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IT IS A COUP  
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Carole Cadwalladr
February 10, 2025
The Power [[link removed]]

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_ This is what should be on every front page in 150 point banner
headlines. All I have is this Substack but I lay it beneath your feet
and pray to a higher power that I'm wrong. From the author that first
exposed the Cambridge Analytical scandal. _

What’s not on the front page of the New York Times right now, The
Power

 

_[A short note here on what I’m covering and why. The political
changes we’re seeing across the world are underpinned by
technological ones that are now accelerating. For more than a decade,
I’ve been trying to investigate and expose these forces. Since 2016
that’s included following a thread that led from Brexit to Trump via
a shady data company called Cambridge Analytica and the revelation of
a profound threat exploit at the heart of our democracies. But
what’s happening now in the US is a paradigm shift: this is
Broligarchy, a concept I coined last summer when I warned that what we
were seeing was the proposed merger of Silicon Valley with state
power. That has now happened. Writing about this from the UK, it’s
clear we have a choice: we help lead the fight back against it. Or it
comes for us next. Please share this with family and friends if you
feel it’s of value. Thank you, as ever, Carole]_

It’s a coup

Let me say this more clearly: what is happening right now, in America,
in real time, is a coup.

This is an information war and this is what a coup now looks like.

Musk didn’t need a tank, guns, soldiers. He had a small crack cyber
unit
[[link removed]] that
he sent into the Treasury department last weekend. He now has unknown
quantities of the entire US nation’s most sensitive data and
potential backdoors into the system going forward. Treasury officials
denied that he had access but it then turned out that he did
[[link removed]].
If it ended there, it would be catastrophic. But that unit - whose
personnel include a 19-year-old called “Big Balls” - is now
raiding and scorching the federal government
[[link removed]],
department by department, scraping its digital assets, stealing its
data, taking control of the code and blowing up its administrative
apparatus as it goes.

This is what an unlawful attack on democracy in the digital age looks
like. It didn’t take armed men, just Musk’s taskforce of boy-men
who may be dweebs and nerds
[[link removed]] but
all the better to plunder the country’s digital resources. This was
an organised, systematic, jailbreak on one of the United States’
most precious and sensitive resources: the private data of its
citizens.

In 2019, I appeared in a Netflix documentary, The Great Hack
[[link removed]]. That’s a good place to
start to understand what is going on now, but it wasn’t the great
hack. It was among the first wave of major tech exploits of global
elections. It was an exemplar of what was possible: the theft and
weaponization of 87 million people’s personal data. _BUT THIS NOW
IS THE GREAT HACK. _This week is when the operating system of the US
was wrenched open and is now controlled by a private citizen under the
protection of the President.

If you think I’ve completely lost it, please be advised that I’m
far from alone in saying this. The small pools of light in the
darkness of this week has been stumbling across individual
commentators saying this for the last week. Just because these words
are not on the front page in banner headlines of any newspaper
doesn’t mean this isn’t not happening. It is.

In fact, there has been relentless, assiduous, detailed reporting in
all outlets across America. There are journalists who aren’t eating
or sleeping and doing amazing work tracking what’s happening. There
is fact
[[link removed]] after fact
[[link removed]] after fact
[[link removed]] about
Musk’s illegal pillaging of the federal government. But news
organisation leaders are either falling for the distraction story -
the most obviously insane one this week being rebuilding Gaza as a
luxury resort, a story that dominated headlines and political oxygen
for days. Or…what? Being unable to actually believe that this is
what an authoritarian takeover looks like? Being unsure of whether you
put the headline about the illegal coup d’etat next to a spring
season fashion report? Above or below the round-up of best rice
cookers? The fact is the front pages look like it’s business as
normal when it’s anything but.

This was Ruth Ben-Ghiat on Tuesday. She’s a historian of fascism
and authoritarianism at New York University
[[link removed]] and she said this
even before some of this week’s most extreme events had taken place.
(A transcript of the rest of her words here
[[link removed]].)

_“It’s very unusual. In my study of authoritarian states, it's
only really after a coup that you see such a speed, such obsessive
haste to purge bureaucracy so quickly. Or when somebody is defending
themselves, like Erdogan after the coup attempt against him, massive
purge immediately. So that's unusual._

_I don't have another reference point for a private individual coming
in, infiltrating, trying to turn government to the benefit of his
businesses and locking out and federal employees. IT IS A COUP. I'M A
HISTORIAN OF COUPS, AND I WOULD ALSO USE THAT WORD. So we're in a
real emergency situation for our democracy.”_
 

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LISTEN HERE [[link removed]] - CLICK
ON IMAGE  

A day later, this was Tim Snyder, Yale, a Yale professor and another
great historian of authoritarianism, here
[[link removed]]: “Of course
it’s a coup.”

