convenient instrument of domination rather than a genuine challenge to it.
Without honesty, without context, and without the courage to speak clearly, the conversation cannot move forward. The constant need to qualify – to balance, to soften, to distance – does not advance justice. It obscures it.
So the next time one finds oneself condemning the genocide in Gaza or the US-Israeli aggression on Iran, it is worth resisting that impulse. There is no need to dilute the truth in order to make it acceptable. There is no need to neutralize one’s own moral position in order to appear reasonable.
And if that cannot be done – if condemnation must always come with conditions – then perhaps it is better to remain silent.
The post The Cowardice of Qualification: When Anti-War Voices Speak the Language of Empire appeared first on Activist Post.
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