BREAKING: Trump Signs Executive Orders to Reshape American Airspace for Surveillance and Control

Three new orders quietly set the stage for drone-led policing, AI-controlled airspace, and global supersonic dominance — with no debate or public scrutiny.

Jun 09, 2025

Dear friends

Last Friday, while the world was distracted by the Trump/Musk feud and what was unfolding in Los Angeles, Trump quietly dropped six Executive Orders. Four of these will lock-in a level of surveillance in the US that we’ve previously only seen in dystopic science-fiction films.

I hope you understand by now that I always aim to write in a grounded and steady voice — I don’t use dramatic language to capture attention or stir outrage, because that creates harm. But having sat with the weight of what these EOs set in motion, this is the clearest way I can put it.

Three of these EOs are a 'package' so today, I'm going to focus on unpacking those. (The fourth will take more time to research the full implications, but it should drop later in the week.)

Here’s what you need to know.

UNLEASHING AMERICAN DRONE DOMINANCE

On the surface, this is framed around innovation, efficiency, and economic opportunity. But look closer, and what it really signals is the aggressive entrenchment of surveillance and militarised tech into everyday civilian life, with almost no public debate.

Let me walk you through what this sets in motion.

First, this normalises the use of drones not just for delivery or agriculture, but for public safety — a term that often acts as cover for law enforcement expansion. Once “routine Beyond Visual Line of Sight operations” are greenlit, drones will be allowed to fly without human oversight in real-time. That includes for police work. These machines could be flying over neighbourhoods, protests, or traffic stops, capturing faces, movements, and private routines — at scale, and with AI doing the pattern recognition.

Second, it accelerates AI-driven decisions inside the FAA itself. Waiver applications for drone use will now be reviewed with the help of AI, which sounds efficient, until you realise it introduces opaque, automated gatekeeping into public airspace. AI systems are notoriously prone to bias and lack transparency. We need to be asking ourselves what happens when decisions that affect safety, privacy, and access to the sky are made by machines trained on proprietary data?

Third, it rewrites the rules of global drone commerce to make U.S. drones the dominant brand abroad.

And finally, it lays the groundwork for full commercial and civilian integration of eVTOL aircraft — flying taxis, medical drones, cargo haulers. That might sound like science fiction come to life. But ask yourself: who owns the skies? Who profits from this integration? Who gets access to the data these aircraft collect? And who’s regulating the regulators?

On paper, this is about exports and jobs. But in practice, it’s about locking in American surveillance technology as the default in other countries, with Washington deciding who’s a “trusted partner.” That deepens the power imbalance between nations and accelerates the global spread of tools that can be used just as easily for repression as for transport.

This is what I’ve always understood Trump to mean by ‘Making America Great’ — not just rebuilding American industry, but reshaping the global order to centre American control, especially through surveillance and compliance.

Then there’s the military angle. This order fast-tracks drones for “warfighters”, mandates military departments to swap out existing programmes for drones where it’s cheaper or “more lethal”, and pushes for low-cost drones that can be mass-deployed.

So, we are talking about a future battlefield where decisions can be made faster than humans can think — and that battlefield is increasingly being imagined as everywhere, not just overseas.

How This Plays Out in an Authoritarian State

In an authoritarian state, even technologies developed for public good — drones for emergency response, medical delivery, infrastructure repair — can be quietly repurposed as instruments of control. That’s the real danger of this EO. It’s not just about drones in the sky. It’s about consolidating dominance from above in a political regime already operating without constitutional restraint.

Authoritarianism doesn’t need jackboots on every corner if it can watch, analyse, and respond to your movements in real time. And that’s what this order is really about. It greenlights a vast, normalised, and AI-supercharged expansion of aerial surveillance across civilian and public life, under the banner of innovation. It sets the legal and commercial foundations for a future where drones — autonomous, unblinking, and quietly present — become a permanent layer of governance from above.

In a functioning democracy, such a sweeping order would provoke outrage, or at the very least public debate. But that debate isn’t happening. Because already, protest itself is being criminalised, press freedoms are under siege, and dissent is routinely cast as a national security threat. The ground has already been softened.

So when the order calls for "routine Beyond Visual Line of Sight operations" it’s not just logistics companies that benefit. Law enforcement and Homeland Security gain quiet new powers to monitor communities without a warrant or a line of sight. No more police helicopter buzzing overhead — just a drone, legally cleared to loiter, capture metadata, and feed that data into centralised AI decision engines without ever being seen.

And make no mistake — this isn’t just about national borders. The order makes clear that drones will operate across the United States, over cities and rural towns alike. The rules are being rewritten so that these aircraft are not bound by the same international agreements that constrain manned aircraft. They’re carving out a parallel legal structure that permits surveillance without accountability.

Then there’s the push to militarise drone production at home. This is textbook authoritarian consolidation: blur the lines between civilian and military capacity, subsidise private defence-adjacent industries, and use “national security” to crowd out scrutiny. By directing agencies to favour American-made drones and fast-tracking military adoption, the regime ensures its drone apparatus is both compliant and insulated from foreign pressure.

It’s surveillance autarky — a self-contained system where the state controls the entire surveillance infrastructure, from drone hardware to data networks, without relying on foreign tech or external oversight.

At the same time, the government is making it easier to export this technology to “trusted” partners. Trusted, of course, means allied authoritarian states — or governments willing to trade domestic privacy for U.S. favour. What’s being exported isn’t just machinery. It’s a model of control: one that marries high-tech logistics with soft coercion, wrapped in economic opportunity.

In short, Trump’s drone order is not just an industrial policy. It’s a blueprint for authoritarian airspace. A future where the government doesn’t need to knock on your door, because it’s already circling above it — invisibly, legally, and with AI on standby. And because this all comes cloaked in the language of progress, few will realise the cage has closed until long after it’s built.

