Mamdani’s Panopticon Burden: To Inherit the Hardened and Databased Political Epistemology of the Security State(s)? By Jeremy Rothe-Kushel Host/Producer, Understanding Israel Palestine: Beyond The Walls New York City is a paradox disguised as a metropolis. Above, the glass-and-steel canyons of Midtown reflect the accumulated wealth of empire—the real estate dynasties, the hedge funds, the global insurers. But beneath the asphalt, pulsing through fiber-optic cables and radiating from the microwave dishes atop One Police Plaza, lies a second, silent city: a digital autocracy. The invisible city does not vote. It watches, and targets. It is a “Ring of Steel” that has metastasized from a temporary post-9/11 shield into a permanent, self-governing intelligence agency. On this broadcast of Understanding Israel Palestine: Beyond The Walls, we descend into the friction point where local governance meets global counter-insurgency. We are joined by Ali Winston, an award-winning investigative journalist whose forensic reporting - including for WIRED, The Guardian, ProPublica, and The Baffler, among many others - regularly exposes police corruption, right-wing extremism, and surveillance. Our point of departure is Winston’s incendiary new reporting: “Zohran Mamdani Just Inherited the NYPD Surveillance State.” It documents a profound collision: Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, whose platform was built on the promise of Palestinian rights and systemic reform, now holds the keys to a machine built to repress those very ideals. It is a machine currently operated by Commissioner Jessica Tisch—a scion of the very financial and real estate interests that fought Mamdani’s rise. I. Ground Zero and the Architecture of Paranoia To understand the burden Mamdani has inherited, we must first perform an autopsy on the psychic break of September 11, 2001. As Winston details, the trauma of Ground Zero did not just militarize the police; it fundamentally altered its constitutional DNA. “The NYPD transitioned,” Winston explains, “from a law enforcement agency into essentially a small to mid-sized intelligence agency.” Under the “Never Again” doctrine of Commissioner Ray Kelly, the department imported David Cohen, a veteran CIA executive, to run its Intelligence Division. The result was a domestic force operating with foreign rules. Winston describes the creation of the “Demographics Unit”—a secret squad that engaged in “mosque-raking,” mapping Muslim communities from New Jersey to Long Island not based on criminal suspicion, but on the “pre-crime” logic of identity. This digital dragnet was matched by a physical one: Stop and Frisk, turning the bodies of Black and Brown New Yorkers into data points for the machine. II. The Towering Shadow: The Iron Triangle of the Permanent State The surveillance state does not float in the cloud; it is anchored in the bedrock of Manhattan real estate and the liquidity of Wall Street. As reports break - just in the days after our interview - that Mamdani and Tisch have officially scheduled their first transition meeting, the question of her retention moves from theoretical to imminent. In the broadcast, I drew attention to the “top 10 list” of donors who backed Andrew Cuomo against Mamdani. These figures seem to sit at the epicenter of an ossified “Iron Triangle”: Financialization, Real Estate, and Political Zionism. While not explicitly named in our dialogue, this anti-Mamdani donor class—which notably included direct funding from Tisch’s own family members and was typified by hedge fund titans like Bill Ackman—views “law and order” as a euphemism for asset protection and ideological control. Commissioner Jessica Tisch is the avatar of this nexus. An heiress to the Loews Corporation fortune (hotels and theaters, not the hardware store), she sits at the precise intersection where the old-money real estate lobby meets the Israel Lobby donor class. By retaining Tisch, Mamdani isn’t just keeping a police commissioner; he is signaling a truce with the towering interests of Capital that define New York’s power structure. She is, as Winston argues, a “sacred cow to the business elite”—the human firewall protecting the property values of the 1%. Ultimately, Winston posits that this truce may be short-lived: Tisch will likely not remain if Mamdani imposes the serious oversight and reform conditions that his political backing might demand. III. The High Priest of the Deep State: William Bratton If Tisch is the heir, I see William Bratton as an architect. Bratton is the High Priest of modern policing, the man who institutionalized the architecture of the surveillance state. Bratton currently sits as Chair of the Homeland Security Advisory Council. A look at this council reveals the “Deep State” in plain sight. Sitting alongside Bratton in this pantheon is Jamie Gorelick. Gorelick is a master key to the