“Even committed border watchers who favor stronger enforcement of immigration rules should have qualms about the deployment of surveillance state capabilities by the government,” writes J.D. Tuccille in Reason. “Tools and techniques adopted for one purpose are inevitably redirected to others.”

Tuccille goes on to round up recent news articles that underscore his point.

• “In the battle against illegal immigration, the U.S. is spending hundreds of millions of dollars on tools that give federal agencies easy access to the home and workplace addresses of American citizens, their social-media accounts, vehicle information, flight history, law-enforcement records, and other personal information, as well as data to track their daily comings and goings,” write Shane Shifflett and Hannah Critchfield in The Wall Street Journal.

 

• The Georgetown Law Center on Privacy & Technology reports that by 2022, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had “scanned the driver’s license photos of 1 in 3 adults,” “had access to the driver’s license data of 3 in 4 adults,” “was tracking the movements of drivers in cities home to 3 in 4 adults,” and “could locate 3 in 4 adults through their utility records.” We can only imagine how these capabilities have expanded in the subsequent four years.

 

• “ICE is currently using the Mobile Fortify app in the field to identify anyone they happen to encounter and want to identify,” warns the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC). “By pointing their phone at an individual for face identification, ICE can query various databases and obtain data related to ‘individuals, vehicles, airplanes, vessels, addresses, phone numbers, and firearms.’”

EPIC reports that scanned protesters have lost TSA PreCheck and Global Entry status for travel.

Tuccille writes: “In itself that may not sound like a big deal, but it means the federal government is willing to identify and retaliate against people for exercising constitutionally protected rights. That can extend to even more severe consequences.”

As Congress returns this week to resume the debate on Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act – an authority enacted by Congress to enable the surveillance of foreign threats on foreign soil, but often used to spy on Americans – Members would do well to take stock of just how much the surveillance state has grown.

Tuccille concludes: “Ultimately, there’s no such thing as a single-purpose surveillance state. There’s just the misuse and abuse of the government’s ability to monitor and identify people who come to its attention.”

​As Congress debates surveillance policy, there is increasing focus on the role of artificial intelligence in weaving together disparate strands of information to create “total informational awareness.” The elements of an American surveillance state are clearly falling into place.

To illustrate this danger, we often point to revelations from the secret FISA court, reports from the intelligence community, and surveillance scandals unearthed by journalists. But today we point to the words of Jimmy Carr, a British and Irish comedian.

There is no denying that Carr is truly funny, though his jokes can sometimes cross the line from edgy to reprehensible. Carr is also truly bright. This Cambridge graduate shared some sobering insights about the nature of AI and freedom on the UK free speech podcast Triggernometry clips.

When asked about the threat of AI, Carr noted the “one rule of history – unintended consequences.” He continued:

“People are worried about the wrong thing with AI, in my humble opinion. People are worried about losing their job. It’s a perfectly valid thing to worry about, but I think you’re worried about the wrong thing …

“The cost of running an authoritarian regime, like the Stasi, has come down by 10 orders of magnitude in the last three years … When you had to run their Stasi, if you were in East Germany back in the day, it was like 20 percent of the GDP [spent] on spying on people and keeping an eye out.

“Now you’ve got a bunch of cameras, you’ve got AI, everyone’s got a phone on them, and we’re tracking everything at all times. Okay? That’s a worry, because we live in liberal democracies, and we’re very lucky too. But our leaders, how long will they resist that temptation?”

He then turned to the dangers of digital identification.

“There’s lots of lessons from history about digital ID, that we should take very seriously. Because even if the good guys are in charge when it comes in, well, at what point does the world turn and people vote for a bad guy? And then they have the power.”

Carr underscored this point with one devastating observation:

“More Jews died in the Netherlands than in France. You know why? Better records.”

Carr quoted Thomas Sowell, who said: “There are no solutions. There are only tradeoffs.” Carr added that “safety and freedom” are the tradeoffs of our times. He asked: “Where do you want to draw that line?”

Carr concluded:
​
“Civilization is a clearing in the forest. We need to stand very firm against any authoritarian regime, whether it comes from the left or the right, whether it comes from a good place or a bad place. We have to resist that.”

The Associated Press last year wrote a landmark series of six stories about the role that U.S. tech firms play in global surveillance, particularly in China. “Made in America, Watched Worldwide,” just won a Pulitzer for international reporting. The award is richly deserved, honoring the efforts of multiple journalists who worked painstakingly on the project for three years.

Celebrating their efforts is an opportunity for all of us in the privacy community to reflect not only on the AP’s key findings but also on the ominous realization that the technology described is homegrown. In other words, it can just as easily be sold to U.S. agencies and directed at the American people. That’s over 90,000 distinct entities when you add up the total number of federal, state and local government operations.

In other words, U.S. technologists not only helped design the Chinese surveillance state, we’re also not that far from having one ourselves. This danger is growing more acute with the ability of AI to transform information into actionable knowledge and to turn individual data points into personal dossiers.

So let’s think about that as we briefly summarize the AP’s topline findings. Everything in this list is all-too-easily capable of being implemented here in the United States:

• Silicon Valley Is the Architect: The sprawling digital cage used to monitor and suppress millions in China was designed and powered by American tech. And U.S. tech didn’t just sell generic hardware that was misused after the fact. AP demonstrated that Big Tech actively pitched their products as tools for social control, providing the blueprint for automated, algorithmic repression.

• Surveillance at Scale: Mass surveillance no longer requires specialized hardware; everyday cloud infrastructure can process staggering amounts of video surveillance footage. Ubiquitous, mundane IT equipment is being repurposed to form an active monitoring grid. And data such as fingerprints and facial recognition scans can be readily synthesized into centralized tracking databases.

• Algorithms of Suspicion: The repression blueprint is already being operationalized on American roads through predictive intelligence networks that monitor the daily movements of millions of drivers, analyzing travel patterns to flag individuals as “suspicious.” Targeted human observation based on probable cause is increasingly being ceded to the opaque calculations of a machine.

• China Is Everywhere: Beijing is leveraging U.S.-engineered AI and high-end hardware to conduct transnational repression on American soil. Systems designed in Silicon Valley and perfected in China are being used to track individuals within the United States, projecting the latter’s authoritarian power into American suburbs. It’s already too late for Tibetans, even in Nepal. One refugee in that mountain kingdom said: “There are cameras everywhere. There is no future.”

• AI Goes To War: The rapid integration of Silicon Valley tech into lethal military operations exposes a chilling reality: Once these systems are “battle-proven,” they can be refined and marketed to militaries and law enforcement authorities anywhere. Domestic policing could quickly become a RoboCop scenario, in China and in California. The line between surveillance and lethal force is blurring.

One of the heroes of AP’s reporting is longtime Chinese activist Zhou Fengsuo. Arrested and imprisoned as a student leader during the Tiananmen protests, the now-U.S. citizen Zhou testified before Congress in 2024, warning that the lack of privacy guardrails and meaningful reform “is a strategic failure by the United States.”  

Current legal guardrails on American surveillance are not keeping pace with advancing technologies and questionable partnerships unmasked in AP’s series. And that gap underscores the urgent need for robust reform of surveillance laws – before these untethered AI networks are fully (and permanently) turned inward.
​
Congress should take a deeper look into the technologies U.S. companies are selling to China and other adversarial nations – and how they are being deployed here. The rapidly escalating power of AI should especially make it clear why the House leadership proposal to extend FISA Section 702 for three years is unacceptable.

​Did you see The Wall Street Journal editorial Monday morning entitled “Playing National Security Roulette”? The editors argue that anything less than a clean reauthorization of the FISA Section 702 surveillance authority will “put the lives of Americans at risk.”
 
