As I See It: Digital Coup
September 15, 2025 Victor Rozek
“If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.” Those dire words were spoken in the 17th century by Cardinal Richelieu, the perfect deadly blend of Church and State, who served as chief minister to King Louis XIII of France.
To maintain power, Richelieu employed eerily familiar methods notably censorship, forbidding discussion of political matters in public places, suppressing dissent and, most important, data collection. Richelieu employed a vast network of spies who gathered information on dissenters and potential enemies. Those who were suspected of conspiring against him were imprisoned, tortured and executed.
The Nazis followed much the same game plan during WWII, and notably began the practice of computerized data collection. Sadly, IBM, then America’s most powerful corporation, participated in that process. The sales force followed the German invaders from country to country and installed punch-card technology, providing the Nazis with coded information on national census data, military logistics, ghetto statistics, train traffic management, and concentration camp capacity. The result has come to be known as the Holocaust.
Though centuries apart, the process remained essentially the same: Gather data; identify targets; silence them.
Earlier this year, through the Department of Government Efficiency, unelected officials, without proper legal authority, without security clearance, or any government experience whatsoever, invaded dozens of US government facilities, starting with the Treasury Department and the Social Security Administration, bypassing data safeguards, and siphoning confidential data from government computers, leaving behind embedded private actors whose intentions were dubious.
Carole Cadwalladr, British author and investigative journalist, called it a “Digital Coup.” in a TED Talk in April 2025. Like Richelieu and the Nazis, the government is compiling dossiers on Americans – particularly those who oppose current policies and practices.
Data, Cadwalladr notes, is “the crack cocaine of Silicon Valley.” For decades corporations have tracked our online activities, our clicks, our likes, our dislikes. Much of our most personal data; our financial information, tax returns, social security records, and medical information, resides on government computers previously siloed at individual agencies. They were islands of data never intended to be linked by digital viaducts. The unlawful appropriation of that data, according to Cadwalladr, has only one purpose: the building of a surveillance state.
Ironically, we are the only democracy without privacy laws and clear remedies for wanton violations. Privacy per se was not an issue the framers grappled with 250 years ago. And although the right to privacy is not specifically mentioned in the constitution the 4th and 14th Amendments are linked with the right to privacy by virtue of prior Supreme Court rulings. The 4th Amendment explicitly protects against unreasonable searches and seizures, implying a right to privacy in one’s person, home, papers, and effects. The 14th Amendment’s Due Process Clause prevents states from infringing on fundamental rights, including privacy, and contains a section on equal protection.
Siphoning our data from government servers would certainly appear to qualify as an unreasonable search and seizure. Where that data now resides is anyone’s guess. There is no way to guarantee its return or erasure. There is no way to know what back doors were installed in the software. Cadwalladr fears that Democracy won’t survive the technology we’re building. “Politics is technology now,” she says. And as much as well-meaning people would like to keep those worlds separate, the remarkable computer technology first developed in the 1940s, has evolved to become ever more invasive and increasingly weaponized.
Even leisure and culture are not immune. Culture, Cadwalladr notes, has been largely reduced to what next appears on your phone, which is controlled by AI. Thus, what we see is determined by what we’ve already seen. There is no common cultural experience, no unifying reality that can’t be manipulated by AI.
Not coincidentally, a clause was inserted in the Reconciliation Bill tried to make it illegal for any state to pass AI restrictions or enforce any laws regulating AI during a ten year period commencing with the passage of the law. AI unchained for ten years. What could possibly go wrong? After considerable bipartisan objection, this item was removed from the bill by the Senate, by a vote of 99 to 1.
Cadwalladr has a personal answer to that question. She was the journalist responsible for exposing the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal, for which she was a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize. Earlier that decade, the data of millions of Facebook Users was collected by British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica for political advertising without the users’ consent.
The same year that she was nominated for journalistic excellence, she was sued for libel by British businessman, Brexit advocate, politician, and mega political donor Arron Banks. Her alleged crime? Giving a TED talk in which she said that Banks had lied about “his relationship with the Russian government.” The case was initially dismissed but damages and costs of over £1m were awarded upon appeal. Cadwalladr unsuccessfully sought permission to appeal that decision to the Supreme Court. Having nowhere else to turn, she started a crowdfunding site to help pay for the judgement. (You can read a lengthy story about this case by Cadwalladr from the June 19, 2022 issue of The Guardian.) In November 2023, Cadwalladr’s lawyers announced that they would be taking the case to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. She called the entire experience “a digital witch burning.”
This legal action carried out by Banks was considered by 19 organizations defending press freedom to be a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation (SLAPP), as well as an abuse of law. Cadwalladr was shaken by the experience, but was not silenced. Personal data cannot become the adjudicator of free speech.
Perhaps, as Cadwalladr suggests, it’s time to include Data Rights as human rights. Perhaps, as she further suggests, allowing your child to be data harvested from birth will one day be recognized as child abuse.
But it’s not only what is harvested, but what is being taught. Whoever controls the Internet controls the truth, she argues. The concepts of right and wrong can be controlled for centuries to come. Reality can now be manufactured.
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