The new surveillance state is you

Privacy is not dead. Just ask Kristi Noem.

The Secretary of Homeland Security spent 2025 trying to convince the American public of this determination Roving bands of masked federal agents He is “doxing“- and that revealing the identities of these public officials is”violenceLegal experts say Noem is wrong on both fronts, but her defamation claims highlight a central conflict of the current era: Surveillance now goes both ways.

Over the nearly 12 months since then President Donald Trump Taking office for the second time, life in the United States was torn apart by relentless arrests and raids by officers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection, and federal, state, and local authorities. representative To carry out immigration procedures. Many of these clients hide their identities on the basis that management agrees that they are at risk. In response, US residents have intensified their documentation of law enforcement activities to seemingly unprecedented levels.

“Ice Watch” groups have They are popping up all over the country. Apps to track immigration enforcement activity have appeared on (Then he disappeared from) Apple and Google app stores. Social media channels are filled with videos of anonymous customers Dealing with men in parking lots, Throwing women to the groundand Tearing families apart. From Los Angeles to Chicago to Raleigh, North Carolina, neighbors and bystanders took out their phones to document the arrests and disappearances of members of their communities in the machinery of the Trump administration.

This doesn’t mean it’s new, of course. Document law enforcement response activities He said he said The imbalance of power between police and civilians is practically an American tradition, says Adam Schwartz, director of privacy issues at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties nonprofit. “This goes back at least to the 1968 Democratic Convention when journalists documented police officers rioting and beating protesters — and lying about who was responsible,” he says.

The practice likely goes back “centuries,” says Jennifer Granick, an attorney with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. In fact, documentation of police activity is likely as old as police work itself. “The difference (today) is that technology has made everyone have a video recording device with them at all times,” Granik says. “Then it would be very easy to release that recording to the public.”

Non-journalists recording police activity entered the mainstream after a bystander, George Holliday, filmed Los Angeles Police Department officers brutally beating Rodney King, a black man, in March 1991, and shared the footage with local media. The video will launch a national reckoning on race and policing in modern America.