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Great Reset

From Border Security to Big Brother: Social Media Surveillance

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10 minute read

 By Christina Maas

Was the entire immigration reform rhetoric just a prelude to broadening government spying?

Let’s take a closer look: immigration became a hot-button campaign issue, with plenty of talk about “welcoming” migrants, combined with a healthy dose of hand-wringing about border security. Now, however, critics are uncovering what looks like the real priority—an enhanced federal surveillance operation aimed at monitoring not just new arrivals, but American citizens too. In the name of keeping tabs on who’s coming and going, the administration sank more than $100 million into a social media surveillance system designed to keep an eye on everyone.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) first flirted with these powers under Trump’s presidency, when ICE officials began monitoring social media under the guise of protecting the homeland. The Biden-Harris administration, having previously expressed horror at Trump-era excesses, took a softer tack, but actually increased mass surveillance. They rebranded the initiative as the Visa Lifecycle Vetting Initiative (VLVI), a name that practically exudes bureaucratic charm while implying a methodical, visa-centric approach. But if it was just an immigration program, why was it scanning communications between Americans and their international friends, family, or business contacts?

According to a lawsuit from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the program evolved into something much larger than a mere visa vetting system. The scheme entailed broad surveillance of communications and social media activity, conveniently sidestepping pesky things like “probable cause” or the First Amendment. “Government officials peering through their correspondence with colleagues visiting from overseas and scrutinizing the opinions expressed in their communications and their work,” read a lawsuit that laid bare the VLVI’s invasive nature. What started as a system to vet foreigners’ eligibility to enter the U.S. quietly metastasized into an excuse to monitor anyone who dared connect across borders.

We obtained a copy of the lawsuit for you here.
We obtained a copy of documents batch one for you here.
We obtained a copy of documents batch two for you here.

Of course, in true Washington style, this story wouldn’t be complete without a twist of political theater. The administration’s rhetoric has leaned heavily on a supposed dedication to protecting civil rights and personal freedoms—while simultaneously doubling down on programs that do the opposite.

A Little Privacy, Please? DHS Puts American Social Media on the Watchlist
Ah, the Fourth Amendment — one of those quaint, old-timey Constitutional protections that grant Americans the basic human right not to be poked, prodded, or probed by their own government without a solid reason. It’s a promise that Washington will think twice before sifting through your life without a warrant. Yet somehow, in the age of social media, this Fourth Amendment right seems to be slipping into the hazy realm of memory, particularly when it comes to Uncle Sam’s latest pastime: keeping tabs on everyone’s online chatter under the banner of immigration vetting.

Welcome to the VLVI, a Homeland Security special that appears to have mistaken “security” for “surveillance.” This bureaucratic marvel was dreamed up as a means to monitor non-citizens and immigrants, ostensibly for national security. But according to recent lawsuits, it’s not just foreigners on the watchlist—average Americans now get to share the surveillance limelight too, all thanks to the Department of Homeland Security’s fondness for “indiscriminate monitoring” of citizen communications. And why? Because in the brave new world of VLVI, any American chatting online with an overseas connection might just be suspicious enough to keep an eye on.

A Sweeping “Security” Measure or Just Mass Surveillance?

Here’s where the Constitution starts to feel like an afterthought. Traditionally, the government can’t simply jump into your emails, texts, or online rants without a warrant backed by probable cause. The Fourth Amendment makes that pretty clear. But in the VLVI’s playbook, this notion of “probable cause” becomes something of a suggestion, more of a “nice to have” than a constitutional mandate. Instead, they’ve embraced an approach that’s less “laser-focused security effort” and more “catch-all dragnet,” casting wide nets over American citizens who happen to connect with anyone abroad—no illegal activity necessary.

Imagine you’re a US citizen messaging your friend in France about a summer trip, or maybe you’re just exchanging memes with a cousin in Pakistan. Under this initiative, that simple exchange could land you in a Homeland Security database, your innocent messages cataloged alongside the truly suspicious characters of the internet. And this is happening without any individual warrants, without specific suspicion, and in some cases, without probable cause. One might ask, exactly how does that square with the Constitution’s protections?