The Journal editors acknowledge that this authority, enacted by Congress to surveil foreign threats abroad, was misused by FBI agents who ran searches on political protesters, political donors, and Members of Congress. “But the intelligence community has since instituted safeguards on how searches must be authorized,” the editors tell us.
 
Thus, according to The Journal, adding any amendments to Section 702 would be a reckless gamble with national security – and reforms are not needed anyway, because the Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act (RISAA) fixed all the problematic parts of Section 702.
 
Wrong on both counts.
 
Reforms Would Not Compromise National Security
 
Reformers want to amend the law to make the program consistent with the Fourth Amendment by requiring probable cause warrants before inspecting Americans’ communications.
 
But the warrant requirement being proposed for surveillance of Americans contains very clear exceptions for “exigent circumstances,” such as terrorist threats, as well as exceptions for every single other type of search the administration has claimed is helpful in protecting national security, including defenses against cyberattacks. Not only would these reform proposals allow the FBI to proceed without obtaining a warrant in an emergency, but the Bureau would also have great latitude as to what constitutes an emergency.
 
In short, warrants would be required in cases where the government is conducting a fishing expedition with no nexus to national security – such as an agent searching for the communications of his Tinder date, or searching for the communications of thousands of donors to a congressional campaign – but would not be required in exigent cases with national security implications. 
 
The FBI Continues to Violate the Law
​
A FISA Court opinion in March 2025 revealed that the FBI had been systematically violating statutory requirements. In August 2024, DOJ overseers learned that the FBI was operating a “filtering” tool that allowed it to query Section 702 data under the radar. These U.S. person “searches” or queries were not counted, tracked, or audited, nor were they approved by an attorney or supervisor, as required by law.
 
Thus, the actual number of U.S. person queries for 2024 remains unknown and outside of any audits.
 
A new FISA Court opinion found that the systemic violations continue. According to The New York Times and The Washington Post, the FISA Court issued a classified opinion that reportedly reveals that even though DOJ shut down the filtering tool the FBI used in 2024, the FBI has been using another, similar filtering tool to conduct queries without following the requirements of RISAA.
 
Thus, the systemic violations of RISAA are not fixed. They are ongoing.
 
In Summary:
 
The warrant requirement proposals contain sufficient exceptions to counter potential terrorists, cybersecurity attacks, and other threats to the American people. And contrary to The Journal’s assertion that the RISAA “reforms appear to be working,” they are clearly not.
 
One final note – while the reauthorization of the Section 702 statute has an April 20 deadline, FISA Court surveillance orders are in effect through next spring. The House has plenty of time to debate these reform measures. There is no need for the kind of panic The Journal – obviously influenced by intelligence community spin – is fomenting.

​At the eleventh hour – as the House prepares to vote on a “clean” reauthorization of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which would exclude any reform amendments – a revelation from a secret court has disclosed major compliance problems directly related to Americans’ constitutional rights.

FISA Section 702 is a legal authority that allows U.S. government agencies to surveil foreign targets on foreign soil, but has been used by the government to spy on Americans’ texts, phone calls, and emails. The FBI, CIA, NSA, and National Counterterrorism Center conduct thousands of these warrantless “backdoor” searches each year.

In August 2024, it was revealed that the FBI was using a querying tool that allowed it to access Americans’ communications without adhering to the procedures Congress had just passed in the Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act (RISAA). These searches evaded RISAA procedures meant to prevent abuses, such as obtaining approval for backdoor searches from in-house lawyers or supervisors, and recording the reasons for the search for internal audits.
The Department of Justice claimed to have fixed these violations in early 2025 and to have discontinued the use of that querying tool.

Yet a few days ago, the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) found that the violations are in fact ongoing. We cannot be sure of the exact details, since the court’s opinion is classified. The New York Times, however, reported that the use of data-filtering tools to perform queries or searches of Americans’ information is:
​

• A problem “across the intelligence community”  

 

• Being conducted by the FBI through “another tool” with the same functionality as the discontinued querying tool.

This should be enough to settle the debate about stiff-arming consideration of more effective reforms. House Members must reject calls for a clean reauthorization and send a clear signal to the intelligence community that Congress will no longer tolerate its shell games.

Nor should House Members be panicked by the phony claim that failure to reauthorize Section 702 will result in America’s security apparatus going dark. While the statute expires on April 20, the FISC’s current surveillance orders remain in effect until spring 2027.

The reform amendments before the House would require warrants before the government can search the communications of Americans, as mandated by the Fourth Amendment. However, they all contain robust exceptions for emergencies, cybersecurity attacks, and metadata.
​
The House should not let itself be stampeded into a rushed vote. We have the time to debate reasonable reforms that will protect Americans from terrorists, while also protecting our constitutional rights from government overreach.

​Yes, you – and us, and everyone else. We may all soon be tracked in the FBI’s proposed database for domestic terrorism. As Ken Klippenstein reports, buried inside the administration’s 2027 budget “is a new FBI-led center dedicated to ‘proactively’ hunting Americans the government classifies as so-called domestic terrorists.”

It’ll be a busy place, by the looks of it, operating as a joint mission center where 10 federal agencies watch out for any hint of the following beliefs:

·      anti-Americanism
·      anti-capitalism
·      anti-Christianity
·      support for the overthrow of the U.S. government
·      extremism on migration
·      extremism on race
·      extremism on gender
·      hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family
·      hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on religion
·      hostility towards those who hold traditional views on morality

With the exception of overthrowing the government, this is a highly subjective list, capable of being interpreted (or added to) as any current or future administration of any stripe sees fit. It could include any atheist or agnostic, any supporter of Bernie Sanders, anyone who has leftward views on gender and the family. These standards, of course, could be inverted by the next administration to make suspects out of people who are critical of progressive policies, restrictive gun laws, or big government.

Today, we target atheists. Tomorrow, the FBI could once again target “radical traditional Catholics.”

The free speech implications alone are beyond chilling, but as a privacy matter, it’s draconian. It blurs the distinction between George Orwell’s “thoughtcrime” and actual terrorism. And to work, it must rely on artificial intelligence crunching vast amounts of social media data in ways that reduce the Fourth Amendment to an afterthought.

No less concerning, when this database is paired with the personal data these same federal agencies obtain by purchasing Americans’ digital records from third-party data brokers, you can see all the elements of a total surveillance state falling into place.
​
It is hard to imagine that such broad categories can yield meaningful intelligence about real terrorists. But it may be just enough for the government to build a dossier on you.

​“Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?”

That was the question Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) put to then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper in an open hearing in 2013.

“No sir,” Director Clapper responded, then qualified his statement by saying, “not wittingly.”
It has since been proven – and is a matter of government record – that the NSA’s global trawl of data has pulled in the communications of Americans by the millions over the last five years. Quite a record for a surveillance authority enacted by Congress to surveil foreign targets on foreign soil.

See for yourself the misuse of this authority revealed in a rare public scolding of the FBI by the secret FISA Court over “widespread violations” of Americans’ privacy with Section 702 data. Or look at the revelations issued by that court of specific instances of how the FBI misused warrantless Section 702 material against U.S. political figures. It is widely reported that the FBI has freely helped itself to Section 702 data, searching the data of more than 19,000 congressional donors, a state judge, and Members of Congress.

The Hunter Biden Laptop Deceit

In 2016, former Director Clapper was joined by former CIA Director John Brennan, former NSA General Counsel Glenn Gerstell, and former NSA Deputy Director Richard Ledgett, along with almost 50 other former senior intelligence officials in signing a letter released just before the 2020 election. They chimed in on a New York Post story about the contents of a laptop owned by Joe Biden’s son, Hunter.

This time, the Fibbing Four solemnly told the American people that the contents of the Hunter Biden laptop had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian intelligence operation.” The FBI later determined that the emails and contents of the laptop were “not tampered with or manipulated.” Even The New York Times was forced to report that the laptop and its contents were genuine.