History was made this week and while reporters are doing incredible
work, to understand it our guides are historians, those who’ve lived
in authoritarian states and Silicon Valley watchers. They are saying
it. What I’ve learned from investigating and reporting on Silicon
Valley’s system-level hack of our democracy for eight long years and
seeing up close the breathtaking impunity and entitlement of the men
who control these companies is that they break laws and they get away
with it. And then lie about it afterwards. That’s the model here.

Everything that I’ve ever warned about is happening now. This is it.
It’s just happening faster than anyone could have imagined.

It’s not that what’s happening is simply unlawful. This is what
David Super, an administrative law professor at Georgetown Law
School told the Washington Post.
[[link removed]]

“So many of these things are so wildly illegal that I think
they’re playing a quantity game and assuming the system can’t
react to all this illegality at once.”

And he’s right. The system can’t and isn’t. Legal challenges are
being made and even upheld but there’s no guarantee or even sign
that Musk is going to honour them. That’s one of the most chilling
points my friend, Mark Bergman, made to me over the weekend.

Last week [[link removed]], I
included a voice note from my friend, tech investor turned tech
campaigner, Roger McNamee, so you could hear direct from an expert
about the latest developments in AI. This week I’ve asked Mark to do
the honours.

He’s a lawyer, Washington political insider, and since last summer,
he’s been participating in ‘War Game’
[[link removed]] exercises with Defense Department
officials, three-star generals, former Cabinet Secretaries and
governors. In five exercises involving 175 people, they
situation-tested possible scenarios of a Trump win. But they didn’t
see this. It’s even worse than they feared.

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CLICK ON RED ARROW ON RIGHT TO LISTEN
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_“Those challenges have been in respect of shutting down agencies,
firing federal employees and engaging in the most egregious hack of
government. It all at the_ _hand hands of DOGE, Musk and his band of
tech engineers. DC right now is shell-shocked. It is a government
town, USA, ID, the FBI, the Department of Justice, Department of
Homeland Security, CIA, no federal agency will be spared the revenge
and retribution tours in full swing, and huge numbers have been put on
administrative leave, reassigned or fired, and the private sector is
as much at risk, particularly NGOs and civil society organizations.
The more high-profile violate the law, which is why the courts have
been quick to enjoin actions._

_“So yes, we've experienced a coup, not the old fashioned kind, no
tanks or mobs, but an undemocratic and hostile takeover of government.
It is cruel, it is petty. It can be brutal. It is at once chaotic and
surgical. We said the institutions held in 2020 but behind
institutions or people, and the extent to which all manner of power
structures have preemptively obeyed is hugely worrying. There are
legions ready to carry out the Trump agenda. The question is, will the
rule of law hold?”_

Last Tuesday, Musk tried to lay off the entire CIA. That’s the
government body with the slogan ‘We are the nation’s first line of
defense’. Every single employee has been offered an unlawful
‘buyout’ - what we call redundancy in the UK - or what 200 former
employees - spies - have said [[link removed]] is blatant
attempt to rebuild it as a political enforcement unit. Over the
weekend, the Washington Post reports 
[[link removed]]that
new appointees are being presented with “loyalty tests”.

Musk’s troops - because that’s what they are, mercenaries - are
acting in criminal, unlawful, unconstitutional ways
[[link removed]].
Organisations are acting quickly, taking lawsuits, and for now the
courts are holding. But the key essential question is whether their
rulings can be enforced with a political weaponized Department of
Justice and FBI. What Mark Bergman told me (and is in the extended
note below) is that they’ve known since the summer that there would
be almost no way of pushing back against Trump. This politicisation of
all branches of law enforcement creates a vacuum at the heart of the
state. As he says in that note, the ramifications of this are little
understood outside the people inside Washington who study this for a
living.

And at least some of what DOGE is doing can never be undone. Musk, a
private citizen, now has vast clouds of citizens’ data, their
personal information and it seems likely, classified material. When
data is out there, it’s out there. That genie can never be put back
into the bottle.

Itt’s what it’s possible to do with that data, that the real
nightmare begins. What machine learning algorithms and highly
personalised targeting can do. It’s a digital coup. An information
coup.
[[link removed]] And
we have to understand what that means. Our fleshy bodies still inhabit
earthly spaces but we are all, also, digital beings too. We live in a
hybrid reality. And for more than a decade we have been targets of
hybrid warfare, waged by hostile nation states whose methodology has
been aped and used against us by political parties in a series of
disrupted elections marked by illegal behaviour and a lack of any
enforcement. But this now takes it to the next level.

It facilitates a concentration of wealth and power - because data is
power - of a kind the world has never seen before.

