How a court footnote, retention orders, interagency data sharing, and the government’s own words reveal what happens when we pour private thought into a chatbot.
The Claude by Anthropic app logo appears on the screen of a smartphone in Reno
(Photo by Jaque Silva/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
LONG READ
John Marks
Apr 18, 2026
John Marks
Apr 18, 2026
Common Dreams
Last month, a sentence went viral claiming that if you type into a chatbot, the FBI can get everything. The claim was too broad. The truth may be narrower, and worse.
Worse, because what is at stake is not some dramatic collapse of privacy. It is a daily practice so ordinary that most people do not even register it as exposure. Thought leaves a protected setting, enters a consumer platform, becomes a record, and then falls under rules the user did not write and will almost never see. Catastrophes announce themselves. Habits do not. Habits become infrastructure before the public notices what has changed.
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This essay walks through six documents: a footnote, two preservation orders, an executive order on interagency sharing, a national security memorandum, and a budget request. Read one by one, each can be minimized. Read together, they describe an apparatus already in motion, and a desk already inside it.
A conversation is something you have. A record is something someone else keeps. The text box in front of you now performs both functions at once. It feels like conversation. It can become record.
I. The First Shift: When Thinking Starts Looking Like Disclosure
In United States v. Heppner, decided in the Southern District of New York on February 17, 2026, Judge Jed S. Rakoff wrote in a footnote: “But even if certain information that Heppner input into Claude was privileged, he waived the privilege by sharing that information with Claude and Anthropic, just as if he had shared it with any other third party.”
Read that again, slowly. Speed helps disguise the act.
What happens when the record no longer belongs to the person who created it?
The footnote does not say the attorney-client relationship dissolves because a chatbot exists. It says something narrower, and more unsettling. Whatever Heppner himself carried out of a protected setting and voluntarily shared with Claude could lose privilege the way material shared with any other third party can lose privilege. The room remains protected. What leaves the room may not.
That is old doctrine meeting a new habit. The danger lies in the habit’s ordinariness. A doctrine once applied to deliberate disclosure becomes harsher when the third party is a text box millions of people treat as an extension of private thought.
People use consumer chatbots to think through problems, including legal ones. They paste in memos, summaries, draft language, and questions they cannot yet frame in legal terms. Some of that material originated with counsel. Some did not. Not every exchange is privileged. That is not the point. The point is that the text box does not sort those categories for the user, and the user often does not sort them either. The platform feels intimate, immediate, and close enough to thought that the act often does not register as disclosure.
That is the shift. Most users do not believe they are sharing protected material with a third party. They believe they are working privately through a problem. The platform may not honor that distinction. The court may not honor it. The state may not honor it either.
The Heppner footnote may not survive appeal, but the pattern it marks does not depend on its survival. Carpenter v. United States points in a different direction on digital third-party records. A split among district courts is already visible. But appellate uncertainty is not protection in the meantime. Courts sort doctrine on one timetable. Institutions build systems on another. Retention practices, routing rules, and interagency structures can harden before doctrine settles.
The legal tracks must stay distinct. Privilege is not work product. Work product is not Fourth Amendment privacy. Privacy is not retention. Retention is not acquisition. Acquisition by warrant is not acquisition by administrative subpoena or interagency sharing. The sequence that follows does not require those categories to collapse. It requires only that, in practice, they begin to converge in ways that steadily weaken user control.
A ruling declaring that every chatbot exchange destroys privilege would trigger immediate alarm. A footnote this quiet does not. That is why the narrower reading is worse. It marks an ordinary act, repeated every day by people who think they are thinking privately when, in legal effect, they may be disclosing.
The public paraphrase overstated the law. The law understated the habit. Once that shift comes into view, the next question follows: What happens when the record no longer belongs to the person who created it?
II. The Record Leaves Your Hands
The Heppner footnote did not arrive alone. It arrived inside a pattern. The pattern matters more than the sentence.
Courts are sorting several adjacent questions the public keeps collapsing into one. One week before Heppner, in Warner v. Gilbarco, the Eastern District of Michigan rejected the claim that using ChatGPT to work through litigation material automatically destroyed work-product protection. Roughly six weeks later, Morgan v. V2X in the District of Colorado widened the split rather than closing it, recognizing Rule 26(b)(3) protection for AI-assisted material prepared by a pro se litigant while still imposing disclosure obligations and cautioning against uploading confidential information into mainstream AI systems.
