Corpofascism | The Surveillance State

A Note on This Page

Every entry below is preliminary. These are dated, sourced notes on unfolding events judged relevant to a future Volume 2 paper — not the papers themselves, and not yet integrated into the numbered chapter dossiers on The Evidence or The Actors. Every Corpofascism paper published from this point forward is labeled Volume 2. When an addendum below is developed into a full paper, it will be removed from this page and linked from its permanent home instead.

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The Surveillance State

License plate readers, body cameras, the contractors selling both, and the compute the whole apparatus runs on — including who actually owns it.

Relevant to Ch. 17, The Seeing Stone — and to Ch. 22, Left Click, Right Click, Left Click

The vendor changed. The architecture didn’t.

The clearest thing in this batch is a case study in how a public backlash can succeed completely against a brand and change nothing about the system. Flock Safety, which has been installing automatic license plate readers across the country, became the visible face of ALPR surveillance and drew hundreds of local protests. Per the tracking site DeFlock.org, at least 53 municipalities have cancelled their Flock contracts — specifically over concerns that federal officials were accessing the data the cameras collected.

The cameras are not coming down. Cities including Denver are ending Flock contracts and replacing the same capability with Axon — Douglas County, Colorado is swapping Flock hardware for a $22.8 million Axon system. Futurism’s summary of what changed: Axon provides “a remarkably similar surveillance architecture — just without the specter of federal overreach.” The objection was to a name. The infrastructure was re-procured under a different one.

And Axon is already elsewhere in this log. It is the company an account in the President’s name bought $1–5 million of on February 10, 2026, fourteen days before ICE solicited a $220 million Taser contract written to specifications only Axon products meet — documented in Corruption & Self-Dealing above. The surveillance build-out and the self-dealing are not two stories. They are the same contract.

Axon’s position, in figures: as much as 85% of the U.S. body camera market; $383 million in lifetime federal awards, most of it in the last five years; $2.8 billion in 2025 revenue, up 33% year over year, with Q4 alone at $797 million, up 39%. In 2025 it spent a company-record $2.4 million lobbying the federal government — a 50% jump year over year, against a company that had never exceeded $1 million before 2022 — and in 2024 it formed a corporate PAC. It fulfilled $73 million in federal contract obligations in 2025, including at least $13.1 million in new ICE awards.

The disclosure fight is the part that belongs in this book. The Nathan Cummings Foundation, an Axon shareholder, filed a proposal asking the company to disclose its political spending, including dark-money donations. Axon moved to exclude it on the grounds that disclosure would “micromanage” operations — a rationale that sits awkwardly against the hundreds of companies that have adopted comparable disclosure. The shareholders sued. What made suing necessary is structural: the SEC had recently abandoned its “no-action” process, the mechanism by which regulators reviewed such exclusions and shareholders got a right of reply. Corporate governance scholars describe the result as letting companies “unilaterally omit a resolution without considering further input from proponents.” The foundation’s own account: lawsuits like this “were previously considered a last resort. But now, for many, they’re the only option.”

One further detail worth preserving, reported by The Lever: Axon’s CEO donated directly to key lawmakers behind the Democratic ICE “reform” initiative that allocated $20 million exclusively for body cameras. The company sells the enforcement hardware and funds the reform that purchases the accountability hardware. Axon markets body cameras as a check on police brutality; the evidence that they change policing outcomes is mixed, while their function as a surveillance instrument is well documented. Axon has separately drawn criticism for “Draft One,” a ChatGPT-integrated tool that converts body-camera audio into police reports — hallucination-prone, and built on models with documented racial bias.

Responses and status: Axon did not respond to The Lever’s request for comment. The shareholder suit is unresolved; the judge has asked Axon to produce evidence that disclosure would in fact be burdensome, and has directed both sides to attempt a compromise proposal. Sources: Veronica Riccobene, Jacobin/The Lever (Mar. 12, 2026); Joe Wilkins, Futurism (Jul. 22, 2026), citing DeFlock.org, Gadget Review, and the Denver Gazette. Set aside deliberately: one item supplied for this batch was a Substack post by Greg Reese, a video producer associated with InfoWars. This project does not source from outlets in that orbit, and nothing above draws on it. The underlying Flock–Axon relationship is documented adequately by the reporting cited here and by Axon’s own 2020 investor announcement of its Flock Safety partnership.

