The Government Surveillance Web: Expanding…Undeniable…Fatal to Freedom

Host: Hon. Sam Rohrer

Guest: Leo Hohmann

Note: This transcript is taken from a Stand in the Gap Today program aired on 2/23/26. To listen to the podcast, click HERE.

Disclaimer: While reasonable efforts have been made to provide an accurate transcription, the following is a representation of a mechanical transcription and as such, may not be a word for word transcript. Please listen to the audio version for any questions concerning the following dialogue.

Sam Rohrer:

Hello and welcome to this Monday edition of Stand In the Gap Today. And it’s also the beginning of the last week of February on the East coast where our studios are located. Many are digging out from a literal blizzard. And while I received only about eight inches or so, just about 10 miles to the east of that, the number was over twice that amount. Now, I don’t know what the weather is like where you are, but can I make the connection here that like government policies and politicians promises and presidential tweets, if you don’t like what you see today, just wait. It will change by tomorrow. But thankfully, let me say upfront that God’s word does not change. And when Christ Himself said to be aware of deception in our very days, he meant it. And when we’re told that the spirit of antichrist was active 2000 years ago and would only increase to the time when the antichrist would step onto the global scene, Christ meant that too.

Therefore, those with eyes to see should be alert to the mass deception swirling all around us, lest even those who have a fear of God become caught in the net of technology driven communications, believing what they want to believe, but denying the reality. One such deception is the web of surveillance and control perpetrated under the guise of freedom and safety and protection of our citizens, all done by past and present government officials. Now today I’ve asked Leo Hohmann independent researcher and investigative reporter to join me again to focus on this matter of surveillance. And we’ll look to a couple of his recent articles that touch on this theme. Now, the title I’ve chosen to frame today’s discussion is this, the government surveillance web expanding, undeniable, fatal to Freedom. And with that, I welcome to the program Leo, glad to have you back with me,

Leo Hohmann:

Sam. Thanks for having me,

Sam Rohrer:

Leo. Today, let’s define, describe, illustrate and connect the dots in this massively increasing in government surveillance web. You’ve done a lot on it I have done as well. So we’re going to try and net it all down, but distracted by other narratives, the final stage of implementation seems to be in place across our nation just awaiting an event for the trigger to be pulled and the web to fully capture its prey. At least that’s how I look at it. Too many who say they love their privacy are giving it up by ignoring the reality of our times and for the sake of providing a current publicly available definition of government surveillance and its purpose. Leo, I ask ai, I’ll tell you where it came from because I asked them, well, I’m going to say this. AI is an integral thread of government surveillance. It is the piece that pulls it all together.

So I thought what better place to go to find out what it is than to ask the thing that is. So here it is, there’s the definition. Government surveillance refers to the monitoring, collection and analysis of information about individuals, groups or activities by government agencies, often through digital, electronic, or physical means. This monitoring can include communications, meaning calls, messages and emails, online activity, physical movements, location data, financial records, camera footage, and other personal information. They complete the definition by saying this surveillance is typically carried out using tools such as wiretaps, data collection systems, closed caption, TV networks, internet monitoring and large scale digital tracking technologies. Now I thought that was pretty complete, but that’s right from the entity that’s actually doing the analysis. So Leo, if you don’t mind add to this definition, anything that you think should be added or emphasized, and then from your research, describe how extensive you think this web of surveillance already is and why or how it is fatal to freedom at least as we have known freedom in America.

Leo Hohmann:

Wow, that’s a big question there, Sam, but I would say that it is about as all inclusive and across the board of our daily lives, as anyone can imagine and much bigger than the vast majority of Americans would ever imagine this surveillance to be. It is literally embedded in everything, every device that has become ubiquitous in our daily lives from our vehicles, our home appliances, our smart TVs, our obviously our phones, our ring doorbell, security systems, our baby monitors. I mean it is just everywhere. Everything you do, even the way that your utility company tracks your electric usage is now completely in real time available to authorities and fed into a central database through the smart meter on your home. So they can tell, for instance, if you have company over for a weekend because the toilet is flushing two or three times more than usual, your electricity use is up.

They can tell how many people are in your home compared to the average and what’s for your home. And then you’ve got everything out in the public spaces and we’re going to touch on that I think later on with all the cameras everywhere in your city on literally practically every block. And then combine that with all of the private cameras. You go into Walmart and even if you pay in cash for instance, they know what you’re buying because everything you do in that store right down to the bills taken out of your wallet are monitored in real time and stored in perpetuity in their system. So yeah, it’s all encompassing, it’s everywhere. And most Americans are completely oblivious.

Sam Rohrer:

They are. And that’s the amazing thing about it. We’re going to go into detail more in the other segments, but how long have you been bringing up the warning about this expansive surveillance, Leo, just out of curiosity?

Leo Hohmann:

Oh my gosh, it’s been something that’s been on my radar since right after nine 11 when the government granted unto itself the authority to snoop on our emails, Snoop on our text messages, snoop on the books, we check out from the library Snoop on the mail that goes through the US Postal Service. So I knew then that we were being set up and as technology has advanced and improved, it’s only gotten obviously much worse. And now with ai, and we found out from the Epstein files the release of that huge 3 million documents that Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted pedophile, people are known, he’s noteworthy for that. But he was into much else that is just as nefarious, including he was one of the early investors in the whole development of AI and the ability to surveil the public with his connections with MIT and also Harvard, Harvard University.

Sam Rohrer:

Alright, so ladies and gentlemen, if some of this you’re saying, wow, that’s an amazing stuff, stay tuned because there’s a lot more coming. And the point is surveillance. The goals of government have always been unrestrained by the word of God. They always want more and more power and that is control. And we’ll unpack that a little bit further. Well, if you’re just joining us today, again, welcome on board. We’ve just begun the program. My special guest is Leo Holman. He’s been with me a number of times and his website, I’m going to give you one here, Leo Holman, there’s two Ns in that name, Leo holman.substack.com, where he posts all of his articles of which he writes many. And so I want to give you that and I will say that again here shortly. But the theme today is something that really touches all of us.

It’s almost as inescapable as not breathing air. And here’s the theme, the government surveillance web, expanding, undeniable and fatal to freedom. So we’re talking about that to help to understand this a little bit better. Now, according to a 2024, this is two years ago obviously, so these numbers are low. But according to a 2024 comparative study, it found that 537,000 plus cameras are in the top 50 most populated US cities over a half a million cameras. And they say covering 48.9 million people, that’s an average of 11 cameras per 1000 residents. Atlanta alone, the city of Atlanta has 124.14 cameras. They say per 1000 people, which is roughly one camera for every eight residents, and it’s one of the highest ratios in the world. Now this all according to the Comparex study, most major cities now have integrated networks combining fixed CCT tv, closed captioned TV traffic cameras, real-time crime center feeds, private cameras voluntarily linked to police systems, flock A LPR cameras and they say now used in 11 of the 50 largest cities.

Then as of 2025, a year ago, over 85 million surveillance cameras, 85 million surveillance cameras are deployed across the United States. That’s public and private because those are old numbers, those numbers are going up. Okay, now Leo, in my research, one particular company caught my eye and it was mentioned as being the entity cameras being used by them. It’s now in 11 of the 50 largest US cities, it’s a company called Flock, like Flock of Geese Flock. You happen to write about this in a February 10th article that you entitled your city is recording your conversations flock’s, new AI powered audio sensors quietly installed in thousands of communities nationwide. Alright, Leo, share the contents of your documented findings as you included in this article.

Leo Hohmann:

Yeah, flock safety, as you mentioned, based here in Atlanta near where I live, started nine years ago, producing what they call automated license plate readers where you basically have a camera and a high resolution camera connected to the internet that basically logs every single vehicle license plate that goes by the camera. And you’ve installed these at various points within your city. Some cities have literally hundreds of them and you’re able to track everyone that comes in and out of your city and tie if necessary, each vehicle plate number to a name, to a driver. And this has been going on for nine years now, and they say the police say that it helps ’em keep track of the bad guys wanted people, drug dealers, killers, what have you. And it sounds really good on paper when they describe it to a local city council. And the police chief gets up and puts in a good word for this technology and how it can help him keep the local population safe.

And there’s usually very little, if any pushback against it. Fast forward a few years to about one and a half, two years ago and they now upgrade their software to include not only visual camera ability but audio where they, and again, it sounds very good because the local police chief or sheriff gets up before the council or commission and says how this new, if it’s even done. I doubt in most communities this was ever even brought before a council. This part of it, it was probably just done quietly. They upgraded the technology to include the Raven acoustic sensors, which are now capable of detecting what they say are gunshots. And who would really be against that? The police need to know if a gun is being fired somewhere in a crowded city. And so when they hear the gunshot, they can automatically respond immediately and hopefully prevent a mass shooting or something like that, or at least contain a mass shooting and make it not as bad as it would have otherwise been.

But then in October of last year, October, 2025, these Raven acoustic sensors are upgraded again to where they can now pick up the sound of people screaming or talking loudly. And so now they’ve got a real complete picture of everything going on and audio to accompany it, including even human conversations. And so this is now finally starting to make the alternative news. It’s never made the mainstream media and actually very few alternative or conservative news sites have reported on it, but I did a few days ago last week and there’s been quite a reaction to it. Actually, my article’s been passed around a lot. I think people are shocked, but I’ve got the receipts, I’ve got the facts. This is not conspiracy theory folks. Your city is now spying on you visually and audio with audio, with super sensitive speakers, with the ability, a capability of picking up human conversations. This really is Orwellian if you think about it, Sam.

Sam Rohrer:

Well, it is Orwellian and I’m going to go next to you to say, all right, now purpose for it. But talking about these red light cameras, the ones we’re talking about, the stoplights and all that, Washington dc I don’t know if it was with Flock that they had used, but Washington DC years ago, the nation’s capitol installed these cameras all over the city. And I know from talking to many, many, many people outside don’t live in dc, but they go to DC. I mean it seems like every time you go, you’ll get contacted by the city of DC that you were going over the speed limit at some location in that city by a few miles an hour and it didn’t make any difference to what it was, but also associated with it. You had $175, fine. Well, you’re stuck. There’s no place to go. And if you make another trip to go back down there to fight it, you know how worthless that is. And so people just pay the $175 fine. So it was really a mechanism to raise money. But the point was being that as you’re talking about, all that information that is collected has kept forever and it’s all linked. We’ll get more into that. So what’s the end of this? What’s the end goal of all of it? Is it money for fines? So obviously it goes beyond that, but what have you found about that purpose?

Leo Hohmann:

I think that the end goal is to create a department of pre-crime, Sam, where they’re able to predict through cameras and algorithms, crimes before they happen. Of course, we know they’ll never be able to do this with any acceptable level of accuracy, but yeah, that is the goal, to build a dossier on every single human being. It will be in private data banks owned and operated by firms like Flock and Flock will probably at some point if they’re not already turnover or share or sell their data to a company like Palantir, which is a company basically started by the CIA back in 2003 or four to create dossiers on Americans. And at some point you may get arrested or censored or otherwise punished for committing what I call non-crime actions or behaviors, thoughts or words that go against government narratives.

Sam Rohrer:

And Leo one thing is, ladies and gentlemen, you’ve probably heard this predictive surveillance or predictive, the predictive mentality that if you have enough information together and AI is able to analyze and on the spot, make decisions that yes, in fact you can actually get to the point of predicting when that person, if that person may do something counter to which government is, I did some further research, Leo, this has come from government sources, US government statements and intelligence documents indicate the core purpose of surveillance expansion. What we’re talking about is preventing terrorism before it happens. Identifying threats prior to action actually being done predicting violent extremism based on online behaviors. That’s whether they’re monitoring your emails and what you’re seeing and forecasting, unrest, protests or other community risk indicators. Ladies and gentlemen, do you get the idea, this whole movement of technology, it’s not just to be able to capture things that happen so that you have a proof of what happened or not happened?

No, no, no. It goes way beyond to the point of influencing how people think and predicting what they are going to do. And that goes extraordinarily wide. Is this person a religious person? Is he likely to go to church? I’ve actually queried. These are the kind of things they’re already working on. Point being, it is all around us. Surveillance, the reality of it is undeniable. Now in the next segment, Lee, I’m going to talk a little bit further about the participants and the plan, again, more of the purpose. All right. Our theme, if you’re just joining us perhaps, is the government surveillance web, and I use that word web, obviously hope it connotes certain thoughts in your mind about those things that spiders make to catch innocent little insects that they then eat. Webs are something that are done by many entities and government is one of them, frankly.