Read together, these cases do not settle AI in the abstract. They suggest that courts are sorting channels, control, supervision, and institutional setting. Where the law sees counsel, protective orders, and defined litigation materials, it can still imagine a protected path. Where it sees voluntary disclosure into a consumer platform outside counsel’s direction, the protection thins. A law firm inside a controlled environment gets one reading. A person at a kitchen table with a monthly subscription gets another. Ordinary users behave as though the boundary were settled in their favor. It is not. Uncertainty does not reduce the risk. It enlarges it.
Then the preservation orders deepen the problem. Once material becomes platform record, the user no longer controls the baseline that governs how long it exists or when it can be reached.
People still imagine their chat history exists inside a promise. It does not.
On May 13, 2025, in New York Times v. OpenAI, Judge Ona Wang entered a preserve-and-segregate order covering a vast population of user logs. On January 5, 2026, Judge Sidney Stein affirmed production of a 20 million de-identified log sample. His reasoning matters as much as the scale. He wrote that users’ privacy interests in that material were weaker than in wiretapped phone calls because the users had voluntarily disclosed the contents to a platform that retained them in the ordinary course of business.
The point is not that one company lost a fight. The point is that deletion baselines can change outside the user’s control. They can change in litigation the user is not party to, in a courtroom the user has never heard of, without notice to the person whose records are being kept. The later announcement that the broad preservation obligation ended does not erase that point. It confirms it. The baseline moved once. It can move again.
Even if the Heppner footnote falls on appeal, the preservation and retention architecture does not fall with it. Privilege doctrine is one track. Retention defaults are another, governed by platform terms, contract law, litigation holds, and administrative process. The constitutional fight may proceed in one courtroom while the records keep being kept in another.
Retention exposure is not uniform across users. When OpenAI’s broad preservation obligation was in effect, it excluded Enterprise accounts, Edu accounts, and API customers who had contracted for Zero Data Retention. The organizations and professionals with resources to buy safer configurations could obtain them. Ordinary users on consumer accounts could not.
That stratification is a structural feature of the platform layer, not an accident of one lawsuit. Law firms can buy protected configurations. A person at a kitchen table with a monthly subscription cannot. Before the first subpoena arrives, before the first interagency route opens, before any category written into National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7) is applied to anyone, the exposure is already stratified by who can afford which tier. That stratification will track the sorting that follows.
Retention is not government acquisition. It is the prior condition that makes acquisition possible. People still imagine their chat history exists inside a promise. It does not. It exists inside a current default, and defaults are fragile. A judge can change them. A litigation hold can change them. A production order can change them. The user often learns that only after the fact, if at all. Once a record can be kept, the next question is how it begins to move.
III. The State Has Already Built the Routes
On March 20, 2025, the White House issued an executive order with a title that sounds like office management: “Stopping Waste, Fraud, and Abuse by Eliminating Information Silos.” The word “silo” sounds bureaucratic and dull. That is part of its function. It makes a structural change sound merely administrative. The key word is “eliminating.”
Taken on its own, the order does not compel any single disclosure. Yet it plainly directs movement. It tells agency heads to ensure that designated officials receive full and prompt access to unclassified records, data, software, and IT systems. It authorizes sharing and consolidation within and across agencies. It calls for unfettered access to comprehensive data from state programs that receive federal funding, to the maximum extent consistent with law. The order treats the seams between agencies not as safeguards, but as obstacles. Boring language often carries the heaviest load because it is designed to pass without alarm. Usually, it does.
Administrative routing does not require a courtroom. It does not require a warrant. It requires an interagency agreement and a technical connection. Once that connection exists, records move under rules the user does not see, into hands the user did not anticipate, for purposes the user was never asked to weigh. Quietly at first. Then routinely. Then as a matter of course.
Once a state can create records, keep them, and move them with reduced friction, it no longer waits passively for events to arrive in fully formed cases.