A primary source, closing a gap flagged earlier

Partners before they were substitutes

The Vendor Changed, already drafted from this page's material, argued that towns escaping Flock by switching to Axon were not escaping the network they thought they were escaping. Axon's own April 2020 investor announcement confirms the argument more precisely than the paper could state without it.

Axon did not merely compete with Flock. In April 2020 it made a minority investment in Flock with warrants to commit additional capital over time, conditioned on partnership performance; sold Flock's own hardware through Axon's sales team, integrated alongside Axon's own Fleet 3 in-car ALPR system; and secured Flock's commitment to collaborate with Axon's own AI Ethics Board. Both companies described the arrangement, in their own announcement, in identical language — “ethical design,” “privacy-centric,” “transparency and accountability.”

The financial terms were not disclosed, and Axon's own CFO called the investment “not material” relative to the company's cash on hand at the time — a small, early stake rather than a controlling one. But the towns that later fled Flock for Axon, specifically to escape federal reach into local surveillance data, were moving toward a company that had held a financial and operational relationship with Flock since before most of those towns had installed either company's cameras. Source: Axon Enterprise, investor press release (Apr. 2, 2020), fetched directly.

Relevant to Ch. 2, The Trust as Private Empire — and Ch. 20, The Company Planet

Who actually owns the machines

The compute the preceding entries run on is being built at continental scale, and the question of who owns it has a surprising answer. On July 28, 2026, Meta and BlackRock announced a venture to develop a $14 billion, one-gigawatt, 1,000-acre AI data center campus in El Paso. Meta contributes land and in-progress construction worth roughly $2.3 billion; BlackRock contributes about $4.9 billion in cash; Meta takes a $1 billion distribution. When it settles, Meta owns roughly 20% and BlackRock-managed funds own 80% of a facility that will carry Meta’s name and run Meta’s models.

This is not a one-off. In October 2025 Meta did the same thing with Blue Owl Capital for the Hyperion campus in Richland Parish, Louisiana — a special-purpose vehicle named Beignet Investor issued roughly $27 billion in project bonds, with Blue Owl taking 80% for about $3 billion. Google has a joint venture with Blackstone; Broadcom has one with Apollo and Blackstone targeting more than 20 gigawatts; Microsoft, BlackRock, and the Abu Dhabi state-backed fund MGX built a vehicle to channel institutional money into the same buildout. OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle and MGX formed Stargate, initially $100 billion and reportedly scaling toward $500 billion — though there, unusually, the tech companies remain co-owners rather than minority tenants.

Why this belongs beside Chapter 2 rather than only the tech chapters. The book’s second chapter concerns the trust: a form in which the operating company is visible and the ownership is not. That is the structure here. The public understands these as Meta’s data centers — sited in Meta’s name, defended in Meta’s public interest, drawing on local power and water under Meta’s brand — while the majority economic interest sits with asset managers whose names appear on no signage and who answer to no user, no electorate, and no local council. When a community in El Paso or Richland Parish negotiates over power draw or water use, the entity across the table is not the entity that owns the thing.

Scale, and countervailing facts. More than 700 data centers are under construction across 38 states, concentrated in Virginia and Texas. Nothing here is alleged to be improper: these are disclosed commercial financings, announced by the parties in investor releases, and the structure exists for an ordinary reason — the capital requirement has outgrown what the operating companies want on their own balance sheets. Meta’s shares fell about 10% in a single day, erasing roughly $175 billion in market value, after it raised its capital-expenditure forecast; its CFO attributed the increase to memory-chip pricing and data center costs. The countervailing signal worth recording: New York has halted large data center construction for a year, which indicates the siting question is contested and not yet settled in the industry’s favor. Source: Mary Whitfill Roeloffs, Forbes (Jul. 28, 2026), citing Meta and BlackRock investor releases.

