The Punk Panopticon: ‘See-Through-Wall’ Tech and Digital Vivisection Forge a New Surveillance State

The Felonious Punk administration is engineering a two-front assault on privacy, constructing a surveillance state that aims to be omnipresent in both the physical and digital realms. While seeking dystopian technology to see through the walls of our homes, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is simultaneously pursuing a parallel campaign of digital vivisection, demanding new tools to extract, analyze, and archive the entire contents of our personal electronic devices.

This technological escalation is no rogue agency action; it is the direct fulfillment of a political mandate. The $165 billion budget, rubber-stamped by Felonious Punk, is less a funding allocation and more a blank check, empowering the most extreme elements within federal enforcement to operationalize their long-held authoritarian desires under the guise of national security. The physical component of this strategy involves deploying advanced AI and drones to monitor urban areas far from any border, operating within a 100-mile-wide “constitution-free” zone where Fourth Amendment protections are perilously thin. This legal anomaly effectively inverts a foundational American principle: instead of probable cause justifying a search, one’s mere geographic location becomes the pretext for total information seizure. The request for militarized BORTAC units to be equipped with wall-penetrating sensors confirms an ambition to turn entire American cities into theaters of operation, leveraging a unit with a documented history of being used to suppress domestic protest.

Parallel to this expansion of physical surveillance is an equally voracious push to conquer the digital frontier. A recent federal request shows CBP is seeking to “expand” its digital forensics program, soliciting tools with capabilities that are breathtaking in their intrusiveness. The agency wants to divine “hidden language” from text messages, identify specific objects like a “red tricycle” across vast video archives, and crack open encrypted messaging applications for “intel generation.” The scale of this operation is exploding, with device searches skyrocketing from just over 8,500 in 2015 to more than 47,000 last year.

At the core of this technological gambit is the inherently biased and pseudoscientific pursuit of “suspicious activity.” As ACLU attorney Mohammad Tajsar bluntly stated to The Intercept, the notion that an algorithm can objectively identify nefarious behavior is a “fantasy” that “remains unchallenged despite the complete lack of empiricism to support it.” This reliance on algorithmic judgment represents a dangerous form of digital phrenology, where the state outsources its profiling to opaque, proprietary systems. These “black box” algorithms, often developed by controversial contractors, are trained on existing data sets, which invariably reflect and amplify societal biases. The result is not objective security, but the laundering of prejudice through a veneer of technological sophistication.

The chilling, real-world application of this power is not hypothetical. It is a tool of ideological policing. In a recent high-profile case, a Lebanese professor at Brown University was denied entry and sent back to Lebanon after CBP searched her phone and alleged she was “sympathetic” to a deceased foreign political figure. This is not a search for contraband; it is a search for unorthodox thoughts.

Perhaps the most terrifying aspect of this digital vivisection is its permanence. Data extracted from a device—every text, photo, contact, and location point—can be shared with a vast network of “other federal, state, local, and foreign law enforcement agencies.” Worse still, CBP has the right to store this deeply personal information in its Automated Targeting System (ATS) for up to 15 years. A single border crossing can now result in the creation of a permanent, shareable intelligence file on any individual, citizen or not, effectively creating a system of pre-crime analysis and perpetual suspicion.

When combined, the administration’s ambitions are starkly clear. The physical surveillance apparatus tracks your body; the digital forensics tools plunder your mind. The goal is total information dominance, creating a populace perpetually aware that it could be watched, listened to, or digitally dissected at any moment. The walls Felonious Punk seeks to build are not only on the border; they are being erected around the very concept of a private American life.