That matters more when other forms of process reduce friction further. Washington Post reporting in February 2026 described the Department of Homeland Security’s use of administrative subpoenas at volumes that experts and former staff estimated in the thousands or tens of thousands. American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) litigation, including Doe v. DHS, added specific challenged cases to that pattern. Administrative subpoenas are not new. What matters is their operational use: speed, breadth, and limited front-end judicial review.
A system that can demand material quickly behaves differently from one that must persuade a judge before the process begins. A system that does not require a judge at the front end is not meaningfully slowed when a judge at the back end issues a clarifying opinion three years later. By then, the records have moved, and the institutional lesson has been learned.
The warrants aimed at journalist Hannah Natanson reveal the same pattern from another angle. Their significance is not that journalists are uniquely vulnerable. It is that Natanson’s case was legible. She had a national byline. Her case could be read, tracked, and contested in public.
Most cases will not look like that. Most people caught in expanding process will be organizers, students, immigrants, and members of communities sorted first under every previous expansion of federal attention. They will not have a national employer or a legal defense fund. Their names will not trend. Their records will still move. The unreadable cases are the condition. The visible ones are the narrow window through which the rest of us glimpse it.
Names matter less than architecture. Replace any one official and the route still exists the next morning. The Information Silos order still stands. The subpoena posture still matters. The warrant machinery still works. Personnel matter. Architecture matters more.
Once a state can create records, keep them, and move them with reduced friction, it no longer waits passively for events to arrive in fully formed cases. It gains the practical ability to sort, correlate, and escalate before the public sees any full story. From there, the next question is unavoidable: What kinds of people has the state already told itself to look for?
IV. The Categories Are Already on the Page
The most revealing documents in this essay are not leaked. They are posted. The apparatus does not need secrecy for the first stages of this work. It can describe itself in public because the public rarely reads primary documents until the output becomes undeniable.
Start with NSPM-7, issued on September 25, 2025, under the title “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence.” Read that title carefully. “Domestic terrorism” is one phrase. “Organized political violence” is another. The memorandum joins them into a single operational field. A category this wide gives agencies room to sort more conduct, posture, and association than the public usually imagines when it hears the word “terrorism.”
The FBI’s Fiscal Year 2027 Budget Request, submitted in March 2026, translates that field into administrative appetite. On page 13, the request states that violent conduct in the United States commonly relates to views associated with anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the US government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility toward those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality. That ideological enumeration is the budget’s own language. NSPM-7 supplies the broader “investigate, prosecute, and disrupt” frame within which it operates. The categories are framed in terms of political disposition and affiliation rather than completed acts.
Broad security language rarely falls evenly. It reaches certain communities first, long before the public agrees on what the category means or whom it is for.
Appetite alone does not move records. A vehicle does. The same request names it: the NSPM-7 Joint Mission Center, composed of personnel from 10 agencies, which the budget says will integrate intelligence, operational support, and financial analysis to proactively identify networks and prosecute domestic terrorist and related criminal actors.
That phrase matters. Proactive identification of networks is not the same as investigating a specific act after a complaint, a tip, or an arrest. The language moves upstream, away from completed acts and toward recurrent motivations, indicia, and network mapping. When the categories guiding that work are framed in ideological and cultural terms, network mapping does not remain confined to the individuals at any given node. It extends outward. That is how categories begin to function as engines. Broad markers, interagency routes, and a budget request for advance identification: That is the combination now on the page.
These documents do not prove that every citizen who holds one or more of these views is already under active federal investigation. They prove something serious enough. They show that the administration has formalized a broader operational category than most citizens realize, paired it with interagency movement of information, and requested funding for proactive identification under that category. The concern is not a proven dragnet. The concern is that the categories, routes, and funding streams are now broad enough to normalize sorting before a complete individualized case exists.
Kash Patel’s name appears on a cover page. Stephen Miller, Russell Vought, and Todd Blanche occupy familiar nodes of power. Those offices matter. But the signature is not the explanation. It is the citation. The explanation is the architecture written into policy, budget language, and routing authority. That architecture will outlast the current roster, and most of the litigation currently aimed at one footnote inside it. Once categories are written, routes are built, and funding is requested, somebody meets them first.
V. Broad Powers Never Land Evenly
In American practice, that somebody is rarely random. Broad security language rarely falls evenly. It reaches certain communities first, long before the public agrees on what the category means or whom it is for. That is not incidental to the history. That is the history.
The recent treatment of students and faculty involved in campus Palestine solidarity shows the first mechanism clearly: label before case. Visa revocations, detention, and removal proceedings have moved ahead of any settled public showing of unprotected conduct. The label comes first. The individualized case comes later, if it comes at all. That is what proactive identification looks like when policy language leaves the page and lands on a life.
The Stop Cop City prosecutions show the second mechanism: association widening exposure. Protest activity, bail funds, and mutual aid networks were drawn into racketeering and domestic terrorism frames that stretched beyond any single completed act. Once the state begins to map relation, exposure no longer stops where conduct stops. It moves through contact, support, and nearness itself.
The newest entry point into an old machinery does not arrive with sirens or boots at the door. It arrives as invitation. It arrives as convenience. It arrives as a blinking cursor.
Standing Rock shows the third mechanism: records and suspicion moving across institutions. Federal agencies, state police, and private contractors shared surveillance functions across the very seams liberal legal culture likes to treat as safeguards. The point is that, in practice, observations, records, and suspicions moved across a cooperative field. The Information Silos order does not invent that logic. It removes more of its friction.
The post September 11 surveillance of Muslim American communities shows the oldest mechanism: population sorting before any specific act. Whole communities were subjected to preemptive scrutiny because of religion, association, and presumed risk. That template did not disappear when the emergency rhetoric faded. It remained ready for new technologies, new authorizations, new words, and new enemies.
Taken together, these examples reveal recurring forms, not isolated abuses: label before case, association widening exposure, records moving across institutions, populations sorted in advance. None of this depends on a future court adopting the broadest possible reading of Heppner. The apparatus already knows how to work on bodies, files, and communities.
What is new is not the appetite to sort, but the route by which sorting begins. The newest entry point into an old machinery does not arrive with sirens or boots at the door. It arrives as invitation. It arrives as convenience. It arrives as a blinking cursor.
VI. The Text Box Is the Last Voluntary Step
That cursor sits in a text box. That is where the sequence begins, not in a courtroom, not in a budget request, not in a raid after the fact. It begins here, at the tips of your fingers.
Once the record leaves your hands, the rest unfolds elsewhere: in retention policies you did not write, in orders you will never see, in routes built to reduce friction, in agencies already widening the categories through which they read the public. What felt private a moment ago enters systems that are not private at all.
By this point, the sequence should be visible. Ordinary use turns thought into record. Record is kept under terms the user does not control. Kept records travel along routes designed to reduce friction. They enter a state that has already begun defining, in public, the kinds of subjects it intends to sort before complete individualized stories arrive. None of those steps depends on whether one district court footnote survives appellate review. Each proceeds under its own authority and on its own timetable.
Once thought becomes record, and record becomes retainable, movable, sortable, the problem is no longer private. It is structural.
That is why civic literacy now matters at a different level. It is one of the few ways a citizen can see the structure before its output reaches him in a form he can no longer mistake. By the time most people encounter the apparatus as event, surprise is no defense. The route already existed. The category already existed. The records already existed.
That is also why the answer cannot be private caution alone. No defensive posture at one desk can interrupt an architecture built at the level of routes, retention, and category. The venues where architecture is contested are collective: civil liberties litigation at organizations like the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation; investigative reporting willing to read the documents before the output reaches the front page; and legislative pressure aimed at retention, at sharing, and at the scope of process. That is where the sequence can still be slowed. That is where it can still be narrowed. That is where it can still be broken.
The point is no longer just to be cautious at the desk. The point is to understand what the desk now connects to. Once thought becomes record, and record becomes retainable, movable, sortable, the problem is no longer private. It is structural.
The text box may feel like a place to think. It is also becoming a place where thought changes hands.
Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.
John Marks
John D. Marks, PhD, PE, is a US Army veteran and biomedical engineer who earned his doctorate at the University of Utah and later directed clinical research at a major medical device firm. His military service in the Corps of Engineers and his years living in postwar Europe gave him direct insight into how governments use bureaucracy, surveillance, and institutional power. He has authored numerous peer-reviewed scientific and clinical research publications and now writes from Pennsylvania on democratic erosion, authoritarian systems, and strategies of civic resistance.
