Meanwhile, Behind the Cloud of Dust...

Since a couple of weeks, the world's attention is fully focused on the US and Israeli war on Iran and its repercussions in the Middle-East. As we have already discussed it in this blog, our attention is essentially sequential, it is difficult to grasp more than one extraordinary event sequence at a time. Thus, medias' main focus, for just the same reason, moves on from one major geopolitical event to the next, with very little time and space left for what is felt like yesterday's news although it might be just as alive (think of the war in Ukraine right now...). The huge majority of analysts and observers agree on the fact, that the Trump administration doesn't have neither clear objectives, or a clear strategy with this war. What is certain, on the contrary, is that the same administration's focus, since the beginning of 2026, has turned its sight on foreign politics, much more than on domestic ones (Venezuela, Iran, now Cuba). It is of course tempting to believe, that it is an easy way to turn American voters' attention away from domestic issues like persistent inflation, a shaky job market and soft consumer confidence... Difficult to say, but the moves are definitely erratic and confusing, even if there was a logic behind?

The first piece below, written by Ben Raderstorf comes like a mild sigh of relief in the context, as it points at how difficult it is for the Trump administration to force its way through domestically, with non-constitutional and even illegal moves and decisions, that are reversed one after another, as well as all the hinders there would be if Trump tried to rig the midterm elections.

The second piece, also written by Ben Raderstorf, is less optimistic on the medium term. It's an interesting explanation on the recent fight between Anthropic and the Trump administration, that has tried to force the company to allow it to use its AI for Mass domestic surveillance, as well as for lethal autonomous weapons without a human operator. In the meanwhile, as explains the author, everything is now ready for AI-enabled mass-surveillance in the US.

I have already published pieces from Ben Raderstorf, who is writer and policy strategist at Protect Democracy. He writes about how to beat authoritarianism in the substack "If you can keep it." His writing has been published in The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Bulwark. Protect Democracy is a cross-ideological nonprofit group dedicated to defeating the authoritarian threat. Their experts use litigation, advocacy, research, and technology to stop the consolidation of power, defend dissent, protect the US elections, and build a thriving, multiparty democracy.

https://protectdemocracy.org/

It could feel, for us, in majority living in France, Sweden or in another democratic European country, that this fight is far away from us. I believe, that it is coming closer. Protect Democracy is an interesting organization, as it provides us with examples if not tools, that would have to be adapted to different legal and constitutional environments, but with a common base line, to defend our democracies...

If Trump can depose a regime, why can’t he rig an election?

A moment of weakness, not strength

By BEN RADERSTORF

MAR 6

A view of an Iranian diplomatic police station that is completely destroyed in U.S.-Israeli attacks in Tehran, Iran. (Photo by Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto via AP)

"A week ago, the president unilaterally launched a full-scale war to kill Iran’s leadership and overturn the Iranian regime.

Our country’s founders would be horrified. The Constitution was designed to prevent an unchecked, imperial leader from dragging the country to war on a whim. Congress was supposed to share warmaking powers with the president to prevent exactly this scenario.

Our constitutional system of checks and balances over warmaking is functionally dead. With Congress abdicating on Iran, the president is unbound and acting like it. Donald Trump wants you to believe he is already an imperial ruler able to shape the world to his whim.

So are we — and our democracy — already screwed?

No.

The president’s projection of strength, his bravado in starting this war, is not just hubris. It is an illusion. In truth, this administration is currently weaker than it has ever been. And many of the most critical guardrails in our democracy — especially those around elections — are still (relatively) intact. Instead of the hard work to continue consolidating power, Trump instead just gambled his presidency on a quagmire in the Middle East.

Meanwhile, the authoritarian project, which had been stalling since last summer, is suddenly facing the most pronounced string of losses yet (for my whole list, read to the end).

We are still so far from safety. It’s still going to take all of us to ensure that democracy endures over the next three years. But, big picture, authoritarianism is losing.

The spectrum of hard and soft guardrails

How can Trump be so unchecked abroad and still not have consolidated autocratic power at home? It’s because not all limits on presidential power are the same.