Privacy Protections? That’s for Other People

This is all a question of government trust and hypocrisy. The program began under a previous administration but was quickly shuttled along by the current one, despite its public stance championing privacy rights. There’s something ironic about politicians who rally for civil liberties in campaign speeches, only to maintain and expand government surveillance in office. The backlash has been predictably loud, and for good reason. Here we have a policy that effectively treats every social media user as a latent threat and a government that somehow expects people to swallow this as reasonable.

Critics have slammed this “watch-all” approach, pointing out that it doesn’t take a legal scholar to see how this might just cross a constitutional line or two. It’s not just Americans with foreign friends who are worried—it’s anyone who believes the government shouldn’t rummage through citizens’ lives without cause. “This type of program, where citizens’ digital lives are surveilled under a sweeping policy without individual warrants or specific reasons, sounds like an unreasonable search,” privacy advocates say.

The Price of a Free Society: Now With Less Freedom

Of course, VLVI supporters wave away these concerns with a dismissive “it’s for security” mantra as if that excuse covers every constitutional breach. And true, there’s little doubt that some level of monitoring is necessary to keep the truly dangerous elements out of the country. But we’re talking about ordinary people here, law-abiding citizens getting swept up in a bureaucratic machine that fails to distinguish between a casual chat and a credible threat.

When the government can tap into anyone’s social media profile because of a flimsy association, what’s left of the citizen’s “reasonable expectation of privacy”? In theory, the Fourth Amendment protects it; in practice, programs like VLVI gnaw away at it, one seemingly “harmless” violation at a time. If we keep pretending this is just another harmless tool in the security toolkit, we might as well hang up any remaining illusions about the privacy rights we’re supposedly guaranteed.

Just Another Step Toward a Surveillance State?

For Americans, it’s a chilling reminder that a swipe on Instagram or a chat on Facebook can mean more than just casual social interaction. For the DHS, it seems the message is clear: treat everyone as a suspect first, and figure out the legalities later. What happens to the expectation of privacy for ordinary Americans? It’s probably time we all start looking over our digital shoulders, because in the world of VLVI, “reasonableness” is a government privilege, not a citizen’s right.

Censorship Industrial Complex

France condemned for barring populist leader Marine Le Pen from 2027 election

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From LifeSiteNews

By Frank Wright

It remains to be seen how long the rule of lawfare can last against the rising demand for popular politics. The globalist remnants across the West are now liberal democracies in name only.

Marine Le Pen, the former leader of the populist French opposition party, has been sentenced to prison and barred from standing for election as president in 2027, following a court ruling against her for alleged financial crimes.

Le Pen is currently leading polls to win the presidential election, being 11 to 17 points ahead of the party of the globalist President Emmanuel Macron.

The ruling Monday on charges of “misuse of EU funds” sees Le Pen, leader of the National Rally (RN) party, facing two years’ imprisonment and a five-year ban on running for elected office. Her lawyer stated she would appeal the ruling.

 

Speaking a day before the verdict, Le Pen said, “There are 11 million people who voted for the movement I represent. So tomorrow, potentially, millions and millions of French people would see themselves deprived of their candidate in the election.”

She is to address the French nation in a televised statement Monday night.

Party leader Jordan Bardella responded on X, saying, “Today, it is not only Marine Le Pen who is unjustly condemned: it is French democracy that is being executed.”

Bardella has called for “peaceful mobilization” in support of Marine Le Pen, with a petition launched in protest at the “democratic scandal” of her effective cancellation as a candidate.

The RN won 33 percent of the vote in the first round of the 2024 French parliamentary elections, being the single largest party overall. It is prevented from entering government by a “cordon sanitaire” – an agreement between liberal-global and left-wing parties to “firewall” national-populists from power regardless of how many people vote for them.

Le Pen’s appeal would suspend the jail sentence and the fine of 100,000 euros – but would not be heard until 2026, effectively sabotaging her preparations for the 2027 election should she win. The ban takes effect when the appeal process is exhausted, meaning Le Pen is free to campaign until her appeal is heard in a year’s time.

The court ruled that Le Pen, whose RN was the single largest party in the recent French parliamentary elections, had misused 3 million euros in EU funds by paying party officials based in France.