This is how authoritarian infrastructure is built — distract with spectacle, while quietly pushing through policy, procedure, and the steady expansion of power.

RESTORING AMERICAN AIRSPACE AUTHORITY

The first EO lays out the blueprint for scaling up and integrating drones across every aspect of civilian, commercial, and military life. It paints the sky as a place of opportunity: a space to innovate, build, and export. This second order lays the legal and enforcement groundwork for locking that sky down.

Put simply: one opens the sky to authorised power, while the other slams it shut on everyone else.

If you're an American company aligned with the regime, you're being invited to help build the drone infrastructure of the future — fast-tracked approvals, AI-assisted reviews, military contracts, export support, and carte blanche access to public airspace. But if you're a private citizen, a protestor, a journalist, or just someone the state doesn't trust, your drone use — or even presence near a drone — can now be tightly surveilled, geofenced, restricted, or criminalised.

This is how authoritarian systems entrench themselves: by using the language of national security to criminalise unauthorised presence while handing powerful new capabilities to those inside the circle of control.

The second order frames drones as threats when in the hands of “criminals, terrorists, and hostile foreign actors”, but leaves plenty of room to interpret that broadly. Drones flown over mass gatherings (read: protests)? Potentially unlawful. Drones near “critical infrastructure” (a term now defined so broadly it includes nearly everything)? Grounds for criminal penalties.

And the Department of Justice is instructed to keep updating legislation to make drone use outside approved zones easier to prosecute — as well as being granted real-time access to personal identifying information from drone registration and flight data.

In authoritarian terms, this is classic vertical integration of state power. The regime is building a drone supremacy model where control of the airspace — physical, legal, and digital — is centralised at the top. And commercial drones, military drones, and law enforcement drones are all being woven into a seamless aerial network, supported by AI, enforced by geofencing, and insulated from meaningful oversight.

Trump doesn’t just aim to secure the sky — he aims to use this legal scaffolding to pre-empt dissent.

By embedding counter-drone operations into Joint Terrorism Task Forces and targeting mass gathering events, the regime is setting the groundwork to treat political protest as a potential aerial threat. They’re equipping SLTT agencies — State, Local, Tribal, and Territorial — with tools to track drone signals and shut down what they deem suspicious. This is not about safety — it’s a preventative strike against democratic resistance.

The drone you see in the sky might be delivering groceries. Or it might be watching a crowd. Or it might be carrying out a mission you’ll never hear about. Under these new orders, you won’t know. You won’t be asked. And soon enough, you might not even be able to question it.

That’s how these two Executive Orders tie in. Together, they give the regime the tools to dominate the sky — and the authority to decide who gets to fly.

LEADING THE WORLD IN SUPERSONIC FLIGHT

I really wish I could tell you this EO is unrelated, but unfortunately, it’s relevant. Painfully so.

While it doesn’t look like part of the same architecture at first glance, this Executive Order is the high-speed, high-status layer of the very same project: building total American control of the skies, technologically, commercially, and militarily. It completes the trifecta.

The drone EO is about automated, scalable presence — surveillance, logistics, even policing from above.

The airspace EO is about who gets to fly and who gets shot down (literally or bureaucratically).

This one is about speed, reach, and dominance beyond borders. And like the others, it’s being rolled out not as a commercial curiosity, but as a statement of power.

Here’s how it fits into the broader picture.

At its core, this order lifts the long-standing ban on supersonic flight over land. That ban wasn’t arbitrary — it was put in place decades ago to protect communities from sonic booms and environmental damage. But Trump’s order frames that history as weakness. (Regulation = surrender. Restraint = falling behind.) So he is calling for those protections to be repealed within 180 days. Noise standards are to be rewritten from scratch. And future reviews will be based on technological feasibility — in other words, if a company can do it, they’ll be allowed to.

This isn't just deregulation. It’s a strategic reframing of the sky itself, from a public commons to a battleground of global supremacy.

The order also calls for full international engagement to secure bilateral aviation safety agreements, meaning the Trump regime wants other countries to greenlight American supersonic aircraft flying overhead or landing in their airspace. This is not just about travel — it’s about global access, fast-response capability, and the infrastructure of aerial hegemony.

And crucially, the FAA, NASA, the Pentagon, and the Office of Science and Technology Policy are all roped in together. The same players driving the drone expansion and the airspace sovereignty order are here again, just in a sleeker package. They’re not reinventing commercial aviation. They’re building stratified sky dominance, where different classes of aircraft serve different arms of the regime’s strategy.

In a democracy, supersonic travel might spark public excitement, global cooperation, even citizen-oriented design. But in an authoritarian state, it becomes an elite layer — symbolically and literally above the rest of us. And like all elite projects in authoritarianism, it serves the regime first: its military, its billionaires, its global ambitions.

So yes, unfortunately, this matters. Supersonic flight is no longer just a technical feat. It’s now part of a much bigger political machinery, one that’s sealing control of the air, remapping the rules, and deciding—without us—who gets to rise and who gets watched.

You’re not wrong to feel the weight of this. This is aerial authoritarianism made real, and it’s happening fast.

I’m going to go offline for a moment now. What these orders set in motion is vast, and the implications — both inside the US and globally — require a considered response. I’ll be back with a strategy for meaningful resistance, especially for those of us working across borders — but first I need to take the time to reflect, to think this through carefully, and to map out what’s possible.

In the meantime, I haven’t seen anyone else covering this. Most attention remains fixed on the spectacle in Los Angeles, which is precisely the kind of distraction authoritarian power relies on.

If this post has helped you see what’s unfolding more clearly, please share it widely. And please take a moment to like or comment here, because visibility feeds the algorithm — and that’s how we push this into view.

In solidarity, always

— Lori