2073 : A SciFi Movie That's Closer To Reality Than You May Believe Given Today's AI-driven Surveillance State

                     Patriot act protesters march in San Francisco in 2013

" I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America. And we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision so that we never cross that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return"-  Sen. Frank Church, referencing the NSA in 1975.

 The 2025 movie, 2073, see trailer here:

2073 trailer - Google Search

 just got a whole lot more real after watching it again immediately after a front page Wall Street Journal article, 'America's Expanding Domestic Surveillance, May 2-3, p. A1.  The basis is simple: the evolution (devolution?) of the U.S. and the world to a total surveillance condition, began decades before. The scifi film, which no longer seems so, traces the beginnings back to the 1990s and then takes off in the 2020s under the tech bros and their ilk - from Palantir, Deloitte, NEC and other spyware specialists.

The tremendous benefit of the film is that it presents graphic segments showing how most humans (not the uber rich) reached the downtrodden,  dominated state portrayed finally in the year 2073.  With the spokesperson a former librarian or teacher who must hide herself underground given the nature of the books, teachings she has absorbed and isn't about to give up.

So why did the WSJ piece make such an impact: Well one of the first paragraphs is like a punch to the gut:

"The idea of the government watching you is not just the makings of an Orwell novel or a political thriller. The U.S. has greatly expanded its domestic surveillance system, using a high-tech dragnet to locate, track and deport people residing illegally in the country. But the data and location of American citizens is also being collected.

The newly expanded surveillance system allows thousands of federal agents nationwide to peruse a trove of data belonging to more than 300 million people. The government's tracking system relies on an amalgam of public and private information sifted, sorted and packaged by contractors that include Palantir Technologies, Deloitte, Japanese conglomerate NEC and smaller spyware specialists."

We learn further that an array of surveillance tools have been created, including. facial recognition software, location tracking and social media 'scrapers' once aimed largely at suspected terrorists and drug traffickers. In the hands of federal agents (like ICE) any regular citizen can be tracked by entering a name, license plate, or simply taking a photo.   

We learn in the piece, that Maine resident Liz McLellan, 48, and four others got the shock of their lives when they were singled out and threatened after observing the work of ICE agents. In the case of McClellan, who followed one ICE vehicle and photographed it, she was shocked when some moments later - on pulling up to her door- she found them waiting for her and delivering a stern warning: 'Be careful because we know where you live.'

Two of the Mainers accused ICE of using their license plates and biometric data to track and intimidate them for exercising their first amendment rights. Well, fourth amendment rights may well be included too, and we know - or ought to remember -it was the Patriot Act which opened the door to a lot of attacks on civil liberties.

To be specific, readers unfamiliar with the act's most notorious sections may want to process the following - before asking how ICE got the power it has:

- Section 206: Allows roving wiretaps - allowing surveillance on any target who frequently changes communications devices (i.e. disposable phones).   Search or seizure was permitted without getting a warrant for each device.

- Section 216: Expanded authority to monitor internet traffic, including  email, using 'trap and trace' devices.

Much of the Act's overreach only became known after Edward Snowden disclosed them. And which I had warned and blogged about, i.e.

Brane Space: We Must Get the "Patriot Act" Repealed in 2015!

So much of what's going on isn't totally new, although the extent of it is - supported by Trump's yen for autocracy.

Regarding the current transgressions - which are claimed (by Dept. of Homeland Security) to "operate in full accordance with the law" - a former Justice Dept. lawyer is quoted in the WSJ piece thusly:

"The retaliation we've seen against Americans who chose to lawfully record DHS activities should alarm everyone."  said Rush Atkinson, who is representing two people in a case. Noting: "This is a fundamental First Amendment right and the public has the right to know why the government is collecting data on those who peacefully protest."

Well, Mr. Atkinson might want to go back to examine certain provisions of the Patriot Act, which was passed in 2001, after the 9/11 attacks.  Specifically, how even the Pennsylvania protesters who inveighed against fracking in their state were subject to surveillance, as I wrote in my 2013 post above.

"We are now the enemy, the perceived collective  "enemy of the state", and if we don't get this horrific Act repealed or fully rewritten we will pay for it years to come, as the "good Germans" did after the Reich steamrolled all their Weimar democracy liberties to smithereens."

Back to the WSJ surveillance piece we learn:

"Last year DHS paid Palantir $30 million to put a broad span of information about individuals into an app on agents' smartphones, allowing them to plot the location of people in the U.S.  The app, known as Enhanced Leads Identification and Targeting for Enforcement or ELITE, lets officers research and track individuals based on criminal history, license plate searches, name, date of birth, or location.