Full Bio >
Last month, a sentence went viral claiming that if you type into a chatbot, the FBI can get everything. The claim was too broad. The truth may be narrower, and worse.
Worse, because what is at stake is not some dramatic collapse of privacy. It is a daily practice so ordinary that most people do not even register it as exposure. Thought leaves a protected setting, enters a consumer platform, becomes a record, and then falls under rules the user did not write and will almost never see. Catastrophes announce themselves. Habits do not. Habits become infrastructure before the public notices what has changed.
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This essay walks through six documents: a footnote, two preservation orders, an executive order on interagency sharing, a national security memorandum, and a budget request. Read one by one, each can be minimized. Read together, they describe an apparatus already in motion, and a desk already inside it.
A conversation is something you have. A record is something someone else keeps. The text box in front of you now performs both functions at once. It feels like conversation. It can become record.
I. The First Shift: When Thinking Starts Looking Like Disclosure
In United States v. Heppner, decided in the Southern District of New York on February 17, 2026, Judge Jed S. Rakoff wrote in a footnote: “But even if certain information that Heppner input into Claude was privileged, he waived the privilege by sharing that information with Claude and Anthropic, just as if he had shared it with any other third party.”
Read that again, slowly. Speed helps disguise the act.
What happens when the record no longer belongs to the person who created it?
The footnote does not say the attorney-client relationship dissolves because a chatbot exists. It says something narrower, and more unsettling. Whatever Heppner himself carried out of a protected setting and voluntarily shared with Claude could lose privilege the way material shared with any other third party can lose privilege. The room remains protected. What leaves the room may not.
That is old doctrine meeting a new habit. The danger lies in the habit’s ordinariness. A doctrine once applied to deliberate disclosure becomes harsher when the third party is a text box millions of people treat as an extension of private thought.
People use consumer chatbots to think through problems, including legal ones. They paste in memos, summaries, draft language, and questions they cannot yet frame in legal terms. Some of that material originated with counsel. Some did not. Not every exchange is privileged. That is not the point. The point is that the text box does not sort those categories for the user, and the user often does not sort them either. The platform feels intimate, immediate, and close enough to thought that the act often does not register as disclosure.
That is the shift. Most users do not believe they are sharing protected material with a third party. They believe they are working privately through a problem. The platform may not honor that distinction. The court may not honor it. The state may not honor it either.
The Heppner footnote may not survive appeal, but the pattern it marks does not depend on its survival. Carpenter v. United States points in a different direction on digital third-party records. A split among district courts is already visible. But appellate uncertainty is not protection in the meantime. Courts sort doctrine on one timetable. Institutions build systems on another. Retention practices, routing rules, and interagency structures can harden before doctrine settles.
The legal tracks must stay distinct. Privilege is not work product. Work product is not Fourth Amendment privacy. Privacy is not retention. Retention is not acquisition. Acquisition by warrant is not acquisition by administrative subpoena or interagency sharing. The sequence that follows does not require those categories to collapse. It requires only that, in practice, they begin to converge in ways that steadily weaken user control.
A ruling declaring that every chatbot exchange destroys privilege would trigger immediate alarm. A footnote this quiet does not. That is why the narrower reading is worse. It marks an ordinary act, repeated every day by people who think they are thinking privately when, in legal effect, they may be disclosing.
The public paraphrase overstated the law. The law understated the habit. Once that shift comes into view, the next question follows: What happens when the record no longer belongs to the person who created it?
II. The Record Leaves Your Hands
The Heppner footnote did not arrive alone. It arrived inside a pattern. The pattern matters more than the sentence.
Courts are sorting several adjacent questions the public keeps collapsing into one. One week before Heppner, in Warner v. Gilbarco, the Eastern District of Michigan rejected the claim that using ChatGPT to work through litigation material automatically destroyed work-product protection. Roughly six weeks later, Morgan v. V2X in the District of Colorado widened the split rather than closing it, recognizing Rule 26(b)(3) protection for AI-assisted material prepared by a pro se litigant while still imposing disclosure obligations and cautioning against uploading confidential information into mainstream AI systems.
