The New Surveillance State Is You

Privacy isn’t dead. Just inquire Kristi Noem.

The Department of Homeland Security caput has spent 2025 trying to person the American nationalist that identifying roving bands of masked national agents is “doxing”—and that revealing these nationalist servants’ identities is “violence.” Noem is incorrect connected some fronts, ineligible experts say, but her claims of doxing item a cardinal struggle successful the existent era: Surveillance present goes some ways.

Over the astir 12 months since President Donald Trump took bureau for a 2nd time, beingness successful 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 section authorities deputized to transportation retired migration actions. Many of these agents are hiding their identities connected the administration-approved ground that they are the ones astatine risk. US residents, successful response, person ramped up their documentation of instrumentality enforcement enactment to seemingly unprecedented levels.

“ICE watch” groups person appeared crossed the country. Apps for tracking migration enforcement enactment person popped up connected (then disappeared from) Apple and Google app stores. Social media feeds are awash successful videos of unidentified agents tackling men successful parking lots, throwing women to the ground, and ripping families apart. From Los Angeles to Chicago to Raleigh, North Carolina, neighbors and passersby person pulled retired their phones to papers members of their communities being arrested and vanishing into the Trump administration’s machinery.

That’s not to accidental it’s new, of course. Documenting instrumentality enforcement enactment to antagonistic the he said, helium said imbalance of powerfulness betwixt constabulary and civilians is practically an American tradition, says Adam Schwartz, privateness litigation manager astatine the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civilian liberties nonprofit. “This goes backmost astatine slightest arsenic acold arsenic the 1968 Democratic Convention erstwhile journalists documented constabulary officers rioting and beating up protesters—and lying astir who was liable for this,” helium says.

Jennifer Granick, an lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, says the signifier apt goes backmost “centuries.” Indeed, documenting constabulary enactment is apt arsenic aged arsenic policing itself. “The quality [today] is that exertion has made it truthful everybody has a video recorder with them astatine each times,” Granick says. “And past it's precise casual to get that signaling retired to the public.”

Non-journalists signaling constabulary enactment entered the mainstream aft a bystander, George Holliday, videotaped Los Angeles Police Department officers brutally beating Rodney King, a Black man, successful March 1991 and shared the footage with section media. The video would acceptable disconnected a nationalist reckoning implicit contention and policing successful modern America.