She had told France’s La Tribune Dimanche on Saturday that “the judges have the power of life or death over our movement.”

The judges appear to have given her party a death sentence. Eight further RN members and twelve assistants were also found guilty in the same trial.

Elon Musk has warned the move will “backfire,” with globalist house magazine The Economist in agreement that “her sentence for corrupt use of EU funds could strengthen the hard right.” Its report stated, “Barring Marine Le Pen is a political earthquake for France.”

The shockwaves have reached across Europe, and around the world. Italy’s Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini called the court’s ruling a “declaration of war by Brussels,” joining Dutch and Hungarian national-populist leaders Geert Wilders and Viktor Orban in condemnation of the move.

 

According to commentators, the legal ruling shows that the liberal-global regime is now canceling democracy. Independent journalist Michael Shellenberger said on X of worldwide globalist moves to criminalize its opponents: “This is a five alarm fire.”

 

Citing the lawfare undertaken against then-candidate Donald Trump, former State Department official Mike Benz described the many examples of the rule of lawfare were “a dagger in the heart of democracy”:

 

Donald Trump Jr. asked whether the French judiciary are “just trying to prove JD Vance was right” – referring to the vice president’s “blistering attack on European leaders” over their rising censorship and anti-democratic moves. Vance told EU and UK leaders in Munich, “Democracy rests on the sacred principle that the voice of the people matters. There is no room for firewalls. You either uphold the principle or you don’t.”

U.S. political strategist Steve Bannon also referenced populist figures facing legal persecution in his “War Room” rundown of the Le Pen affair today:

 

The move to legally “firewall” Le Pen has left even her political opponents disturbed, with the ruling Prime Minister Francois Bayrou reportedly “disquieted” by the verdict. Jean-Luc Melenchon, the leader of the left-liberal LFI and a determined political enemy of Le Pen, has said, “The decision to remove an elected official should be up to the people” – not the courts.

Right-populist leader Eric Zemmour, who coined the term “remigration,” warned of a “coup d’etat” of activist judges in 1997 – and said today that “everything has to change” as “it is not for judges to decide for whom the people must vote.”

Laurent Wauquiez of the conservative Les Republicains – who have also refused to work with the RN in coalition – said, “The decision to condemn Marine Le Pen is heavy and exceptional. In a democracy, it is unhealthy that an elected official be forbidden to stand for election.”

It seems this latest example of liberal-global lawfare may even see Le Pen’s party rise in the polls, with a survey today showing two-thirds of all French voters saying her ineligibility would not stop them voting for her RN party.

Nearly half of voters believe she was treated harshly “for political reasons,” with a quarter believing the move to bar her will be a “trump card” for the party overall.

Whether the move “backfires” or not, the message to Western electorates is becoming clear. You can vote for liberals of the left, right, or center – because anyone offering a real alternative will be locked out of power, or locked up in jail.

It remains to be seen how long the rule of lawfare can last against the rising demand for popular politics. After canceled elections, speech crackdowns, and criminalizing their opponents, the globalist remnants across the West are now liberal democracies in name only.

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Censorship Industrial Complex

Welcome to Britain, Where Critical WhatsApp Messages Are a Police Matter

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“It was just unfathomable to me that things had escalated to this degree,”

“We’d never used abusive or threatening language, even in private.”

