WIRED obtained more than 1,000 pages of internal, unpublished reports from DHS, the FBI, and fusion centers around the country. What they describe is a coordinated national shift — using the domestic surveillance apparatus to monitor a threat category the government invented itself.
They’re calling it “anti-tech violent extremism.”
The term appears nowhere in any publicly available DHS or FBI extremism framework. No public rulemaking created it. A New York Intelligence and Counterterrorism Bureau report obtained by WIRED warns that AI adoption may fuel “large-scale protests that devolve into civil unrest and anti-tech violent extremist activity” — and that this threat is already emerging. People who show up at town halls and budget meetings to object to data centers in their neighborhoods are being surveilled under this label.
This didn’t happen in a vacuum. Trump’s National Security Presidential Memo 7 instructs the Justice Department to target anyone holding “anti-American,” “anti-Christian,” and “anti-capitalism” beliefs. His counterterrorism czar Sebastian Gorka recently released a strategy document naming left-wing extremists one of the three top counterterrorism priorities facing the United States. “Anti-tech violent extremism” is an unreported addition to that framework — quietly bolted on.
Note what the administration is also doing: actively subsidizing and deregulating the AI and data center industries these Americans are protesting. The same government that is fast-tracking data center permitting and eliminating state-level AI regulations is now classifying opposition to those policies as a potential extremism concern.
Civil liberties experts say there is no clear line between what these reports describe and constitutionally protected protest. That blurring is not incidental. Once a government decides it can label a belief as extremism, the specific belief almost does not matter. The category is reusable. The apparatus, once built, doesn’t get dismantled when the politics change.
Today it’s people worried about AI and data centers. The machinery, however, is already running.
A government that surveils the people protesting its own economic agenda — and calls it counterterrorism — isn’t protecting public safety. It’s protecting itself.
Sources: WIRED