Sept. 13, 2026 (EIRNS—Jose Vega, independent candidate for Congress in New York City’s 15th Congressional District, opened the second panel of a “9/11” conference convened by his campaign Sunday afternoon with the following remarks:

Jose Vega:If you’re just walking into the discussion, this is the second panel of a conference called 9/11 + 25: The Endless War Turned on You. We just finished a riveting first panel.

Now, as we go into the second panel, I want to explain why I put together this event. I am 27 years old, turning 28 in less than a week. And I was two years old when 9-11 actually happened, turning three, and I grew up in a post-9-11 America, a matrix that was created, or Plato’s Cave, for another allegory, of a world of surveillance that I was told: this event [9/11] is the reason why we have to trample all over the Constitution. It’s the reason why you have to give up your freedom for safety.

And I have been very privileged to have such a great relationship with some of these whistleblowers like Bill Binney and Kirk (Wiebe.) Those two were the first people I got to meet in 2017—and Ray McGovern as well. So, I was doing this nine years ago, at an event here, at Symphony Space, actually!

And I got to go to Ground Zero for the first time with Tom Drake just a couple days ago on September 11th, and it was a very moving experience. Not only that, yesterday we also got to spend some time with Tom. We were playing chess with Tom, myself, Guy,…and a few other people around our campaign.

One of the reasons why Tom wanted to come up here and do this, agreed to do this, and Kirk and Bill and others agreed to do this, was because—and the reason I put this on—was because I was tired of these events that only have people who continue to say the same things over and over again, and do no outreach to the new generation.

Because there’s a new generation of people right now, the Gen Z generation, that is the most active, proactive, that wants to go out and do something, that wants to go out and intervene and disrupt.

And so, connecting, you know, the 9-11 generation, which is, I believe, anyone 30 and under, to what came before that, and to hear it directly from the people who were in some way involved in shaping the architecture of this matrix, but then to say, “we don’t need to live in it,” I thought was very powerful.And that’s why I’m glad I got to put together this event.

And so, before we go to our main speakers, I want to pass it off to my friend Guy Christensen, who came here yesterday, also got to spend the whole day with Tom, had some good reflections to offer around this, and actually, like, one of the main inspirations behind this event was because, I think, you know, not to dismiss the other event, the Turning the Tide event, but I showed Guy the poster of the Turning the Tide event.

I said, “you know, any of these speakers?”

He goes, “no.”

I was like, “okay, you know, are you interested at all in the 9-11 generation?”

“No, not really.”

You know, and I thought, there is a bigger conversation that needs to be had here, and it’s not about what happened that day, it’s about how it was used to shape Americans’ lives for generations to come. And so Guy did his homework. He watched (the film) A Good American, he did a lot of research, and I was listening to the discussion he was having with Tom. I’d say it was a two-way discussion, too.

I mean, Tom got a whole lot out of it, too, and I could tell. It was just, this is going to be a weekend that I will forever remember, and I am eternally grateful to everybody, everybody who made that happen. So I want to pass things off to my friend Guy, who will then lead us right into the beginning of the panel, too, so, come on.

Guy Christiansen: I actually planned to start this speech a different way, but we’re going to go with this:

In 1969, Fred Hampton turned 21 years old, and he gave a speech that was entitled, and it was posthumously named, “Why Don’t You Die for the People?” I just want to start off by reading an excerpt from that speech he gave: “Like we always said, if you’re asked to make a commitment at the age of 20, and you say, ‘I don’t want to make a commitment only because of the simple reason that I’m too young to die, I want to live a little bit longer, what you did is you’re dead already. You have to understand that people have to pay the price for peace.


“If you dare to struggle, you dare to win. If you dare not struggle, then, God damn it,
you don’t deserve to win. Let me say peace to you if you’re willing to fight for it.”

By the end of the year, December 4th, 1969, the feds murdered Fred Hampton for speaking truth to power and power to people. Now (to) the speech I have prepared:

The Patriot Act is older than I am. I was born four years after the tower fell. I have never made a phone call that wasn’t collected. I have never attended a protest that wasn’t scanned. I’ve never driven across my own city without being logged. So when people my age are told that mass surveillance is a warning about the future, we don’t even know what that means. For us, it isn’t a warning. This future is the only reality we have ever lived in. It is in no way an accident we had to grow up this way. There was a decision that was made for us and sold to the world as protection. In the late 90s, three men in NSA built a novel program called ThinThread. Its importance was that it encrypted American data at the moment of collection. The Fourth Amendment was built into the machine. You needed a legal process to be able to spy on your own people. Radical, right?

In January 2001, they asked to deploy it worldwide. The NSA, they shut it down. It lost to Trailblazer—280 million dollars to a private contractor, dead five years later, having burned past a billion, having never worked at all! And I need you to listen to me here. ThinThread wasn’t shut down because it failed. It was shut down because it worked, because the protection was the part that nobody wanted. 