And the area of surveillance is a clear one. Now, one of the sad realities of living in an age of deception includes living in a polarized political nation. Now, these are my words. This is how I view things here, living in a polarized political nation where far too many people are deceived into thinking that there are two distinctly different political parties. If you’re a Republican and I am, if you’re a Republican, you’re made to feel that you can’t speak out publicly against a Republican president or a Republican congressional majority, or if you’re a Democrat that you can’t speak out publicly against a Democrat president or a Democrat congressional majority without being called a traitor, yet an easily provable reality for decades. While some clear differences of course exist, and we know they do on things such as life and so forth. There yet though remains the unchanging fact that there is one behind the curtain government expanding debt, increasing justice denying uniparty.

So when Democrat presidents pursue freedom attacking policies, the Republicans rightly oppose them. But when a Republican president pursues the same attacking policy freedom attacking policies, the Democrats may or may not oppose while the Republicans go totally mute. And so expanding government policies grow and grow. And so it is in this area of government controlled surveillance. Now, Leo, there’s never been a faster or more aggressive expansion of big government and government surveillance than what we are witnessing today. And one cannot deny that yet. It’s been happening of course under various administrations going all the way back to George Bush following nine 11, which you talked about in the last segment and the passage of the deceptively titled Patriot Act. It was not a patriot act, anything from that. But in a recent article you released on February 16th, you entitled it Hackers Claim to have Broken into the Government’s Chief Data Collection firm Palantir.

And here’s what they claim to have found, and I want you to explain what it is that they found. And I also preface it Leo, by saying this, when I was in the Pennsylvania house, I chaired a committee and it had to do with information collecting was all the way back in the nineties. My point is being this is going to on for a long time and some things don’t change regardless of the administration, but I had a computer scientist that was a expert witness before our committee, and he made a statement I’ve never forgotten when it comes to the security of data. He said, the only secure data is uncollected data. Oh, that was a long time ago. That was before a big hack. So that being said, what was hacked in this Palantir database, they’re big boys in the data collection

Leo Hohmann:

Business. Yeah. Well, I think it’s important to start that conversation with a disclaimer. We don’t know exactly what was hacked because these hackers were incredibly vague about their modus operandi, how they did it, and exactly what they came up with and what maybe they did say that it was AI agents that were used to gain access to talent. Here’s files and what they claim to have found was evidence. Again, we can believe it. We cannot believe it because they don’t really give us the receipts to prove that they have this information. And so some people have tried to debunk it. However, I would add that at least half of what they come up with here has been previously reported and shown to be true. So is the other half of relatively new information also true? I kind of leave that up to the reader in my article.

But what they claim, let’s just start with the new revelations, is that they have hours of transcribed and searchable conversations within the Palantir database of conversations among world leaders. This would include President Trump, his vice president and various advisors. They claim to have achieved backdoor access to the devices of these world leaders, meaning their cars, their jets, their phones, and accumulated a huge archive of black mailable material. They say that Palantir is creating nuclear and bioweapon capabilities for Ukraine and is working closely with the CIA to defeat Russia. And they believe they may be one year away from achieving that goal. And they’re just trying to keep Russia busy with unquote meaningless peace negotiations. They say that Palantir was responsible for the IDF, whether you’re for it or against it, what they did in Gaza, this has already been previously reported, so that’s not the least bit new.

They provided targeting to the Israeli defense forces who to kill, who not to kill. Palantir it said is an arm of the CIA and all data from international clients is copied into a CIA spy cloud. Now, that would not be at all surprising since Palantir was created in 2004 as an offshoot of the government’s CIA total Information Awareness program. This was a CIA program that Congress funded and then later defunded because when people got wind of it, it didn’t sound very American spying on Americans, creating, collecting data and analyzing it on every American. So what happened was the government simply outsourced that to a private company called Palantir. And so now technically the government is not invading your privacy. It’s a private contractor that just happens to turn it over, turn the data over to the government, and then also it just ended by saying Palantir has become the most dangerous company in the world.