The irony is that former intelligence officials, abusing their continued access to classified information to skew a national election, is about the most Russian thing they could do.

Misinformation About Reform Legislation

Now Director Clapper, and his Hunter Biden colleagues Brennan, Gerstell, and Ledgett, have fired off another letter. This one is directed at Congress telling Members not to allow any reform amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act authority, Section 702, because that would degrade the government’s ability to protect Americans.

“If Congress fails to authorize Section 702, history may judge the lapse of Section 702 authorities as one of the worst intelligence failures of our time,” they write, joined by enough of their colleagues to get the number of signatories up to around 50. “As Members of Congress know, we face sophisticated threats from China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, including the real possibility of devastating cyber-attacks and state-sponsored terrorism directed at Americans.”

These are, of course, real and active threats. But the Fibbing Four gloss over the fact that all of the reform proposals being proposed in Congress contain exceptions for “exigent circumstances.” These exceptions would allow intelligence agencies to react to time-sensitive emergencies, such as the so-called “ticking time bomb” scenario. These reform proposals also contain exceptions for cybersecurity and warrantless searches of metadata, requiring court approval only to examine the content of Americans’ communications.

Fool Me Once…

The good news is that Congress is getting wise to such shenanigans just before every vote. Before the last Section 702 reauthorization two years ago, the champions of the intelligence community put out a cryptic story about “a serious national security threat” that turned out to be theoretical, not imminent, reports about “Russian space nukes.”

Our advice to Congress is to look at the plain language of the reform legislation that allows the intelligence community to continue to defend America – while upholding our constitutional rights as well.
​
We can defend America and obey the Constitution at the same time. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

​The American Prospect reports that statements made by Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT), Ranking Member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, are raising the question of how well Members of Congress understand the surveillance authorities they oversee.

​“I am not aware of any NSA purchases of U.S. person data,” Rep. Himes is quoted as saying in a virtual town hall last week. “And because their targets, by law, are exclusively foreign, they … have no reason and no business buying American data.”

​
​We agree with the last part of that statement. If only the first part were true.
 
In a letter sent in 2023 in response to a query from Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), then-NSA Director Gen. Paul Nakasone wrote: “NSA acquires various types of CAI (commercially available information) for foreign intelligence, cybersecurity, and other authorized mission purposes, to include enhancing its signals intelligence (SIGINT) and cybersecurity missions. This may include information associated with electronic devices being
used outside and, in certain cases, inside the United States.”
 
Charlie Savage of The New York Times summarized the letter’s content thusly, “The National Security Agency buys certain logs related to Americans’ domestic internet activities from commercial data brokers.” This characterization was under the headline, “N.S.A. Buys Americans’ Internet Data Without Warrants, Letter Says.”
 
Rep. Himes also said that AI “has absolutely nothing to do with 702. Nothing. Full stop.”
 
The American Prospect reports that the Department of Justice’s National Security Division (NSD) budget justification shows that NSD “worked closely” with the intelligence community “to discuss new AI tools that are involved in processing or analyzing FISA-acquired information.”
 
All of which suggests that before the House debates the reauthorization of FISA Section 702 – a program that authorizes foreign surveillance on foreign soil but has often been used to warrantlessly spy on Americans on U.S soil – a deeper discussion with civil liberties groups and a robust House debate are warranted.
 
In facing the looming Section 702 debate, Members of the House need to hear from all sides of the surveillance debate – not just the approved line from the executive branch intelligence agencies.

Why does PPSA oppose a “clean” extension – without any changes or reforms – of the scandal-ridden Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)? Recent history shows how much is at stake when the U.S. House votes in April on whether to reauthorize this surveillance authority, and why Congress must allow time for significant debate and reforms.

Section 702 was enacted by Congress to enable U.S. intelligence agencies to surveil foreign threats on foreign soil. The intelligence community maintains that the communications of Americans are swept up in the National Security Agency’s global trawl only “incidentally.”

Patrick Eddington, a former CIA officer now a Cato Institute policy analyst, writes that the rub is that “the practice is not incidental but a predictable, systematic, and – from the government’s perspective – valuable byproduct of the program.”

Here are some examples of what “incidental” looks like:

• The FBI in 2021 conducted more than 3 million warrantless searches of Americans’ communications under Section 702. This was an astonishing abuse of a surveillance power that Congress designed for foreign surveillance, not warrantless surveillance of Americans.

 

• The FBI, in violation of its own rules, illegally searched for the communications of 19,000 donors to a congressional campaign, of multiple U.S. government officials, of journalists, of political commentators, of a local political party, of people who came to the FBI to perform repairs, of victims who approached the FBI to report crimes, of business, religious, and community leaders who applied to participate in the FBI’s “Citizens Academy,” of college students participating in a “Collegiate Academy,” of police officer candidates, of colleagues and relatives of FBI agents, and of Black Lives Matter and January 6 protesters.

 

• Some of the most egregious improper queries occurred after the FBI implemented new rules to curb abuses. In April 2023, a FISC opinion revealed that the FBI in 2022 dipped into Section 702 data to warrantlessly spy on a U.S. Senator, a state senator, and a state judge.

 

• Just last week, the FBI admitted that it has resumed collecting Americans’ location data and movements – where we go and potentially those we meet with – by purchasing that data from third-party data brokers. Though this is not a Section 702-authorized program, it is a clear sign of the hunger the government has for collecting our data without a warrant.

Three evils emerge from what has become a routine domestic surveillance program.

• The first evil is that warrantless surveillance of Americans – which completely sidesteps the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment requirement for a probable cause warrant – gives the FBI a “backdoor search” loophole. By conducting fishing expeditions, the FBI can develop predicates for investigating Americans outside of constitutional boundaries.

The intelligence community objects to this characterization, stoutly maintaining that Section 702 is not directed at Americans. To quote Eddington again:

“The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) and multiple congressional oversight reports have documented thousands of such searches annually, many involving wholly domestic criminal investigations with no foreign intelligence nexus.”

• The second evil is where this data can go. Once Americans’ data is collected by surveillance programs authorized by Section 702, it can be held for years. With a recent move by the Trump administration to tear down long-standing data silos between the agencies, this information could soon be at the fingertips of dozens of federal agencies, including the IRS, the Department of Homeland Security, and the ATF.

 

• The third evil is the ability of AI to quickly turn vast amounts of data from domestic surveillance into actionable intelligence against Americans.

PPSA agrees that Section 702 is an important authority, needed to keep Americans safe from foreign threats. We also believe that we can protect civil liberties and national security at the same time. There is no reason for Members of Congress to be panicked by a needless legislative game of chicken.
​
Defenders of civil liberties should stand together to test the value of various reform amendments in the crucible of a much-needed open debate.

Talk of a “clean reauthorization” of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) is growing on Capitol Hill. But as Washington starts to dream of an easy vote that includes no surveillance reforms, the American people are not having it.
 
FISA Section 702 is an authority enacted by Congress to enable the surveillance of foreign threats on foreign soil, but it has often been used by the FBI in recent years to spy on the communications of millions of Americans. Included in that debate is concern over the way in which a dozen federal agencies – ranging from the FBI to the IRS – are purchasing Americans’ personal information from shady third-party data brokers.
 
A new poll commissioned by Demand Progress shows that Americans are paying attention to this threat to privacy – and they don’t like what they see.

• Only 12 percent of voters, including 17 percent of Republicans and eight percent of Independents, believe Congress should renew surveillance and monitoring activities without reforms.

 

• Some 37 percent of voters, including a plurality of 41 percent of Republicans, think FISA should only be reauthorized if it contains restrictions on government purchases of our personal data.

 

• Another 37 percent don’t want the program reauthorized at all.

The poll also shows that the recent dust-up between the Pentagon and AI company Anthropic is focusing the public’s attention on the potential for the government to use artificial intelligence to drive the surveillance of the American people to unprecedented levels.
 
