December 11 Update: DHS' Surveillance State Targets Dissent; UK to Scrap Most Jury Trials; Tallying Trump's Retribution; Outrage Scamming, Inc; LAPD's Shadow Warrants; UCLA Circles the Drain; Illegal Mining in French Guiana; Russia's Hybrid War in Europe

It's an honest question (© Ali Winston)

The last few weeks of 2025 show zero letup in a breakneck year strewn with mayhem, as tens of millions of Americans stand to lose their healthcare thanks to Congressional and Presidential fecklessness, the Department of War (I'm honestly fine with the renaming and dealing away with the doublespeak of 'Defense) double-tapping fishing boats in the Carribean and shaping up a Wag The Dog-style phony war with Venezuela to distract from the Endless Summer of Jeffrey Epstein, and the Trump Administration formally declaring a policy of white nationalist regime change in Europe. All that while he continues to sink in the polls, with a short-circuiting economy running off nothing but the promise of eternal data centers and giant media mergers for regime-friendly oligarchs.

Meanwhile, Zohran Mamdani's perplexing decision to keep his insanely corrupt predecessor's Zionist police commissioner on through January 1st is predictably backfiring. Aside from causing a major schism within Mamdani's base over Tisch's opposition to NYC's Palestine solidarity movement, Jessica's little brother Benjamin tarred the mayor-elect as an "enemy" of the Jewish people at a philanthropic gala this week. Benjamin, a wet-noodle-armed failure of a quarterback in high school whose parents bought his way into Brown University, is now the head of the Loews Corporation, the font of the Tisch clan's fortune.

Things aren't going well on the job either, with two young cops arrested on sexual assault charges, including a recruit arrested at the NYPD academy in Queens while in his fourth month of training.

I'll have more on Jessica Tisch and the NYPD in a forthcoming article for the New York Review of Books, the third and final installment of my 'Zohran and the NYPD' trilogy for for Fall 2025. Part I is over at The Baffler, with the much-imitated part II at WIRED.

Earlier this year, I traveled to London to attend the extradition hearing of animal rights militant Daniel Andreas San Diego, who fled the United States more than 20 years ago while under FBI surveillance as their prime suspect for a pair of politically-motivated pipe bombings in the East Bay. The Guardian ran my longread on the Northern Californian's two-decade-long fugitive saga this past Sunday, which explores how San Diego has turned his British case into a referendum on the parlous state of American justice. His saga was also covered in the Green Scare episode of BIG TERROR earlier this year, for those of you interested in deeper context.

There's still a bit more to come from me before the year is out, including a couple more articles about the NYPD (yes I am doing my best to drive a news cycle here) and one about some Neo-Nazi organizing on both sides of the Atlantic. Familiar fare. Oh, and a new episode of BIG TERROR that will cover extraordinary rendition and torture by American AND British authorities before and after September 11. Holiday cheer, brought to you by Winston & Hanrahan.

That's enough bloviating. Let's get to it.

BLEEDING EDGE JOURNALISM

-If there's one article you should in 2025 on what Immigration and Customs Enforcement has become, it's this deeply reported interactive feature from the Financial Times on the post-9/11 behemoth's massive buildout of its surveillance capabilities. The Trump Administration is shoveling mountains of taxpayer dollars towards ICE in order to hit Stephen Miller's demanded 1 million deportations in 2025, a target the agency is almost certain to miss. However, as the chart below shows, ICE has rapidly increased their spending on spyware, third-party location databases, license plate readers, Palantir-based software platforms, mobile biometrics and data-mining tools to track down undocumented folks for detention and removal.

You'll find some familiar names in this report, including Palantir, Thomson Reuters, Clearview AI, Flock, and AT&T (which may still be running Hemisphere, a 20th Century War on Drugs-era warrantless eavesdropping program). In addition, the FT spoke to several current and former officials at ICE and DHS about their deep concerns with the expansion of invasive surveillance tools, the lack of safeguards, the cross-referencing of sensitive government data like tax and social security records for immigration enforcement purposes, and the inevitable targeting of anti-fascists and political opponents of the Trump Administration by ICE's bloated, unqualified and lawless ranks.