Read together, these cases do not settle AI in the abstract. They suggest that courts are sorting channels, control, supervision, and institutional setting. Where the law sees counsel, protective orders, and defined litigation materials, it can still imagine a protected path. Where it sees voluntary disclosure into a consumer platform outside counsel’s direction, the protection thins. A law firm inside a controlled environment gets one reading. A person at a kitchen table with a monthly subscription gets another. Ordinary users behave as though the boundary were settled in their favor. It is not. Uncertainty does not reduce the risk. It enlarges it.
Then the preservation orders deepen the problem. Once material becomes platform record, the user no longer controls the baseline that governs how long it exists or when it can be reached.
People still imagine their chat history exists inside a promise. It does not.
On May 13, 2025, in New York Times v. OpenAI, Judge Ona Wang entered a preserve-and-segregate order covering a vast population of user logs. On January 5, 2026, Judge Sidney Stein affirmed production of a 20 million de-identified log sample. His reasoning matters as much as the scale. He wrote that users’ privacy interests in that material were weaker than in wiretapped phone calls because the users had voluntarily disclosed the contents to a platform that retained them in the ordinary course of business.
The point is not that one company lost a fight. The point is that deletion baselines can change outside the user’s control. They can change in litigation the user is not party to, in a courtroom the user has never heard of, without notice to the person whose records are being kept. The later announcement that the broad preservation obligation ended does not erase that point. It confirms it. The baseline moved once. It can move again.
Even if the Heppner footnote falls on appeal, the preservation and retention architecture does not fall with it. Privilege doctrine is one track. Retention defaults are another, governed by platform terms, contract law, litigation holds, and administrative process. The constitutional fight may proceed in one courtroom while the records keep being kept in another.
Retention exposure is not uniform across users. When OpenAI’s broad preservation obligation was in effect, it excluded Enterprise accounts, Edu accounts, and API customers who had contracted for Zero Data Retention. The organizations and professionals with resources to buy safer configurations could obtain them. Ordinary users on consumer accounts could not.
That stratification is a structural feature of the platform layer, not an accident of one lawsuit. Law firms can buy protected configurations. A person at a kitchen table with a monthly subscription cannot. Before the first subpoena arrives, before the first interagency route opens, before any category written into National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7) is applied to anyone, the exposure is already stratified by who can afford which tier. That stratification will track the sorting that follows.
Retention is not government acquisition. It is the prior condition that makes acquisition possible. People still imagine their chat history exists inside a promise. It does not. It exists inside a current default, and defaults are fragile. A judge can change them. A litigation hold can change them. A production order can change them. The user often learns that only after the fact, if at all. Once a record can be kept, the next question is how it begins to move.
III. The State Has Already Built the Routes
On March 20, 2025, the White House issued an executive order with a title that sounds like office management: “Stopping Waste, Fraud, and Abuse by Eliminating Information Silos.” The word “silo” sounds bureaucratic and dull. That is part of its function. It makes a structural change sound merely administrative. The key word is “eliminating.”
Taken on its own, the order does not compel any single disclosure. Yet it plainly directs movement. It tells agency heads to ensure that designated officials receive full and prompt access to unclassified records, data, software, and IT systems. It authorizes sharing and consolidation within and across agencies. It calls for unfettered access to comprehensive data from state programs that receive federal funding, to the maximum extent consistent with law. The order treats the seams between agencies not as safeguards, but as obstacles. Boring language often carries the heaviest load because it is designed to pass without alarm. Usually, it does.
Administrative routing does not require a courtroom. It does not require a warrant. It requires an interagency agreement and a technical connection. Once that connection exists, records move under rules the user does not see, into hands the user did not anticipate, for purposes the user was never asked to weigh. Quietly at first. Then routinely. Then as a matter of course.
Once a state can create records, keep them, and move them with reduced friction, it no longer waits passively for events to arrive in fully formed cases.
That matters more when other forms of process reduce friction further. Washington Post reporting in February 2026 described the Department of Homeland Security’s use of administrative subpoenas at volumes that experts and former staff estimated in the thousands or tens of thousands. American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) litigation, including Doe v. DHS, added specific challenged cases to that pattern. Administrative subpoenas are not new. What matters is their operational use: speed, breadth, and limited front-end judicial review.