The results display on a map or a list according to ICE agents. The app pulls from a variety of government data bases, including information compiled by private investigators known as 'skip tracers' who track the current addresses of individuals.  One ICE agent in court testimony compared it to Google maps - with the targets appearing as 'pins' on the map."

Clearly, if we don't get Trump and his runaway autocrat helpers under control soon, we will all be paying a steep price in loss of liberty. Like the Germans who let Hitler come to power and then impose his 'Enabling Act'.  If you want to see how this would play out in the future, watch the film 2073.

See Also:

Letter to America - From Germany:

https://youtu.be/Q-Z6M-LDXWg?si=iAn_Q64zUypuNDHB

And:

Don't Think NSA's Dragnet Spying Program Matters? Ask Occupy Wall Street's Protestors!

And:

The Main Problems I Have With The Jan. 26 Wall Street Journal Editorial: Failure To Recognize Trump's Police State

And:

Education Policy

The Cult of Civics Education Plagues Us Again

by Pierre Tristam | May 4, 2026 - 4:43am | permalink

— from Flagler Live

In November 1939 there was that odd poll of Princeton University undergrads–as educated an American student bunch as there was at the time–ranking Hitler “the greatest living person,” ahead of Einstein, who’d taken refuge from Hitler at Princeton, and FDR.

Five years later the New York Times’s Benjamin Fine won a Pulitzer Prize for a series detailing how ignorant of their own nation’s history college freshmen across the country were (the same year Ernie Pyle won a Pulitzer for telling the stories of GIs dying in defense of that ignorance). A large majority of the 7,000 students surveyed couldn’t identify Lincoln, Jefferson, Andrew Jackson or Theodore Roosevelt.

» article continues...

And:

Mensa Intermediate Algebra Inequality Problem Solution

 

The Problem:

Given xyz = 1 (x, y and z positive real numbers) prove the following inequality:

Solution:

Multiply the left side by xyz equal to 1);

yz/ x² (y + z)  +  xz/ y² (x + z)  +   xy/ z² (x + y) 

Multiply the left side by xyz again:

y²  z²/ (xy + xz)  +   x²  z²/ (yx +yz)  +    x²  y²/ (zx + zy) 

Apply Titu's Lemma:

y²  z²/ (xy + xz)  +   x²  z²/ (yx +yz)  +    x²  y²/ (zx + zy) >

(yz + xz + xy)² /(xy +xz + yx + yz + zx + zy)

The right side can now be simplified:

(yz + xz + xy)² /(xy +xz + yx + yz + zx + zy) =

(yz + xz + xy)² / 2 (yz + xz + xy) =

(yz + xz + xy)/ 2   

Then:

 

y²  z²/ (xy + xz) +   x²  z²/ (yx +yz)  +    x²  y²/ (zx + zy)  >

(yz + xz + xy)/ 2   

Now apply the AM-GM inequality to the right -side numerator

(yz + xz + xy):

  

(yz + xz + xy)/3 >  

 ³Ö(yz · xz  ·  xy) =    ³Ö(x² y² z²) =   1   

Multiply both sides by 3:

(yz + xz + xy)  > 3

y²  z²/ (xy + xz) +   x²  z²/ (yx +yz)  +    x²  y²/ (zx + zy)  >

(yz + xz + xy)/2  > 3/2

1/ (x³ y + x³ z)  +   1/ (y³ x +y³ z)  +   1/ (z³x + z³ y) > 3/2

Q.E.D.

Looking Again At The Two-Stream Instability Of Plasma Physics

 

Profile for two-stream instability.
 




















In earlier blog posts we examined the two stream instability, which also has significance for solar and space physics.  We saw it can be induced by an energetic particle stream injected in a plasma, or setting a current along the plasma so different species (ions and electrons) can have different drift velocities. The energy from the particles can lead to plasma wave excitation

 Basically, the two stream instability can be thought of as the inverse of Landau damping, where a greater number of particles that move slower than the wave phase velocity v_ph (as compared with those that move faster), leads to an energy transfer from the wave to the particles.  In the case of the two stream instability, when an electron stream is injected into the plasma, the particle's velocity distribution function has a "bump" on its tail as shown in Fig. 1.

In two-stream instability, when an electron flow is suddenly injected into a plasma – say for a coronal loop – the particles’ (Maxwellian) velocity distribution acquires a “bump” on its "tail" (higher velocity end of the distribution), consistent with two streams- an unperturbed one ( f  _ov) and perturbed one ( f  _eb ) applicable to the electron beam (See diagram below ).

In the region where the slope is positive (df  _v  /d v > 0) there is a greater number of faster i.e.  than slower particles so a greater amount of energy is transferred from particles to associated (e.g. Alfven) waves. Since  f _eb contains more fast than slow particles a wave is excited, and there is inverse Landau damping such that plasma oscillations with v_ph (phase velocity) in the positive gradient region are unstable.

