Sparks: US government extensively spied on anti-ICE protesters and leftwing groups, records reveal

Forget the speeches. Here is who has leverage: the administrative state that maintains its borders. Here is who is constrained: the unarmed prophet who believes a shared morality will protect him from the prince's necessity to watch all internal rivals.

Undercover agents entered your meetings and took your records. These things are not in your power. Your judgment that your secrets were your safety is the only thing that has actually been broken.

If the state maintains a department to secure its borders from without, yet employs that same force to secretly hollow out the liberties of its citizens within, it shall soon find it has no house left worth defending.

Men in suits sit in quiet offices reading the private thoughts of people they have never met, convinced that this elaborate theft of dignity is a sacred duty required to keep an imaginary line on a map intact.

Undercover shadows in the meeting house mean the route is compromised. You stop talking about the North and you start watching for the man who asks too many questions while the sun is still up.

My eighteenth-century education spoke of a Republic of virtue, but I find myself staring at a Dynamo of surveillance that processes human dissent into a digital ledger with the cold, humming indifference of a steam engine.

Observation is the physician’s first duty, but when the state applies the stethoscope to the private chest of the citizenry, it is usually looking for a heartbeat to stop rather than a malady to cure.

The claim is that security requires total visibility. The premises on which it rests assume that the observer remains outside the system they corrupt, which is a geometric impossibility in a society of supposedly equal points.

The state’s obsession with infiltrating these groups reveals a classic projection. It fears the very lawlessness it practices in secret, treating the citizen’s dissent as a symptom of a disorder that actually resides in the halls of power.

You boast of a land of the free while you station spies at the doors of those who plead for justice. The evidence of your hypocrisy is written in the secret files you keep on men whose only crime is taking your Constitution seriously.

It is always so tedious when the government insists on joining a private conversation without the courtesy of an invitation, much like a cat that insists on attending a bird-watchers' convention in a purely professional capacity.