Facebook’s actual corporate motto until 2014 taken from words Mark
Zuckerberg spoke was “Move fast and break things”. That phrase has
passed into commonplace: we know it, we quote it, we also fail to
understand what that means. It means: act illegally and get away with
it.

And that is the history of Silicon Valley. Its development and
cancerous growth is marked by series of larcenous acts each more
grotesque than the last. And Musk’s career is an exemplar of that, a
career that has involved rampant criminality, gross invasions of
privacy, stock market manipulation.
[[link removed]] And
lies. The Securities and Exchange Commission is currently suing
Musk 
[[link removed]]for
failing to disclose his ownership stock before he bought Twitter. The
biggest mistake right now is to believe anything he says.

Every time, these companies have broken the law, they have simply
gotten away with it. I know I’m repeating this, but it’s central
to understanding both the mindset and what’s happening on the
ground. And no-one exemplifies that more than Musk. The worst that has
happened to him is a fine. A slap on the wrist. An insignificant line
on a balance sheet. The “cost of doing business”.

On Friday, Robert Reich, the former United States Secretary of Labor,
who’s been an essential voice this week, told the readers of his
Substack to act now and call their representatives.

_“Friends, we are in a national emergency. This is a coup d’etat.
Elon Musk was never authorized by Congress to do anything that he’s
doing, he was never even confirmed by Congress, his so-called
Department of Government Efficiency was never authorized by Congress.
Your representatives, your senators and Congressmen have never given
him authority to do what he is doing, to take over government
departments, to take over entire government agencies, to take over
government payments system itself to determine for himself what is an
appropriate payment. To arrogate to himself the authority to have your
social security number, your private information? Please. Listen, call
Congress now.”_

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CLICK ON ARROW TO PLAY CLIP
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It’s a coup

I found myself completely poleaxed on Wednesday. I read this piece
[[link removed]] on the New York Times website first thing
in the morning, a thorough and alarming analysis of headlined
“_TRUMP BRAZENLY DEFIES LAWS IN ESCALATING EXECUTIVE POWER
GRAB”. _It quoted Peter M. Shane
[[link removed]],
who is a legal scholar in residence at New York University,
“programmatic sabotage and rampant lawlessness.” It was displayed
prominently on the front page of the New York Times but it was also
just one piece among many, a small weak signal amid the overpowering
noise.

There’s another word for an “Executive Power Grab”, it’s a
coup. And newspapers need to actually write that in big black letters
on their front pages and tell their tired, busy, overwhelmed,
distracted, scared readers what is happening. That none of this is
“business as usual.”

 
Random women with better headlines than any editor in America  (The
Power)
Over on the Guardian’s UK website on Wednesday, there was not a
single mention on the front page of what was happening.
[[link removed]] Trump’s
Gaza spectacular diversion strategy drowned out its quotient of
American news. We just weren’t seeing what’s happening in the seat
of government of our closest ally. As a private citizen mounted a
takeover of the cornerstone superpower of the international
rules-based order, our crucial NATO ally, our biggest single trading
partner, the UK government didn’t even apparently notice.

The downstream potential international consequences of what is
happening in America are profound and terrifying. That our government
and much of the media is asleep at the wheel is a reason to be more
not less terrified. Musk has made his intentions towards our democracy
and national security quite clear. What he hasn’t yet had is the
backing of the US state. That is shortly going to change. One of the
first major stand-offs will be UK and EU tech regulation. I hope I’m
wrong but it seems pretty obvious that’s what Musk’s Starmer-aimed
tweets are all about. There seems no world in which the EU and the UK
aren’t headed for the mother of all trade wars.

And that’s before we even consider the national security
ramifications. The prime minister should be convening Cobra now. The
Five Eyes - the intelligence sharing network of the US, UK, New
Zealand, Australia and Canada - is already likely breached. Trump is
going to do individual deals with all major trading partners that’s
going to involve preposterous but real threats, including likely
dangling the US’s membership of NATO over our heads all while Russia
watches, waits and knows that we’ve done almost nothing to prepare.
Plans to increase our defence spending have been made but not yet
implemented
[[link removed]].
Our intelligence agencies do understand
[[link removed]] the precipice
we’re on but there’s no indication the government is paying any
attention to them. The risks are profound. The international order as
we know it is collapsing in real time.

It’s a coup

We all know that the the first thing that happens when a dictator
seizes power is that he (it’s always a he) takes control of the
radio station. Musk did that months ago. It wasn’t that Elon Musk
buying Twitter pre-ordained what is now happening but it made it
possible. And it was the moment, minutes after Trump was shot and he
went full-in on his campaign that signalled the first shot fired in
his digital takeover.

It’s both a mass propaganda machine and also the equivalent of an
information drone with a deadly payload. It’s a weapon that’s
already been turned on journalists
[[link removed]] and
news organisations this week. There’s much more to come.