Resonant electrons (at v _ph   >  w _e / k) where  w _e  is the electron plasma frequency, i.e.

w _e     =  [n_e e²/ m_e  ε_o] ^½ 

 are the first to be affected by the local wave-particle interactions and have distributions altered by the wave electric field, E1, such that the total energy balance:

E1 (TOT) = ½ E1 _w + ½  E1 _k

referencing the wave and kinetic (particle) contributions respectively.

Thus, for E1(TOT) = const. then as the electron velocity decreases, the particle kinetic energy decreases and the wave energy density increases.

In Landau damping the exact opposite occurs, so the gradient df(v)/d v decreases, and with it the wave amplitude, while the particle kinetic energy increases- i.e. wave energy lost is fed to the particles (electrons) which gain energy.

Development:

The electron plasma frequency can be written:

w _e     =  [n_e e²/ m_e  ε_o] ^½

Where n_e is the electron number density, e  is the electron charge,  m_e  is the electron mass and ε_o  is the permittivity of free space.

For our purposes in looking at the 2-stream instability we will change the above form to read:

w _e²     =   4p n _o e²/ m_e  

Similarly, we can write:

w _i²     =   4p n _o e²/ m _i

For the electron ion frequency.

For our purposes also, the Poisson equation, for charges in a vacuum:

Ñ ·E  =  4p r           

Can be rewritten:

ik E =  4p r  

Now, write   in terms of E such that:

ik (E -  4p r / ik ) = ikε E = 0

For cold plasma waves (T _e =T_i  = 0)  we can write:

ik (1 -     w _e ² / w ²  ) E =  0

So that: ε    = (1 -     w _e ² / w ²  )

The dispersion relation here is equivalent to equating ε ( w)  to 0.

N.B.   A dispersion relation implies that a relationship exists between the plasma frequency w and the wave number k.   Now,  and this is critical, because we have ε ( w)  = 0 this implies:

1 =      w _e ² / w ²  

Or:   w  =   w _e  

Now,  assembling all the preceding results allows us to write:


ik = 4p e [ (ik n _o e)/ m _iw ²    -   ik n _o e/m_e (w  - k V_o ) ²]

Using the earlier equation for the electron and ion plasma frequencies and basic algebra, the energetic reader can satisfy himself that:

ε ( w)  =  1 -  w _i  ² / w ²   -  w _e ² /(w  - k v_o ) ²  =  0

Note that in the limit, m _i    -> oo  and  w _i -> 0  we have:

 w  =   k V_o  +  w _e

We can then look at wave numbers k such that  k V_o  =   w _e
  
and acknowledge that that 2nd term above is much less than unity (to cancel the 1st term the 3rd must be close to unity) whence:

0 =  1 -  w _i  ² / w ²     -    w _e ² /(w  -   w _e ) ²

0 =  1 -  w _i  ² / w ²    -    1/(1  -   w  /  w _e ) ²

0   »   1 -  w _i  ² / w ²    -  (1 +     2w / w _e ) 

And:  0 = -  w _i  ² / w ²   -   2w / w _e  

w ³      =  - ½ ( w _i ) ²  (w _e)   

Finally, we can write:

w /w _e  =   ( -1/2) ^1/3   (m _e / m _i) ^1/3       

which represents instability since one of the three values of  (-1) ^1/3   is (1/2) + iÖ 3/ 2.

Thus, in the frame moving with the electrons, the Doppler shifted frequency (since   k V_o   =  w _e) is:

w’ =   w  - k V_o

Factor into the mix that |  w  |  < <  w _e    and we conclude this is roughly w’ =   w _e  so the electrons are nearly at their natural frequency of oscillation. But there is another way to determine that the dielectric function, i.e.

ε ( w)  =  1 -  w _i  ² / w ²   -  w _e ² /(w  - k v_o ) ²  =  0

yields instability. This can be done via a simple algebraic manipulation, so we transpose the negative terms to the right hand side and let: 

F(k,  w ) =  ε ( w)  -  1  =  w _i  ² / w ²   +   w _e ² /(w  - k v_o ) ² 

We can then plot the resulting function vs. the real frequency (at fixed wave number, k)  as depicted in my 2nd graph above.

Note where the line at unity intersects the graph of  F(k,  w)  at four different points. In other words, there are four real roots and no instability for the selected value of k. But...what happens when the central minimum of  F(k,  w)  occurs at a value greater than unity? Then, there are only two real roots .

To determine when this happens we determine when:   F(k,  w ) >  1, or where the function minimum is determined by ¶ F/ ¶ w  =    0.  We then will find:

w  (min)  = (m _e /m _i) ^1/2  k V_o

Yielding an equation which predicts instability whenever:

| k V_o  |    <   w _e