Teen Social Media Ban Is A TROJAN HORSE For Mass Surveillance! w/ Kyle Anzalone

Our Take

Jimmy Dore sits down with Kyle Anzalone to make a point we think is dead on: every 'think of the children' bill in Congress right now comes stapled to an age-verification regime, and age verification means handing your driver's license or your face to a database just to post a meme. The stated goal is protecting teens. The actual mechanism is building permanent identity infrastructure that outlives whatever bill justified it. That's the same bait-and-switch we've watched play out with license plate readers — sold as finding stolen cars or missing kids, quietly repurposed into a nationwide tracking grid that any agency with a login can query.

What Dore and Anzalone are describing is the broader pattern of surveillance creep: once the hardware or database exists, the use case always expands past what the public was promised. Flock Safety cameras started as a neighborhood crime-deterrent pitch too, and now they're logging hundreds of millions of plate reads a month, shared across jurisdictions with almost no court oversight. Age-verification databases for teens will work the same way — built for one narrow purpose, then quietly mined for everything else once it exists.

Credit to Dore and Anzalone for naming the Trojan horse dynamic plainly. If you want to see how that same dynamic already looks on the ground in your own neighborhood, check our camera map for nearby ALPRs, and hit take-action for ways to push back before the next 'safety' bill becomes the next permanent surveillance system.