Our democracy, like any democracy, has a whole bunch of guardrails. Some are hard and some are soft.

I think of soft guardrails as the things that a president “must not,” “traditionally does not,” and “legally isn’t allowed to” do. We often say a president “can’t” go to war without Congressional approval, unilaterally shutter agencies, or usurp the power of the purse — but really we mean he’s not allowed to do those things. They are against norms, against the law, or even against the Constitution. But unless there’s someone to stop him, semantically speaking, he can do them ; the president can violate the Constitution.

Soft guardrails matter, but they’re the first thing to go on the slide to dictatorship.

Hard guardrails are actual barriers, not just rules. In order to abuse power, a president needs to literally have the manpower, resources, and capacity to carry out the abuse.

Or, alternatively, hard guardrails can be countervailing actors in a system able to firmly push back. The courts, the civil service, Congress when it does its job. States passing laws to protect their citizens. Protestors expressing their First Amendment rights who refuse to be intimidated.

Think of it as a series of defensive barriers that get increasingly less permeable as you go from “he’s not allowed to do that” to “no, he actually can’t do that.” An authoritarian obstacle course.

How far an autocrat is able to go from left to right, how far he’s able to get through the increasingly hard barriers, is ultimately up to all of us.

In the United States, we’re still only maybe halfway through the spectrum. Many of the most important hard guardrails are — as of March 2026 — still at least somewhat intact.

There are still many practical barriers to Trump interfering in elections

Consider the many hard guardrails that prevent a president from interfering in elections.

First, the federal government — which is the only thing the president has direct control over — has a very limited role in election processes. Elections are, per the Constitution, run at the state and local level.

Donald Trump cannot order your local elections officials to do anything because your local elections officials do not work for him. He cannot force them to break the law and he cannot fire them if they refuse. If the president tries to issue an order instructing local officials to interfere in an election, they will be legally required to ignore that order — same as you would be if the president tried to issue an order telling you to interfere in the election. And if they break the law, they could face criminal charges under state law (the consequences of which the president, who can only grant pardons for federal crimes, has no power to shield them from).

Yes, there are some areas where the federal government, by law, plays a role in elections. But it’s mostly defining baselines on security, setting standards on voting rights, and providing funding. Practically speaking, the president cannot nationalize, cancel, or otherwise upend an election because there is simply no pathway to him doing so.

To be clear, the White House may (and almost certainly will) still abuse the power that it does have to try to meddle in the elections process. Trump may try to do outlandish things, like unilaterally ban mail-in voting or mass-disenfranchise voters. He might even succeed in some of them. But it’s still a long, uphill battle for him to tilt or rig the elections against the opposition.

It is possible for an autocrat to overcome hard guardrails. It’s just… well, hard.

And if he does, I believe we can collectively ensure that other actors and institutions — the courts, the press, the business community, law enforcement, and yes, even Congress — push back. It’s one thing for the president to abuse his power to topple a foreign dictator, it’s quite another for him to attempt to end representative government in the United States. I’m not saying courts and Congress would never go along with election subversion schemes (after all, 147 members of Congress violated their oaths in voting to overturn the 2020 election), but it’s far less of a done deal than it is with something like war powers.

It’s not a done deal because of the last and hardest guardrail:

All of us.

In an autocratizing country (like ours), the last and hardest guardrail is convincing the public to go along.

That may sound contradictory — isn’t the point of authoritarianism that public opinion no longer matters? Yes, that’s true to a degree, but only after an autocrat has consolidated power. Before, it’s the opposite. Until it’s too late to turn back, modern competitive authoritarians desperately need to convince the populace to accept their authoritarian project.

It is still not too late for the United States. And Donald Trump is losing public opinion. Here is FiftyPlusOne’s tracker:

The White House is losing everywhere

Perhaps because of this deteriorating political standing, the White House lost across the board this week:

·      Under mounting public pressure and outrage, Trump was forced to fire one of his key officials : DHS Secretary Kristi Noem.

