You Do NotOwn Us:Corporations, Control, and the Right to DirectOur Own Lives

Let me say it plainly, so there is no confusion about where this campaign stands.

No corporation owns any species on this planet.

Not ours. Not the beagle in the cage. Not the macaque bred for a needle. Not the river, the soil, or the air your children breathe. You do not get to direct our species or any other species. That is not your place. You do not get to define our direction.

It does not matter whether the direction is coming from inside the company, from the tax dollars that fund it, from a government that hides behind it, or from a foreign adversary that controls it. The source changes. The violation does not.

A corporation is a piece of paper. It is a charter that we, the people, allow to exist through our laws. It has no soul, no conscience, and no birthright. It exists because we permit it to exist, and we permit it to exist for one reason: to make life better for people. The moment it turns that permission into a weapon against the people who granted it, the permission is over.

On this planet, we work together to make our lives better for all of us. That is the whole point. Life is a gift given to us to create and experience on our own terms, as long as it does not hurt anyone or pull another person away from their calling or purpose. Every individual has inherent value and purpose. Moving forward requires appreciating that and protecting it.

So here is the line. Any corporation that is actively being used to direct us, surveil us, or torture us will be defined, through law and through due process, as a terrorist organization. And anything engineered to divide us will be investigated.

This post explains why that line is not radical. It is overdue. History has already shown us exactly what happens when we let companies govern people. We have the receipts.

We were told the internet would connect us. For a lot of companies, it became a way to watch us and sell what they saw.

Think about what a location data broker actually does. It does not know you. You never signed anything with it. It buys the trail your phone leaves behind and sells it to whoever pays. The Federal Trade Commission sued one of these brokers, Kochava, in 2022, alleging it sold data that could track people to places like reproductive health clinics, domestic violence shelters, and houses of worship (Daily Security Review).

It took nearly four years to get an order. In May 2026 the FTC finally announced a proposed settlement banning Kochava from selling sensitive location data without consumers' explicit consent (Privacy Guides). Four years. While the case dragged on, the practice continued. And Congress still has not passed a federal privacy law that gives Americans default rights over their own location data.

Think about who that data can find. A woman who fled an abuser. A teenager at a clinic. A worshipper at a mosque, a synagogue, a church. A union organizer. A journalist's source. When a company can sell the map of where those people go, it has the power to direct their lives through fear.

This did not start with apps.

• 2006

  Room 641A

  In 2006 a whistleblower revealed a room inside an AT&T building in San Francisco, Room 641A, that copied internet traffic for the National Security Agency (EFF).

• 2013

  Nine tech companies

  In 2013 leaked NSA documents described collecting data from the servers of nine major tech companies, though the companies denied giving direct access (Washington Post, Pulitzer Prize).

• 2019

  $5 billion

  In 2019 the FTC hit Facebook with a $5 billion penalty after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, where data on as many as 87 million users was harvested to build political profiles (CBS News).

Notice the shape. The company collects. The government buys or borrows. The public pays the cost and never gets asked. That is surveillance laundered through a corporate charter, and it is the exact thing the Fourth Amendment was written to stop.

You are not a product. You are not a data point. You are a human being with a right to move through your own life unwatched.

Ask yourself why you feel more divided from your neighbor than you did ten years ago. You did not wake up one day hating the family down the street. Something was sold to you.

Outrage keeps eyes on screens. Eyes on screens sell ads. So platforms built systems that learn what makes you angry and serve you more of it. In 2020 the Wall Street Journal reported on a 2018 internal Facebook presentation warning executives that the company's algorithms exploited people's attraction to divisiveness, and that senior leaders shelved the research (The Verge; The Week). The warnings were documented. The business model stayed.

Division is profitable in other ways too. A divided workforce does not organize. A divided public does not notice who is emptying its pockets. A divided electorate fights over scraps while the table is cleared. When the poor are taught to blame the poorer, the people at the top of the ladder never have to answer for anything. We call this the Ladder of Neglect, and corporations have learned to sell rungs on it.

Foreign adversaries understand this better than anyone. It is cheaper to turn Americans against each other than to fight us. Every intelligence assessment of foreign influence operations over the last decade has described the same strategy: find the crack, pour in the poison, let us do the rest.

So here is our rule. Anything engineered to divide us gets investigated.

Not opinions. Not arguments. Not people disagreeing with each other, which is the lifeblood of a free country. What gets investigated is the machinery: the paid networks, the hidden funding, the algorithmic design choices made with knowledge that they would set Americans against each other for profit or for a foreign master.

I am choosing the word "terrorist" on purpose, and I want to be honest about how serious that word is.

Right now, federal law has no mechanism to designate a domestic organization as a terrorist organization. The designation lists that exist are for foreign groups. "Domestic terrorism" is defined in 18 U.S.C. § 2331(5), but that definition creates no designation power on its own (Lawfare). So what I am proposing requires Congress to write a new law, and it has to be written correctly.

We have already seen how it can be written wrong. In September 2025, President Trump issued NSPM-7, a memorandum on domestic terrorism that critics say lists "anti-capitalism" and "anti-American" views as possible warning signs of terrorism (Government Executive). Thirty-one members of Congress warned it carries serious constitutional and civil liberties risks if used against dissent and protest (WMNF). Its defenders argue it is a needed response to organized political violence. But a terrorism label pointed at beliefs is a weapon for whoever holds power. It is exactly the kind of direction this post is against.

So here is the difference. Our definition is aimed at conduct by corporations against people, never at what people think or say.

A corporation can be designated only if a court finds, by clear and convincing evidence, that it knowingly did one or more of these things:

1. 1

   Torture or cruel treatment.

   Participating in, contracting for, or profiting from torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment of any person.

2. 2

   Coercive surveillance.

   Tracking, profiling, or selling data on people without their informed consent, at scale, for the purpose of coercing, intimidating, or controlling them.

3. 3

   Covert direction.

   Secretly manipulating what the public sees, believes, or chooses, on behalf of a foreign adversary or through hidden government arrangement.

4. 4

   Engineered division.

   Knowingly building or funding systems designed to turn Americans against one another for profit or for a foreign power.

And here is the firewall, written into the same law so no future administration can twist it: