David speaks with career public defender Eliza Orlins about the growing scope of ICE-enabled surveillance and why it should concern everyone, not just non-citizens. Orlins outlines a sprawling, largely unaccountable dragnet powered by commercial data brokers, license-plate readers, toll and DMV records, app-based location tracking, and an emerging push for real-time social-media monitoring—often sidestepping warrants and eroding Fourth Amendment protections. The pair discuss how these tools can be repurposed beyond immigration to target journalists, dissenters, and protest movements, and how legal guardrails like Posse Comitatus or voting-rights protections are being weakened in practice, even when they still exist on paper. They also focus on practical safety for this weekend’s protests: consider leaving your phone at home, don’t post identifiable photos of others, avoid engaging with agitators, and if approached by police, assert your right to remain silent and ask if you’re free to leave. Despite the dark backdrop, Orlins emphasizes “joy as resistance” and points to the research suggesting that sustained, nonviolent participation at scale—the 3.5% threshold—can still check authoritarian drift. Follow Eliza Orlins on social media TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@elizaorlins Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/eorlins/ Substack: https://substack.com/@elizaorlins
Full Episode
What you are about to hear is a recent substack live conversation I had with Eliza Orleans, a career public defender who has been covering ISIS new social media surveillance efforts as well as unlawful surveillance as a whole. With the No Kings protests happening this weekend, we wanted this out in your feed today.
In this discussion, we cover what's actually being monitored, why it affects citizens and noncitizens alike. The David Pakman Show David Pakman dot com. We are live with Eliza Orleans, who is a career public defender for 15 years and has been covering the surveillance methods and mechanisms and tools that ICE has been using. You know, Eliza, I'm really glad.
Glad sounds weird because it's such a horrible thing, but I'm glad to be able to talk to you about this in the sense that. I think a lot of people have no idea that this is even going on. So maybe first just sort of lay it out. When we talk about ICE surveillance, what's going on generally?
Well, David, I'm thrilled that we're having this conversation because as horrible of a topic as this is, like it genuinely couldn't be more imperative that folks understand what is going on and how they can protect themselves. You know, I think that mass surveillance has been going on for a very long time, but the ways in which it is getting more and more nefarious is fascinating.
Deeply alarming. And so everyone should be aware of this big like dragnet that they've created and the ways in which they're funding it so that they can keep eyes on every single thing that you do in your life, essentially.
Now talk a little bit about the tools and techniques that are used but also a lot of people in the audience might be thinking well I was born in the United States and like that's it I'm not I have nothing to do with ISIS goals priorities whatever what about those people and why is this still a concern for them which I assume is the vast majority of the audience.
Yeah, listen, I think that a lot of folks think about being surveilled. And I know this. I quite literally gave a TED Talk earlier this year on unlawful surveillance and the erosion of the Fourth Amendment. And people say, but I didn't commit a crime or I'm a U.S. citizen. What does it matter that they have access to my location data? What does it matter that...
you know, that my DMV records or the tolls that I pay or, you know, that I'm being pinged on my cell site location. Why does that matter? Well, it matters because as we've seen with Trump's executive orders, you know, anyone who is considered Antifa, could be placed on a list, could be criminalized, could be at some point rounded up, prosecuted, jailed. We don't know at this point.
So everyone should be thinking about the ways in which they can protect themselves and protect their neighbors because we all have people in our lives who we love, who are non-citizens, who are green card holders, who are visa holders, who are DACA recipients. I mean, guaranteed every single person we...
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