Orwell wrote it as a warning.
We built it as a startup. And called it innovation.
Your location. Your face. Your search history. Tech companies have been selling it quietly. Governments have been buying it quietly. This isn't a conspiracy theory. It's a contract. And it doesn't stop at any border.
Behind the scenes of the digital economy sits an infrastructure most people never think about. Palantir. Thomson Reuters. LexisNexis. Babel Street. Clearview AI. These aren't just data companies. They are the invisible backbone behind deportation systems, border controls, and political surveillance, built on the data you generate every single day.
What techfascism actually looks like
Techfascism isn't a robot hit*er with a gun. It's an algorithm that flags your cousin in Chicago. It's predictive policing software deployed in London and Los Angeles. It's facial recognition activated at protests in Berlin, Hong Kong, and Atlanta. It's a border surveillance system that watches you before you even arrive.
It doesn't look like tyranny. It looks like efficiency.
And this isn't an American problem. In the United States, ICE uses commercial data brokers to track undocumented people without a warrant. In the UK, the Prevent programme surveils Muslim communities using social media data. India's Aadhaar biometric database links your identity to your every transaction. In Brazil, police use Palantir-built tools to profile and target favela residents. China's social credit system is the extreme, but the infrastructure exists everywhere.
The tools are the same. Only the targets change.
Think you're safe in Germany?
The US CLOUD Act, passed in 2018, compels American tech companies to hand over user data to US authorities, regardless of where the servers are physically located. Your data could sit in a Frankfurt data center and still be accessed by US law enforcement. Without your knowledge. Without your consent. Without informing European regulators.
Germany's own Federal Commissioner for Data Protection has explicitly warned against using US cloud providers for sensitive data. The GDPR says your data is yours. The CLOUD Act says: not if it touches a US company.
Gmail. WhatsApp. iCloud. AWS. If you use any of them, you are inside that reach.
Deportation by algorithm
America isn't just collecting your data. It's scoring you with it.
Palantir's ELITE app, used by ICE agents in the field, assigns a confidence score out of 100 to each deportation target, rating how certain the algorithm is of someone's real-time location. Their new ImmigrationOS platform, a $30 million contract awarded in 2025, goes even further. It ranks and prioritizes people for deportation using passport records, IRS tax data, Social Security files, license plate readers, and social media activity.
An algorithm decides who gets flagged first. An algorithm decides who gets a raid at their door. No judge. No jury. Just a score.
The telescreen you paid for
Orwell imagined a world where the state watched you through a telescreen in your home. He couldn't have imagined you'd pay for the telescreen yourself. Carry it in your pocket. And hand it to forty different corporations before breakfast.
The difference between 1984 and now? Big Brother doesn't need to force his way in. He has a Terms of Service agreement. And unlike Winston Smith, most of us don't even know we're being watched.
It doesn't matter if you're in Berlin, São Paulo, Mumbai, or Chicago. Your data is already inside this system. The first step to resisting a surveillance state is knowing you're already living in one.
Sources & further reading:
Georgetown Law, American Dragnet: Data-Driven Deportation in the 21st Century (americandragnet.org). The Markup, How LexisNexis Sells Your Data to ICE (2021). 404 Media, Palantir's ELITE App and confidence scores (Jan. 2026). American Immigration Council, ImmigrationOS by Palantir (2025). In These Times, The Data Brokers Fueling ICE's Deportation Machine (Oct. 2025). Conceptboard, The US Cloud Act and European Data Protection. OpenCloud.eu, US Law in European Data Centres. AlgorithmWatch and AI Now Institute, annual reports on facial recognition. MIT Technology Review, Brazil Is Sliding Into Techno-Authoritarianism (2022). Liberty Human Rights, UK Prevent Programme reports. Amnesty International and Internet Freedom Foundation, Aadhaar coverage (India).
Books: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff. Automating Inequality by Virginia Eubanks. 1984 by George Orwell.