This is especially true as the administration works to dismantle long-standing information silos and remove safeguards that once limited the sharing of Americans’ private data between agencies – from the Department of Homeland Security to the FBI and the IRS.
 
AI surveillance, with data collected under Section 702, could allow government employees across the federal bureaucracy to run warrantless searches of Americans’ private communications. Combined with the vast amounts of Americans’ personal data that federal agencies purchase from third-party data brokers, AI-run surveillance programs will have truly frightening reach.
 
The poll also shows that Americans are watching the AI debate and that a majority see it as a threat to privacy.
​

• Sixty-six percent of voters – including 76 percent of Independents and 52 percent of Republicans – believe the government should not be able to force AI companies to grant unrestricted access to analyze Americans’ personal data.

Before Congress embraces a comfortable conformity on a “clean” reauthorization of Section 702 or any other surveillance authority, Members would do well to pay attention to the rising alarm over surveillance among their constituents.

The Government Surveillance Reform Act (GSRA), which would stop federal agencies from buying Americans’ most personal data from shady data brokers while reforming Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), was reintroduced on Thursday with strong bipartisan and bicameral support.

Sens. Mike Lee (R-UT) and Ron Wyden (D-OR), and Reps. Warren Davidson (R-OH) and Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) are the sponsors of the GSRA, which balances comprehensive surveillance reform with national security.

“It leaves in place the authorities needed to protect the American people from foreign threats, while reforming what Senator Lee calls ‘illegal government spying’ directed at Americans,” said Bob Goodlatte, former Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and now Senior Policy Advisor to PPSA.

Cosponsors of the bill include Sens. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), and Reps. Sara Jacobs (D-CA) and Pramila Jayapal (D-WA).

Among its many reforms, the GRSA:

Closes the backdoor search loophole: By requiring a warrant for the government to inspect Section 702 information, the bill stops federal agents from fishing through warrantlessly obtained data to generate suspicions about Americans.

Ends reverses targeting: It prohibits the use of foreign surveillance as a pretext to gather data on Americans.

Closes the data broker loophole: The bill bans the practice of federal agencies buying some of our most personal information from data brokers without a warrant.

Repeals the “Make Everyone a Spy” provision: The bill repeals a controversial 2024 provision that allows the government to force millions of Americans and companies to secretly spy on its behalf.

Updates privacy protections for AI and other modern technologies: The bill’s warrant requirement extends to Americans’ location information, web browsing data, search and chatbot records, and the wealth of data collected by modern vehicles.

Expands the use of amici in the secret FISA courts: The bill mandates increased use of amici curiae – experts in privacy and civil liberties – to represent the civil rights of the American people in sensitive cases before secret courts that have no adversarial process. It also provides these advisors to the court with full access to all relevant information needed to do their job.

“It has been said that the Government Surveillance Reform Act is the most balanced and comprehensive surveillance reform bill in almost half a century,” Bob Goodlatte said. “It enjoys deep bipartisan and bicameral support because many Members of Congress are alarmed by the abusive and pervasive surveillance of the American people.
​
“This well-crafted legislation must be included in the reauthorization of FISA Section 702 in April.”

​“National security and civil liberties are not mutually exclusive,” said Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ). “We can give our intelligence professionals the tools they need to target foreign threats while ensuring that Americans are not subjected to unconstitutional surveillance.”
 
Rep. Biggs last week underscored that philosophy by reintroducing the Protect Liberty and End Warrantless Surveillance Act. His bill would bring powerful reforms to Section 702, which authorizes federal intelligence agencies to spy on foreign targets on foreign soil but has often been used by the FBI to spy on Americans. This authority must be reauthorized by April 20 or expire.
 
Among its many provisions, the Protect Liberty Act would:
 

• Require a warrant before information collected under Section 702 could be used to inspect the communications of people inside the United States.

 

• Bar the government from purchasing or obtaining Americans’ personal digital data – a practice currently carried out by more than a dozen federal agencies, from the FBI to the IRS.

 

• Sunset the “Make Everyone a Spy” provision slipped into the last reauthorization that requires virtually every business or house of worship to secretly facilitate spying on its customers and congregants.

 

• Require the secret FISA courts to appoint legal experts (amici curiae) with security clearances to represent the civil liberties of the American people.

 

• Reauthorize Section 702 for two years from this April, ensuring that the next reauthorization does not arise during a budget or election season, when Congress will be too busy to take a careful look at how this authority has worked and how it might need to be adjusted.

 
Despite talk on the Hill of a “clean” reauthorization of Section 702, Rep. Biggs’ bill should get the attention of civil liberties champions across the ideological spectrum, from the House Freedom Caucus to Demand Progress.
 
Polls show that vast majorities of Americans in both parties are deeply concerned about government agencies that treat privacy as a luxury and the Fourth Amendment as a nuisance.
 
“The Protect Liberty Act is the most important government surveillance reform measure in several generations – protecting Americans’ constitutional rights while leaving in place important authorities to keep the American people safe from foreign threats,” said Bob Goodlatte, former Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and Senior Policy Advisor to PPSA.
​
“FISA Section 702 was enacted by Congress to enable the surveillance of foreign threats on foreign soil, but has been used in recent years by the FBI for domestic spying,” Goodlatte said. “It has been abused to spy on millions of Americans, including judges, sitting Members of Congress, 19,000 donors to a congressional campaign, and countless others.
 
“PPSA commends Subcommittee Chairman Andy Biggs for bringing this reform into the debate over the reauthorization of Section 702,” Goodlatte said. “We are hopeful that Republicans and Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee will once again pass it and that President Trump will sign it into law."

​The media reported on the drama of the Pentagon’s AI contracts as a horse race: Anthropic tried to limit what the War Department could do with the company's Claude AI product. The administration subsequently rescinded all government contracts with the company. OpenAI offered its products as the alternative and won the day.

But beneath this drama lies a deeper and more dangerous reality: In the absence of meaningful guardrails, the AI tech of any company can be used for surveillance and – if combined with data collected under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) – could allow government employees across the federal bureaucracy to run searches on Americans’ private communications.

Such AI-powered surveillance could extend far beyond the Department of War’s use cases and even the Justice Department’s FBI investigations. Government AI-enabled mass surveillance of the domestic population would:

• Not be subject to any oversight authority – constitutional or statutory

 

• Not be encumbered by recent reforms like 2024 RISAA (Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act)

 

• Be supercharged by the dismantling of long-standing information silos and the removal of safeguards that once limited the sharing of Americans’ private data between agencies – from the Department of Homeland Security to the IRS.

 

• All done without a warrant – without any court supervision of the government’s invasion of your privacy.

The danger of AI surveillance in a government that shares data between agencies should prompt Congress to strengthen Fourth Amendment privacy protections. With such a vast datascape available to the world's most powerful government – where many existing restrictions have already been weakened – we otherwise risk the irrevocable loss of personal privacy and the rise of a permanent surveillance state.

We need to come to terms with the fact that AI tech makes rummaging through our private lives and personal histories easier and faster than anyone could have imagined even a few years ago. Americans’ communications could become permanently accessible to the prying eyes of government agents in almost any agency with a whim (or a political directive) to pursue.

It wasn't supposed to be this way. AI was supposed to have guardrails, as was Section 702, enacted by Congress to enable the surveillance of foreign threats on foreign soil, but has instead been used by the government to search the private communications of Americans without a warrant.

RISAA was a noble attempt to rein in the misuse of Section 702 as a domestic spy tool. Its reforms included oversight and restrictions on FBI searches involving people inside the United States. It implemented rules for queries involving high-profile groups or individuals. It established training and accountability measures, while enhancing oversight of the two secret courts FISA created.
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These were important reforms, but they were weakened by last-minute changes to the bill. When Section 702 comes up for renewal next month – this time in the context of an AI juggernaut – it may well be our last chance to protect our freedoms while protecting national security. 

