Akashma Online News

by Marivel Guzman | Akashma News

September 12, 2025

In 2012, Edward Snowden revealed what many suspected but few could prove: that the web’s promise of freedom was under silent siege. Governments and their corporate partners were not content to simply watch the public square — they had built the ability to tap into the very fabric of digital life, from emails to phone calls, from search histories to location trails.

A year later, Silicon Valley reassured us with a different kind of symbol: the lock icon in the browser bar. “HTTPS Everywhere,” Google and Mozilla proclaimed, as if a single letter — the s in https:// — could redeem the betrayal Snowden had exposed. And for a while, we believed it. The padlock meant our banking details were safe, our searches hidden, our reading habits private.

But privacy, like history, is written in layers. HTTPS encrypts the path between you and a website, but it does not erase the footprints you leave behind. Your internet provider still knows you went to akashmanews.com. Palantir-style data mining can still link that visit to your phone location, your Amazon orders, or your political donations. And if your device itself is infected — by Pegasus or its quieter cousins — every keystroke is already compromised before encryption even begins.

What we call “online privacy” is, in truth, a narrow perimeter. It guards the tunnel but leaves the tunnel’s entrance and exit wide open. For investigative journalism, for dissidents, for the ordinary reader who believes the lock icon shields them from surveillance, this is the cruelest paradox: the illusion of privacy, packaged as its fulfillment.

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Further Reading: Palantir and the Invisible Web of Surveillance

Juan Sebastián Pinto, a former Palantir designer turned civil rights organizer, warns that the company’s AI-driven surveillance systems now shape immigration enforcement in U.S. neighborhoods and war operations abroad. These “Istar” tools — intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition, and reconnaissance — fuse vast datasets from biometrics, phones, drones, and private brokers to generate targets at scale, eroding privacy, free speech, and due process. Pinto argues that unless lawmakers and the public embrace strong protections, we will see these invisible architectures of control expand from deportation dragnets and Gaza bombings into everyday commerce and employment.

🔗 Read Pinto’s full op-ed in The Guardian