documenting

“Citizens will behave because we are constantly recording and documenting everything that happens.” It sounds like a phrase taken from George Orwell’s 1984, but Larry Ellison said it during an Oracle financial meeting. It has been two years since he spoke those words and today we can say that this disturbing vision is closer than ever to being a reality. The hyper-vigilant citizen. In September 2024, Ellison projected a future in which mass surveillance would cause us all to behave civilly. The founder of Oracle spoke of cameras everywhere and an AI that would process everything to, if necessary, “report the problem to whoever it concerns. Whether it’s the sheriff, the chief or whoever has to control the situation.” In short, a context of hypervigilance in which any infraction would be recorded and have consequences. This, which sounds like a science fiction scenario, has been silently integrated into the reality of many citizens, and we are not talking about the China social creditbut from the West, especially the United States. The State-Technology fusion. Historically, the tasks of surveillance, security and border control fell to the public institutions themselves. However, the US government has progressively delegated these critical security tasks to technology corporations. At the same time, the militarization of Silicon Valley is a reality: OpenAI and Palantir executives have been named lieutenant colonels and the big tech companies already They do not prohibit the military use of their AI. The government seeks technological efficiency, but at the same time it is ceding enormous power to private companies, with the risk of putting commercial interests before issues such as transparency or democratic scrutiny. The privatization of the US security apparatus has already materialized on various fronts. Objective: deportations. One of the areas in which technology is being used the most is border control and the identification of undocumented immigrants. At the beginning of 2025, the New York Times It said that ICE and USCIS (the agency in charge of processing immigration applications) had spent $7.8 billion on technologies. Many of these contracts were signed under Biden, but under Trump they have been taken to an even more extreme level. Among this arsenal, systems such as ELITE, created by Palantirwhich works like a “Google Maps” to locate potential deportation targets, or the Mobile Fortify app, used by agents to scan faces and check legal status in real time. The persecution is complemented by forensic tools such as Cellebrite to unlock and extract deleted data from mobile phones, rapid DNA tests and the lucrative business of prison operator Geo Group, which forces hundreds of thousands of immigrants to wear GPS ankle bracelets and the SmartLink app to validate their location with daily selfies. Not just immigrants. The alarming thing about this infrastructure is how these tools are powered. To avoid the obligation of court orders, The government directly buys information from data brokers private companies such as LexisNexis and Thomson Reuters, which means that they have data on all citizens, not just immigrants in an irregular situation. During the protests in Minneapolis, where the murder of Alex Pretti, ICE used that same facial recognition software against American citizens who participated in the protests. What was built for deportations is becoming a mass surveillance system for the entire population. Larry Ellison was not wrong at all. The data convenience trap. We have accepted terms and conditions without reading them, installed apps, third-party cookies, shared our lives on social networks… While we gave up our privacy out of pure convenience, thinking that the worst that could happen is that we would be served personalized ads, we were feeding a much murkier machinery. There is tools like Clearview AI that feed directly from the millions of photos that we upload to social networks, or Locate X that takes advantage of apps that collect our location to know where we are. The services that promised to keep us connected are also the ones that keep an eye on us. The ideology behind the code. The leaders of the companies that create these tools promote a techno-utopian vision that quickly leads to techno-authoritarianism. We have the most obvious example with Peter Thiel, founder of Palantir, who said openly “I don’t think freedom and democracy are compatible.” Alex Karp, the company’s current CEO, recently published a 22 point manifesto full of nationalist and militarized ideas. Another defender of this ideology is the investor Marc Andreessen, who published his “techno-optimistic manifesto” in which he proclaims that technology will solve all human problems while stating that ethics, caution and democratic scrutiny are obstacles to progress. We also see it in Elon Musk and his accelerationist visionwhich means that technology must advance without ethical limits or democratic restrictions, because AI is the only tool capable of solving the great problems of humanity. In this context, Larry Ellison’s phrase was not an on-air prediction, it was a warning and a declaration of intent from an elite with a very clear agenda. Image | Oracle PR, Flickr In Xataka | In Silicon Valley no one dares to criticize Trump. Nobody except one person