“I love the inflation.”—Donald Trump (June 2026)

“I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody.”—Donald Trump (May 2026)

America has become an occupied nation.

Not by one invading army, but by many occupying powers: the police state, the surveillance state, the war state, the corporate state, the foreign influence machine, and a ruling class that treats the American people as little more than collateral damage in its pursuit of power, profit and control.

We have been policed, surveilled, taxed, indebted, manipulated, censored, tracked, searched, silenced and sold out.

Foreign powers are buying up our farmland, buying favor with the Trump family, weaseling their way into the White House, dictating national policy, and now—with the backing of the Trump administration and bipartisan support in Congress—one of America’s closest partners-in-crime may soon gain even greater access to U.S. intelligence and surveillance capabilities.

This is what we have come to.

The swamp under President Trump has taken on a decidedly foreign flavor: any nation with enough money, leverage or strategic value to enrich the Trump family can now get its hands on a piece of the American pie—all the while, the American people continue to struggle to survive Trump’s self-enrichment schemes, broken promises, endless wars, militarized streets and vanity projects.

We’re being sold to the highest bidders, and still nothing is being done to protect us.

Ordinary Americans are told there is not enough money to honor the government’s promises to them. Social Security’s retirement trust fund is now projected to run short in late 2032, at which point retirees could face an automatic 22 percent cut in scheduled benefits if Congress fails to act. Medicare’s hospital insurance fund is projected to run short the following year. Seniors, the disabled, working families and the poor are told to brace for sacrifice.

But there is always money for war.

There is always money for surveillance.

There is always money for police-state crackdowns, border militarization, private contractors, foreign aid, weapons systems, tax breaks for the wealthy, slush funds for political allies, and spectacles of imperial excess.

While Americans worry about groceries, rent, medical bills, job security, retirement and whether their children will inherit anything resembling freedom, the White House is being turned into a playground for power and celebrity. Trump’s June 14 birthday celebration is reportedly set to include a UFC fight on the White House lawn, with weigh-ins at the Lincoln Memorial, transforming public symbols of sacrifice, liberty and national memory into props for one man’s vanity show.

This, too, is occupation.

Not merely the occupation of land, but the occupation of the public imagination. The occupation of the people’s institutions. The occupation of the Constitution itself.

The contrast could not be more obscene.

On June 8, 1789, James Madison rose in the House of Representatives to introduce amendments to the Constitution that would become the Bill of Rights. Madison and the founding generation fought to bind the government down. They understood that written limits on government power were not optional. They were essential.

Today’s rulers are fighting to free the government from those restraints.

They want fewer limits on surveillance, police power, presidential immunity, war-making, foreign entanglements, secrecy, corruption, and the ability of the rich and powerful to buy their way into the machinery of government.

That is how far we have fallen.

From a Bill of Rights, we have descended into a bill of sale.

From a Congress that amended the Constitution to protect the people from government power, we now have a Congress that hides government power inside thousand-page defense bills, intelligence authorizations, classified annexes and emergency spending packages.

From founders who warned against foreign influence, we now have rulers who auction off access to foreign governments, foreign donors, foreign wars and foreign intelligence interests.

That is not government by consent.

That is occupation by transaction.

And nowhere is this more dangerous than in the machinery of surveillance.

Surveillance is not just another government program. It is the nervous system of the police state. It is how the government tracks who you are, where you go, what you say, who you know, what you believe, what you fear, what you oppose and what you might become.

Once that machinery is built, everyone wants access to it: federal agencies, local police, private contractors, political operatives, corporate partners and foreign governments.

That is why the latest push to deepen intelligence sharing with Israel should stop every American cold.

This is not happening in a vacuum.

It is happening in a country where the government already treats the Fourth Amendment as a nuisance, where speech is increasingly flagged as threat activity, where protesters and journalists are monitored, where private companies help police public opinion, where Congress hides massive expansions of government power inside defense bills and intelligence authorizations, and where foreign influence has become one more currency of power.

It is happening at the very moment U.S. officials are reportedly warning that Israel poses a growing espionage threat to the United States.

And yet Congress is moving to give Israel even greater access to America’s intelligence machinery.