Okay? Again, not exactly a news flash. Those of us who’ve been researching and following this company know that it’s extremely dangerous and that it has contracts with multiple federal US government agencies. And the co-founder Peter Thiel, according to the Epstein files, has a close relationship, had a close relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, who was tied in with the Rothschild banking family and the whole financial global financial power structure. So when you combine data collection with the financial world, you’re talking about an all powerful human entity, the likes of which we’ve maybe never seen in the history of the world.

Sam Rohrer:

And I mean everything that you’ve shared there, and you were very careful to say what was hacked, I don’t know. But all those things that you shared have been out there generally publicly available. It was last year, I believe that early in the current administration, the president, I believe, gave an award. I mean basically put a contract out to Palantir, a hundred million dollars contract. So the connection between this administration, but it would also appear past administrations have been there, it’s been existent, but they tend to be one of the largest analyzers of the data that is being collected, right? I mean that’s basically what you were saying.

Leo Hohmann:

Yes. I think if you had to describe them in a nutshell, they not only collect data across a broad spectrum of sources, but they then log store and analyze that data for the purpose of creating threat assessments for governments, not just the US government, but multiple governments around the world. They’re in the business of, they make money by collecting information on you, a member of John Q Public and creating a dossier. And at the end of it, a threat assessment. How big of a threat are you to the government’s agenda? And I think that’s where we as Christians should be wary of this whole system and know that it’s not just the government. Okay? This is the problem with conservatives. They equate government intrusion with evil, but they tend to have a blind eye towards this corporate superstructure that is in place to serve the government’s interests in spying and keeping tabs on we

Sam Rohrer:

Individuals. That’s a great point, and we could go further into that. Ladies and gentlemen. You say, well, how’s all this possible? Have you ever heard of public private partnerships? That’s a that began, oh, back in the nineties, it was kind of floated as a novel idea. Well, government doesn’t just have to be government. They can make an arrangement with private business and private businesses, just like Leo said, that’s a good thing and government therefore is a bad thing. So if we connect these two, we can just have the best of both worlds. In reality, I’m going to tell you, public private partnerships have become real life, modern day socialism, government, or probably more accurately defined, I’m going to say fascism, where maybe the government doesn’t own these private businesses, but they control them. That’s fascism. That’s where we’ve been for a long time. One cannot deny that.

Well, that’s how the surveillance system is being put into place, private government together, public private partnerships, the result of being very broad and frankly no accountability. When we come back, we’ll try to wrap up some of this and say, how do we respond to all of this as we go forward? Alright. Leo Hohmann is with me today. He’s an independent investigative journalist and one of the most prolific investigative writers that I’ve come to know. He has a website at Leo Hohmann. There’s two Ns in that, Leo Hohmann.substack.com. You can find the two articles we’ve referenced here today as well as all that he puts together. And Leo, as we come to kind of wrap it up, we’ve been dealing with this issue of government surveillance web, and we’ve talked about it. It’s expanding. I think we’ve indicated plenty of that. It’s undeniable and it is undeniable.

If someone says that surveillance is not out there, that’s not growing, then their eyes are completely shut. Because if they’re driving on the road, they see cameras everywhere. If they live in a big city, there are cameras everywhere. If they hold anything in their hand, they know that they’re being monitored. And of course that’s what we’ve given the definition of all of this. That’s all a part of it. Yet somehow, as you say, many will want to placate themselves and say, well, you know what? As long as government’s not doing this because they’ve done this in such a way that these actions of cameras on lights or cameras on the road or audio recordings, things that we’re talking about that you talk to, a politician will say, well, we didn’t make a law that should be done that’s just private. And to some extent they are true, but they’ve opened up the door and we’re not getting into all of that like the Patriot Act.

That opened up the door for a lot of things to happen. And so private business does their thing because there’s money involved. Government not wanting to be restrained by the Constitution or God’s moral law look for opportunities to do what they otherwise could not do, should not do. And so you come up with public private partnerships, and it’s kind of like what we witnessed during the whole COVID lockdown. Government had no authority to tell people to shut their doors. They could not limit free speech First Amendment by canceling things, but lo and behold, private companies did because they’re not controlled by the Constitution. So they could do it, but all this was worked out ahead of time. It’s kind of like, wow, isn’t that amazing? So ladies and gentlemen say, how can a be? Do we actually have anybody really watching and guarding the expansion of surveillance and what it is doing?