The rest of this batch is unread and queued. The Root on the same El Paso project, which may carry the community-impact reporting the Forbes piece does not. On intelligence: the Guardian on cuts to the Director of National Intelligence’s staff, and Democracy Docket on the Senate confirming Jay Clayton as intelligence chief — both of which would sit with the Oversight material rather than here, and the DNI staffing story is the more likely of the two to matter. On the military: NBC on how the Pentagon is counting Iran war casualties, which bears directly on the undercounted-casualties material already in The Evidence, and The Bulwark on Elbridge Colby, which is argument rather than new documentation. There is probably enough in the intelligence and military items together for a section of their own once read; on one source I am not willing to assert that.

Relevant to Ch. 1, The Company Town

A power plant that sells to no one

The entry above concerns who owns the data centers. This one concerns how they are powered, and it arrives at the book’s first chapter by the shortest route yet. In July 2026 the EPA issued guidance — its own headline says the purpose plainly — “to Further President Trump’s Agenda Promoting Data Centers.” The substance: the Clean Air Act’s Acid Rain Program does not apply to “islanded” power generation facilities, meaning generators not connected to any public electricity grid.

The reasoning is a statutory-interpretation argument, and the agency states it clearly: the Acid Rain Program reaches facilities that sell electricity or must report as a generating unit to the Department of Energy. An islanded plant does neither — it burns fuel to power one company’s own campus and sells nothing to anybody — so on EPA’s reading it falls outside the program. The release states the effect without euphemism: the guidance “expands opportunities for companies to develop and operate islanded power generation facilities for data centers,” giving developers “greater flexibility in where and how quickly they can build.” Should such a facility later connect to the grid, it may become subject.

What this is, structurally. A corporation builds its own generating capacity, on its own land, to serve its own operations, and by virtue of serving only itself sits outside the regulatory regime written for power that is sold to the public. That is the company town’s defining move, transposed from housing and scrip to megawatts: the same activity, exempt from the same rules, because it happens inside the firm rather than between the firm and a public. Chapter 1 traces a period in which a company that generated its own power, housed its own workers, and policed its own streets was not thereby subject to less oversight but to more scrutiny, because privacy of ownership was not accepted as a reason for absence of rule. This guidance accepts exactly that reason.

Recorded in fairness, and it matters here. EPA’s argument is a reading of statutory text, not an assertion of discretion, and it is not obviously wrong on its face — the Acid Rain Program was written around utilities selling into a grid. The guidance sits alongside the administration’s Ratepayer Protection Pledge, under which signatory companies commit to “build, bring, or buy all of the energy needed to power their facilities and to pay the full cost of that energy and its supporting infrastructure” — a commitment aimed at a real problem, since the alternative is data center demand raising ordinary households’ bills. EPA Assistant Administrator for Air and Radiation Aaron Szabo framed both objectives together: “Ensuring that the United States maintains our artificial intelligence dominance is essential to national security and economic prosperity. At the same time, it is equally important that we safeguard our communities from utility price hikes… EPA is proud to further the President’s agenda through commonsense approaches to regulating.” What this entry does not establish: the practical air-quality consequence depends on what these plants burn and at what scale, which the guidance does not address and this log has not determined. The exemption is documented; its emissions effect is not, and should not be asserted without it. Source: U.S. EPA news release and linked guidance document (Jul. 27, 2026), fetched directly.

The remainder of this batch is unread and queued. Mother Jones on the EPA being ordered again to release $2.8 billion in climate justice funds — which belongs with the Vought grant-withholding material in Oversight and is the item I would read next, since a second order implies non-compliance with the first. ProPublica on Russell Vought, OMB, and federal science grants, which extends both the Oversight and Public Health entries. The American Prospect on the Yale protests and university governance. Inequality.org on labor. And the BBC world item, which I have not identified well enough to characterize. Education, labor, and international reaction are each thin at one source apiece; if they are to become sections rather than scattered entries, they need more than this.

Extends The Vendor Changed — the mechanism by which a company with “no contract” still supplies the access

The search reason was literally the word “ICE”

Flock Safety's own public position, repeated by CEO Garrett Langley, is that ICE has no contract with the company and no direct access to its license-plate-reader network. Audit logs reviewed by journalists and researchers across multiple states describe a mechanism that makes the distinction close to meaningless in practice.

404 Media's review of search records found more than 4,000 lookups conducted at the federal government's request for immigration purposes — not through a contract, but through local police departments running the searches on ICE's behalf. A single local search can reach not just that department's own cameras but Flock's entire nationwide network, meaning one cooperating department anywhere in the country can supply federal access to the whole system. In San Jose, public audit logs listed search reasons including “fresno dea intel,” “CBP,” and “ICE” — despite California's SB 54 explicitly prohibiting state and local agencies from sharing this exact data with federal immigration authorities. In Richmond, Virginia, an ATF analyst improperly accessed the city's Flock system to aid an immigration investigation after people escaped an ICE detention facility; the analyst no longer works for the department.

The Minnesota Star Tribune, examining the Operation Metro Surge period already documented above, found some law enforcement agencies had left their data accessible to far-flung departments that searched it for immigration purposes during the surge; Twin Cities departments said they had not shared data directly, but Crow Wing County, which holds a working agreement with ICE, searched multiple Twin Cities departments' camera data itself. In Denver, the City Council voted unanimously to terminate its Flock contract; Mayor Mike Johnston unilaterally extended it anyway, over the council's own vote, arguing the technology remained a useful crime-fighting tool — while the ACLU of Colorado's review of the same city's audit logs found more than 1,400 searches conducted for ICE since June 2024.

The pattern is not confined to one state. Evanston, Illinois found Flock had illegally reinstalled cameras the city had already ordered removed for violating state privacy law. The Electronic Frontier Foundation's own analysis of millions of searches found law enforcement, in the absence of any warrant requirement to search ALPR data at all, has moved well beyond specific criminal investigations into what the group characterizes as use for virtually any purpose. Some cities have responded by canceling their contracts outright — Santa Cruz's city council voted to end its Flock relationship in January, with one councilmember citing “the absolute insanity of what we were seeing.”

Recorded for accuracy. Flock's statement that it lacks a direct contract with ICE is technically accurate and not contradicted by this entry; the mechanism documented here is indirect access via cooperating local departments, which is a real and consequential distinction from a formal federal contract even though its practical effect on privacy may be similar. Individual instances of improper access, like the Richmond ATF analyst, were identified and the individual involved is no longer employed there — suggesting at least some accountability mechanisms function when violations are discovered, even if the underlying system-wide pattern persists. Sources: 404 Media, via the Immigration Policy Tracking Project (Feb. 18, 2026); Electronic Frontier Foundation (May 26 and Feb. 9, 2026); NPR (Feb. 17, 2026); Stateline (Jan. 8, 2026); Minnesota Star Tribune (Jul. 2026); Berkeleyside (Jul. 13, 2026); VPM News, on the Richmond ATF incident; Gibbs Mura law group's class-action filing, on the San Jose audit logs.

Extends The Seeing Stone — a $1 billion contract, and a tax agency's own admission of improper disclosure

Seven million taxpayers sought, and the IRS's own admission

In 2025, the IRS and DHS signed a memorandum of understanding to use confidential tax data for immigration enforcement — reversing years of assurance to ITIN holders, people without Social Security numbers who file and pay taxes using an IRS-issued identification number, that their data would remain protected specifically to encourage tax compliance regardless of immigration status.

ICE sought data on as many as seven million taxpayers under the agreement; 47,000 had their information shared before two federal courts barred further disclosure. On February 11, 2026, the IRS filed its own declaration in court stating that some confidential taxpayer data had been improperly disclosed to ICE — the tax agency's own admission, not an outside allegation. ICE has stated it has not used the shared data to deport anyone and is now enjoined from using what it already received.