A system that can demand material quickly behaves differently from one that must persuade a judge before the process begins. A system that does not require a judge at the front end is not meaningfully slowed when a judge at the back end issues a clarifying opinion three years later. By then, the records have moved, and the institutional lesson has been learned.
The warrants aimed at journalist Hannah Natanson reveal the same pattern from another angle. Their significance is not that journalists are uniquely vulnerable. It is that Natanson’s case was legible. She had a national byline. Her case could be read, tracked, and contested in public.
Most cases will not look like that. Most people caught in expanding process will be organizers, students, immigrants, and members of communities sorted first under every previous expansion of federal attention. They will not have a national employer or a legal defense fund. Their names will not trend. Their records will still move. The unreadable cases are the condition. The visible ones are the narrow window through which the rest of us glimpse it.
Names matter less than architecture. Replace any one official and the route still exists the next morning. The Information Silos order still stands. The subpoena posture still matters. The warrant machinery still works. Personnel matter. Architecture matters more.
Once a state can create records, keep them, and move them with reduced friction, it no longer waits passively for events to arrive in fully formed cases. It gains the practical ability to sort, correlate, and escalate before the public sees any full story. From there, the next question is unavoidable: What kinds of people has the state already told itself to look for?
IV. The Categories Are Already on the Page
The most revealing documents in this essay are not leaked. They are posted. The apparatus does not need secrecy for the first stages of this work. It can describe itself in public because the public rarely reads primary documents until the output becomes undeniable.
Start with NSPM-7, issued on September 25, 2025, under the title “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence.” Read that title carefully. “Domestic terrorism” is one phrase. “Organized political violence” is another. The memorandum joins them into a single operational field. A category this wide gives agencies room to sort more conduct, posture, and association than the public usually imagines when it hears the word “terrorism.”
The FBI’s Fiscal Year 2027 Budget Request, submitted in March 2026, translates that field into administrative appetite. On page 13, the request states that violent conduct in the United States commonly relates to views associated with anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the US government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility toward those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality. That ideological enumeration is the budget’s own language. NSPM-7 supplies the broader “investigate, prosecute, and disrupt” frame within which it operates. The categories are framed in terms of political disposition and affiliation rather than completed acts.
Broad security language rarely falls evenly. It reaches certain communities first, long before the public agrees on what the category means or whom it is for.
Appetite alone does not move records. A vehicle does. The same request names it: the NSPM-7 Joint Mission Center, composed of personnel from 10 agencies, which the budget says will integrate intelligence, operational support, and financial analysis to proactively identify networks and prosecute domestic terrorist and related criminal actors.
That phrase matters. Proactive identification of networks is not the same as investigating a specific act after a complaint, a tip, or an arrest. The language moves upstream, away from completed acts and toward recurrent motivations, indicia, and network mapping. When the categories guiding that work are framed in ideological and cultural terms, network mapping does not remain confined to the individuals at any given node. It extends outward. That is how categories begin to function as engines. Broad markers, interagency routes, and a budget request for advance identification: That is the combination now on the page.
These documents do not prove that every citizen who holds one or more of these views is already under active federal investigation. They prove something serious enough. They show that the administration has formalized a broader operational category than most citizens realize, paired it with interagency movement of information, and requested funding for proactive identification under that category. The concern is not a proven dragnet. The concern is that the categories, routes, and funding streams are now broad enough to normalize sorting before a complete individualized case exists.
Kash Patel’s name appears on a cover page. Stephen Miller, Russell Vought, and Todd Blanche occupy familiar nodes of power. Those offices matter. But the signature is not the explanation. It is the citation. The explanation is the architecture written into policy, budget language, and routing authority. That architecture will outlast the current roster, and most of the litigation currently aimed at one footnote inside it. Once categories are written, routes are built, and funding is requested, somebody meets them first.
V. Broad Powers Never Land Evenly
In American practice, that somebody is rarely random. Broad security language rarely falls evenly. It reaches certain communities first, long before the public agrees on what the category means or whom it is for. That is not incidental to the history. That is the history.