You’d think that in Britain, the worst thing that could happen to you after sending a few critical WhatsApp messages would be a passive-aggressive reply or, at most, a snooty whisper campaign. What you probably wouldn’t expect is to have six police officers show up on your doorstep like they’re hunting down a cartel. But that’s precisely what happened to Maxie Allen and Rosalind Levine — two parents whose great offense was asking some mildly inconvenient questions about how their daughter’s school planned to replace its retiring principal.
This is not an episode of Black Mirror. This is Borehamwood, Hertfordshire, 2025. And the parents in question—Maxie Allen, a Times Radio producer, and Rosalind Levine, 46, a mother of two—had the gall to inquire, via WhatsApp no less, whether Cowley Hill Primary School was being entirely above board in appointing a new principal.
What happened next should make everyone in Britain pause and consider just how overreaching their government has become. Because in the time it takes to send a meme about the school’s bake sale, you too could be staring down the barrel of a “malicious communications” charge.
The trouble started in May, shortly after the school’s principal retired. Instead of the usual round of polite emails, clumsy PowerPoints, and dreary Q&A sessions, there was… silence. Maxie Allen, who had once served as a school governor—so presumably knows his way around a budget meeting—asked the unthinkable: when was the recruitment process going to be opened up?
A fair question, right? Not in Borehamwood, apparently. The school responded not with answers, but with a sort of preemptive nuclear strike.
Jackie Spriggs, the chair of governors, issued a public warning about “inflammatory and defamatory” social media posts and hinted at disciplinary action for those who dared to cause “disharmony.” One imagines this word being uttered in the tone of a Bond villain stroking a white cat.
Parents Allen and Levine were questioned by police over their WhatsApp messages.
For the crime of “casting aspersions,” Allen and Levine were promptly banned from the school premises. That meant no parents’ evening, no Christmas concert, no chance to speak face-to-face about the specific needs of their daughter Sascha, who—just to add to the bleakness of it all—has epilepsy and is registered disabled.
So what do you do when the school shuts its doors in your face? You send emails. Lots of them. You try to get answers. And if that fails, you might—just might—vent a little on WhatsApp.
But apparently, that was enough to earn the label of harassers. Not in the figurative, overly sensitive, “Karen’s upset again” sense. No, this was the actual, legal, possibly-prison kind of harassment.
Then came January 29. Rosalind was at home sorting toys for charity—presumably a heinous act in today’s climate—when she opened the door to what can only be described as a low-budget reboot of Line of Duty. Six officers. Two cars. A van. All to arrest two middle-aged parents whose biggest vice appears to be stubborn curiosity.
“I saw six police officers standing there,” she said. “My first thought was that Sascha was dead.”
Instead, it was the prelude to an 11-hour ordeal in a police cell. Eleven hours. That’s enough time to commit actual crimes, be tried, be sentenced, and still get home in time for MasterChef.
Allen called the experience “dystopian,” and, for once, the word isn’t hyperbole. “It was just unfathomable to me that things had escalated to this degree,” he said. “We’d never used abusive or threatening language, even in private.”
Worse still, they were never even told which communications were being investigated. It’s like being detained by police for “vibes.”
One of the many delightful ironies here is that the school accused them of causing a “nuisance on school property,” despite the fact that neither of them had set foot on said property in six months.
Now, in the school’s defense—such as it is—they claim they went to the police because the sheer volume of correspondence and social media posts had become “upsetting.” Which raises an important question: when did being “upsetting” become a police matter?
What we’re witnessing is not a breakdown in communication, but a full-blown bureaucratic tantrum. Instead of engaging with concerned parents, Cowley Hill’s leadership took the nuclear option: drag them out in cuffs and let the police deal with it.
Hertfordshire Constabulary, apparently mistaking Borehamwood for Basra, decided this was a perfectly normal use of resources. “The number of officers was necessary,” said a spokesman, “to secure electronic devices and care for children at the address.”
Right. Nothing says “childcare” like watching your mom get led away in handcuffs while your toddler hides in the corner, traumatized.
After five weeks—five weeks of real police time, in a country where burglaries are basically a form of inheritance transfer—the whole thing was quietly dropped. Insufficient evidence. No charges. Not even a slap on the wrist.
So here we are. A story about a couple who dared to question how a public school was run, and ended up locked in a cell, banned from the school play, and smeared with criminal accusations for trying to advocate for their disabled child.
This is Britain in 2025. A place where public institutions behave like paranoid cults and the police are deployed like private security firms for anyone with a bruised ego. All while the rest of the population is left wondering how many other WhatsApp groups are one message away from a dawn raid.
Because if this is what happens when you ask a few inconvenient questions, what’s next? Fingerprinting people for liking the wrong Facebook post? Tactical units sent in for sarcastic TripAdvisor reviews?
It’s a warning. Ask the wrong question, speak out of turn, and you too may get a visit from half the local police force.
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