The whole country is Spartacus. Stephen Miller is furious.

Two women in Maine were recording ICE agents on a public street. According to a new lawsuit supported by a video that one of the women took, an ICE agent told them they would be added to a database of “domestic terrorists.”

Here we have one of the more settled questions in American constitutional law. Seven federal circuit courts have ruled on it. Every single one agreed: it’s a core First Amendment right. The Supreme Court put it plainly in 1987 that the freedom to observe and challenge what the police do in public is one of the principal things separating a free country from a police state.

The women in Maine knew this. They kept filming.

When asked if the database exists, DHS said no, which is what you say when it does. But it almost doesn’t matter whether it does. Because the threat doesn’t need to be true to work, it just needs to be said. That’s Stephen Miller’s whole game: speak your horrors into reality. And escalate when you’re checked or defeated in any way.

Why activists are the regime’s biggest domestic problem

Let’s review how the opposition to Trump 2.0 works, and why it’s forcing Miller to justify this kind of fascist overreach. The regime lies. Activists document. The lie collapses. While institutions have competed to see who can crumble harder and faster, the people have done the opposite.

When ICE killed Renée Good in Minneapolis in January, the White House said the agent acted in self-defense, that she had run him over with her car. Multiple videos showed her vehicle turning away from the agent when he fired. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, having reviewed the footage, called the government’s account, in the technical legal term, “bullshit.” When CBP agents killed Alex Pretti 17 days later, an ICU nurse and VA employee who was filming agents and directing traffic before stepping between an agent and a woman they’d shoved to the ground, bystander videos reviewed by Reuters, the BBC, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the AP all directly contradicted the administration’s account. Stephen Miller called Pretti a “would-be assassin.” Kristi Noem called him a “domestic terrorist.” Jon Stewart, in one of his best lines in a decade, called his phone “a weapon of mass illumination, because there is nothing more dangerous to a regime predicated on lies than witnesses who capture the truth.”

And here is the detail the CBP’s own internal report confirmed: the encounter that ended in Pretti’s death began when officers were “confronted by two female civilians blowing whistles.” Two women with whistles. The government killed a man, and its own account starts with two women doing exactly what you’re being asked to do here.

The pattern extends beyond Minneapolis. When Operation Midway Blitz launched in Chicago, community organizers began wearing green plastic whistles and broadcasting street patrols on Facebook, one short blast for ICE nearby, one long blast for an active detention. Neighbors distributed 120,000 whistle kits across the city. ICE agents began leaving neighborhoods sooner once they knew they’d been seen. The tactic spread to Minneapolis, Denver, and Atlanta. Sociologists documented that agents required significantly more backup to execute even a single detention when observers were present. They’re afraid of your eyes and your lips. Probably your thumbs, too. Anything that can document their lies.

Without the neighbors with phones and whistles, there is only the official story, which is invariably filled with racist fan fiction. Without the lawyers who showed up uninvited at detention centers, the clergy who placed themselves between ICE and the people they serve, the families who refused to disappear quietly, there is only the official story. This is the opposition’s power. And it is more than enough to terrify a regime built entirely on controlling the story.

What is NSPM-7, and how have you violated it today?

Last September, while the media was covering the indictment of James Comey, the luckiest MFer alive, Trump signed a mostly drowned-out National Security Presidential Memorandum. It’s not an executive order, which explains the lack of coverage, but rather a sweeping policy decree that runs the defense, intelligence, and law enforcement apparatus, often in secret. Miller announced it as “the first all-of-government effort to dismantle left-wing terrorism in American history.”

The natural question: what counts as left-wing terrorism? NSPM-7 lists the indicators investigators should look for: anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, “extremism on migration,” “extremism on race,” “extremism on gender,” and “hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”

This describes the majority of the Democratic Party, most independents, a significant chunk of Republicans, and what you did this morning before you peed.

Notably, NSPM-7 fails to mention the First Amendment anywhere. They must be using that MAGA Bill of Rights, which includes only #2, with an asterisk for Alex Pretti. It does, however, direct the FBI’s roughly 200 Joint Terrorism Task Forces, over 4,000 personnel drawn from 500 state and local agencies, to investigate individuals before any violent act occurs, based on those ideological indicators. Investigating pre-crime as if Philip K. Dick were one of the authors of Project 2025.

