- 13 hours ago
Since the start of the second Trump administration, there's been open debate about whether the United States is descending into a modern high-tech surveillance state. But is there any truth to that? And what can existing surveillance states tell us about where the U.S. might be along the path? Today WIRED takes a deep dive to determine just that.
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00:00Since the start of the second Trump administration, many people have wondered whether the U.S.
00:04is becoming a surveillance state.
00:05But is there any truth to that?
00:07Today we'll dig in.
00:08This is Incognito Mode.
00:17What I think about is a state where the government's tracking or recording of people living in
00:26this state keeps them from doing things, chills their speech.
00:31To me, that's what a surveillance state is.
00:33I think about this idea of a panopticon where perhaps the government isn't watching everything
00:37that everyone's doing, but there's always the potential that you could be watched and
00:41you feel watched all the time because you never know if they're watching and therefore
00:45you have no fundamental sense of privacy.
00:47To me, a surveillance state is a society where the government is fundamentally hostile to
00:52privacy.
00:53I would agree with both of those definitions.
00:55I guess for me, it's a state that has both the capabilities to surveil everyone on a
01:00mass scale and the political will to do so, and that results in impacting people's lives
01:05in meaningful ways.
01:06According to Privacy International, a surveillance state has a number of specific characteristics.
01:11This includes mass surveillance of residents, avoidance of democratic oversight, surveillance
01:16of threats to the state and of threats to the surveillance apparatus itself, operates
01:20in secrecy and vilifies those who protest or resist the surveillance, compels the private
01:25sector to share data on people with the government or even sells data on people to the private
01:30sector, uses surveillance as a solution to social problems, and uses its surveillance powers
01:35beyond their original justification for them.
01:37Why would a state want to impose so much surveillance on its citizens?
01:42It seems like it's creating a lot of work and spending a lot of money to do something that
01:47might not have a lot of benefits to anyone.
01:50I think that, you know, a surveillance state preserves the status quo and makes the powerful more
01:56powerful.
01:57That's what dictators want.
01:59That's what the elites always want in any country, including the U.S., which I think is
02:03why we're asking this question today of whether the U.S. is one of these surveillance states
02:07now, too.
02:09Perhaps the three most common examples are China, North Korea, and Russia.
02:16China has built the most technologically advanced and expansive surveillance apparatus on Earth.
02:20The country has roughly 700 million cameras.
02:23Many are equipped with facial recognition, as well as a system called CityBrain, which uses
02:27AI and data collection for so-called urban management.
02:30The system fuses information from public cameras, cell phones, financial transactions, and even
02:35health and e-commerce information to track citizens in real time.
02:39The system was developed by Alibaba Group, and that's just talking about cameras.
02:43China's government developed the internet and all types of telecommunications to be centralized
02:47in a way that it can surveil pretty much everything everyone does online or over the phone at any time.
02:52China has been developing a digital surveillance state for decades.
02:59That's sort of been a hallmark initiative of their regime is the Great Firewall.
03:05Their model was to build that into all their digital technology, all the infrastructure
03:10of the telecoms, everything from the ground up.
03:14The amount of internet censorship in China is widespread and really obvious.
03:18Popular social media sites are banned in China.
03:20Instead, you have to use social media developed domestically in China, which the government has
03:24a massive amount of control over.
03:25A lot of this might sound similar to what's happening in the US or other Western countries.
03:29But the reason people call China a surveillance state is because its systems were developed with
03:32surveillance in mind from the very beginning.
03:34Just as the open internet was developing across the world, China was building an alternative
03:38version that had tight centralized control that really imposed a lot of limits on what
03:42people could say and do online.
03:43And then there's a true totalitarian state like North Korea, which I think of as the quintessential
03:51surveillance state that actually is not digital at all for most people.
03:54Most people don't even have access to the internet.
03:56Those who do, it's completely entirely surveilled.
03:59Those are mostly elites and government employees.
04:01But then for everyone else, there's a kind of analog surveillance state through informants,
04:05through a whisper network of neighbors snitching on each other and being incentivized to do
04:10so, so that there really is no privacy, or at least that is the intention of the regime of Kim Jong-un.
04:15In North Korea, surveillance enforces loyalty and dissent there can mean imprisonment.
04:19Virtually all aspects of life are under surveillance in North Korea.
04:22Classrooms, workplaces, roads, even homes are subject to surveillance.
04:26It's been reported that as many as 1 in 20 North Koreans participate in the surveillance network,
04:31making privacy virtually non-existent.
04:33In Russia, the surveillance state is really geared toward shutting down dissent,
04:36so much so that human rights advocates call this a cyber gulag.
04:40Authorities scan the internet every day to find photos and videos showing banned content.
04:44They use cameras equipped with facial recognition to identify and track protesters.
