Surveillance, Targeted Tracking, and Ethical Violations in Government-Linked Platforms

Background: What I Was Doing

I was using a combination of privacy-protecting tools, including VPN, Tor Browser, and browser debuggers, to investigate:

• Government contracts awarded under questionable legal authorities, especially those citing Executive Order 14158.

• Changes in real-time to public-facing government data on USASpending.gov.

• The targeting of Reddit posts and threads discussing whistleblower content, government funding, and surveillance contracts.

• Bot suppression and manipulation of NBC News and other mainstream media comment sections when specific phrases like “mutationObserver,” “Palantir,” or “Truth Social Mixpanel” appeared.

Despite using tools that should have protected my identity, I was tracked, tagged, and logged through Mixpanel, session fingerprinting, background workers, and DOM-level manipulation.

What I Found: Truth Social and Mixpanel Tracking

Identity Resolution and Device Fingerprinting

• Mixpanel alias(): Connected my session to past identifiers, even if I had deleted cookies or changed devices.

• distinct_id: Persisted across sessions through localStorage, defeating privacy tools.

Explicit IP Logging

• API calls included ip=1, deliberately forcing Mixpanel to log and geolocate my address, even over Tor.

Behavioral Telemetry

• Mouse movements, DOM interactions, dwell time, and form field behavior were all logged.

• Background worker threads continued tracking while the page appeared idle.

Group Tagging

• track_with_groups labeled me with suspicious categories like “UCLA,” “UCB,” and “purchase.”

• I was assigned to behavioral cohorts likely used to filter, suppress, or amplify content.

Reddit and NBC News: DOM Manipulation and Comment Hijacking

Reddit

• DOM MutationObservers revealed that comments critical of government contracts or surveillance were instantly hidden.

• Prepopulated low-effort comments appeared within seconds of my post.

• Comments using terms like “Palantir,” “Bukele,” or “JS censorship” triggered immediate bot replies and shadow suppression.

NBC News

• News comment sections contained fake threads inserted seconds after page load.

• Engagement noise buried authentic replies.

• Coordinated bot networks upvoted government-aligned responses and suppressed whistleblower content.

Real-Time Changes on USASpending.gov

I monitored real-time edits to government contracts related to:

• Department of Homeland Security

• U.S. Coast Guard

• Classified contracts citing EO 14158

Award descriptions and vendor information were updated or scrubbed in near-real time.

• Contracts for potable water infrastructure (Kodiak, AK) suddenly changed classification tags.

• USAspending entries linked to companies under scrutiny disappeared or reappeared with altered metadata.

• Several contracts showed backend JavaScript scripts that filtered public view based on session data.