The new surveillance state is you

Privacy is not dead. Just ask Kristi Noem.

The secretary of the Department of Homeland Security spent 2025 trying to convince the American public that I.D. roving bands of masked federal agents East “doxing» – and that revealing the identity of these officials is “violence.” Noem is wrong on both fronts, legal experts say, but her doxing claims highlight a central conflict of the current era: Surveillance now cuts both ways.

In the nearly 12 months since President Donald Trump took office for the second time, life in the United States has been torn apart by relentless arrests and raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection agents, as well as federal, state, and local authorities. substituted to carry out immigration actions. Many of these agents hide their identities under the administration-approved pretext that they are the ones at risk. In response, U.S. residents have increased their documentation of law enforcement activities to seemingly unprecedented levels.

The “ICE watch” groups have appeared all over the country. Apps to track immigration enforcement activities have appeared on (then disappeared from) Apple and Google app stores. Social media feeds are full of videos of unidentified agents attack men in parking lots, throw women to the groundAnd tear families apart. From Los Angeles to Chicago to Raleigh, North Carolina, neighbors and passersby took out their phones to document the arrest and disappearance of members of their community in the inner workings of the Trump administration.

That’s not to say it’s new, of course. Document the activities of law enforcement to counter the he said, he said The power imbalance between police and civilians is practically an American tradition, says Adam Schwartz, director of privacy litigation at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties nonprofit. “It goes back at least to the 1968 Democratic Convention, when reporters documented police officers rioting and beating protesters — and lying about who was responsible for it all,” he says.

Jennifer Granick, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, says the practice likely dates back “centuries.” Indeed, the documentation of police activities is probably as old as policing itself. “The difference [today] “It’s that technology has made it possible for everyone to have a VCR with them at all times,” Granick says. “And then it’s very easy to broadcast that recording to the public.”

Non-journalists recording police activity became commonplace after a bystander, George Holliday, filmed Los Angeles Police officers brutally beating Rodney King, a black man, in March 1991 and shared the footage with local media. The video would spark a national debate about race and policing in modern America.