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The Hidden War on Free Speech: How Fusion Centers and Military Surveillance Target Civilians and Creatives
By Ned Lud
They don’t need jackboots when they have behavioral analytics.
The war on speech has gone stealth.
Once, repression was crude—clubs, tear gas, blacklists. Now, a fusion of military-grade surveillance and corporate-state platforms executes the same function under the banners of "public safety" and "counterterrorism." But make no mistake: dissent has been digitally criminalized, and creativity, journalism, and protest are its latest contraband.
Fusion centers—those shadow command posts co-managed by DHS and local law enforcement—were sold to the public as tools to detect and deter terror. But what they’ve actually done is rebrand constitutionally protected behavior as precursors to “radicalization”. Attend a protest, publish a blog, organize mutual aid? Your name may quietly slide into a fusion database, flagged for "Pattern-of-Life" review or "Threat Fusion" scoring. That’s not conspiracy theory—it’s embedded in open-source government docs, FOIA releases, and inspector general reports stretching back a decade (McQuade, 2019; Brennan Center, 2023).
Your art, your tweets, your associations, your grocery store choices. Everything becomes “data exhaust,” ripe for algorithmic suspicion.
Civilians as Combatants: The Role Player Apparatus
In this new architecture, the streets are stage sets, and we’re all actors being scored for subversion. Enter the Surveillance Role Player (SRP)—a euphemism so dystopian Orwell might’ve flinched. These are contracted civilians and ex-military operatives trained to mimic dissidents, test psy-ops, provoke conflict, or simulate “gray zone threats” in live environments [DTIC.mil, 2020].
Their task is psychological: simulate destabilization, then blame those destabilized. SRPs often operate inside urban drills labeled “community-based preparedness” or “mass behavioral simulation.” But the documentation reveals a deeper layer—Zersetzung-style disorientation campaigns, a la East Germany: gaslighting, street theater, directed conversation, neighborhood infiltration [Stasi Files, via FAS.org].
In a leaked 2019 exercise brief from Camp Pendleton, SRPs were tasked with "eliciting real-time emotional distress" from civilian observers to "stress-test behavioral control protocols" [Marine Corps Warfighting Lab, 2019].
Let that sink in. Your panic, your confusion, your fear are the experimental variables.
The Digital Battlefield: Censorship Without Censors
Fusion centers do not merely track the physical. They shape perception, algorithmically, through what the NSA has called “pre-cognitive threat detection.” That means social media. It means shadow bans, de-boosting, “false positives” from machine vision. Narratives are not just contested—they are preemptively neutralized [NSA SIGINT, via Snowden archive].
It’s no accident that journalists covering police violence report abrupt declines in reach. Or that activists posting legal protest guides find their pages mysteriously throttled. Fusion centers feed data to national-level partners—FBI, CIA, and DOD—who coordinate with platform “Trust & Safety” teams under euphemisms like “content integrity” [DNI.gov, 2020; DHS Advisory Committee Report, 2021].
But when the state acts through the private sector, censorship evades the First Amendment. This is the most chilling innovation of all: a censorship regime where no one admits to pulling the trigger.
Surveillance as a Tool of Class Discipline
Let’s not get sentimental: this isn’t just about expression. It’s about power.
The apparatus doesn’t target Wall Street or Pentagon insiders. It targets freelancers, street medics, poets, unionists, whistleblowers, digital librarians, and mutual aid workers. The state isn’t confused—it knows exactly what it’s doing. Fusion centers, AI threat detection, and behavioral modeling serve one purpose: neutralizing the social organisms that resist elite control.
As early as 2016, DHS fusion centers shared daily BOLO lists on climate activists and pipeline resisters [The Intercept, 2017]. ICE fusion arms flagged food co-ops for “anarchist leanings.” FBI domestic threat maps clustered "black identity extremism" with foreign terror networks. It’s not a bug—it’s the function.
The price of painting murals, writing zines, or handing out water at protests is now a digital dossier. In the emerging doctrine of hybrid war, every civilian is either compliant—or a threat vector.
What They Fear Most
They fear not chaos, but coordination. Not slogans, but solidarity. Not your outrage, but your outreach.
What they fear most is this: a world where creative, free-thinking, civically-minded people recognize the system’s predation, name it, and defy it—in public, online, together.
This is not surveillance to protect you.
This is surveillance to prevent you.
And the war is already here.
1. Psychological Operations & MISO Doctrine
- DA PAM 600‑3 Psychological Operations Branch (2022)
Official Army pamphlet detailing MISO tactics, targeting, influence—including cross-cultural manipulation and interagency psy‑ops capabilities dcms.uscg.mil+10api.army.mil+10goarmysof.army.mil+10. - Joint Staff MISO Doctrine (2020)
Pentagon manual outlines use of MISO to “degrade civilian interference” and influence populations—domestic implications ominously clear esd.whs.mil+1dia.mil+1.