​There is a point early in a marriage when spouses get comfortable and uninhibited around each other in the bedroom and even the bathroom. That’s because there is no third set of eyes in the room… unless one of them just happens to be wearing a pair of smart glasses.

We recently covered the perils and pitfalls of Meta adding facial recognition software to its Ray-Ban smartglasses. Now Victor Tangermann of Futurism has uncovered a genuine horror story about private images captured by these glasses, millions of which are already in circulation.

Meta, in order to refine its AI imaging, sends footage from consumers’ glasses to contractors in Kenya and other countries to label them for training. This tedious process is necessary to enable AI to learn to recognize everyday objects.

At that point, almost anything recorded by Meta glasses is liable to be sent abroad for data annotation.

“I saw a video, where a man puts the glasses on the bedside table and leaves the room,” one data annotator told two newspapers in Sweden. “Shortly afterwards his wife comes in and changes her clothes.”

Another data annotator said: “In some videos you see someone going to the toilet, or getting undressed.”

Tangermann reports that other footage included “imagery of people’s bank cards, users watching porn, or even filming entire ‘sex scenes.’”

Meta customers have no recourse. Data protection lawyer Kleanthi Sardeli told the Swedish press, “Once the material has been fed into the models, the user in practice loses control over how it is used.”
​
Of course, as the Internet of Things weaves together Ring cameras, cloud-based voice-activated AI assistants, baby monitors, and robot vacuums, we are all subject to being surreptitiously recorded at, well, inconvenient moments. But none of them have the reach into personal privacy that happens when one spouse is wearing a pair of smart glasses and the other announces that the toilet paper holder is empty.

​Why do so many Americans object to the expansion of surveillance networks like Flock technology that can track where we drive, pervasive Ring networks that show where we walk, and government purchases of our personal data that reveal information about us that is more sensitive than a diary? After all, this is for our own good – to protect us. We can trust the government, right?

One reason for alarm among the civil liberties community is that we have seen how these separate surveillance systems can be woven together by AI to create a comprehensive surveillance state. This used to be the stuff of dystopian science fiction. Today, it is a functioning model we can see in real time across the Pacific.

Consider the Fujian Police Academy in China, which at the end of last year released an internal document that shows how AI can detect unrest by weaving together actionable intelligence from sound sensors, cameras, reports from paid community spies called “grid workers,” and other sources.

The China Media Project unearthed and analyzed this document (linked here for Mandarin readers) showing how comprehensive surveillance can further the cause of “social governance.” China Media Project reports that:

• The so-called grid workers have apps to alert the authorities to anything unusual. The telecom giant Huawei has filed a patent to pinpoint the location of images uploaded by these neighborhood spies – “and can even turn the locations depicted in the photos into a 3D model.”

 

• Guizhou Normal University showed interest last year in using OpenAI’s GPT model to rate individuals’ “personality traits,” “long-term emotional states,” or “degree of exposure on negative cultural influences.”

 

• The Southwestern University of Political Science and Law in Chongqing has created a risk-monitoring system to follow people filing petitions seeking redress over a wrong done to them by a local cadre or peer. Targets who have spread “inflammatory” comments on social media are flagged as risks.

China Media Project summarizes:

“Throughout the past year, institutions across China, both private and state-owned, have proposed variations of the same system: taking big data from China’s extensive surveillance system – including input from street cameras and satellites, noise sensors, social media posts, as well as reports from social services – and feeding it into AI models to aid predictive policing.”

Of course, Washington is not Beijing. We are not going to find ourselves having to memorize the platitudes of our Dear Leader and spout them online in order to enjoy internet and travel privileges. But the technological ambition – to fuse disparate surveillance streams into systems for “predictive policing” – is not uniquely Chinese. This ambition was reflected in the post-9/11 attempt by the Pentagon to create “total informational awareness” – an ambition finding new life in the many surveillance elements that PPSA reports on daily.

Unlike the “netizens” of China, we can urge our elected leaders to take us off the path that leads to a surveillance state. Congress has an immediate opportunity to do exactly that. One step off this path would be the passage, this April, of measures to end the purchasing of Americans’ most sensitive and personal data by the FBI, the IRS, the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security, and other federal agencies.
​
The lesson from China is not that America is doomed to follow the same path – but that once surveillance systems integrate, pulling them apart becomes exponentially harder. We will keep you posted as the surveillance debate heats up in Congress.

​ICE has become enough of a household word that, like NASA, it’s no longer necessary to spell out its acronym. ICE’s aggressive enforcement of immigration law, now the nation’s hottest political flashpoint, is dividing Americans like nothing else in recent memory. Regardless of where you stand on ICE and illegal immigration, we should all agree that ICE’s massive expansion into domestic surveillance is a grave concern for anyone who values the Fourth Amendment and privacy.

When a protester recording video on her phone wants to know why a masked agent is taking down her information and he replies – “Because we have a nice little database and now you’re considered a domestic terrorist!” – Sheera Frankel of The New York Times rightly suggests that we’ve entered uncharted territory. Political dissent is now being treated as domestic intelligence.

The masked agent was not kidding. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is launching a pressure campaign to get Big Tech to identify persons who post content deemed “critical” of ICE. Rather than traditional investigative work, the government appears to be leaning on something akin to an abuse of process, filing hundreds – if not thousands – of subpoenas intended to compel tech giants to cough up user data.

This data grab of lawful speech is unprecedented. It amounts to using an exceptional legal maneuver – an emergency procedure meant for crimes like child trafficking – to collect constitutionally protected political expression. And let’s be clear about the constitutional claim: The contents of our “friends-only” digital posts are modern “papers and effects,” private possessions the Fourth Amendment was designed to shield from generalized searches.

If tech companies cave (and, as highly regulated companies, they likely will), and ICE plugs the data of protesters into its increasingly Orwellian surveillance architecture, then the genie will already be out of the bottle. Once such a capability is developed, it rarely remains confined to a single mission or a single agency. Surveillance tools migrate. Authorities expand. Bureaucracies replicate what works.

These tools – algorithms housed in digital fortresses – will almost certainly be shared with the FBI, IRS, FTC, SEC, and a dozen other agencies eager for their piece of the silicon pie. And they won’t just target Americans who are anti-ICE. Depending on the political winds of the day, databases built to track one form of dissent can just as easily be turned against pro-choicers, pro-lifers, critics of the administration in power, progressives, or MAGA supporters.
​
This looks less like law enforcement and more like the construction of a permanent political-intelligence system – the start of a security-state apparatus on a scale never before seen, primarily and perversely used to surveil and catalog the political beliefs of Americans. Congress should examine this emerging capability and look to install guardrails when it debates surveillance policy in March and April.

​Look up. There is a good chance a drone is looking back.
 
From government agencies to insurance companies, drones now routinely patrol American neighborhoods, hovering over backyards and rooftops in search of violations, liabilities, and profit. What was once pitched as a tool for emergencies or remote inspections has quietly become a pervasive system of aerial surveillance of American homes without public consent.
 
In Virginia, under current law, surveillance drones may conduct close inspections of private property without a warrant in emergency or “exigent” circumstances. These exceptions include searches for a missing child or an elderly person who has wandered off, or tracking a dangerous suspect on the run.
 
Now a bill introduced in Virginia’s lower chamber by Alfonso Lopez, a Democratic member of the House of Delegates, would expand this list of emergency exceptions in which the Fourth Amendment’s requirement for a probable-cause warrant can be swept aside. If this bill passes, the Commonwealth of Virginia will be able to spy on citizens to make sure they follow environmental rules on sediment control and erosion management, as well as regulations regarding water and wetlands.
 
In short, this bill would allow the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality to deploy surveillance drones not for the usual dire exigent circumstances, but just to make sure that property owners are in compliance with that department’s environmental regulations.