The recent treatment of students and faculty involved in campus Palestine solidarity shows the first mechanism clearly: label before case. Visa revocations, detention, and removal proceedings have moved ahead of any settled public showing of unprotected conduct. The label comes first. The individualized case comes later, if it comes at all. That is what proactive identification looks like when policy language leaves the page and lands on a life.
The Stop Cop City prosecutions show the second mechanism: association widening exposure. Protest activity, bail funds, and mutual aid networks were drawn into racketeering and domestic terrorism frames that stretched beyond any single completed act. Once the state begins to map relation, exposure no longer stops where conduct stops. It moves through contact, support, and nearness itself.
The newest entry point into an old machinery does not arrive with sirens or boots at the door. It arrives as invitation. It arrives as convenience. It arrives as a blinking cursor.
Standing Rock shows the third mechanism: records and suspicion moving across institutions. Federal agencies, state police, and private contractors shared surveillance functions across the very seams liberal legal culture likes to treat as safeguards. The point is that, in practice, observations, records, and suspicions moved across a cooperative field. The Information Silos order does not invent that logic. It removes more of its friction.
The post September 11 surveillance of Muslim American communities shows the oldest mechanism: population sorting before any specific act. Whole communities were subjected to preemptive scrutiny because of religion, association, and presumed risk. That template did not disappear when the emergency rhetoric faded. It remained ready for new technologies, new authorizations, new words, and new enemies.
Taken together, these examples reveal recurring forms, not isolated abuses: label before case, association widening exposure, records moving across institutions, populations sorted in advance. None of this depends on a future court adopting the broadest possible reading of Heppner. The apparatus already knows how to work on bodies, files, and communities.
What is new is not the appetite to sort, but the route by which sorting begins. The newest entry point into an old machinery does not arrive with sirens or boots at the door. It arrives as invitation. It arrives as convenience. It arrives as a blinking cursor.
VI. The Text Box Is the Last Voluntary Step
That cursor sits in a text box. That is where the sequence begins, not in a courtroom, not in a budget request, not in a raid after the fact. It begins here, at the tips of your fingers.
Once the record leaves your hands, the rest unfolds elsewhere: in retention policies you did not write, in orders you will never see, in routes built to reduce friction, in agencies already widening the categories through which they read the public. What felt private a moment ago enters systems that are not private at all.
By this point, the sequence should be visible. Ordinary use turns thought into record. Record is kept under terms the user does not control. Kept records travel along routes designed to reduce friction. They enter a state that has already begun defining, in public, the kinds of subjects it intends to sort before complete individualized stories arrive. None of those steps depends on whether one district court footnote survives appellate review. Each proceeds under its own authority and on its own timetable.
Once thought becomes record, and record becomes retainable, movable, sortable, the problem is no longer private. It is structural.
That is why civic literacy now matters at a different level. It is one of the few ways a citizen can see the structure before its output reaches him in a form he can no longer mistake. By the time most people encounter the apparatus as event, surprise is no defense. The route already existed. The category already existed. The records already existed.
That is also why the answer cannot be private caution alone. No defensive posture at one desk can interrupt an architecture built at the level of routes, retention, and category. The venues where architecture is contested are collective: civil liberties litigation at organizations like the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation; investigative reporting willing to read the documents before the output reaches the front page; and legislative pressure aimed at retention, at sharing, and at the scope of process. That is where the sequence can still be slowed. That is where it can still be narrowed. That is where it can still be broken.
The point is no longer just to be cautious at the desk. The point is to understand what the desk now connects to. Once thought becomes record, and record becomes retainable, movable, sortable, the problem is no longer private. It is structural.
The text box may feel like a place to think. It is also becoming a place where thought changes hands.
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John Marks
John D. Marks, PhD, PE, is a US Army veteran and biomedical engineer who earned his doctorate at the University of Utah and later directed clinical research at a major medical device firm. His military service in the Corps of Engineers and his years living in postwar Europe gave him direct insight into how governments use bureaucracy, surveillance, and institutional power. He has authored numerous peer-reviewed scientific and clinical research publications and now writes from Pennsylvania on democratic erosion, authoritarian systems, and strategies of civic resistance.
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