The data-sharing sits inside a much larger acquisition. DHS holds a $1 billion ceiling blanket purchase agreement with Palantir — the company already documented in this volume's paper on Alex Karp — which took effect in February 2026 and gives ICE the analytical capacity to process exactly this kind of dataset at scale. Planning documents reviewed by FedScoop show DHS budgeting a further $10–20 million this year specifically for an AI-enhanced surveillance data platform, on top of ICE's own enforcement budget of $28.7 billion for 2025 alone — nearly triple the prior year's, with $56.25 billion more budgeted over the following three years. The Electronic Frontier Foundation's own comparison: that budget alone would rank ICE as the world's 14th best-funded military, between Ukraine and Israel.

Senators Mark Warner and Tim Kaine formally warned that ICE's expanding toolset, combined with documented instances of excessive and deadly force, “potentially enable[s] DHS to circumvent the constitutional protections provided by the Fourth Amendment.” One specific tool, developed by Palantir and called ELITE, lets agents build an on-the-spot dossier on any individual in the field, generating a probability score for where that person is likely to be at a given time.

Recorded for accuracy. Data-sharing agreements between federal agencies are common and often lawful, and the underlying policy question — whether tax data collected under a promise of confidentiality can later be repurposed for enforcement — is a genuine legal dispute the two courts' injunctions have not yet fully resolved on the merits. ICE's claim that it has not used the shared data to deport anyone has not been independently verified by a neutral party in the sources reviewed, and this entry records the claim without endorsing it. Sources: Brookings' IRS Spotlight project (updated Feb. 24, 2026), read directly, including its own citations to the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and Bloomberg Tax; Brookings commentary by Stephanie Pell, Rashawn Ray, and Gabriel R. Sanchez (May 20, 2026); FedScoop (Mar. 16, 2026); the Electronic Frontier Foundation (Jan. 7, 2026), on ICE's budget comparison; NPR/WBUR, on the ELITE tool.

Relevant to Ch. 32, The Least of These — a database built for sex offenders and violent criminals, now holding a four-year-old's genetic profile

133,000 children, queried every time a crime is searched

CODIS, the FBI's Combined DNA Index System, was authorized by Congress in 1994 for one purpose: identifying convicted sex offenders and violent criminals. WIRED's review of internal documents found more than 133,000 migrant children and teenagers now have a DNA profile permanently entered into that same database — not because any of them were convicted of anything, but because they passed through civil immigration custody.

Among the children: at least one four-year-old. Nearly 230 are under age 13; more than 30,000 are between 14 and 17. Once a profile is entered, it does not expire and does not require a new crime to be searched — it is queried automatically every time law enforcement anywhere in the country runs a DNA search against CODIS for any investigation. Senator Ron Wyden, in a formal letter to DHS Secretary Noem and Attorney General Bondi, put the practical effect plainly: these children “will be treated by law enforcement as suspects for every investigation of every future crime, indefinitely.”

The legal mechanism dates to an October 2019 rule, finalized in April 2020, that eliminated a prior regulatory provision letting DHS exempt noncitizens from DNA collection when doing so was “not feasible.” Since 2020, DHS has added more than 1.5 million noncitizen DNA profiles to CODIS — a 5,000% increase, making DHS the database's single largest contributor. In CODIS's first two decades of existence, the federal government held only 25,000 noncitizen profiles total; the post-2020 expansion now exceeds that entire prior history sixtyfold. Georgetown's Center on Privacy & Technology found CBP collects DNA from virtually anyone in its custody, regardless of how briefly they were held.

Wyden's letter draws the comparison directly: “Governments exercising such broad discretion to involuntarily collect and retain DNA are repressive authoritarian regimes also engaging in gross human rights violations, such as genocide, ethnic cleansing, torture, and more.” The Georgetown Center, the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, and Americans for Immigrant Justice sued DHS after being stonewalled on records requests filed in August 2024. Georgetown's Stevie Glaberson: DHS is “collecting DNA from people accused of no crime and while operating with none of the constraints that are supposed to be in place before the government compels someone to give over their most sensitive personal information.”