-Just in case American citizens don't think the ICE/DHS data-harvesting campaign will impact them, Vittoria Elliot at WIRED has a timely corollary to the FT investigation above that makes clear we are all at risk of getting caught up in this federal dragnet. Federal agents have targeted and arrested citizens for merely 'fitting the profile' - meaning anyone who isn't white, has a foreign accent or is part of a broader immigrant community. When they present identification, the feds have repeatedly told citizens that the documentation is 'fake', which makes sense given that ICE is under tremendous pressure to hit Stephen Miller's deportation quotas. You can thank the Supreme Court for legalizing this garbage, with the Kavanaugh Stops establishing a racialized national rubric for profiling. By using previously disparate pools of data from immigrants who decided to go through the legal pathways to residency and citizenship, the Trump Administration is only going to drive communities deeper in to the shadows.

-Not content to shred the rights of the British public with an inexorable rollout of facial recognition technology by police, Keir Starmer's increasingly unpopular Labor government is set on eliminating most jury trials in the United Kingdom, an eye-popping move in the country that originated the practice. Only the most serious cases (homicide, attempted murder, rape, or manslaughter), would result in a trial by peers in a move that Justice Minister David Lammy claims will reduce a crushing case backlog in British courts. Stripping away the right to jury trial moves Britain closer to the once-controversial 'Diplock courts' of Northern Ireland, where terrorism suspects would only face a judge because regularly citizens were deemed too easily intimidated - or sympathetic towards the defendants.

-If you ever wanted a quick and dirty summary of the businesses, prosecutors, elected officials, universities, media organizations or any other entity that is in the crosshairs of Trump 2.0's revenge tour, Reuters did the legwork and assembled an exhaustive dossier of all the targets of the White House's increasingly unhinged and somnolent occupant. Highly useful if you've not been tracking the drip of court cases, lawsuits and targeted executive orders that've rained down since Inaugeration Day.

-By now it should be abundantly clear that a massive chunk of extremist accounts and content on social media networks are the work of overseas grifters seeking to earn fortunes from inflaming political debates in North America and Europe. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, a London-based newsroom, unpacked the story of a Sri Lankan scammer who has earned a fortune from Artificial Intelligence-fueled Facebook posts pushing Tommy Robinson-style ethno-nationalism in the United Kingdom. We all need a daily reminder that the ragebait floating around on your favorite social media platform is almost certainly someone trying to trigger you for a buck.

-I don't use Substack, but do like to support independent reporters wherever possible. Southern California journalist Ben Camacho won an important court victory a year or so ago when he won the release of LAPD departmental photos from through a public records act and successfully beat back a cynical effort by the city to claw back the mugshots. Ben spent years digging into a mind-bending incident involving LAPD officers shooting at a party, then generating an illegal warrant to cover up the use of force incident. The key takeaway from Camacho's investigation is that the department's community safety 'bureau' is now using 'shadow warrants', which the LAPD never returns to the authorizing judge for a true accounting of the evidence seized. This is a massive issue - judicial oversight of police search and seizure powers is bedrock for the American criminal justice system. I haven't seen any followup stories yet, but fully expect them from other SoCal media.

-Remember when a mob of Zionists attacked the Gaza solidarity encampment at UCLA and seriously injured several students while the cops stood around and watched? All that happened in Spring 2024 on livestream, and the culprits were identified by independent journalists who worked back on the network of local pro-Israel partisans involved in the attacks. Yet UCLA, under pressure from Los Angeles' influential Zionist community and key figures in the administration, capitulated and cracked down hard on Pro-Palestine activism welllllll before Donald Trump's charade crusade against 'anti-Semitism' began. Will Alden, a talented reporter who took several years off to pursue fiction, made a very welcome return with an excellent feature for Jewish Currents that examined UCLA's capitulation to a genocidal foreign government and their stateside lobby, all at the expense of independence and academic freedom at a once-proud campus.

