The Surveillance Net Is Closing, But The Smart Ones Can See The Writing On The Wall – The Washington Standard

The privacy coin Zano just rallied nearly 70 percent in the last 30 days, lifting its market cap toward a quarter billion dollars and pushing daily trading volume close to three million. The spike isn’t about speculation alone. It reflects a shift underway as people begin to hedge against a tightening surveillance state.

The latest proof of financial control came just last month, when Tether froze $49.6 million in USDT at regulators’ request during a coordinated international crackdown. Regardless of the guilt or innocence of the targets, the lesson is obvious. These assets can be frozen in an instant, with no trial and no process, making them less a hedge against the state and more a compliant extension of it.

Congress reinforced this fact with the GENIUS Act, a law that hard-wires surveillance into stablecoins by forcing issuers to operate under bank-style oversight, AML regimes, and reserve mandates. The fact that Democrats and Republicans both lined up behind it should tell you everything. In Washington, true bipartisan consensus only happens when war, debt, or control are on the line.

That same logic now extends to the streets. National Guard units are being deployed into American cities to “fight crime,” but the justification is always the same: safety over freedom. Deployments like this normalize militarization at home and make clear that the tools built for foreign wars are now being pointed inward.

The grid doesn’t stop at the barrel of a gun either. It runs through data. Federal agencies have been caught buying location data from brokers like Venntel to track millions of Americans without warrants. The AT&T Hemisphere program continues to funnel call records to law enforcement, building a quiet dragnet with virtually no oversight. License plate readers vacuum up hundreds of millions of scans, with databases shared across jurisdictions and tapped for immigration enforcement. Flock Safety’s license-plate readers generated 1,400+ immigration-related searches in Denver and 113 million scans in a year in Austin, triggering local backlash over data-sharing and policy violations. This is mass movement tracking, normalized street by street. All of this happens without a vote, without consent, and in most cases without warrants.

Behind much of the architecture sits Palantir. The company has built what amounts to an operating system for surveillance, weaving itself into ICE, the CDC, HHS, and the military. It powers immigration enforcement through digital case management, disease surveillance through multimillion-dollar contracts with the CDC, and next-gen battlefield monitoring through the Army’s TITAN program. The connective tissue is simple: ingest every stream of data possible, correlate it, and make it actionable. What began as a warfighting tool has become infrastructure for controlling civilians.

The irony is that much of this expansion of state power has the blessing of the political right. Many conservatives cheer on National Guard deployments in U.S. cities because they believe it’s about fighting crime or cracking down on “illegals.” But memories are short. These are the same forces that turned on Americans protesting lockdowns, mandates, and curfews just a few years ago. The truth is simple: the standing army our forefathers warned us about is already here, and every cheer for its expansion only tightens the noose. Wake up—because once these powers are normalized, they will not remain pointed only at someone else.

And before anyone attempts to apply labels here, the left is no less guilty. Wrapped in the language of “safety” and “equity,” progressives have championed the same surveillance grid under a softer brand. They demand more oversight of speech online, more financial monitoring in the name of stopping “disinformation” or “terror finance,” and more data collection to supposedly fight pandemics or climate change. But just like the right, they forget that every tool built to control the “other side” will eventually be aimed back at them. Authoritarians always find new targets, and the surveillance net doesn’t care whether you voted blue or red when it tightens around your throat.

It’s in this climate that the words often attributed to Benjamin Franklin echo with renewed force: those who trade liberty for a little temporary safety deserve neither. The bargain being offered is the same one it has always been. Hand over privacy and autonomy, accept the dragnet and the militarization, and in return you might feel safe for a moment. But the tools of control never remain limited to “the bad guys.” They turn inward, and the public pays the price. Every. Single. Time.

That is why privacy adoption is no longer theoretical and why interest in it is skyrocketing. Google searches for “privacy coins” have surged to multi-year highs, and coverage frames Zano’s rally as a breakout. Its ecosystem of privacy wallets, aliases, private stable value through fUSD, and bridges like Confidential Layer aren’t white papers or future promises—they are live, functional rails that give people custody and choice.

This is the real off-ramp. As government-compliant stablecoins morph into surveillance tokens, as National Guard troops patrol city streets, and as Palantir’s analytics burrow deeper into government, people are choosing tools that can’t be switched off. The rally in Zano is not a fad. It is a signal. Privacy is no longer a luxury. It is survival. And as the market is showing, privacy pays—because it protects.

Article posted with permission from Matt Agorist

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