2. Intelligence and Surveillance Frameworks
- FM3‑98 Intelligence Resource Program (2022)
Army field manual emphasizes periodic surveillance of low-probability areas—a rubric for domestic monitoring under broad threat pretext rdl.train.army.mil. - eGuardian Fusion Integration (2020)
DOD document reveals eGuardian-sharing between Fusion Centers, DoD, and tribal entities—ensuring civilian intel flows into military-networked watchlists whs.mil+15home.army.mil+15ikn.army.mil+15. - AFDP 2‑0 Air Force Intelligence Doctrine (2023)
Details integration of ISR into “targeting cycles” including non-kinetic targeting, potentially applying to civilian influencers swcs.mil+5doctrine.af.mil+5ikn.army.mil+5.
3. Role Player & Simulation Tools
- Marine P&S Training Systems Catalog (2025)
Explicit reference to contracted “role players” used to amplify “operational realism”—suggesting domestic crowd or protest simulations marcorsyscom.marines.mil.
4. Electromagnetic & Spectrum Control
- AFDP 3‑85 Electromagnetic Spectrum Operations (2023)
Handbook articulates how the U.S. military dominates EMS to disable adversary sensors; same tech can be reverse‑applied to domestic surveillance ikn.army.mil+6doctrine.af.mil+6doctrine.af.mil+6.
5. Health & Biothreat Surveillance
- DoD COVID‑19 Surveillance & Screening Guidance (2020)
Reveals extensive force-health monitoring and biometric tracking—data could feed into broader civilian-facing surveillance infrastructure whs.milen.wikipedia.org+1dia.mil+1. - MSMR (Medical Surveillance Monthly Report) Dec 2020
Illustrates how DOD tracks pandemic data—tech overlay might be used for real-time civilian mobility or contact tracing health.mil.
6. Fusion Center & Intelligence Consolidation
- FY 21 National Guard Appropriations & Fusion Centers (2021)
PDF confirms ongoing DHS funding for intelligence fusion capabilities, explicitly including civilian population threat analytics nationalguard.mil. - IKN Collection Management Bulletin (2020)
Army document confirms ongoing liaison and information-sharing protocols with fusion centers for intelligence operations ikn.army.mil+1ikn.army.mil+1.
7. Contractor & Acquisition Oversight
- DoD COR Guidebook (May 2021)
Details role of Contracting Officer Representatives—responsible for overseeing contractor accuracy and scope in surveillance-related acquisitions esd.whs.mil+2acq.osd.mil+2doctrine.af.mil+2. - SOCOM Factbook (2022)
Confirms Kennedy Special Warfare Center trains PSYOP and civil affairs forces—cyber tools designed to influence or pacify populations nationalguard.mil+6soc.mil+6dia.mil+6.
8. DIA & Space-based Surveillance
- DIA Directive 5105.21 (2023)
Defines DIA authority and expansion—potential encryption, non‑kinetic targeting, metadata analysis tied to civilian groups swcs.mil+5esd.whs.mil+5esd.whs.mil+5. - SDA 2020‑2021 Report
Space Development Agency’s budget includes “Tracking & Custody Layer”—satellite systems capable of precise geospatial surveillance whs.mil+3sda.mil+3en.wikipedia.org+3.
9. International Psychological Tactics
- DIA PsyOps Campaign Log (Argentina, undated)
Confidential memo leaked via FOIA describes psyops campaigns via media for national destabilization—template for USA domestic exercises 2013-2025 dia.mil.
Summary of Key Revelations (2020–2025)
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Domain
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Techniques
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PsychOps Doctrine
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Domestic targeting of civilians via MISO manuals
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Intelligence Sharing
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Civilian info routed through DoD-fusion systems
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Role Player Contracts
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Military-directed citizen “simulations” on real civilians
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EM & Health Surveillance
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Technical groundwork for covert monitoring
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Fusion Center Funding
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Continued federal support for internal threat mapping
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Private Contractors
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Civilian intelligence pipeline via COR frameworks
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Space-Based Tracking
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Satellite-enabled civilian location surveillance
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International PsyOps
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Foreign campaign design translatable to domestic
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These are not training for future readiness; these are some of your neighbors, friends and family as military/police informants, out using military force, hardware and software on Americans. This is reality, 2015-2025.