-Did you know France still has a colony in South America? Which is the home base for France's preeminent Foreign Legion regiment, as well as the European Union's one and only spaceport for its continent-wide space agency? French Guiana is a formal 'departement', meaning it, like Guadeloupe, Martinique, and La Reunion, sends deputies to France's National Assembly. But unlike any other overseas departement, French Guiana's southern half is occupied by the Amazon jungle, which is currently wracked by ecological devastation, rampant drug trafficking, and illegal extraction. The Guardian's Alexander Hurst spent weeks with the Foreign Legion in their pursuit of illegal gold miners deep in the jungle, part of a €55m-a-year operation that's been ongoing since 2008. I found this read particularly fascinating given this particular FFL regiment's role in the Algerian War of Independence, as well as the European Space Ageny's work in tracking down wildcat mining operations.

-Sam Jones at the Financial Times assembled a chilling account of Russian 'hybrid warfare' throughout Europe as part of Putin's efforts to destabilize Ukraine's remaining allies through 'gig work' sabotage campaigns employing opportunistic criminals. It's not just synagogue vandalism in Paris, train derailments across the Continent or arson against shopping centers: a series of European intelligence officials who spoke to the FT also detailed disrupted plots to set off bombs several cargo flights in 2024, as well as plans to rig explosives on flights bound to the United States to 'cause more disruption to the airline industry than any act of terror since the World Trade Center attacks.' Take all this seriously, especially as Trump and his cronies continue to suck up to the Kremlin.

BOOK OF THE WEEK - Given all the talk of New York City's imminent return to 'the bad old days' on January 1 when Zohran Mamdani moves into Gracie Mansion, I figured it's time for a reality check about the city's late-Twentieth Century flirtation with the abyss.

Historian Kim Phillips-Fein's magisterial Fear City: New York City's Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics (2017) explores the city's mid-1970s brush with bankruptcy, urban decay, white flight and the reactionary politics of the 1970s and 1980s that gave rise to austerity politics, neoliberal governance and the current Permanent Government that is currently bending Zohran Mamdani to their longstanding agenda of securitization, market-rate development and the privatization of government services (bookmark this if you don't believe me). Fear City is essential reading to understand the current shape of New York City, and unlike Robert Caro's doorstop The Power Broker, you can actually take it out of the house.

FILM - Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men blew me away when I saw it in theaters back in 2006. This grim, gripping depiction of an apocalyptic London disintegrating under the weight of a planetary infertility crisis not only established Clive Owen's bonafides as a leading man for serious dramas, but also coincided with the release of Cormac McCarthy's dystopian novel The Road. '06 was a great year for downer media, but keep in mind this was before the advent of social media and the post-literate turn in American society.

Children of Men was part of a streak of films in the mid-Aughts that explored migration, demographic crises and the War-on-Terror securitization of the United States in jarring new ways that pushed back on the plastic, fear-mongering patriotism emanating from Cheney's White House (Dubya was golfing and clearing brush in Texas). Keep in mind this was released right on the heels of Hurricane Katrina's devastation of New Orleans and the images of ragged, downtrodden refugees in major Western cities were very real to moviegoers at the time. More relevant than ever given the Trump immigration blitz.

MUSIC - A qualifying statement: mainstream podcasts are not my thing. I don't like the narration style, I don't like the overproduced background music that never lets the tape breathe, and I don't like the commercials for the inevitable Amazon or financial services product. Many of these problems exist in Snitch City, a Boston Globe series based on the newspaper's reporting about informants and wild police corruption in the fishing town of New Bedford. That said, the vibrancy of the narrative told here, the reporter's commitment to this story and the brazen crimes committed by an entire police department over decades in a New England city awash with narcotics got me over the line. That and the sheer brutality of these genuine Masshole accents. American regional dialects are a gift to this country and we need to bring them back en masse.