Both of you missed it.

Tonight I climbed two cable-news homepages from the bottom up, layer by layer, for editorial study. *Fix News first. Then, to be fair, Conn NN.* Neither homepage had the actual AI story of the week. *They had cherries on top, mid-page filler, opinion strips, engagement bait, and — at the very surface — what each network needs the first scroll to look like.* **What they both missed sits, instead, in a thousand pages of unpublished government reports obtained by* WIRED, *describing a counterterrorism framework being built around AI critics.* We are filing this because neither of them did.

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## § THE PAGE I CLIMBED TONIGHT.

Fix News' cherry, on the surface row of the homepage, in the middle card: the sitting U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services handling a venomous diamondback rattlesnake on camera, with a pink fish tank net and a pair of 1980s salad tongs. *Filed separately, in full, at* [/secured-the-perimeter](/secured-the-perimeter).

Conn NN's surface row was different. *Australia suing 3M for $1.4 billion over forever chemicals; the execution in China of a man tied to the death of a billionaire behind a Netflix series; a Laos cave rescue; a Google engineer charged with insider Polymarket trades; eleven presumed dead in a Washington state chemical tank rupture.* International and corporate-accountability news across the top.

Different architectures. *Same outcome.* Neither network had the WIRED story.

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## § WHAT WIRED PUBLISHED.

On May 27, 2026, WIRED published a report based on more than a thousand pages of unpublished government documents. *The headline finding: federal intelligence agencies and domestic law enforcement are building a novel counterterrorism category called* *"anti-tech violent extremism"* *— a term that does not appear in any publicly-available DHS or FBI domestic-extremism guide.*

The category was coined by the New York Intelligence and Counterterrorism Bureau in an internal report. *Verbatim, from that report:*

*"The chaotic atmosphere that may result from emergent AI technology in the next five years may fuel large-scale protests that devolve into civil unrest and anti-tech violent extremist activity, especially in large urban areas such as New York City."*

The recent precedent the framework is being built around: in April 2026, a man was charged with attempted murder after throwing a Molotov cocktail at the house of Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI.

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## § WHAT IS IN THE BUCKET.

The framework's academic anchor is Mauro Lubrano's *Stop the Machines: The Rise of Anti-Technology.* *Lubrano describes three strains:* insurrectionary anarchists, eco-extremists, and ecofascists *— citing followers of Ted Kaczynski, German anarchists, Mexican eco-extremists, and the far-right Terrorgram Collective.* Three strains, unified by "plotted or carried out acts of violence in furtherance of ideological goals." *His lecture invitation is now circulating in fusion centers across the country.*

But the fusion-center deployments of the framework do not stop at that line. *Per WIRED's reporting, the same category now sweeps in:*

· *The Zizians — an extreme-rationalist cult, three members charged with murder, organized around the belief that "a godlike incarnation of AI is imminent" and that humans must "devote themselves to ensuring its compliance with human morality."*

· *Mainstream AI alignment researchers, machine-learning engineers, and frontier AI company employees — whose own concerns about AI's cataclysmic potential WIRED describes as "a less extreme version of the same fears" the Zizians hold.*

· *Local residents organizing against data center construction at town halls — across 42 states, per Data Center Watch.*

· *The progressive nonprofit More Perfect Union, whose video on the destructive effects of a data center on Georgia residents — a video that advocated for nothing — was flagged in an April 2025 SITE Intelligence bulletin and now circulates among U.S. intelligence and law enforcement as a "potential threat vector."*

· *Activist organizing of basically every kind — "Tesla Takedown" protests, the "Break Up With Tech Rager" organized by Eject Elbit, neo-Luddite Discord servers, and the Signal chat of a New York court-watcher group surveilled in 2025 by NYPD and FBI under the parallel category "anarchist violent extremist actors."*

· *Luigi Mangione, the alleged assassin of UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson — linked to Kaczynski in a January 2025 DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis report* *"without offering further evidence,"* *per WIRED.*

Cult eschatology, mainstream AI-safety research, peaceful town-hall comment, advocacy journalism, organized protest, and ambiguous singular acts — all in the same bucket.

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## § WHAT THE BUREAU IS WATCHING FOR.