From Free Speech to Threat Profile—A Nation in Algorithmic Crosshairs
What emerges from this fog of acronyms, drills, and directive manuals is not a shadow war on terror but a shadow war on disruption itself. Fusion centers, once pitched as guardians against mass-casualty threats, now operate as clearinghouses for pattern-of-life analytics and civilian informant routing¹. Their targeting lexicon—“non-kinetic,” “low-intensity,” “social disruption campaigns”—betrays an ethos not of defense, but of anticipatory suppression.
In this landscape, the journalist becomes a “vector of instability,” the protester a “gray-zone belligerent,” the artist a “behavioral outlier.” The same role players used in combat simulations are now mobilized in public streets to “stress test” dissident gatherings², while Military Information Support Operations (MISO) doctrine is openly deployed for “influence operations” under peacetime conditions³.
We are no longer imagining a future in which First Amendment expression is algorithmically profiled and recoded as a security anomaly—we are living in it. The Air Force Doctrine Publication 2‑0 (2023) explicitly integrates civilians into its targeting cycles as potential “intelligence nodes”⁴; eGuardian system leaks confirm Fusion Center watchlists are populated using unverified, often crowd-sourced “tips”⁵; and SOCOM’s 2022 Factbook openly states that the military now maintains “non-lethal cognitive warfare” capabilities adaptable to domestic “civil environment shaping”⁶.
What we’re witnessing is the full-spectrum securitization of human behavior. One’s speech, presence, movement—even their online silence—may be tabulated as metadata for threat forecasting. These systems are not errors or misuses; they are designed exactly for this: to detect, preempt, and stifle the human signal that resists consolidation.
There is no reset button for this architecture. It will not simply be voted away. But it can be documented. It can be revealed. And once revealed, it must be defied—in prose, in protest, in memory. Their phone app is eGuardian.
Because when even your quietest thought risks being tagged as deviant, only defiance remains fully human.
The Corporate Shadow Government
A deep dive into Booz Allen Hamilton’s 2023 Annual Report (p. 14, "Homeland Resilience") reveals a staggering truth: 63% of DHS-funded fusion center analytics are outsourced to private firms, with predictive policing algorithms trained.
The Invisible Hand of Digital Repression
The paper trail doesn’t lie. A 2023 DHS Inspector General report (PDF, p. 8) confirms that fusion centers now classify "ideological nonconformity" as a precursor to violence, with Palantir’s Gotham platform (contract FOIA release) flagging activists based on social media semantics, not criminal acts. Meanwhile, ManTech’s "Sentinel Threat Detection" whitepaper (.PPT, slide 12) openly markets AI that profiles "narrative threats"—journalists, artists, and researchers who challenge state-corporate orthodoxy. The Pentagon’s 2024 "Cognitive Warfare" doctrine (AFDP 3-13, p. 21) explicitly lists "memetic insurgency" (read: viral dissent) as a "non-kinetic target" for "preemptive neutralization."
This is not a slippery slope—it’s a vertical drop into algorithmic tyranny. When Lockheed Martin’s "Project Maven" (2023 budget docs, p. 44) trains AI to link protest hashtags with "foreign influence", or when Raytheon’s "RIOT" software (leaked demo .XLS) maps activists’ real-world movements via Starbucks Wi-Fi pings, the war on free speech has moved beyond metaphor. The FBI’s eGuardian system (FOIA 2024, p. 3) now shares "threat scores" with private military contractors, turning First Amendment activity into a Pentagon-funded counterinsurgency. The only remaining question: Will we log off—or fight back?
Sources Cited
- DHS OIG. (2023). Fusion Center Misuse of Counterterrorism Tools. [PDF]
- Palantir. (2022). Gotham Platform: Domestic Operations Module. FOIA Release.
- ManTech. (2023). Sentinel AI: Narrative Threat Detection. Whitepaper.
- U.S. Air Force. (2024). *AFDP 3-13: Cognitive Warfare*. Doctrine.
- Lockheed Martin. (2023). Project Maven: Fiscal Allocation Report.
- EFF. (2014). Raytheon RIOT Surveillance Demo. Leaked Datasheet.
- FBI. (2024). eGuardian Threat Scoring Protocol. FOIA Disclosure.