Within weeks of September 11th, the surveillance tech was deployed anyways, with the protection stripped out. The ethics were the disqualifying feature. What happened next? In late 2003, Congress killed Total Information Awareness, Admiral Poindexter’s program. They killed it because Americans were disgusted by it. And that same year, Palantir was incorporated. Palantir’s first outside investor was In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s new venture capital arm. For years, the CIA was effectively Palantir’s only customer. And shortly after it launched, the former chairman of the Defense Policy Board, Richard Perle, brought Peter Thiel and Alex Karp to meet John Poindexter at his house so they could learn from the man whose program had just been shut down. So Congress didn’t kill the surveillance capabilities nor the technology. They resurrected it, this time with shareholders. And the reason that this happened is structural. When a government agency surveils you, there are hearings, there are erected requests, there’s oversight committees, but when a private company does it, it’s their trade secret. 

The state didn’t privatize surveillance because it’s more efficient in the private sector. It outsourced the specific part they already knew was unconstitutional. Palantir holds contracts worth 10 billion dollars with the US Army alone. In 2025, the Pentagon expanded its Maven Smart System contract by 795 million dollars. ICE pays Palantir for a system that tracks every single one of you, every single person in America, in near real time and can predict your movement behaviors in the future. Thousands of American police departments run Palantir’s Gotham program. The current regime tapped Palantir to build a master database on all Americans, on you guys. And a few months ago, Palantir’s CTO, the chief technology officer, was sworn in as a lieutenant colonel charged with restructuring, radically restructuring our military. The contractor now wears the uniform. And with J.D. Vance as Vice President, Peter Thiel is just one heartbeat away from the presidency. 

In April last year, Alex Karp was asked directly whether Palantir’s tech had enabled the genocidal slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza. He said, “mostly terrorists, that’s true.” It was through Israel’s genocide of Palestine that gave Palantir their chance to show the world their worth to our empire. Francesca Albanese cited Palantir’s service to the IDF, providing them with technology. As a reason, their stock saw a 300 billion dollar windfall after October 7th.

I spent all of yesterday with Tom Drake, and I’m very grateful to have that opportunity. And he said something that I can’t stop thinking about. In other words, I’ll paraphrase it: “what the Constitution forbids, a contract permits.” They cannot search you without a warrant, technically, but they sure can make you click “Agree.” Every terms of service is a private constitutional amendment. It applies only to you. You did not vote on it. You cannot amend it after signing it, and you signed it to simply check your email. Once surveillance became profitable, they stopped needing terrorism as an excuse, and went scouring for everything else.

There are now more than 140,000 documented flock cameras in over 6,000 American communities, scanning people billions of times. 40% of police in this country are on that network. In January, a federal judge ruled that searching a surveillance database isn’t a search under the Fourth Amendment. So these corporations, these billionaires, and their technology are completely outside our Constitution. Meanwhile, the FTC found that retailers are using your location, your browsing history, your mouse, and eye movement, plus whatever other data they can buy on you, to set your price. Your price! Someone booking a flight for a funeral was reportedly quoted a fare 230% higher, and it runs the other way too. 

Corporations infer from your data how economically desperate you are, and then they pay you accordingly. They’re not spying on us to know us, let alone to help us or to bring us better, higher quality products. They want to know the exact price of our desperation and then charge us for it. Your rent, your paycheck, your groceries, your wages, your costs in emergencies. This was never about a police state arriving, about a 1984 to come. It is a police state that turned out to be a business model, a model that requires us to be poorer, more precarious, more controlled, and most of all, easier to loot. Every crisis we have, is being intensified on purpose because our suffering is where their profit is. The top is rotting us from the bottom up.

Tom told me one more thing last night. He brought up Pandora’s box. Everyone knows
how the Furies were unleashed, and they could never be put back inside. (Editorial note: Not the Furies, but all the evils of the world, were released from Pandora’s box.) And this is what Tom pointed out to me. There’s a part about that story that everyone forgets about. The part that there was something still in the box. There was something deep inside past the dark abyss.

It was Hope. And I’ll be honest, Hope is not going to be enough for my generation. We can’t afford that as a feeling, really. But Hope was in the box. It came out of the same place that the plagues did. It’s kin to them. And it’s the last thing out because hope is what you need after the furies, not instead of them. 

In 2002, it took whistleblowers from inside the NSA to tell us what our government was doing to our people and to the world. Last year, it took 13 former Palantir employees citing a letter to warn that there were no guardrails left. One former Palantir exec said that their company intended to take over the United States government and that his old colleagues are now installed literally and digitally inside of it. It’s the same act of conscience. One generation apart. And it is the only reason, the only reason that any of us know anything at all. This is what was at the bottom of the box. I know what surveillance is,because three men said it out loud before I was even born. And they paid for it dearly with everything they had. My consciousness is a product of their work. So is the consciousness of every person in this room who is angry about the right things. The machine they warned us about got built. It got privatized and we are all living underneath it. They reached into the box and it’s our turn to use what they handed us.

So I present to you Thomas Drake, Kirk Wiebe, and Bill Binney…