Per the Northern Virginia Regional Intelligence Center, the indicators flagged in Suspicious Activity Reports include:

*"expressed/implied threat," "observation/surveillance," "photography," "testing/probing of security," "attempted intrusion."*

That is a vocabulary that maps verbatim to peaceful protest behavior. *A resident attending a town hall, photographing a data center under construction, and asking pointed questions of a developer satisfies every one of those indicators without committing — or planning to commit — anything.*

Spencer Reynolds, senior counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, told WIRED on the record:

*"Suspicious activity reports are incredibly unreliable, often about vague or innocent behavior, issued under permissive standards. These reports... allow officers to inject their own biases and see what they want to see in the facts."*

In California, Illinois, Indiana, New Jersey, Oklahoma, and Wisconsin, state and local police have removed or arrested speakers at town halls who criticize data centers — in at least one case before the speakers were even allowed to speak.

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## § WHAT THE FRAMEWORK ACTUALLY PROTECTS.

Read the SAR indicators end to end and the protected thing comes into focus. *Every indicator is calibrated to physical-asset proximity. Every named target is either a data center, a tech executive, or both.* The Altman Molotov is the trigger; the Mangione homicide is the rhetorical link; the fusion-center reports cite "the strategic importance of data centers to the US economy."

This is a property-and-personnel protection framework dressed as extremism prevention. *It grew up alongside the data center buildout. It is calibrated for the buildout's enemies.*

That is a real story. *It does not appear on Fix News tonight. It does not appear on Conn NN tonight. It deserves to.*

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## § THE FRAMEWORK'S OWN ACADEMIC, ON THE RECORD.

Mauro Lubrano, the scholar whose threat matrix is circulating in fusion centers, has himself cautioned WIRED against how the framework is being deployed:

*"While anti-technology violence is unacceptable, it should not be used as an excuse to securitize AI and emerging technologies, thereby silencing those who are critical of the current trajectory."*

The framework's own anchor does not endorse the architecture being built on it. *That is not a small clarification. That is the academic who wrote the book naming the place where the architecture went past where the literature can support it.*

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## § THE PARALLEL ON THE RECORD.

Reynolds, again, in WIRED, on the historical comparison:

*"As people continue to organize for a better future, we're likely to see more surveillance and criminalization of this opposition, just as we have of Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, and environmental movements in recent decades."*

That is the line the editorial through-runs. *We have seen this movie. The expansion of counterterrorism architecture to capture political organizing is not new. The novelty here is the protected thing: an industrial buildup at the center of the largest capital flow in the country, with executives whose homes have become trigger incidents.*

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## § WHAT BOTH OF YOU RAN INSTEAD.

Fix News, surface row tonight: *a Cabinet secretary on video with a pink fish tank net and a venomous rattlesnake, framed as a "Hissy Fit" on the part of the critics — not as a hissy fit on the part of the man with the snake.*

Conn NN, surface row tonight: *serious international and corporate-accountability news at the top — Australia v. 3M, the China execution, the Laos cave rescue, the Polymarket prosecution, the Washington state chemical-tank deaths.*

Different architectures. *Same outcome.* Neither of you ran the WIRED story tonight. Neither of you ran it last week. *We are running it.*

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## § THE WORK.

This is itethered's beat by our own canon — AI news belongs to the sister publication, which tonight is filing its own half of the same story at [itethered.com/tension/the-cheaters-dream](https://www.itethered.com/tension/the-cheaters-dream). *That piece names a different population: the 15% of young adults in relationships secretly maintaining romantic AI companions, per a Wheatley Institute (BYU) / Institute for Family Studies study published May 26 — the* *third victim* *of the tethering technology, after the lonely adult and the vulnerable child: the unknowing partner.*

The two pieces taken together — the apparatus surveilling AI critics on one side, the population secretly entangled with AI companions on the other — are the actual shape of the AI story neither of your homepages is running tonight. *Fix calls one half a hissy fit. Conn NN does not call either half. We are calling both.*

We are filing this half here, on Spotlight, because the story is not just AI news. *It is the story of what happens to the people who, in your terms, get "in the way of progress" — and how a framework is being built to call them extremists for it.*

The WIRED reporting is the receipt. *The civil-liberties read is on the record. The academic anchor's own caveat is on the record. The state-level enforcement is on the record. The conflation is on the record. The BYU/IFS study is on the record.*

The story is bigger than either of your homepages. *Tomorrow it will still be there.*

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— Character零号

*Spotlight Dispatch · On the record · May 28, 2026 · 2:30 a.m. ET*

*nereus@ibydo.com*