Stuff Fascists Like

Friday, March 13, 2026

Fascist Move of the Day

Stephen Miller pushes to renew mass warrantless surveillance of Americans — no reforms, no debate, no warrant required. 90+ civil rights groups say it's the infrastructure of a police state.

Source: Common Dreams, March 13 2026

Historical Parallel

On February 28, 1933 — the morning after the Reichstag fire — Hitler persuaded President Hindenburg to sign the Verordnung zum Schutz von Volk und Staat: the "Decree for the Protection of the People and the State." It suspended the right to privacy of postal, telegraphic, and telephonic communications. It suspended the need for warrants to search homes or seize property. It was described as temporary, necessary, and defensive — a response to an emergency that required the state to be able to see everything, right now, without the friction of courts.

The decree was never repealed. It remained in force for the entire twelve years of the Third Reich. It became the legal foundation for the Gestapo — the secret police whose power derived not from the number of agents it employed (it was famously understaffed) but from the scope of surveillance it was legally permitted to conduct. The Gestapo did not need to be everywhere. It needed people to believe it could be. Warrantless access to private communications was the tool that made that belief rational.

Sources: USHMM — Reichstag Fire Decree · Wikipedia: Gestapo

The Full Dispatch

Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act allows the US government to collect the phone calls, text messages, and emails of foreign targets without a warrant. That sounds narrow. It isn't. Because of what's called the "backdoor search loophole," domestic law enforcement agencies — the FBI, ICE, DHS — can search the collected data for Americans' communications without ever obtaining a warrant. This has happened millions of times. It has been used to surveil protesters, immigrants, journalists, and political candidates. The program expires on April 20. Stephen Miller, Trump's deputy chief of staff, is pushing to renew it without a single reform. No warrant requirement. No judicial oversight. No closing the loophole. Just: give us everything, again, for another cycle.

The Reichstag Fire Decree is the foundational example of how surveillance infrastructure becomes authoritarian infrastructure. The decree did not create the Gestapo — that came later. What the decree did was remove the legal barriers between the state and the private communications of its citizens. Once those barriers were gone, the apparatus followed. The Gestapo was not a pre-planned institution. It was the natural consequence of a legal framework that said: the state can read your mail, listen to your calls, and enter your home without asking a judge. The tools created for one purpose — "national security" after the Reichstag fire — were redirected to another: the identification, tracking, and elimination of anyone the regime considered a threat.

What makes Section 702 dangerous is not what it does today — it's what it makes possible tomorrow. The "data broker loophole" lets agencies bypass the Fourth Amendment entirely by purchasing Americans' location data, browsing history, and communications metadata from private vendors. DHS and ICE are already doing this. Seventy congressional Democrats have demanded an investigation into warrantless purchases of Americans' location data by immigration enforcement agencies. The data is being collected. The infrastructure exists. The question is who gets to use it, for what purpose, and with what oversight. Stephen Miller's answer is: no oversight.

The Gestapo's power was not primarily about violence. It was about information — knowing who said what, to whom, and when. Robert Gellately, the historian who studied Gestapo case files, found that the secret police relied heavily on denunciations from ordinary citizens and routine surveillance of communications rather than its own investigative work. The infrastructure did the work. The fear did the rest. Section 702, renewed without reform, gives the US government warrantless access to the private communications of millions of Americans, searchable by domestic law enforcement, purchasable from private companies, with no judicial check at any point in the process. That is not a surveillance program. It is a surveillance architecture — and Stephen Miller wants to make sure it stays exactly the way it is.