·      In the face of the Defense Department’s efforts to weaponize AI for domestic surveillance and autonomous weaponry, leading artificial intelligence company Anthropic told the administration to pound sand — and was promptly rewarded by becoming the top-downloaded app.

·      Faced with the growing reality that the unconstitutional campaign against law firms had failed, the DOJ raised the legal white flag (then, in an even more loser-like move, tried to backtrack on surrendering — presumably after the White House got mad).

·      Five Republicans on the House Oversight Committee voted to subpoena Attorney General Bondi as part of the growing Epstein Files inquiry.

·      We learned that the Justice Department also tried and failed to — incredibly — indict Joe Biden for using an autopen.

·      Lindsey Halligan, the loyalist lawyer who has become the face of Trump’s efforts to bring criminal cases against his enemies, is under investigation by the Florida Bar and could lose her license to practice law.

·      On the heels of the White House’s devastating tariff loss at the Supreme Court, a federal judge ruled that companies are entitled to tariff refunds.

·      Tuesday’s primary elections, far from showing a demoralized or cowed opposition, saw Democratic voters swamping their Republican counterparts almost everywhere. In Texas, significantly more people voted in the Democratic primaries than the Republican one, including in most of the districts that were targeted by the new gerrymander.

·      The effort in Florida to declare CAIR, one of the largest Muslim advocacy groups, a terrorist organization — one of those classic authoritarian tactics to target civil society — crashed headlong into the First Amendment.

And that’s all before the potential consequences of another disastrous war in the Middle East set in.

None of us know exactly where any of this is going. Likely it ends in some pretty dark places.

But this is not what consolidated autocracy looks like."

“A nice little database” of “domestic terrorists”

ICE, the Anthropic case, and how to stop mass domestic surveillance

By BEN RADERSTORF

MAR 13

This week, I want to go deep on a few different ways that Protect Democracy is working to combat the administration’s surveillance efforts. AI labs in California and ICE raids in Maine may seem like disparate topics, but they are different manifestations of the same hydra-like threat to all of our freedoms.

Public outcry is the key to stopping mass domestic surveillance. Please share.

-Ben 

A federal agent records protesters and press with his phone as he drives out of the Broadview ICE Facility driveway. (Chris Riha/ZUMA Press Wire/Shutterstock)

"On January 23, Colleen Fagan stood in a parking lot in Maine and watched federal agents conduct an immigration operation. Fagan, who would tell you with great pride that she is a “lifelong Mainer,” didn’t interfere. She didn’t block anyone. She recorded what she saw — something Americans have an unambiguous constitutional right to do.

A masked man started recording her back. She asked why.

“Cause we have a nice little database,” he sneered. “And now you’re considered a domestic terrorist.”

Two days earlier, Elinor Hilton was observing ICE agents outside of a Home Depot when agents similarly started filming her.

“He said ‘We’re putting you on a domestic terrorist watch list, and if you keep coming to things like this, we’re going to come to your house later and arrest you,’” Hilton recounted in an interview. 

Protect Democracy is suing on behalf of Hilton, Fagan, and other Mainers who have faced similar intimidation attempts.

The same tactics have also been documented in Oregon and Minnesota. Federal agents in multiple cities have surveilled and intimidated community members who observed immigration enforcement operations. The coordination is too consistent to be coincidental.

We don’t know exactly how and to what extent the Trump administration is already surveilling American citizens as the president seeks to intimidate and retaliate against critics. We do, however, know that many in our government are hell-bent on developing unprecedented tools, systems, and databases to keep watch on those they see as “enemies from within.”

The surveillance we’re already seeing in places like Maine may just be the beginning.

If the president gets his way in the months ahead — especially in his administration’s ongoing campaign to control the AI industry — we could be entering a new and Orwellian era for domestic surveillance.

The Anthropic fight is over the future of surveillance and democracy

Earlier this week, AI company Anthropic filed suit against the Defense Department for designating the company a security threat.

On the surface, the dispute concerns the Trump administration’s attempt to essentially take over the company “by force and coerce them into maintaining a product for uses they fundamentally oppose.”

