by Janet Levy
In his many articles for Tablet and other outlets, Jacob Siegel, a journalist and war veteran, has focused on how rulers and elites use digital tools to calibrate information and control people. His new book, The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control, traces the evolution—from 9/11 to the advent of AI—of a mammoth alliance between government and Big Tech that subverts our constitutional republic and enslaves Americans.
According to Siegel, the foundation of the information state is a “whole-of-society” approach to governance that aligns “the most powerful institutions behind the dictates of the state.” Tech platforms, NGOs, academia, and even individuals are enlisted to enforce government policies, creating what he calls a “360-degree police force” comprising the companies you do business with, civic organizations, and even your neighbors.
This top-down method, now preferred over building grassroots support by appealing to voters, originated in aid organizations' efforts to modernize Third World countries. It entered our political system during the post-9/11 global war on terror, and the Obama administration reshaped it into a community-led initiative—read surveillance via social media—to counter violent extremism. In practice, though, it evolved into leftist activism that seeks to control minds and behavior, promoting certain ideologies and suppressing or censoring others.
The most recent and pernicious advance has been the so-called war on misinformation and/or disinformation, launched in full force after the COVID pandemic and the prevailing narrative were questioned. Anything that opposes what the government and its technocrats want you to believe can be labeled disinformation and squashed through algorithmic intervention by the social media giants aligned with the government.
Is there any room left for genuine dissent? How did this come about? These are among the questions that Siegel seeks to answer, making his book an important and much-needed work of research, argument, and brave honesty.
No doubt, 9/11 left America shaken and determined not only to punish the perpetrators but also to prevent future attacks. But the “intelligence failure” blamed for 9/11 created an opportunity to expand the federal government’s power and the reach—without accountability—of intelligence agencies. Along with the global information systems that collated intelligence from multiple agencies, bureaucracies gained greater authority to supervise and punish ordinary Americans.
Enacted soon after 9/11, the USA Patriot Act granted the government the power to spy on foreign terrorists and American citizens alike. It weakened protections afforded by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), allowing the government to collect phone and internet data, conduct warrantless surveillance of terror suspects, monitor financial accounts, target individual citizens, and freeze funds. In 2002, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was created, adding another layer of surveillance and further undermining constitutional rights.
Seigel calls the Patriot Act “the greatest assault on American civil liberties since the Espionage Act of 1917.” He provides background in the opening chapters, describing the Great War as the first in American history in which information control and the winning of public opinion were key elements in the quest for victory.
A year after the Great War began, President Woodrow Wilson—whose campaign slogan was ‘He kept us out of the war’—had manipulated a reluctant public into accepting that America must enter the war. To sustain this opinion and the belief that victory was certain, Wilson created America’s first large-scale propaganda machine, the Committee on Public Information (CPI), staffed by journalists, filmmakers, cartoonists, intellectuals, and artists. Through posters, films, public speeches, and other media, the committee boosted morale and encouraged public sacrifice.
Simultaneously, Wilson imposed restrictions on the media and encouraged people to report those who were disloyal, lacked sufficient loyalty, or were pessimistic about an American victory. The Espionage Act of 1917 made it illegal to say, write, or publish anything against the government. “The authority to exercise censorship over the press…is absolutely necessary to the public safety,” he said.
Wilson was not too enamored with our founding fathers’ ideas about liberty and believed that the separation of powers and checks and balances hindered effective government. With Wilson, the Platonic idea of a ruling intellectual aristocracy—as opposed to the public, who could not be trusted with the complexities of self-government and needed guidance to reach the right conclusions and beliefs—took root in American government. In effect, Wilson nationalized individual belief and conscripted public opinion into a shared commodity.
The CPI was dissolved in 1919, but Wilson’s legacy endures in the way propaganda, censorship, and secrecy became embedded in government operations; in the belief that faith in experts was crucial to solving problems; and in the media’s role as a partner in shaping opinion and manufacturing consent.
Barack Obama—another progressive, like Wilson—drew on this legacy and leveraged the technological advances of the internet age to build the infrastructure for all-encompassing, ever-expanding digital control that has replaced or greatly diminished our civil liberties. Impressed by the reach and power of social media, Obama—whom Siegal calls the Silicon President—forged a partnership between the Democratic political class and tech giants to advance his vision of shaping people’s opinions through the “right” information.
Circumventing the legislature, Obama could work through tech companies to get people to endorse policies already decided for them by unelected experts and administrators; to regulate countries’ access to digital networks and, in turn, their leverage in foreign policy; and to deploy social media platforms to coordinate large-scale demonstrations (such as the Arab Spring) to push for regime change. In fact, Obama launched the first political campaign on Facebook.
Surveillance to counter terrorism was expanded to include large-scale collection of data on Americans and their online activities. This was mediated through tech companies that provided data to the National Security Agency (NSA). Social media platforms became integrated with the national security infrastructure; Google, Facebook, and other companies began acting increasingly like branches of government.
With smartphones connecting every aspect of a person’s life to the internet, granular tracking of everything a person does has become possible. And since the exchange of ideas is no longer through conversations in town squares, neighborhoods, and social or hobby clubs, opinions are surreptitiously shaped by algorithms controlled by the government and a select elite that has arrogated to itself the right to teach people what to think and what to do.
With little heed for the numerous deaths, the COVID-19 pandemic was treated by governments as a wargame of censorship, propaganda, and mass control felt at the individual level. Social media companies decided what constituted misinformation, disinformation, or mal-information and suppressed it while elevating the dominant narrative, labeling it authoritative content.
Klaus Schwab, then head of the elitist World Economic Forum, praised the role of information monitoring in shaping public response during the pandemic. Facebook even banned users from discussing the lab-leak theory of the COVID virus. While lockdowns were strictly imposed, leftist and anarchist groups like Antifa and BLM were allowed to organize violent protests via social media.
Conformity to the day's narrative—abortion access, rights for transgender people, racial justice, climate change—was enforced by algorithms, and so-called fact-checking was weaponized to suppress dissent. Freedom of speech was cast as anathema to our republic.
Siegel concludes that the digital age has been catastrophic for America, enabling duly elected governments to behave like authoritarian regimes and leaving citizens without rights, opinions, or freedom. It is hard to disagree.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/06/the-information-state-its-impact-on-freedom/