Virginia’s proposal shows how easily “emergency” drone powers can be repurposed for routine regulatory enforcement. But government is not the only actor exploiting the skies. As drone surveillance becomes normalized, private companies have eagerly followed – deploying the same technology not to enforce the law, but to grow profits.
​
Texas provides one example of how the private sector is using drones to impinge on homeowners’ privacy. KUT News in Austin interviewed dozens of homeowners, industry experts, and insurance watchdogs, and reviewed hundreds of pages of complaints and state filings, to document how insurance companies are using aerial drone technology to spy on their customers.
 
KUT reports that poor images of homes often prompt insurance providers to unfairly raise rates or cancel policies. Customers have been told to replace their roofs when in fact their roofs only need a good cleansing rain. As Audrey McGlinchy of KUT writes: “And with the proverbial click of a button, companies can decide if they want to renew a homeowner’s policy.”
 
How pervasive is commercial surveillance? KUT reports that one aerial-imaging technology firm providing imagery for insurance companies estimates there are “eyes on 99.6 percent of the country’s population.”
 
State laws and courts are not adjusting to this new reality. For example, in 2024 the Michigan Supreme Court punted on the Fourth Amendment implications of a township’s low-flying drone that crossed over a couple’s fence line to search for zoning violations. At the national level, the U.S. Supreme Court has yet to fully define drone-specific privacy rights. 
 
Lawmakers and courts need to catch up to a simple reality – pervasive drone surveillance over homes is no longer hypothetical, rare, or futuristic. It is routine, largely unregulated, and already being used to punish Americans financially and intrude on their privacy. If the Fourth Amendment is to mean anything in this age of mass aerial surveillance, our laws must recognize that what hovers over our roofs and backyards today can be just as invasive as a warrantless step into our homes.

​Stewart Baker, former general counsel of the National Security Agency, opened his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee last week with a startling, if somewhat insolent, proposal.

Baker’s proposal came at the beginning of that hearing on the “review and reform of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act,” which centered around FISA Section 702. This is an authority enacted by Congress to enable spying on foreign targets on foreign soil without the need for a warrant or court order. Yet it has been used in recent years to enable warrantless government access to millions of Americans’ private communications.

Section 702 sunsets in April 2026 after the last reauthorization in April 2024. The reauthorization debate now beginning on Capitol Hill is being used to explore not just Section 702, but many other surveillance authorities associated with it as well.

“It’s time to say – let’s stop putting a sunset on 702,” Baker said. “It is only putting our most valuable security tool up for grabs every couple of years and then praying that there is enough bipartisan spirit in the Congress to do what needs to be done.”

This flew in the face of remarks by Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Ranking Member Dick Durbin (D-IL).

Sen. Grassley said that while Section 702 is an “essential national security and intelligence tool,” he believes that “constant Congressional oversight and vigilance is also essential to ensure that this authority is exercised responsibly.”

The chairman also expressed concern about FISA’s “reach” and said there is “still more work to be done.”

To underscore this point, Sen. Grassley reminded the committee that he and Sen. Durbin have complained that an oversight measure passed into law in 2024 is being blocked by the Department of Justice.

That law allows senators and staff members with high levels of security clearance to attend hearings of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance courts. But an onerous set of restrictions imposed by the Justice Department under the Biden administration and continued by the Trump administration has made it impossible for Members of Congress to attend the hearings with staff – or even to discuss them with anyone, whether cleared staff or other senators.

That is not a guardrail. It is a gag order.

The Justice Department also asserts a right to remove senators and Members of Congress at will. This is peculiar, given that the right to remove people from a courtroom is normally exercised by the presiding judge, not a functionary from the executive branch.

Ranking Member Sen. Durbin echoed the chairman on their “responsibility to conduct oversight” of Section 702. “For years the government has used it as a domestic spying tool to collect millions, maybe billions, of Americans’ private communications.”

Sen. Durbin added that the government has been:

“Reading our text messages and emails, and listening to our phone calls, all without a warrant requirement of the Fourth Amendment … Section 702 has been abused to spy on business and religious leaders, political parties, Members of Congress, campaign donors, journalists, and political protesters of all stripes.”

The intelligence community has long played clever word games with Section 702 to enable such warrantless domestic spying. And when federal agencies are called out on their domestic spying, more often than not they fail to respond to their putative overseers on the Hill or to innumerable Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests filed by PPSA and other civil liberties organizations.

Consider the letter of protest Sen. Grassley and Sen. Durbin sent in November to Attorney General Pam Bondi asking her to stop those executive branch restrictions on congressional oversight at the FISA court hearings.

Three months have passed and Attorney General Bondi has yet to respond to the Chairman and Ranking Member of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
​
Could we have a better example of why senators believe Congress must use sunsetting and other robust measures to try to compel oversight of an intelligence community that refuses to answer even basic questions?

​At a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing today (see 54:25), Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) probed Lt. Gen. Joshua Rudd – nominated to lead the National Security Agency – on whether he would obey the Fourth Amendment’s requirement for a probable cause warrant before surveilling the communications of American citizens in programs authorized by Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
 
That authority was enacted by Congress to enable the surveillance of foreign terrorists and spies on foreign soil. The National Security Agency’s trawl of global communications has since become a resource for U.S. intelligence agencies to routinely spy on the communications of American citizens and other “U.S. persons” on American soil.
 
Given that Congress is beginning to debate whether to continue the risk Section 702 poses to Americans’ privacy – with a vote on its reauthorization in April – you might think that Lt. Gen. Rudd would have a good grasp of the background on this issue, if not an actual opinion.
 
The hearing revealed that he has neither.
 
In response to Sen. Wyden’s questions, Lt. Gen. Rudd replied with non-answers. Worse, he admitted that he really didn’t understand the privacy issues at the heart of the looming Section 702 debate.
 
Sen. Wyden framed his questions with a quote from Benjamin Franklin, who wrote: “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” Sen. Wyden said that he sees “striking that balance” between safety and liberty as “essential.”
 
The senator then asked: “General, if you are directed to target people in the United States for surveillance, will you insist that there will be a judicial warrant?”
 
General Rudd replied: “What I can tell you, senator, is that if confirmed I will absolutely commit to executing the foreign intelligence mission of the NSA in accordance with the authorities it has been given and within all applicable laws.”
 
Sen. Wyden came back: “That is about as vague as anything I’ve heard on the subject. And it seems to me that unfamiliarity with basic constitutional rights is not something that can be accepted in this position. It’s so crucial. I continue to believe that what I described for you is not mutually exclusive. Smart policies give you security and liberty. Not so smart policies give you less of both.”
 
Sen. Wyden again asked whether Lt. Gen. Rudd could give us some insight into his thinking. Rudd gave another boilerplate non-answer answer.
 
Sen. Wyden asked: “Do you believe that U.S. person searches of Section 702 collection should require a warrant except in emergencies, which has been largely the position of those who would like to find some common ground as we go forward?”
 
General Rudd replied: “Senator that’s a topic I’d need to look into, and get a better understanding of, and give you a more fulsome and complete answer on that one.”
 
An informed officer might have turned the tables on the senator and noted that a warrant requirement is set to be debated and voted on by Congress in April. He could then have sat back and added, “I will execute whatever laws you, Senator Wyden, and your colleagues pass.”
 
But Lt. Gen. Rudd did not know to do that. Instead, he revealed he wasn’t even conversant with the issue. Not a good look at the hearing – and not very reassuring for the American people.

The Project for Privacy & Surveillance Accountability is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to consider whether the Fourth Amendment allows law enforcement to use geofence warrants to retroactively track the movements of everyone in a defined area. These so-called “reverse warrants” involve law enforcement’s request for information from technology companies – like Google, Apple, Snapchat, Lyft, or Uber – that allows them to identify potential suspects in a crime.
 
