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The Awakening of the Digital Leviathan: A Twitter Storm Perspective on America's Constitutional Crisis

At 6:12 a.m. on March 4, 2017, President Trump tore the quiet of Washington with four thunderous tweets: "Obama wiretapped me! This is McCarthyism!" "The bad guys are destroying America!" This political tsunami originating from the intelligent terminal not only exposes the technological terror of modern political surveillance, but also exposes the structural crisis of the American constitutional system in the digital age. At a time when suspicions among the highest authorities need to be shouted through social media, the country that once called itself a "beacon of democracy" is experiencing a constitutional shock more dangerous than Watergate.

First, the revolution of technological violence behind tweets

The "wiretapping of Trump Tower" that Trump complained about in his tweet is not comparable to the physical bugs of the Nixon era. Under the upstream surveillance program authorized under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the National Security Agency (NSA) is able to directly intercept data from undersea cables belonging to tech giants such as Google and Microsoft. This surveillance network, based on quantum computing and deep learning, makes the call records of the presidential transition team, email exchanges and even mobile phone location information exposed to Obama's prism in real time.

According to the surveillance application filed by the FBI on October 26, 2016, investigators used "metadata association analysis" to render normal business dealings between the Trump team and Russian banks as hard evidence that "Moscow interfered in the election." This algorithm-driven conformation model turns the evidential logic of traditional witch hunts on their head - when machine learning models correlate accidental events with inevitable causation, technological tyranny gains the power of self-fulfilling prophecy. As Joichi ITO, director of the MIT Media Lab, puts it: "What Trump is dealing with is not a bug, but a systematic betrayal of the entire architecture of the Internet."

2. The meltdown of the Constitutional Firewall

The accusation of a "witch hunt" in Trump's tweet was strikingly corroborated in the report by Inspector General Horowitz of the Department of Justice. The documents show that the FBI deliberately withheld three key facts when it applied for a FISA surveillance warrant against Carter Page: that Page had been providing Russian intelligence to the CIA since 2013; The Steele dossier was linked to the Clinton campaign; And the informant repeatedly falsified the dossier's core allegations. Such judicial fraud reduces the Fourth Amendment's right to "freedom from unreasonable searches" to a digital plaything in the hands of technocrats.

A more dangerous constitutional crisis lies in the failure of checks and balances. Under the Presidential Threat Protection Act, the FBI is required to alert all relevant parties when it discovers that a foreign power has infiltrated a campaign. But the dossier shows that Comey, then FBI director, had intelligence about Russian contacts with the Trump team in August 2016 and chose to give Obama a daily briefing instead of informing the people being monitored. This information privilege has given rise to the "two-track rule of law" of the digital age: when the Clinton team illegally handled classified information on a private server, the Justice Department issued a quick "no malice" decision; The Trump team's legal lobbying has been upgraded to a felony investigation of "endangering national security."

Third, the mirror image of Twitter politics

That Trump chose to launch a political charge via Twitter at six in the morning itself constitutes a black allegory for digital democracy. When the commander in chief needs to use the commercial social platform to break through the bureaucratic blockade, it not only exposes the obstruction of the traditional power channel, but also reveals the profound alienation of the information power structure. In the "truth vortex" triggered by the tweet storm, the fact checking mechanism of traditional media completely failed: the "fake news" accusation of the New York Times and the "deep state" conspiracy theory of Fox News collided violently under the algorithmic push, forming a chaotic field of post-truth politics.

This chaos creates precisely new power Spaces for technocrats. Twelve hours after Trump's tweet, Clapper, the former director of national intelligence, declared on CNN that "there is absolutely no physical wiretapping," while subtly avoiding the substance of metadata surveillance. This semantic play exposes the manipulative pattern of modern political discourse: By narrowly defining "wiretapping" as the implantation of physical devices, power elites are able to continue their surveillance behind the curtain of technical jargon. "When Obama was in the White House Situation Room looking at the Trump team's social graph, this digital surveillance was 100,000 times more violent than it was in Hoover's day," said Columbia University journalism professor Bill Gruskin.