How DHS is building a surveillance machine to track and crush dissent

The real mechanism is actively seeking out “obeying in advance”, where organizations self-censor rather than risk investigation or the “domestic terrorist” label. We already have evidence of this: the FBI launched investigations against people for using encrypted messaging apps to discuss ICE activity. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem declared that videotaping ICE agents was equivalent to violence against them. A Homeland Security spokesperson called recording federal law enforcement “obstruction of justice,” a position every federal court has rejected, but which works just fine as a threat before anyone gets to court.

And how do the ideological indicators get picked up?

By scanning faces at ICE operations. By reading social media. The Brennan Center documented that the administration plans to collect social media handles from over three million people a year applying to adjust their immigration status, and through their networks, potentially the American-citizen relatives who ever commented on their posts. The database and the directive are the same project.

NSPM-7 is the legal architecture that transforms two agents bullying women in Maine into official government policy. It is, in the most direct sense, a national security directive designed to instill fear of the state in neighbors with phones.

The Spartacus problem in the age of facial recognition

Now I want to do the “I Am Spartacus” bit. I want to tell you to flood the streets, crash the servers, and make the list so long it becomes meaningless. This is the right spirit. Solidarity always is.

But this isn’t ancient Rome or even ancient America, the Bush/Cheney era, when surveillance technology was new, and targeting was at least nominally specific. Getting on the database won’t jam their systems. Chances are you’re already on it. DHS is assembling a unified biometric platform that includes faces, fingerprints, license plates, and real-time social media, all searchable from a single query. The old math of civil disobedience worked because lists were finite. You could fill up a filing cabinet. A filing cabinet, if it gets too full, you just can’t close it. Deep learning doesn’t have that problem. Facial recognition doesn’t go home at five.

This is not meant to frighten you. It’s meant to clarify something: the database was never the endgame. The fear is the endgame. The Brennan Center found that people subject to social media collection deleted years of posts and effectively stopped expressing their views online, not because of a prosecution or a conviction, but because the threat alone was sufficient.

Your phone is a constitutional right. Use it.

So here is the honest 2026 version of “I Am Spartacus.”

Every face that’s passed an ICE operation, every hand that’s held a phone, every opinion that qualifies as anti-capitalist or insufficiently reverent toward traditional American values on gender, already indexed, already flagged, already running through a system that, per NSPM-7, is looking for you specifically. Congratulations. We are all domestic terrorism indicators now, which means the fear is the only thing left to fight, and the law is unambiguously on our side, at least for now.

The ACLU is unambiguous: the First Amendment protects your right to photograph and video-record law enforcement, ICE agents, police, the FBI, the National Guard, and any government official performing their duties in public. If you’re not under arrest, they need a warrant to take your phone or view its contents. If you are arrested, they still need a warrant to search it. The government may never delete your photographs or videos under any circumstances.

The agents who threatened the women in Maine knew all of this. The threat was the point, not the law. Which is why the answer is what the neighbors in Minneapolis and Chicago already figured out: show up, stay loud, keep the phone up, and do it together, not because it jams the algorithm, but because it’s the only thing that’s actually been working. And sue if and when you can.

The most important lawsuit you haven’t heard of

Elinor Hilton and Colleen Fagan are lifelong Maine residents who lawfully observed and recorded DHS operations in public and were threatened with the “domestic terrorist” label as a result. One of the agents told Hilton he would come to her house that night. Protect Democracy has filed Hilton v. Noem as a class action on their behalf, seeking to represent every American whose personal information was collected via facial recognition and license plate readers simply for watching their government operate in public.

This lawsuit gives you as full a view as exists of how Miller wants to use every instrument of government, from NSPM-7’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces to AI-powered facial recognition to social media surveillance, to destroy the privacy of anyone he brands a target. This case could be among the most consequential of our lives, not because the law is unclear, but because what’s being settled is whether Americans can be trained, through threat and atmosphere and a national security directive that doesn’t mention the First Amendment once, to stop watching what their government does in public.

But the only way to really stop this is to stop this regime and remove them from power, ideally through free and fair elections. The best way to do that is to keep showing up and aggressively practice the rights they’re so desperate to take away.

The women in Maine kept their phones up. Here’s the ACLU guide for when you do the same.

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