I’m not a lawyer and you should go talk to several. Most states have several ways to find lawyers. If you have any friends who are lawyers, describe this to them and ask if they can refer you to anyone. Every state in the US has a bar association. Their websites have search engines for all the lawyers licensed to practice in their state. Make appointments with a few of them. You don’t have to pay for the initial consultation. You explain the circumstances and they tell you what your legal options are and what it will cost you. Pick which ever one you want to work with (if any).

Talk to them about this but here’s my basic understanding of how it breaks down.

There are basically two avenues; criminal and civil.

In order for there to be a criminal prosecution, they would need to have broken some law and it needs to be bad enough that a government attorney is willing to spend their time going after it. There are a whole bunch of federal laws around phones and telecommunications. You’re probably familiar with a bunch of them from your IT work. Chances are pretty good that they broke some law. If you give the police your evidence they may care enough to go after it.

In order for there to be a civil suit, they need to have done something that harmed you, in a quantifiable way and they need to have done it in an illegal way. This does seem like their methods met the threshold. The harder part might be establishing harm. Feeling violated is hard to quantify, unless there’s some statutory compensation. If you can point at something like lost wages or lost economic opportunities it’s probably stronger.

Per Wikipedia, “Tankie is a pejorative label for communists and those who align with Marxism–Leninism ideology.” That’s basically what you get when you ask people to define, “tankie.”

But, as with most perjoratives, its usage has expanded. It can still be used in its original meaning but it’s often used much more broadly. If you do a search on how people use the word “tankie” (like in comment threads) you’ll see it’s now commonly used to describe anyone who isn’t sufficiently critical of China and Russia and sometimes as a modern synonym for “un-American”.