American establishment. A former Deputy Attorney General and a central figure on the 9/11 Commission, she is synonymous with the management of official narratives and the legal scaffolding of the “FISA Wall” that ‘explains’ such security ‘failures’ like the September 11th attacks, and then aiding British Petroleum, Fannie Mae, Big Student Loan and Jared Kushner through their various corruption and emolument scandals. Her web of influence connects the “liberal” establishment (she is a mentor to Merrick Garland) to the “conservative” defense elite (through her long association with Alan Dershowitz). This raises a troubling question to me regarding the present moment: Did Merrick Garland’s “kid gloves” handling of what ultimately became the Trump “Conspiracy to Defraud the United States” case, and the delays in the high-level January 6th prosecutions, stem not from caution, but from the camaraderie of this permanent club? Bratton, Gorelick, and their peers represent a bipartisan truth: the security state often appears immune to elections. It was Bratton who returned to New York in 2014 to anoint Jessica Tisch as Deputy Commissioner of Information and Technology, ensuring the dynasty—and the ideology—would continue uninterrupted. IV. The Hardware of Empire: British Steel, Israeli Silicon Winston offers a crucial historical correction regarding the original conceptual hardware of this surveillance state. While we often look to Tel Aviv for the origins of our post-9/11 escalated police state, the physical “Ring of Steel” is a pre-9/11 product of British counter-insurgency. “It’s not an Israeli import,” Winston explains. “It’s directly patterned off the London Ring of Steel... developed by the British in Northern Ireland during the Troubles.” However, while the pervasively-deployed cameras concept is British, I asserted in our conversation that the software— and the ideological brain of the System—is deeply Zionist. The “Domain Awareness System” (DAS) runs on infrastructure built in partnership with Microsoft. As I noted, Microsoft is not a neutral ‘American’ vendor. It has functioned effectively as an Israeli corporation for decades. I pointed to the history of former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold—a man at the epicenter of the Jeffrey Epstein network, who even accompanied Epstein on an early trip to Russia. Myhrvold was the catalyst for Bill Gates’ deep investment in the Israeli tech sector. Today, the DAS is the domestic application of that lineage: a fusion of Big Tech and Unit 8200 that turns New York into a laboratory for algorithmic control. V. The Epistemological War: The “Gaza Logic” Comes Home Here, we arrive at the heart of the conflict. This is not just a war over data; it is an epistemological war—a battle over the definition of truth. In Palestine, we see “algorithmic warfare” generating kill lists and a war of nomenclature where the “West Bank” becomes “Judea and Samaria,” erasing a people through language. As I asserted to Winston, this epistemological violence has been imported to the American interior. I spoke from personal experience. In 2016, I was arrested at the Kansas City Public Library for merely asking a question at a public event. The arresting detective, who worked at the local fusion center and had recently returned from an “educational” trip to Israel funded by private interests, tagged me—a Jewish American—with an “anti-Jewish” BIAS code. This is the operationalization of Natan Sharansky’s “New Antisemitism” doctrine: reclassifying anti- or even non-Zionism as antisemitism. Winston confirmed this ideology is active within the NYPD, noting that Tisch gave opening remarks at a training where the keffiyeh and the watermelon were branded as “hate symbols.” The machine does not just record the city; it re-codes it, turning dissidents into terrorists to justify its own budget. VI. The Sanctuary Trap: The Boomerang Effect This leads to the final trap. Winston warns that the surveillance state is a boomerang waiting to return and strike Mamdani’s progressive base. “You can’t be a sanctuary city and a surveillance state,” the logic goes. The data amassed by the DAS—fingerprints, facial recognition, movement patterns—sits in a digital silo that the federal government can tap. “The rubber will meet the road,” Winston predicts. “I expect that to happen within the next few months when on whatever day the feds decide to surge their immigration sweeps into New York City.” Mamdani cannot protect undocumented New Yorkers while maintaining the very architecture designed to hunt them. VII. The Panopticon Burden: The Mayor in the Dossier Finally, Winston offers a chilling, personal reality check for the Mayor-elect. The conflict isn’t just political; it is existential. Winston points out that given Mamdani’s long history of vocal pro-Palestinian activism, and that of his parents (filmm