According to recent reporting by The New York Times, Pentagon officials have grown increasingly alarmed about Israel’s espionage efforts against the United States, including alleged attempts to gather information about American diplomacy involving Iran. Israel has denied spying on U.S. officials or entities. The White House has downplayed the concerns.

But the question remains.

How much does it really matter that Israel is allegedly spying on the United States if Congress is preparing to give Israel even greater access to America’s intelligence?

That is the question no one in Washington seems eager to answer.

Because while the Pentagon is reportedly warning that the back door may be unsecured, Congress is preparing to hand out keys to the front door.

Buried inside the latest intelligence and defense legislation are provisions that would deepen U.S.–Israel intelligence and defense technology cooperation.

That may sound harmless, even routine.

It is not.

This is not just about allies sharing tips about terrorist threats.

This is about access.

Access to intelligence. Access to surveillance tools. Access to cyber systems. Access to defense technology. Access to data pipelines. Access to the machinery by which governments monitor, flag, profile and target people.

The Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2027 would require the president, through the Director of National Intelligence and, when needed, the Secretary of Defense, to expand and enhance intelligence sharing with Israel.

In plain English: the bill tells the government to share more intelligence with Israel.

Not less.

More.

And not just narrow intelligence about one isolated threat. The categories are sweeping: cyber threats, terrorism, sanctions evasion, state and nonstate actors, weapons technology, missiles, drones, cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, airspace, space awareness and other threats involving Israel, U.S. forces and regional partners.

That is a wide door.

Even more troubling, the bill would make it harder to close that door once it is opened. Intelligence sharing with Israel could not be suspended, reduced or materially limited unless the president points to a specific national security concern, such as protecting intelligence sources and methods or addressing a counterintelligence risk. Any such reduction would have to be documented and reported to Congress.

Think about that.

At a moment when U.S. officials are reportedly raising concerns about Israeli espionage, Congress is proposing to make expanded intelligence sharing the default—and any reduction in that sharing the exception requiring justification.

That is not oversight.

That is a one-way ratchet.

The 2027 National Defense Authorization Act adds another layer. Section 224 would create a United States–Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative, requiring the Pentagon to synchronize cooperative efforts between the United States and Israel in defense research, development, testing, evaluation, integration and industrial cooperation.

Again, strip away the bureaucratic language.

This is about fusing systems.

This is about joining forces on defense technology, cyber capabilities, electronic warfare, artificial intelligence, surveillance tools, missile defense, drone tracking, network integration and data fusion.

And when governments fuse their intelligence systems, they do not merely share threats.

They share people.

They share patterns of life. They share communications metadata. They share watchlists. They share vulnerabilities. They share assumptions, suspicions and targeting categories. They share the machinery by which individuals are monitored, flagged, profiled and sometimes punished.

That is where the Constitution gets lost.

The Fourth Amendment was written to protect the people from government searches that are unreasonable, generalized and unchecked. It was meant to force the government to justify its intrusions, identify what it is looking for, and answer to the law.

The modern surveillance state was built to evade those restraints.

It outsources. It pools. It launders. It hides behind agencies, contractors, secret courts, classified briefings and foreign partners.

That is why this is so dangerous.

The issue is not whether Israel is friend or foe.

The issue is whether the American government should be allowed to expand foreign access to U.S. intelligence systems while the American people are left with nothing but reassurances, classified briefings and vague promises that safeguards exist somewhere behind closed doors.

No foreign government’s interests are identical to America’s.

That is why constitutional government requires independence, caution and oversight in foreign entanglements. It is why the founders warned so forcefully against allowing foreign influence to corrupt domestic policy. It is why a free people cannot afford to let their government become the errand boy for another nation’s wars, intelligence aims, political demands or security priorities.

For decades, the U.S. government has used intelligence alliances to expand surveillance while avoiding the full force of constitutional scrutiny.

Five Eyes—the intelligence-sharing network involving the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand—should have been a warning.

It showed how easily surveillance can become borderless. One government collects. Another government shares. Agencies swap data. Restrictions blur. Responsibility disappears. And the people whose communications, movements and associations are swept into the system are left with no way to know who saw their information, how it was used, or whether it will follow them forever.

