Turning Food Delivery Workers into Spies

​Imagine this scenario: It’s early evening, and you and your special someone are on the couch preparing to binge-watch your favorite streaming show.
 
Ding-dong.
 
You answer the door and, as you hoped, it is the dinner delivery person. He hands you your prepaid, pre-tipped meal and you start to shut the door when the delivery worker puts his foot down, blocking you.
 
He snaps a picture over your shoulder and asks: “Why is the wall over your couch bare? It should have a picture of the Dear Leader. I now have no choice but to report you.”
 
This fantastical scenario of a police state enlisting food delivery workers as auxiliary police is taking place, for real, in the People’s Republic of China, according to disturbing reports from Radio Free Asia.
 
Beijing recently posted a directive: “We will hire a group of online delivery personnel with a strong sense of responsibility to serve as part-time social supervisors and encourage them to take part in grassroots governance through snapshots and snap reports …”
 
Radio Free Asia reports that this program is being expanded in China’s annexed territory of Tibet, where food delivery workers are being recruited to perform “voluntary patrol and prevention work.” In addition, Chinese police are requiring Tibetans to revise their personal passwords on their social media accounts, link them to their personal cellphones and identity cards, and make it all accessible to the government. Police are also stopping Tibetans in Lhasa to check their cellphones for virtual private networks, or VPNs, that allow users to get around the “Great Firewall of China,” the government’s restrictive controls on the internet.
 
We can shake our heads and laugh. But the fundamental principle of coopting private-sector industries for internal surveillance is one that is gaining purchase in our own country. The federal government isn’t so crude as to turn the Domino’s pizza delivery guy into a spy. But federal agencies can extract Americans’ personal data from FISA Section 702, even though this program was enacted by Congress not to spy on Americans, but to surveil foreign threats on foreign soil. Prosecutors in the United States can extract information about witnesses and criminal defendants from telecoms and service providers of emails, cloud computing, and online searches, then gag those same companies with a non-disclosure order, which keeps them from ever informing their customers they were surveilled.
 
The good news is that more and more Members of Congress are awakening to the threat of a home-grown American surveillance state. The recent reauthorization of Section 702 sets up a debate over the reach of this program in early 2026. The House passed a measure called the NDO Fairness Act, which would limit non-disclosure orders, putting the onus on the Senate to follow suit.
 
The field of surveillance is one area in which public-private partnerships can go very wrong. Unlike China, however, America is still a democracy with a Congress that can counter expansive government threats to our privacy.