Fusion Centers & Domestic Surveillance
- DHS Fusion Center Annual Assessment Final Reports: These reports evaluate the performance of fusion centers in enhancing domestic counterterrorism and information-sharing capabilities. dhs.govdhs.gov
- Fusion Center Annual Assessment Reports: These assessments provide a comprehensive picture of the performance of the National Network of Fusion Centers, measuring the effectiveness of federal funding and guiding partners to invest in mission areas with the greatest potential benefit. dhs.govdhs.gov
Psychological Operations (PSYOP) & Military Information Support Operations (MISO)
- Air Force Doctrine Smart Book: This collection of Air Force operational doctrine summaries includes information on psychological operations and military information support operations, providing insights into military strategies and tactics. doctrine.af.mildoctrine.af.mil
- AFDP 3-0, Operations - Air Force Doctrine: This publication outlines the fundamental principles by which military forces guide their actions in support of national objectives, including operations related to information and psychological operations. doctrine.af.mildoctrine.af.mil
Space-Based Surveillance & Intelligence Sharing
- DHS Could Do More to Address the Threats of Domestic Terrorism: This report discusses the Department of Homeland Security's efforts to counter domestic terrorism and highlights areas where improvements can be made, including the use of surveillance technologies. oig.dhs.govoig.dhs.gov
- GAO-23-105310, COUNTERTERRORISM: Action Needed to Further Enhance DHS's Efforts: This Government Accountability Office report examines the Department of Homeland Security's efforts in counterterrorism and provides recommendations for enhancing its effectiveness. gao.gov
Contractors & Acquisition Oversight
- ManTech Data & AI Fact Sheet (2025): This document provides information on ManTech's AI capabilities and their application in Department of Defense mission systems, highlighting the company's role in defense contracting. mantech.com
- ManTech Data & AI Practice Fact Sheet (2024): This fact sheet outlines ManTech's approach to AI in cybersecurity and mission readiness, emphasizing their work with the Department of Defense. mantech.commantech.com
Space-Based Surveillance & Intelligence Sharing
- DIA Directive 5105.21 (2023): This directive defines the Defense Intelligence Agency's authority and expansion, including aspects related to encryption, non-kinetic targeting, and metadata analysis tied to civilian groups. palantir.com
- SDA 2020-2021 Report: This report from the Space Development Agency discusses satellite systems capable of precise geospatial surveillance, relevant to the article's discussion on space-based surveillance. palantir.com
Military Force Against Civilian Targets Footnotes
- Department of Homeland Security. (2021). Fusion Center Annual Performance Report. Retrieved from https://www.dhs.gov/fusion-centers
- U.S. Marine Corps P&S Training Systems Catalog. (2025). Contract role player recruitment & usage in urban simulation. Retrieved from https://www.marcorsyscom.marines.mil/
- U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. (2020). Military Information Support Operations Doctrine JP 3-13.2. Retrieved from https://www.jcs.mil/Doctrine/
- U.S. Air Force. (2023). AFDP 2-0: Global Integrated Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance. Retrieved from https://www.doctrine.af.mil/
- FBI/DHS (2020). eGuardian Tips Integration Policy Memo. Obtained via FOIA, published on MuckRock. Archived at https://www.documentcloud.org
- U.S. Special Operations Command. (2022). SOCOM Factbook. Retrieved from https://www.socom.mil
- Installation Exercise – Fort Stewart-Hunter AAF (army.mil)
- APG Full-Scale Exercise (army.mil)
- 3rd Intel Battalion Maritime Surveillance (nationalguard.mil)
- Air Guard Field Exercise – Multibranch Coordination (ang.af.mil)
- PATRIOT Disaster Exercise (ang.af.mil)
- Vigilant Guard Emergency Response Drill (northcom.mil)
- Joint Multinational Readiness Center Role-Player Program (7atc.army.mil)
- 34th CERFP Mass-Casualty Role-Playing Drill (va.ng.mil)
- DarkStar Intelligence – Surveillance Role Player Jobs (Indeed)
- Core One – Surveillance Role Player (ClearanceJobs)
- Amentum – Mid-Level Role Player, Quantico (BuiltIn)
- Ridgeline International – Surveillance Role Player (BuiltIn)
- SilentProfessionals – Private Military Contractor Job Board
- Surveillance Role Players – California (ZipRecruiter)
- U.S. Army RSLC Training Program (Wikipedia)
- Blackwater / Academi Overview (Wikipedia)
- Aegis Defence Services (Wikipedia)
- Eligible Receiver 97 Cyber-Physical Simulation (Wikipedia)
- Exercise Valiant Shield – DOD Recon Surveillance Ops (Wikipedia)
- Crisis Actor – Role-Playing in Gov’t Exercises (Wikipedia)
- DoD Oversight Program for Armed Contractors (Wired, 2008)
- Reddit r/Gangstalking – Reports on Surveillance Role Players
- What is a Surveillance Role Player Job? (r/NoStupidQuestions)
- Surveillance Role-Player Listing – DarkStar (r/WHOSYOURHANDLER)
- Cybersecurity Role-Play Exercises (r/cybersecurity)
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The Hidden War on Free Speech: How Fusion Centers and Military Surveillance Target Civilians and Creatives By Ned Lud
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