- Autocoup / autogolpe
- A "self-coup": the seizure of unchecked power by a legally elected leader, accomplished by dismantling, weakening, and coopting the institutions that could remove or constrain him. Political scientists separate two paths to that end—the overnight version, Alberto Fujimori dissolving Peru's congress in 1992, is an executive coup; the slow rebuild that keeps facially legal forms intact, as in Orbán's Hungary, is executive aggrandizement. The literature treats them as distinct categories. This tracker uses "autocoup" for both, because the end state is the same: a government that no longer has to win a fair fight to keep power. That end state is not permanent—Orbán held it sixteen years and was voted out in April 2026—but undoing it took a landslide, and it does not hand back the institutions on the way out. Our proposition is that by witnessing, calling out, and opposing the slow-motion incremental steps, Americans can prevent the very fast endgame. See: "This Is What an Autocoup Looks Like."
- Schedule F (rebranded "Schedule Policy/Career")
- A reclassification of federal jobs that strips career civil servants of their long-standing protections and converts them into "at-will" employees the president can fire for any reason. Finalized by the Office of Personnel Management on February 6, 2026, effective March 9; an order converting the first ~8,000 positions followed on June 3, 2026. Its practical effect is to remove the officials most likely to refuse an unlawful order. See: "The Machine Already Exists."
- NSPM-7
- A National Security Presidential Memorandum—a formal directive the president issues to the national-security apparatus. WIRED's review of unpublished DHS, FBI, and fusion-center documents described the novel "anti-tech violent extremism" classification used to monitor Americans opposing AI data-center construction.
- Fusion center
- A state or regional facility, created after 9/11, where federal, state, and local agencies pool intelligence and share data. Designed for counterterrorism; increasingly a node for domestic monitoring, and a source of the unpublished reports that surfaced the "anti-tech extremism" label.
- Legibility
- A concept from political scientist James C. Scott: the degree to which a government can "read" its population—see, count, locate, and identify individuals. Making citizens legible is a precondition for both administering them and targeting them. Data fusion is a legibility engine. See: "The Machine Already Exists."
- Accountability sink
- A term coined by the writer Dan Davies for a structure that absorbs responsibility so completely that no individual human can be held to account for what it does. When a decision to detain, deny, or audit is attributed to an "AI system," the system becomes the accountability sink: there is no one left to sue, name, or subpoena. See: "The Machine Already Exists."
- Palantir (Foundry / Gotham)
- The data-integration company at the center of federal data integration. DHS has authorized its platform department-wide under a $1 billion five-year ceiling; the IRS has paid Palantir more than $130 million for a criminal-investigation platform reaching tax returns, bank records and Treasury FinCEN data; Medicaid enrollee records have moved to DHS. Separate systems still — but this is where they converge. See: "The Machine Already Exists."
- ImmigrationOS
- A Palantir dashboard (April 2025, ~$30 million) consolidating targeting, "self-deportation tracking," and immigration-lifecycle management into a single interface.
- ELITE
- A system that builds deportation target lists from the roughly 79 million people enrolled in Medicaid—names, addresses, Social Security numbers, race data—drawn from Health and Human Services records. The clearest example of the surveillance stack repurposing data collected for one purpose to serve another.
- Clearview AI
- A facial-recognition company whose database of 50+ billion scraped face images, under contract with ICE and CBP, functions as the apparatus's "identity layer"—the means of turning any camera into a search query.
- Anduril (Lattice)
- A defense-technology company whose Lattice platform—autonomous systems, counter-drone, persistent surveillance—sits under a $20 billion Army enterprise agreement consolidating some 120 contracts. The apparatus's reach into physical space.
- Insurrection Act
- A set of laws allowing the president to deploy the U.S. military domestically to suppress unrest. One of the emergency powers whose invocation becomes more consequential once the internal officials who might resist it have been removed.
- PEAD (Presidential Emergency Action Document)
- Classified draft directives, prepared in advance, that purport to authorize sweeping executive actions in a declared emergency—historically including detention and the suspension of ordinary legal processes. Their exact contents are secret. Named here because they are the kind of pre-loaded authority an autocoup relies on.
This glossary is maintained as a living document. Terms and figures reflect reporting as of the last update and should be re-verified before republication. Suggest an addition or a correction:
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