The problem is not cooperation among nations as such.

The problem is that intelligence sharing has become one of the easiest ways for governments to do indirectly what they may be forbidden from doing directly.

If the NSA cannot spy on Americans without constitutional limits, can a foreign partner collect the information and send it back?

If American agencies are restricted in how they monitor domestic political activity, can foreign intelligence services fill the gap?

If Congress is kept in the dark through classified annexes, secret interpretations and national security briefings, how can the public know whether its rights are being protected or traded away?

The answer, too often, is that we cannot know.

That is the genius and the menace of the modern surveillance state. It hides its most consequential acts behind classification, compartmentalization and euphemism.

It does not say “spying on Americans.” It says “information sharing.”

It does not say “mass surveillance.” It says “domain awareness.”

It does not say “foreign access to U.S. intelligence systems.” It says “integration,” “cooperation,” “interoperability” and “data fusion.”

Yet liberty dies just as easily under acronyms as under edicts.

What makes this moment especially alarming is the contradiction at the heart of it.

The government is warning that Israel may be spying on the United States.

Congress is responding by deepening Israel’s access to U.S. intelligence.

The White House is downplaying the danger.

And the American people—the ones whose privacy, rights and security are on the line—are being told, once again, to trust the very government that keeps selling them out.

We have been down this road before.

After 9/11, Americans were told that extraordinary surveillance powers were necessary to protect the nation from terrorism. The Patriot Act, secret FISA court rulings, NSA bulk collection programs and intelligence fusion centers transformed the relationship between the citizen and the state. Surveillance that would once have been unthinkable became routine. Tools created for foreign enemies migrated inward. Databases multiplied. Watchlists expanded. Local police were folded into federal intelligence networks. Private companies became extensions of the surveillance apparatus.

Every expansion came with the same command: trust us.

Trust us, this is only for terrorists.

Trust us, there are safeguards.

Trust us, oversight committees are watching.

Trust us, the courts are involved.

Trust us, if you have done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear.

Yet again and again, the public learned only after the fact that the government had abused its powers, exceeded its authority, misled Congress, deceived courts, targeted dissenters, tracked journalists, monitored activists, and turned emergency powers into permanent fixtures.

A free people do not trust rulers. They bind them down.

That is the whole point of the Constitution.

The framers did not create a government of secret permissions. They created a government of delegated powers, divided authority and enforceable limits. They did not trust the executive branch to police itself. They did not trust Congress to rubber-stamp the machinery of power. They did not trust courts to remain vigilant without pressure from the people. They certainly did not trust standing armies, secret alliances and foreign entanglements to preserve liberty.

They understood that power, once accumulated, does not surrender itself willingly.

The intelligence state is proof.

It has grown through crises, wars, emergencies and classified exceptions. It has grown under Republicans and Democrats. It has grown through foreign threats and domestic fears. It has grown by convincing Americans that safety requires secrecy, secrecy requires trust, and trust requires surrender.

Now Congress wants to make that surrender harder to undo.

Once this door is opened, it will not be easy to close. Under the bill, if a president later decides that intelligence sharing with Israel has gone too far, become too risky or needs to be pulled back, he would have to explain himself to Congress and point to a specific national security concern.

But where is the burden before the door is opened?

Where is the proof that Americans’ private information will not be swept into these shared systems?

Where is the guarantee that U.S. intelligence will not be used to target political critics, protesters, journalists, students, aid workers or anyone else who gets flagged by some secret threat category?

Where is the promise that foreign intelligence partners will not be used to do what the U.S. government cannot lawfully do on its own?

Where is the constitutional firewall?

There isn’t one.

There are only assurances. There are only classified briefings. There are only vague promises that someone, somewhere, behind closed doors, will make sure the American people are not abused by the very surveillance machinery being built in their name.

That is not good enough.

Not when the government has lied before.

Not when the intelligence agencies have abused their powers before.

Not when secret courts, secret memos, secret watchlists and secret databases have already been used to turn the Bill of Rights into a permission slip for government surveillance.

And certainly not when the same foreign government reportedly raising counterintelligence alarms is being invited deeper into America’s intelligence bloodstream.

These are not abstract concerns.

This is the danger of an occupied nation: the people are no longer treated as sovereigns to whom the government must answer. They are treated as subjects to be monitored, managed, searched, silenced, sacrificed and sold.

We have already watched the government treat dissent as extremism, protest as threat activity and unpopular viewpoints as security risks. We have seen journalists targeted, whistleblowers prosecuted, social media monitored, political speech flagged, police departments armed with military-grade surveillance tools, and private companies folded into the government’s censorship and surveillance machinery.

Now imagine that architecture merged more deeply with foreign intelligence systems.

Imagine an American’s communications, travel patterns, associations or online speech being swept into a shared intelligence environment because it touches on terrorism, cyber threats, sanctions evasion, state actors, regional security or some other elastic category. Imagine that information being passed from one government to another, analyzed by artificial intelligence, stored in classified databases and used to generate a suspicion that the individual can never see, challenge or correct.

That is not the rule of law.

That is government by secret file.

The problem is not merely Israel. The problem is the premise that constitutional rights can be protected after information has already been collected, fused, shared and acted upon.

They cannot.

Once data is shared, it is almost impossible to retrieve. Once intelligence enters a foreign system, American legal protections become uncertain at best. Once agencies develop shared platforms, shared tools and shared threat categories, oversight becomes fragmented and accountability becomes elusive.

That is how republics drift into empire.

It does not happen all at once. It happens through authorizations, appropriations, classified annexes, joint initiatives, security partnerships and must-pass defense bills. It happens when lawmakers bury transformative policies inside legislation too large to read and too politically protected to challenge. It happens when the people are told that questioning intelligence policy is irresponsible, unpatriotic or dangerous.

But the greater danger lies in not questioning it.

No ally should be given a blank check to America’s intelligence systems.

No Congress should be allowed to transform foreign intelligence cooperation into a constitutional black hole.

And no free people should tolerate a government that gathers information in secret, shares it in secret, interprets it in secret and then tells the citizenry to trust that their freedoms remain intact.

The surveillance state has no borders.

That is the problem.

This is how America becomes unfree.

Not merely through one dictator, one party, one war, one emergency or one foreign entanglement, but through the steady surrender of constitutional safeguards to every institution that claims power in the name of protecting us.

The police state claims our streets.

The surveillance state claims our privacy.

The war state claims our money and our children.

The corporate state claims our labor, our data and our future.

The foreign influence machine claims our policies, our alliances and our secrets.

And the ruling class claims the right to decide all of it behind closed doors.

That is occupation.

Not occupation in the old sense alone, with armies marching through the streets and flags planted in conquered soil, but occupation in the modern sense: a people ruled by forces they do not control, watched by systems they cannot see, taxed for wars they did not choose, governed by deals they were never allowed to debate, and stripped of rights by officials who insist it is all for their own good.

That is the America being built around us.

An America where retirees are told to brace for cuts while war and surveillance budgets keep growing.

An America where public institutions become playgrounds for spectacle and self-enrichment.

An America where the Justice Department protects the powerful while ordinary people are policed into submission.

An America where the Bill of Rights is celebrated in speeches and bypassed in practice.

An America where Congress hides the machinery of empire inside defense bills, intelligence authorizations, classified annexes and emergency spending packages.

The founders did not fight a revolution so future generations could be governed by secret intelligence networks, foreign entanglements and unaccountable security bureaucracies. They understood that liberty requires vigilance, not trust.

The question, then, is not simply whether Israel is spying on America.

The question is why the American government is building systems that make spying easier, oversight harder and accountability almost impossible.

The question is whether Americans will wake up before the occupation becomes so complete—so militarized, so monetized, so surveilled, so secretive and so global—that no one can tell who is watching, who is sharing, who is profiting, who is deciding and who is ultimately in charge.

We are not merely being watched.

We are being occupied.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, once a government claims the power to watch everyone, share everything and answer to no one, freedom becomes little more than a memory stored in a classified file.

WC: 3351

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at staff@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.