What’s in This Week’s Issue…

Good morning. You see those cameras on every corner and assume they're making you safer. After all, violent crime dropped 50% since the '90s.

More surveillance must mean less danger, right?

Wrong. The surveillance state isn't failing to keep you safe. It was never designed to.

So this week…

• 🏆 The Big Play: How a trillion-dollar industry turned your fear into the most profitable business model in America

• 💪 The Power Move: Why understanding the real product changes everything about how you see safety

• 💵 Follow the Money: Why Ketamine is booming in America

-GEN

🏆 The Big Play

The biggest money power story of the week.

How Fear Became America's Most Profitable Business

America built the world's most sophisticated surveillance network during the exact same decades that crime was already plummeting.

We now have more cameras per capita than China. More backdoors, more tracking, more everything.

Yet when a 20-year-old climbed onto a roof 130 yards from a presidential stage in Butler, Pennsylvania, the entire system somehow missed him for 90 minutes. Local officers, a counter-sniper team, and even bystanders spotted him long before the shooting. Yet nearly two years later, we still don't have answers.

But mention someone's ex-girlfriend? The system finds her in seconds.

1. The Playbook That Built Your Cage

The pattern repeats with surgical precision across three decades.

• 1994: Phone companies forced to install permanent wiretap backdoors. The pitch? Just for catching mobsters and drug dealers. Engineers warned those same backdoors would eventually be abused. They were ignored.

• 2001: Six weeks after the towers fell, Congress passed the Patriot Act before most members had even read it. Buried inside: Section 215, one sentence allowing the government to demand "any tangible thing" linked to terrorism. The NSA used it to collect every American's phone records for more than a decade.

• 2017: 2017: Flock Safety began selling license plate cameras to stop car break-ins. By 2024, they operated in more than 4,000 cities, letting officers search license plates across a nationwide network.

Notice what never happens. The surveillance never comes back off.

Every expansion arrives wrapped in crisis. Temporary powers become permanent infrastructure. And each promise to scale them back quietly disappears.

And you stop caring because if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.

2. The Industry That Fails Upwards

Here's what makes this different from every other business you know:

• September 2001 happens: The agencies that missed every signal didn't get shut down. They got the biggest budget increase in their history.

• 2013 arrives: Edward Snowden exposed the largest domestic surveillance program in modern history. The intelligence budget kept growing anyway.

• Keith Alexander's exit: The NSA director who oversaw those programs told Congress nobody had violated Americans' privacy. Three weeks later, his own watchdog admitted employees had repeatedly used surveillance tools to spy on girlfriends and wives, an abuse they called "LOVEINT." After retiring, Alexander launched a cybersecurity company, charged Wall Street clients up to $1 million a month, took the company public at a $1.2 billion valuation, sold most of his shares near the top, watched it collapse, then joined Amazon's board.

In any other industry, failure means bankruptcy. Here, failure becomes proof you need to spend more.

Booz Allen Hamilton, where Snowden worked, pulled in $9.3 billion in federal revenue in 2023 and nearly $12 billion by 2025. Roughly 95% comes from government contracts.

So the business model isn't safety. It's fear. And fear scales beautifully when you keep the population scared of itself.

3. When The Machine Works Perfectly

The surveillance state that couldn't stop a shooter works flawlessly the moment it's pointed at regular people:

• Kansas police chief: Used Flock's license plate network to track his ex-girlfriend 228 times in four months.

• Florida deputy: After being rejected by a woman he'd met during a TV shoot, he used the camera network to find her car and pull her over.

• Texas sheriff, May 2025: Ran a search for one woman across Flock's national network, reaching more than 83,000 cameras across the country. He claimed it was a welfare check because her family feared she was bleeding to death. Court records later revealed the real reason: she had taken an abortion pill.

The Institute of Justice documented at least 18 officers criminally charged in just two years for using these systems for personal reasons.

Remember what engineers warned in 1994? Backdoors built for good guys always get used by bad ones.

Except now, even the good guys become villains when the power to find anyone, anytime, sits in their pocket.

💪 The Power Moves

Playbook for understanding the game of power.

Why Understanding the Real Product Changes Everything

Safety was never the product. The product is you, afraid of each other.

Because the easiest way to keep 350 million people scared at the same time is to divide them into tribes and convince each tribe that the others are the threat.

The real danger has always been a country sold on being scared of itself.

And when there's no revenue in peace, the only way to get paid is a population afraid of its own neighbors.

The Takeaway:

So here's what you need to understand moving forward: the surveillance state isn't failing. It's working exactly as designed.

Just not for you.

It works for the people who profit every time you're told to be more afraid. And the more you understand that, the less power fear has over what you're willing to accept next.

💵 Following the Money

Three of the wildest financial and corruption stories from around the world.

#1 - Ketamine is booming in America. The reasons go beyond drugs

#2 - New Trump admin rules tie federal student loans to how much money graduates earn

#3 - Did rising egg prices seem illegal? Turns out, they were

✨ Poll time!

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