This case began with a robbery in 2019 of $200,000 from a credit union in Midlothian, Virginia. Detectives soon hit a dead end in a search for suspects. So they served Google with a geofence warrant to provide certain cellphone data for everyone who passed through a circumscribed area around the credit union.
 
As a result, people suspected of no crime had their personal information examined by police. Targets included residents of a nursing home, diners and wait staff at a Ruby Tuesday restaurant, and guests who had checked into a Hampton Inn. The search led to the arrest and guilty plea of one Okello T. Chatrie, who now seeks to exclude this evidence on constitutional grounds.
 
Federal Judge Mary Hannah Lauck noted that because Google logs cellphone users’ location 240 times a day, technology gives police “an almost unlimited pool from which to seek location data” in a broad area in which everyone has “effectively been tailed.” But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, sitting en banc to review a divided panel decision, held that this geofence warrant did not violate the Fourth Amendment.
 
The U.S. Supreme Court is now set to take up this question. In our brief, we are telling the Court that such dragnet surveillance is fundamentally incompatible with the Fourth Amendment’s core protections. 
 
Geofence Warrants Are “Digital General Warrants”
 
One of the primary abuses that motivated the Founders to create the Fourth Amendment was the use in colonial times of general warrants – broad search authorizations that allowed the King’s agents to rummage through private lives and property without individualized suspicion. Geofence warrants are their modern equivalent.
 
Instead of naming a person or place to be searched based on probable cause, geofence warrants similarly authorize the government to sift through massive location databases to identify people who might be worth investigating.
 
PPSA told the court that these warrants invert the constitutional order – everyone becomes a suspect first, and probable cause, if it appears at all, comes afterward.
 
The Supreme Court’s Carpenter Decision Was Not a Narrow Exception
 
Lower courts have struggled to apply the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Carpenter v. United States (2018), which held that people have a reasonable expectation of privacy in long-term cellphone location records, even when those records are held by a third party. In Chatrie, the Fourth Circuit treated Carpenter as a narrow exception limited to long-term tracking of a single suspect. PPSA demonstrates that this take misreads the case entirely. 
 
Carpenter reaffirmed a broader principle: Fourth Amendment protections must preserve the level of privacy that existed at the nation’s founding, even as technology evolves. The fact that data is held by a third party – or that the government demands only a “slice” of a much larger tracking database – does not erase reasonable expectations of privacy. A two-hour window into a comprehensive location history can still reveal intensely private information – where someone worships, seeks medical care, attends political meetings, or simply lives their daily life.
 
PPSA is telling the Court that the privacy concerns raised by geofence warrants are even more severe than those in Carpenter, because they involve mass surveillance of unknown and unsuspected individuals. This is not targeted policing. It is suspicionless data mining.
 
Your Privacy Rights Depend on Where You Live
 
Courts across the country are sharply divided on this issue. The Fourth and Eleventh Circuits have suggested that geofence searches may not even trigger the Fourth Amendment. By contrast, the Fifth Circuit has correctly recognized that geofence warrants are unconstitutional in nearly all circumstances because they lack particularity and probable cause.
 
That split leaves Americans’ privacy rights dependent on geography, and in the case of Texas, whether state or federal proceedings are involved. PPSA urges the Supreme Court to step in now, before this powerful surveillance tool becomes permanently normalized.
 
The Constitution Must Keep Up with Technology
 
As PPSA warns, geofence warrants are only the beginning. We told the High Court:
 
“Fourth Amendment protections are not categorically lost when a person shares or stores his data with a third party while maintaining reasonable expectations and assurances of privacy. The Court should …  prevent a contrary understanding of Carpenter from continuing to erode Americans’ privacy – especially now, as third-party storage becomes more ubiquitous and artificial intelligence becomes powerful enough to piece together intimate information from seemingly innocuous details about a target’s life.”
 
The data that this practice puts at risk is not limited to location. The government has used other forms of these “reverse search warrants” to extract other private data, such as identifying anyone who has searched for a specific phrase or forcing commercial genealogy companies to allow access to their DNA databases.
 
Advances in artificial intelligence already allow law enforcement to infer locations from photos and videos, even when no geolocation data is attached. Without firm constitutional limits, today’s location dragnet could become tomorrow’s visual surveillance dragnet.
 
The Fourth Amendment’s precise wording is designed to prevent unchecked surveillance. PPSA’s calls on the Supreme Court to reaffirm that Americans do not surrender their constitutional rights simply by carrying a cellphone.

​India is big on surveillance. In fact, you could call it a global surveillance innovator. Case in point: Sanchar Saathi, a state-authored spy app the government quietly demanded be pre-installed on all phones sold to its population of more than 1.4 billion people. Following widespread backlash, the order was rescinded.

The Internet Freedom Foundation called this attempt an effort to convert “every smartphone sold in India into a vessel for state-mandated software that the user cannot meaningfully refuse, control, or remove.”

India’s privacy policies rank among the world’s lowest, surpassed in most surveys only by the usual suspects, including China and Russia. Speaking of Russia, last August it mandated the pre-installation of the Kremlin’s Messenger Max app on every phone and tablet sold. So, if anything, India has joined the race for last place.

Lest we gloat, however, while India is third from last, the United States is seventh from last. Fully 40 countries outrank us (Ireland, France, and Portugal are among the best-rated nations). All of this “matters for the U.S.,” warns Rana Ayyub in The Washington Post, “because the underlying pressures are strikingly familiar.” Those pressures are manifold and include the following (with links to recent examples of each):
​

• Government purchases of data
  
  
• Facial recognition technology
  
  
• License plate readers
  
  
• The absence of a comprehensive federal privacy law
  
  
• Warrantless surveillance in violation of the Fourth Amendment

India is a mirror for our democracy – “a preview,” to quote Ayyub again, “of the political, social, and democratic costs of letting state access to digital infrastructure expand unchecked.”

A debate about whether or not to place meaningful checks on Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act looms this spring. It may be our last chance to begin reclaiming our Founders’ original defense of privacy – what Justice Louis Brandeis would eventually label the “right to be let alone.”
​
It may already be too late for India. It is not too late for us.

​School prepares students for the world of work by instilling discipline, the ability to manage a schedule and prioritize, to solve problems with curiosity and teamwork… and to become accustomed to always being under the watchful eye of the American surveillance state.
 
Public schools use AI software like Gaggle to scrutinize the emails, online chats, and online searches students make on school equipment. Joe Wilkins of Futurism recounts the ordeal reported by Lesley Mathis, a mother in Tennessee, whose eighth-grade daughter was “arrested, interrogated, strip-searched, and held in jail for a night, over some teasing online.”
 
What was this student’s offense?
 
Wilkins: “Specifically, the student’s friends had heckled her about her ‘Mexican’ complexion, even though she has a different ancestry. ‘On Thursday we kill all the Mexico’s,’ [sic] the eighth-grader quipped back.”
 
Was the remark stupid, tasteless, and uncalled for? Yes, yes, and yes. But, as Wilkins writes, “it was clearly a bit of eighth-grade immaturity boiling over, not an actionable threat.” A school counselor would have seen this for what it was. AI did not.
 
“It made me feel like, is this the America we live in?” Mathis said. “And it was this stupid, stupid technology that is just going through picking up random words and not looking at context.” But this was in keeping with Tennessee’s zero-tolerance law requiring any threat of mass violence against a school to be reported immediately.
 
For its part, Gaggle’s CEO Jeff Patterson told The Milwaukee Independent that in this case the school did not use Gaggle the way it is intended. “I wish that was treated as a teachable moment, not a law-enforcement moment,” Patterson said.


It is understandable – given how this nation is regularly traumatized by school shootings – why Tennessee has embraced such a standard. But when the filters are set so wide, and the reactions to infractions so extreme, it is hard to justify such a system on the basis of public safety as well as free speech.