In a larger sense, though, this fight is over the future of artificial intelligence in our democracy. The Defense Department attempted to force Anthropic to provide AI technology without agreeing that it would not use the technology for two use cases:

·      Mass domestic surveillance.

·      Lethal autonomous weapons without a human operator.

Anthropic refused to provide its technology without the Defense Department agreeing to these limitations. And so the federal government is attempting, in retaliation, to destroy Anthropic.

Shortly after Anthropic filed their lawsuit, a group of 37 AI scientists and researchers at competitors OpenAI and Google — including Jeff Dean, the chief scientist of Google’s AI division — filed an amicus brief supporting Anthropic’s position. (Disclosure: My colleagues at Protect Democracy are counsel for the brief.)

Remember, these are people who work for Anthropic’s competitors in the most intense corporate arms race in modern history. And they stood up to defend Anthropic and the red lines that it has drawn against the federal government.

The entire brief is worth your time, but I especially recommend the section on surveillance. Here are the most important parts:

"At its core, AI-enabled mass surveillance means the ability to monitor, analyze, and act on the behavior of an entire population continuously and in real time. The devices and data streams required to do this already exist. As of 2018, there were approximately 70 million surveillance cameras operating in the United States across airports, subway stations, parking lots, storefronts, and street corners. Every smartphone continuously broadcasts location data to carriers and dozens of applications. Credit and debit cards generate a timestamped record of nearly every commercial transaction Americans make. Social media platforms log not just what people post, but what they read, how long they browse, and what they posted before deleting it. Employers, insurers, and data brokers have assembled behavioral profiles on most American adults that are already, in many cases, available for government purchase without a warrant. What does not yet exist is the AI layer that transforms this sprawling, fragmented data landscape into a unified, real-time surveillance apparatus. Today, these streams are siloed, inconsistent, and require significant human effort to connect. From our vantage point at frontier AI labs, we understand that an AI system used for mass surveillance could dissolve those silos, correlating face recognition data with location history, transaction records, social graphs, and behavioral patterns across hundreds of millions of people simultaneously.

The mere existence of such a capability in government hands — even if never activated against a specific individual — changes the character of public life in a democracy. Behavioral scientists and legal scholars have long documented what is sometimes called the “panopticon effect”: when people believe they may be observed, they modify their behavior as if they are always being observed, regardless of whether anyone is actually watching. The journalist thinks twice before calling a source inside the military, knowing the call could be logged and crossreferenced. The activist softens her public messaging, calculating that visibility now carries risk it didn’t carry before. The academic researcher avoids certain search terms — not because the research is wrong, but because she doesn’t want to surface in a database. None of these people have been targeted. None have been punished. But their behavior has already been constrained, and with it the democratic functions they serve — a free press, political organizing, open intellectual inquiry — have been quietly degraded. These chilling effects require no abuse, only the awareness that the capability exists.

History offers ample warning. The FBI’s COINTELPRO program, which ran from 1956 to 1971 and was exposed years later, demonstrated how domestic intelligence powers justified by security concerns were systematically turned against civil rights leaders, journalists, and political dissidents. The program did not merely surveil its targets. It fabricated evidence, sent anonymous letters designed to destroy marriages and careers, tipped off employers, and worked to discredit Martin Luther King, Jr. after he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. It operated for fifteen years before Congress learned of its existence. AI does not merely replicate those dangers — it multiplies them by orders of magnitude, automating at national scale what previously required hundreds of human operatives.

Further enhancing the risk terrain for AI’s deployment in this context, the Pentagon operates under a legal framework oriented toward external threats and warfighting, not domestic civil life. The Posse Comitatus Act, passed in 1878 in direct response to the use of federal troops to police American civilians during Reconstruction, reflects a constitutional tradition of keeping military power categorically separate from domestic governance. When the Pentagon acts domestically, it is operating in legal territory it was not designed for, with oversight structures that were not built to catch domestic abuses. That is in part why the bulk data collection programs by the Pentagon’s own National Security Agency (NSA), revealed by Edward Snowden in 2013, were so shocking and produced measurable chilling effects on lawful speech and inquiry. A study published in the Berkeley Technology Law Journal found statistically significant drops in traffic to Wikipedia articles on terrorism-related topics following the Snowden revelations, likely as ordinary people adjusted their online behavior in response to awareness that their searches were potentially being monitored.

