The New Surveillance State Is You
Privacy may be dead, but civilians are turning conventional wisdom on its head by surveilling the cops as much as the cops surveil them.
Privacy isn’t dead. Just ask Kristi Noem.
The Department of Homeland Security secretary has spent 2025 trying to convince the American public that identifying roving bands of masked federal agents is “doxing”—and that revealing these public servants’ identities is “violence.” Noem is wrong on both fronts, legal experts say, but her claims of doxing highlight a central conflict in the current era: Surveillance now goes both ways.
Over the nearly 12 months since President Donald Trump took office for a second time, life in the United States has been torn asunder by relentless arrests and raids by officers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection, and federal, state, and local authorities deputized to carry out immigration actions. Many of these agents are hiding their identities on the administration-approved basis that they are the ones at risk. US residents, in response, have ramped up their documentation of law enforcement activity to seemingly unprecedented levels.
Related Knowledge Center: Democracy and politics
News organizations are scrambling to find a coverage approach that adequately informs the American public about the country’s slide from democracy to authoritarian rule.
Related Knowledge Center: Digital privacy and data security
If you’re online, you’re generating a constant stream of information about yourself — sometimes voluntarily, sometimes unwittingly — that is assembled and used to craft your online experience. And generate wealth for data brokers. Meanwhile, designers and managers of the digital infrastructure on which the world depends are engaged in a never-ending effort to thwart attempts, by both criminal enterprises and state actors, to exploit vulnerabilities in those systems.
Signalgate | State surveillance