Schools are learning, slowly, to put up guardrails against overreaction, but only after hard bumps into reality. Consider the policy of Philadelphia schools, which in 2010 allowed students to take school laptops home. None of these students were told that when opened, their laptops would snap an image of them at home – often in their bedrooms – every 15 minutes. One student, 15-year-old Blake Robbins, was accused by his school of being involved with illegal drugs on the basis of what his laptop had recorded. This charge was based on images of Blake lying on his bed, popping fruit-flavored candy into his mouth. Schools have since been taught by public backlash that watching a student in his bedroom is illicit. But privacy-infringing technology continues. It is legal for schools to monitor students’ public social-media posts and online activity made on students’ own devices and on their own time.
 
All of which prepares America’s public-school students for the new American workplace. In many offices, active surveillance of employees extends from the parking lot to the workstation, to the breakroom. Employers not only use technology to scrutinize employees’ search histories. They also use sensors to monitor “desk attendance,” and to follow employees as they move from office to office, on their breaks, and even – in some states – into the bathroom.

Nicole Kobie of ITPro reports that one in five office workers are now being monitored by some kind of activity tracker. She also reports surveys that tracked employees are 73 percent more likely to distrust their employer, and twice as likely to be job-hunting as those who are not tracked in their workplace.
 
In California, Assembly Bill 1331 would have barred monitoring in employee-only areas such as break rooms and locker rooms. The bill, which would have fined employers $500 per violation, recently died in the California State Senate.
 
There is likely a human cost – and thus a cost in learning at school and productivity at work – when surveillance records a person’s every move and utterance – all initially judged by artificial intelligence that lacks nuance and social intelligence. Such systems are not only Orwellian; they are also destructive of the trust that is needed for effective teamwork, whether between teacher and student, or employer and employee. 
 
Consider the story of Olivia Stober, in her interview with CBS News, who compared her old retail job – where her every interaction with customers was monitored and critiqued by her employer – with her new job, where she is a trusted employee and the cameras are aimed only at the establishment’s front door.
 
Unlike Stober, today’s students are being inured to constant surveillance as they graduate from classrooms to workplaces under the watchful eye of those who claim to only have our best interests at heart.

​PPSA has long warned that allowing federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies to purchase Americans’ personal digital data from data brokers would build a surveillance state. Now the federal government has put in place the most effective tools to activate that surveillance state in America.
 
This is the natural consequence of two technologies purchased by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Whether you believe ICE’s approach to mass deportations is necessary, or an exercise in cruelty, there is no question that what ICE is doing with technology is guaranteed to transform the whole balance between the federal government and its citizenry. It is deploying two forms of surveillance without a warrant that can track people to meetings with friends, their place of work, and homes, their houses of worship, while also drawing on data gleaned from social media to compile dossiers on Americans’ beliefs and personal associations. In using these technologies, ICE often doesn’t know if the target is an American citizen or someone who is not lawfully in this country.
 
Joseph Cox of 404 Media, in his most recent blockbuster revelation, details the consequences of two technologies purchased from a company called Penlink.
 
One such technology is Webloc, which allows ICE to draw a rectangle, circle, or polygon around a portion of a city and pick out smartphones of interest. Cox writes that “they can get more details about that particular phone, and, by extension, its owner by seeing where else it has traveled both locally and across the country. Users can click a route feature which shows the path the device took.”
 
Webloc’s surveillance relies on exploiting code in ordinary apps on our phones, like games and weather apps, that track our location. The rest comes from data brokers that sell our private information through real-time bidding. In the digital age, we are all standing on the digital auction block.
 
Another Penlink technology, called Tangles, is a social media monitoring product that can take an image of a person’s face on the street, identify that person, locate that person’s social media feeds, and produce a “sentiment analysis” from that target’s posts. At a glance, the government will have a file on your beliefs.
 
These new government capabilities should worry conservatives, libertarians, and MAGA supporters, as well as liberals and progressives. The effectiveness of such technologies makes it inevitable that it will spread beyond ICE to the FBI, IRS, and other agencies, as the government works to break down the traditional data silos between agencies. They are sure to be used against Americans by administrations of both parties.
 
Webloc and Tangles cost only a few million dollars – a rounding error for the federal government. As these capabilities expand and become daily practice, the constitutional balance of government by the consent of the governed – based on the Fourth Amendment’s requirement for a probable cause warrant – will inevitably give way to authoritarian control.
 
Only Congress can stop this. As the surveillance debate heats up ahead of the reauthorization of FISA Section 702 in April, Congress must urgently use that debate to pass a bill or an amendment that will restrict the currently unrestricted purchasing of Americans’ data by the government.
 
As an old Kenny Loggins rock song put it, “make no mistake where you are, your back’s to the corner … stand up and fight.” Let Congress know it is not acceptable for federal agencies to buy our private and sensitive data without a warrant.

​Michael Moore is a retired public-school teacher living in San Francisco. Nearly every day, as he drives to the store, to his sons’ schools, or to meet friends and family, his movements are watched and recorded at every turn. But he is not being tailed by a private detective or by the police.

Moore, like every other driver in San Francisco, is being tracked because he must navigate through the city’s network of almost 500 automated license plate readers (ALPRs).

These devices, operated by the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD), constitute a major link in the national surveillance network that the vendor Flock Safety is providing to state and local law enforcement. Moore has had enough. At the end of December, he filed a class action lawsuit in a federal courtroom on his behalf and on behalf of his fellow San Franciscans against the city and its police department over this continuous violation of their Fourth Amendment rights.

In his suit, Moore states that Flock ALPRs “make it functionally impossible to drive anywhere in the City without having one’s movement tracked, photographed, and stored in an AI-assisted database that enables the warrantless surveillance of one’s movements.”

Here are some of the topline revelations from Moore’s lawsuit:

Suspiciousness surveillance: Of the over 1 billion license plate scans collected by 82 agencies nationwide in 2019, “99.9 percent of this surveillance data was not actively related to any criminal investigation when it was collected.”

Creates “vehicle fingerprints”: “When Flock Cameras capture an image of a car, Flock’s software uses machine learning to create what Flock calls a ‘Vehicle Fingerprint.’ The ‘fingerprint’ includes the color and make and model of the car and any distinctive features, like an anti-Trump bumper sticker or roof rack. Flock’s software converts each of those details into text and stores them into an organized database.”

Tracks social networks: “Flock provides advanced search and artificial intelligence functions that SFPD officers can use to output a list of locations a car has been captured, create lists of cars that have visited specific locations, and even track cars that are seen together.”

Data stored indefinitely: “The data that Flock Cameras collect belong to the SFPD but Flock retains data on a rolling 30-day basis. Nothing, however, prevents the SFPD or its officers from downloading and saving the data for longer than SFPD’s 365-day retention period.”

Flock doesn’t just see and record – it thinks and analyzes:

“ALPR technology is a powerful surveillance tool that is used to invade the privacy of individuals and violate the rights of entire communities. ALPR systems collect and store location about drivers whose vehicles pass through ALPR cameras’ fields of view, which, along with the date and time of capture, can be organized by a database that develops a driver profile revealing sensitive details about where individuals work, live, associate, worship, protest and travel.”

Moore’s lawsuit poses a profound constitutional question: Can a city turn every resident into a perpetual suspect simply for driving on public roads?
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The Fourth Amendment was written to forbid dragnet surveillance untethered to suspicion, warrants, or individualized cause. Yet San Francisco has quietly constructed a system that records nearly every movement of its citizens, not because they are suspected of wrongdoing, but because technology makes it easy. If this practice is allowed to stand, the right to move freely without government monitoring may become a relic – honored in theory, but surrendered in practice to cameras, algorithms, and convenience.