After September 11, the national security apparatus discovered that Silicon Valley had already built something it could never have constructed on its own: a commercial surveillance infrastructure of unprecedented scope. The partnership that emerged—formalized through Section 702, PRISM, and informal coordination channels—erased the boundary between corporate database and government intelligence.
The compliance economy extended that surveillance to finance. Banks became informants. Every transaction became a potential report. Forty billion dollars in annual compliance costs created a system of perpetual financial monitoring that operates without warrants, without probable cause, and largely without public awareness.
And as platforms became central to public discourse, they became subject to government pressure—sometimes explicit, more often implicit—to moderate content in ways that serve administrative priorities. The First Amendment bars government censorship. It does not bar government from suggesting what private companies should censor on its behalf.