The harms from building this infrastructure are not easily undone, as we understand in our field. Data collected on a population does not expire. A database of location records, behavioral profiles, and social graphs built today will still exist years from now, accessible to whoever controls it under whatever political conditions prevail then. That data would feed into an AI-powered surveillance infrastructure that, once constructed, tends to expand rather than contract. Agencies find new uses for existing capabilities, authorities get quietly reinterpreted, and the political cost of dismantling something already built is almost always higher than the cost of letting it continue and grow.

We do not suggest that the Defendants intend to misuse such capabilities. We suggest that the question of intent is the wrong question. Democratic governance does not rest on the good intentions of those in power. It rests on structural constraints that make abuse difficult regardless of intent. AI-enabled mass domestic surveillance, deployed without transparent legal constraints and independent oversight, removes those structural protections in ways that no amount of good faith can replace."

Six ways to keep the genie of AI-powered mass surveillance in the bottle

Despite what the masked agent told Colleen Fagan, Trump has probably not yet managed to weaponize domestic surveillance to its maximum potential.

The main legal safeguards that protect Americans from surveillance — the Fourth Amendment, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the Privacy Act — are all still relatively intact. But none of these were designed with the immense surveillance capabilities of AI in mind.

Here are six strategies that can help ensure further dangerous lines do not get crossed in the US :

First, legal vigilance — Courts and litigators must firmly stand up for First and Fourth Amendment rights, not just in cases like these where surveillance is directly at issue, but across all of the federal government’s ongoing attempts to intimidate and retaliate against critics. And the courts must uphold the industry guardrails that shore up vulnerabilities in the law when it comes to constraining AI-powered surveillance capabilities. Plus, the government’s targets — like Colleen Fagan and Elinor Hilton, like Anthropic — must refuse to be intimidated and instead have the courage to take their government to court to stand up for their own rights, including in the case of private companies’ right to self-imposed guardrails that on the technology they are developing.

Anthropic vs. U.S. Department of War et al. will likely be heard in the coming weeks.

Second, solidarity and collective action — As with Anthropic, the Trump administration will continue to use a divide-and-conquer strategy to build surveillance capacity. Instead of targeting everyone at once, they will continue to pick out individual targets — whether it’s a company or a person — and try to intimidate them.

When someone is targeted, either by intimidation or surveillance, all of us must rush to their defense.

That’s exactly what the senior researchers at OpenAI and Google did when their competitors came under attack. We must all be ready to do the same.

Third, democratic oversight — While courts can protect individuals from the effects of surveillance and intimidation, our democratically elected representatives are the ones who must provide oversight and accountability to ensure that the federal government is staying within the law. 

Last week, an impressive list of 35 national security, business, civil society, and technology leaders wrote to the House and Senate Armed Services Committees urging them to uphold their oversight responsibilities as well as to “establish clear statutory policy governing the use of artificial intelligence” on autonomous weapons and surveillance.

Until Congress acts, our freedoms will never be safe.

Fourth, security — If you’re someone that the Trump administration might consider to be a political enemy (and really, even if you’re not), now is the time to review your digital and information security practices. How easy would it be for a malicious government actor to get their hands on your private information?

Fifth, data protections — Surveillance is only as good as the data it has access to, and data access breaches can be catastrophic (for instance, the former DOGE-er who allegedly stole Social Security info on a thumb drive to take to his next job). By focusing on data weak points, we can protect against some of the worst abuses.

Sixth, public outcry — All of the above are important and effective, but they pale in comparison to the effect of widespread public outcry. If the American people firmly and loudly reject mass government surveillance, if they protest and confront their elected officials and even vote them out if necessary, then I feel confident that we will never have to live under mass domestic surveillance regime.

But if we shrug our shoulders, perhaps thinking there’s nothing we can do? Then I’m not so sure.