AMERICA'S SURVEILLANCE STATE: EVERYTHING, EVERYWHERE, ALL AT ONCE.

• Author: Price, David

The rapid growth of surveillance in the United States brings new threats to our independence, right to dissent, privacy, and hopes for democracy. During the last two decades, a convergence of national security and corporate metadata harvesting has brought new technologies that make our movements, discourse, and politics easily trackable--and with developments in artificial intelligence, increasingly predictable.

Post-9/11 shifts in governmental surveillance and public acceptance of the collection of broad types of metadata continue to shape American lives more than two decades later. The history of public attitudes toward surveillance during the last century shows the American public once strongly opposed governmental wiretaps and mail-monitoring programs. These attitudes were so strong during the 1930s that polls showed solid majorities opposed government wiretaps, even for kidnappers and other known criminals.

Different crises brought some short-lived changes in attitudes. World War II saw increasing acceptance of surveillance, while certain Cold War periods prompted more tolerance for "national security" concerns. But largely, Americans remained skeptical of government surveillance.

The mid-1970s saw significant efforts to limit state surveillance powers, after revelations in the 1960s and 1970s about Defense Department, CIA, and FBI surveillance abuses. These abuses included political surveillance under the FBI's COINTELPRO program, CIA spying on anti-war Americans in Operation CHAOS, and a vast U.S. Army program that spied on anti-war protests and so-called radicals. The findings of the 1976 Senate Church Committee and the House Pike Committee led to legislation restricting the FBI's ability to infiltrate or monitor political organizations. The CIA's domestic activities were also curtailed, and Congress gained oversight of intelligence agencies.

These restrictions were exactly what the 132-page USA Patriot Act rapidly swept aside. Adopted forty-five days after 9/11, this radical piece of legislation capitalized on the immediate public panic after the attacks. We don't know much about where significant parts of the Patriot Act came from, but we do know it rolled back the remaining safeguards created during the Church Committee era--safeguards that protected domestic political groups from government infiltration, surveillance, and harassment. This launched the era of the new surveillance "normal" in which we now live.

It wasn't that the...