The answer is no. And if you take and you look at it and you pursue that, there are no built-in securities, there is no accountability. A private business can utilize the information for whatever purpose because it’s their information. Government can access the individually identifiable information collected by these private companies because, well, they didn’t really collect information. It was private dead. So each can claim innocence while the constitution is routinely violated and the citizens corralled with absolutely no freedom to oppose. That’s the predictive part of we just referenced, except the freedom that they do have is from a government’s perspective, you have the freedom to comply, but you don’t really have the freedom to oppose. This is the very definition of despotism. Now, what’s even worse is that most citizens will call themselves free when in actuality they’re in a digital prison, and that’s the web idea that’s being put together. Alright. Okay, Leo, as we wrap it up here, where do we go with all of this information? Because these things are, they’re not directly under our control. We’re trying to bring these things forward and delight, but what do you say? What do we do? What aren’t we witnessing here in America? Is it unique to us or are we part of a much larger objective?

Leo Hohmann:

Yeah, I would say it’s definitely not unique to us. This is going on a global scale. China is probably the most surveilled country in the world, but frankly I think the US and the UK are probably just one step behind. In fact, I would say that we are every bit as surveilled as Chinese citizens. It’s just what’s done with the data might not be quite as intensely dystopian here yet as it is in China. But that’s the goal. The goal is to create, to use this data, this technologically scooped up data to create a social credit scoring system where you are not able to get on in life. You’re not able to rent an apartment, you’re not able to take out a home mortgage, you’re not able to get a job if your social credit score is below a certain level, meaning that you have posted certain things online, you have said something publicly online that goes against government narratives or corporate narratives as you mentioned.

It’s very tightly tied in where the line is blurred between, okay, this is the government and this is private industry. They’re working hand in glove together to suppress individual sovereignty, individual freedom. That’s the bottom line. Now, how do we get around that? I think we have to start, number one, become more a brazen. That’s the big danger in my estimation, that we don’t have to have this system weaponized quite to the extent of China because people will start self-censoring themselves. This is what they call the chilling effect on free speech, where there may, as you said, be no government law passed to technically violate our freedom of speech or ban freedom of speech. But because of the social pressures put upon us in the corporate world, you may lose your job, you may lose your freedom to post certain things online. This maybe buy certain things at stores like during COVID.

If you said certain or didn’t give certain vaccinations, you are now going to censor yourself. So in the end, it becomes the same net effect as it is in China where the government just makes a law saying, you’re not able to say this, that, or the other online. You’re not able to go here, there. You’re not able to buy this or that. If we have digital credit scoring with digital ID and the soon coming digital money, at that point, I think we’ve reached the point of no return. I’ve always said, once we have digital ID and digital programmable money replacing paper fiat currency, we now have no privacy left on our spending habits, on our freedom of movement. The government is now mandating remote kill switches on all new vehicles produced in the United States or imported to the United States starting this year, 2026. So as I said at the beginning of the show, this surveillance is built into everything that touches our lives, from our cars to our TVs, to our phones, to you name it. It’s all spying on you, even your appliances. Now, if you get the most modern digitally equipped refrigerators, it’s taking an inventory of everything in your refrigerator and telling you, oh, you’re low on this eggs or milk or butter, and do we really want the government knowing everything that we’re doing and everything we buy, every place we go, every person we meet? I don’t think so, Sam.

Sam Rohrer:

Well, I don’t think so either. And that is the thing, and we’re all at the end. So ladies and gentlemen, why are we sharing these things? Well, because we need to understand that what we are seeing unfold is exactly what happens when governments of the world lift their fists against the God of heaven and believe and embrace a tower, a babble type of a mentality. For them government has become God. That’s what we’re seeing happen. And we know biblically, and don’t forget this, the scripture does tell us that these things will come about because they will be incorporated into the Antichrist run world, global Government, the Beast system, the Leo of which you have written so much about. So that is where it’s all going. When we look through the lens of scripture, it all makes sense. When we don’t do that, we get caught by surprise. Let’s not be caught by surprise, Leo Hohmann website, leo Hohmann.substack.com. You can find articles of all types. And again, this program, listen to it again though our Stand in the Gap app or on our website and share it with a friend. I think they would appreciate that very much as well.