On Friday, Musk started following Wikileaks on Twitter. Hours later,
twisted, weaponized leaks from USAID began.
 

This is going to get so much worse. Musk and MAGA will see this as the
opening of the Stasi archive. It’s not. It’s rocketfuel for a
witchhunt. It’s hybrid warfare against the enemies of the state.
It’s going to be ugly and cruel and its targets are going to need
help and support. Hands across the water to my friends at OCCRP, the
Overseas Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, an investigative
journalism organisation that uncovers transnational crime, that’s
been in Musk’s sights this weekend, one of hundreds of media
organisations around the world whose funding has been slashed
overnight.

It’s a coup

By now you may feel scared and helpless. It’s how I felt this week.
I had the same sick feeling I had watching UK political coverage
before the pandemic. The government was just going to ignore the wave
of deaths rippling from China to Italy and pretend it wasn’t
happening? Really? That’s the plan?

This is another pandemic. Or a Chernobyl. It’s a bomb at the heart
of the international order whose toxic fallout is going to inevitably
drift our way.

My internal alarm bell, a sense of urgency and anxiety goes even
further back. To early 2017, when I uncovered information about
Cambridge Analytica’s illegal hack of data from Facebook while the
company’s VP, Steve Bannon, was then on the National Security
Council. That concept of highly personalised data in the control of a
ruthless and political operator was what tripped my emergency wires.
That is a reality now.

The point is that the shock and awe is meant to make us feel helpless.
So I’m telling a bit of my own personal story here. Because part of
what temporarily paralyzed me last week was that this is all happening
while my own small corner of the mainstream media is collapsing in on
itself too. The event that I’ve spent the last eight years warning
about has come to pass and in a month, 100+ of my colleagues at the
Guardian will be out of the door and my employment will be terminated.
I will no longer have the platform of the news organisation where
I’ve done my entire body of work to date and was able to communicate
to a global audience.

But then, it’s all connected. We are living through an information
crisis. It’s what underpins everything. In some ways, this happening
now is not surprising at all. Moreover, many of the people who I see
as essential voices during this crisis (including those above) are
doing that effectively and independently from Substack as I will try
to continue to do.

And, the key thing that the last eight years has given me is
information. The lawsuit I fought for four years as a result of doing
this work very almost floored me. But it didn’t. And I’ve learned
essential skills during those years. It was part of what powered me to
fight for the rights of Guardian journalists during our strike this
December.

The next fightback against Musk and the Broligarchy has to draw from
the long, long fight for workers rights which in turn influenced the
fight for civil rights that must now power us on as we face the great
unknown. What comes next has to be a fight for our data rights, our
human rights.

This was former Guardian journalist Gary Younge on our picket line and
I’ve thought about these words a lot. You have to fight even if you
won’t necessarily win. Power is almost never given up freely.
 

[[link removed]]

LISTEN TO GARY YOUNGE HERE
[[link removed]]- Click on arrow

If you value any of this and want me to be able to continue, I’d be
really grateful if you signed up, free, or even better, paid
subscription. And I’d also urge you to sign up also for the Citizen
Dispatch [[link removed]], that’s the newsletter
from the non-profit I founded that campaigns around these issues.
There is much more it can and needs to do.

PS: I rang Mark Bergman to get him to do a longer version of the note.
It repeats some of the one above but it’s an added extra in case you
want to hear more…

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LISTEN TO MARK BERGMAN AUDIO FILE HERE
[[link removed]] - Click on red arrow
on right

_[CAROLE CADWALLADR
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is a multi-award winning British journalist whose investigative work
exposed the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal that ultimately led
to the biggest fines in history being imposed on the social media
giant by privacy regulators on both sides of the Atlantic. It also
resulted in the collapse of the “sketchy” data analytics company
closely associated with former US President Donald Trump’s
successful 2016 election campaign (Lomas, 2019)._

_But from the moment The Guardian and Observer131 newspapers published
the first story in Cadwalladr’s investigative series on the scandal
that compromised the Facebook accounts of up to 87 million users, the
journalist became the target of a malign, misogynistic,
disinformation-laced campaign of online violence which grew
increasingly threatening over time. This campaign has also created the
enabling environment for her legal harassment by political actors._

_Cadwalladr’s reportage linked the Cambridge Analytica scandal to
both the election of former US President Donald Trump, and Brexit -
the referendum which led to the withdrawal of the UK from the European
Union. It suggested the widespread manipulation of Facebook users by
political actors using microtargeting techniques, which fed into
highly divisive politics in the US and the UK between 2016 and 2020.
And it continues to resonate. Her journalism has led to criminal
investigations, and parliamentary inquiries in multiple countries.]_

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