CBP's official defense, from Assistant Commissioner Hilton Beckham: “In order to secure our borders, CBP is devoting every resource available to identify who is entering our country. We are not letting human smugglers, child sex traffickers and other criminals enter American communities… CBP collects DNA samples for submission to the FBI's Combined DNA Index System… from persons in CBP custody who are arrested on federal criminal charges, and from aliens detained under CBP's authority who are subject to fingerprinting and not otherwise exempt from the collection requirement.”

Recorded for accuracy. The underlying legal framework requiring DNA collection from detained noncitizens was established during the first Trump administration and has statutory grounding CBP can point to; this entry does not assert the collection itself is unlawful, only documents its scale and the specific database it feeds. CBP's stated rationale — identifying genuine threats among people entering federal custody — is a real security interest, and the agency's statement should be read alongside the scale figures rather than dismissed as pretextual; whether collecting DNA from a four-year-old serves that stated purpose is a question this entry poses rather than answers on the agency's behalf. Wyden's authoritarian-regime comparison is a sitting senator's characterization, not a finding by any court or independent body.

Extends the Flock side-door entry above — a state contract tied directly to border enforcement, and a pattern the technology itself enables

$26 million, tied to Operation Lone Star, and a stalking pattern the audits caught

Texas's Department of Public Safety approved a $26 million contract with Flock specifically to surveil state roads in support of Operation Lone Star, the state's border and immigration enforcement effort. DPS now holds data-sharing agreements with 206 local and county law enforcement agencies — up from 122 in February, a 69% expansion in five months — and separately maintains a 287(g) task-force partnership with ICE, allowing state troopers to cooperate directly with federal immigration agents in the field.

The Institute for Justice, a public-interest law firm, has documented two distinct abuse patterns emerging as Flock's network expands nationally. One: 27 cases across nine states of erroneous camera hits leading to innocent motorists being pulled over, detained at gunpoint, or jailed — none yet confirmed in Texas as of late July, though the state's network is still expanding. Two, and more disturbing: a survey of 28 documented cases nationally of police officers using Flock specifically to stalk romantic interests. Two of those cases surfaced in Texas within the same month this reporting covers, including a Pasadena police sergeant who resigned under investigation for using the system to stalk a female colleague.

A February investigation by The 74 found immigration agents gained back-door access to a Houston school district's Flock camera data through out-of-state police departments the district had shared data with — meaning school security infrastructure became an unintended pathway into federal immigration enforcement. Separately, U.S. Rep. Keith Self, a Republican from McKinney, introduced federal legislation last month requiring federal agencies to obtain warrants before accessing Flock camera data: “Americans' Fourth Amendment right to be secure in their privacy does not disappear just because of new technology or artificial intelligence… Get a warrant.”

At least 47 cities nationwide have terminated their Flock contracts outright, including Austin and Bandera, Texas, according to DeFlock, an anti-surveillance tracking group. The backlash has a more direct expression too: Dallas police reported 25 physical attacks on Flock cameras since March, and Houston authorities are investigating a wave of camera vandalism this month. Flock itself did not respond to the Texas Tribune's request for comment for this story.

Recorded for accuracy. Flock cameras have documented, real value for the crime categories police departments cite — auto theft recovery and locating missing persons chief among them — and this entry does not dispute that value; the question the entry documents is the accompanying misuse pattern, not whether the technology has any legitimate use. The Institute for Justice's stalking and false-hit figures are that organization's own count, compiled through public-records requests, not a government audit; DPS itself states misuse of the system for “non-law enforcement purposes” is strictly prohibited by policy, and individual departments including Hewitt, Texas described real internal safeguards and disciplinary consequences for violations. Source: The Texas Tribune / The Waco Bridge (Aug. 3, 2026), Ayden Runnels, read directly in full.