Spying on Americans

Imagine being pulled over on your way to work, handcuffed, and taken to jail. Your crime? Marching in a protest where a government official was humiliated. Cameras hidden throughout the city recorded the crowd, matched faces to names, and issued automated arrest warrants. Artificial intelligence analyzed your image, linked it to your car and workplace, and instructed police where to find you.

This may sound like dystopian fiction, but it’s not. This technology already exists and is rapidly spreading across the United States. As described in a recent NPR article, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has acquired powerful new tools that allow agents to point a smartphone at someone’s face and instantly retrieve personal information from government databases. The Department of Homeland Security is developing 24/7 social media surveillance teams to monitor platforms like Facebook and TikTok, building dossiers on users in real time. Contracts with companies like Israeli-based Paragon Solutions give federal agents the ability to remotely hack into cell phones, granting full access to private communications.

These capabilities are not theoretical. They are operational today, powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) that learns and adapts with each use. Every minute makes the system smarter, faster, and harder to escape. Supporters of this surveillance state insist it’s simply a tool for fighting crime or managing immigration, but once these technologies exist, their purpose can be reassigned in an instant. What is used today to find undocumented immigrants could be used tomorrow to track protesters, journalists, or anyone deemed undesirable by those in power.

Behind this expanding infrastructure is a growing alliance between government and private enterprise. Flock Safety, a surveillance startup valued at $7.5 billion, now operates more than 80,000 AI-powered cameras nationwide. These devices record not only license plates but also vehicle details, like bumper stickers, cracked windshields, and any other distinguishing marks. The collected data flows into vast networks accessible to police and, increasingly, private corporations. Flock’s investors include some of Silicon Valley’s most powerful venture capital firms—Andreessen Horowitz, Tiger Global, and others—many of whom have also funded defense and intelligence contractors like Palantir and Anduril.

Flock’s founder, Garrett Langley, confidently claims his company can “eliminate all crime in America.” In his vision, a perfectly monitored world ensures perfect safety. Yet this dream of a crime-free society comes at a high price: the loss of anonymity, privacy, and ultimately freedom. Langley sees crime as a technical problem to be engineered away, not a social one rooted in inequality and injustice. The technology he helps create can track every car, every face, and every movement, and it is not neutral—it serves whoever holds power. In Missouri, when a county commissioner attempted to remove an unauthorized Flock camera, he was arrested for “tampering with a public utility.” The machinery of surveillance protects itself.

Langley’s fixation on street crime also distracts from where most real crime occurs. The greatest theft in America doesn’t happen in dark alleys but in well-lit corporate boardrooms. The Department of Justice estimates white-collar crimes—fraud, money laundering, embezzlement, securities violations, and corruption—cost Americans between $450 billion and $1.7 trillion annually. Yet no network of cameras or AI systems is being deployed to monitor those who commit these crimes. Instead, the surveillance apparatus targets the powerless: immigrants, low-income communities, political activists, and people going about their business. It assumes ordinary Americans are the threat, while the wealthy, who profit from these tools, remain above suspicion.

This imbalance reflects a deeper rot in American governance. As The Intercept recently reported, there are now two tracks of justice: one for the powerful and one for everyone else. Decades of elite impunity paved the way for this moment, where corporate and political interests are free to manipulate laws while using technology to enforce those same laws against dissenters. Donald Trump’s second administration illustrates the problem—a government that trades influence for donations, rewards loyal corporations with federal contracts, and treats surveillance not as a safeguard but as a weapon of control.

Supporters of mass surveillance often argue that “law-abiding citizens have nothing to fear.” But this logic collapses the moment laws themselves become tools of oppression. If such technology had existed when slavery was legal, or when interracial marriage or union organizing were crimes, it would have been used to enforce those injustices. AI does not question whether a law is just—it simply enforces it. A society that mistakes obedience for order will soon learn that safety and freedom cannot coexist under constant watch.

The reality is that the wealthiest among us are constructing a digital infrastructure for control under a thin veil of security. It protects property, not people. It shields corruption, not democracy. It presumes suspicion, not innocence. And it conditions ordinary Americans to accept a world where every movement, face, and word can be tracked, cataloged, and judged.

Freedom cannot survive under an all-seeing eye. And when safety becomes the excuse for suspicion, liberty becomes the crime.