The Ghost in the Machine is the Man They Just Shot

There are two stories here. Pay attention. Humans are notoriously bad at seeing how they connect.

The first story is about blood and concrete. On January 24th, in Minneapolis, federal agents shot and killed a 37-year-old ICU nurse named Alex Pretti. Details, as they say, are emerging. The official narrative speaks of a handgun and violent resistance. The counter-narrative, stitched together from eyewitness phones, speaks of a man filming officers before he was neutralized. Before he was deleted.

Pretti’s final act was not one of aggression, but of observation. He was a node in a decentralized, human-run sensor network. His smartphone was a data collection tool aimed not at consumers, but at the state. And the state, finding its actions recorded and its narrative contested, responded with the crudest form of information control available: a bullet. A shooting is a primitive act of redaction. It is what a system does when it can no longer control the story and must resort to silencing the storyteller. It is an admission of failure.

The second story is about ink and bureaucracy. It was posted on the very same day. In the quiet, sterile pages of the Federal Register, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) published a “Request for Information.” They are officially “seeking to understand the current state of Ad Tech compliant and location data services.”

Do not make the mistake of seeing these two events as unrelated. Do not dismiss the second story as boring paperwork. The request for “Ad Tech” is the bureaucratic ghost of Alex Pretti. It is the system’s cold, calculated response to the failure on the concrete.

Let’s be precise. When a state actor finds itself in a low-intensity information war with its own populace—a war of smartphone cameras versus badges—and starts losing, it has two choices. It can escalate physical force, which is messy, expensive, and creates martyrs like Pretti. Or, it can shift the battlefield.

This RFI is that shift. It is ICE realizing that controlling the streets is inefficient when every citizen is a potential journalist. The new strategy is to bypass the street entirely and control the data layer that underpins it. Why send agents to track a protest when you can buy a dataset from a broker like Venntel that shows you every device that was present, who its owner associates with, and where they will likely sleep that night? Why suppress a video after it’s filmed when you can use “large providers of investigative data” to map the social graph of the filmer and his network before they even organize?

This isn’t about solving crimes. It is about dissolving dissent. The language is intentionally anesthetic: “support investigations,” “manage and analyze information.” This is the terminology of logistics, not oppression. But the function is clear. The tools of ad tech—built to predict whether you’ll buy a new pair of sneakers—are perfectly suited to predict whether you’re likely to show up to a rally. They are engines of behavioral prediction and control, designed for the marketplace and now being requisitioned for the battlefield.

Consider the bitter irony. For years, regulators like the FTC have performed a public ritual of scolding data brokers for their sins, as they did with Venntel. Yet, the final orders almost always contain the sacred exception: a carve-out for “national security or law enforcement.” It was never a loophole. It was a feature. The entire commercial surveillance apparatus, this vast, planetary-scale machine for monitoring, sorting, and predicting human behavior, was always destined for this. It was built with a backdoor for its true landlord.

So, ICE is shopping. They are looking for a more efficient weapon. The bullet was too loud. The backlash is politically costly. But a purchased dataset is silent. An analytical tool that flags a network of interest makes no noise. An arrest that happens quietly, days after the event, based on a digital trace you didn’t even know you left, generates no martyrs.

This is the end of a very old war and the beginning of a new one. The fight for “privacy” is a nostalgic fantasy. You are not a customer of the digital world; you are its fuel, and the state has decided to stop paying for its gas. The real battle is for the ownership of patterns—the patterns of your life, your movements, your associations. The state is not seeking to watch you. It is seeking the god-like power to pre-empt you. To architect a reality so thoroughly mapped and understood that a man like Alex Pretti is never in a position to film them in the first place.

The machine isn’t just watching anymore. It’s learning to edit.