04:48Online censorship has expanded drastically with hundreds of thousands of web pages blocked annually.
04:53Russia is more of an example of trying to retrofit and come to that digital surveillance later
05:01and invest the time and the energy retroactively.
05:05But what's interesting to me now is that I think digital technology has potentially evolved to the point
05:11where that is an even lighter lift than ever for a state because of the private sector capabilities that are already in place.
05:21Yeah, I mean, you see this in just kind of the nature of the internet where things are so centralized now.
05:26We have so much internet traffic that goes through Silicon Valley companies, the cloud giants like Amazon and Google.
05:33Retrofitting the surveillance is relatively easy compared to how it might have been in the earlier days of the internet
05:38where everything was much more decentralized.
05:42So there are a lot of elements that make a surveillance state a surveillance state or not.
05:47To try to whittle this down on a scale of one to ten, with ten being North Korea, one being a place that no longer exists in the world, I guess, Antarctica.
05:56Where would you place the United States as a surveillance state or not?
06:00Like a seven.
06:01But I start my surveillance state zone at like a five or a six.
06:06I was going to say a kind of creeping six, but that already puts the US into surveillance state territory by your-
06:12We can have different scales.
06:13I think a five or a six.
06:15I feel like we are more than halfway there and creeping up all the time.
06:20I would put it at about a seven or even an eight because the switch could be flipped pretty easily for all the tools that exist,
06:29all the data that's being collected to be used in a way that we have never imagined would be possible in the United States.
06:37I would amp it up just a little bit because the risk is so obvious in this moment that I think we have to take it very seriously.
06:49Lily, do you consider the US a surveillance state right now?
06:52I think the US has been moving toward becoming a surveillance state for a while.
06:58But to me, that means that the capability exists for it to be classified that way if there was the political will.
07:08And now I think it is starting to fully qualify for that title.
07:14There are lots of groups of people around the US who don't feel comfortable posting what they really think about things on social media anymore.
07:23Many more people talk about, well, if somebody already knows everything that's on my phone anyway, or things like that.
07:29So to me, yes, I think the US is in the transition to becoming one.
07:34Well, I don't want to sound like an apologist for the US government, but I don't think it's maybe helpful to call the US a surveillance state.
07:41Yeah, maybe it is becoming one.
07:43There's a really big difference between the US and a country like China or Russia or God forbid, North Korea.
07:48And the main one to me seems that the US has outsourced surveillance to the private sector in many ways.
07:54I wouldn't call the US a surveillance state so much as maybe a surveillance economy at this point.
07:59We are the world's epicenter of surveillance capitalism.
08:02We practically invented it.
08:03So your phone is constantly being tracked by which cell towers it's connecting to and the crappy mobile games that you have on it that are watching your every move.
08:12But that's not actually the NSA listening to your phone calls in the way that the Ministry of State Security might in China.
08:18The end result might be the same, though.
08:20And there are ways in which I think, to your point, Lily, US government is completely co-opting that private sector surveillance and using it and also dialing up its own surveillance, too.
08:30I guess I agree with both of you in that we're unique in just the level of surveilling we're doing ourselves just by engaging in the digital economy and having phones and being on the Internet all the time.
08:43And we've normalized being tracked, being monitored, that everything we post is public or you can't assume that it's not.
08:49I think we are a surveillance state if you are a vulnerable person.
08:54I think it really depends on who you are and what your vulnerabilities are, and that is going to determine whether you feel like you live in a surveillance state or not.
09:02And I think if you feel perfectly free to say whatever you want to say or anything of that nature, you probably don't feel like you live in a surveillance state.
09:09If you don't feel like you can leave your house because masked agents are going to snatch you or members of your family, you probably feel like you're very much living in a surveillance state.
09:18And that's where we're at right now.
09:19There's a class system within the level of surveillance that we have in the United States.
09:23Yeah, to Andrew's point, we are already seeing what a U.S. surveillance state looks like for the have nots.
09:28We are a have and have not society for undocumented migrants.
09:32Their surveillance by ICE is equivalent to a surveillance state for people who are in the margins of society and are forced into the drug trafficking trade.
09:40The war on drugs remains the source of the vast majority of U.S. government surveillance.
09:45Last year, 80 percent of court authorized wiretaps targeted drug operations, drug dealers.
09:50So that is who is actually in a surveillance state today.
09:54I would say that the rest of us have this luxury of maybe for now pretending that's not happening, but also are being surveilled in our own ways, largely through the for profit services we use.
10:06Part of a state being a surveillance state is the political will to make it such.
10:10And we are seeing an expansion of who is deemed an enemy within the United States and even just declaring the Democratic Party part of a terrorist organization harkens back to the Patriot Act and everything that followed the September 11th attacks and the vast expansion of the actual surveillance state that exists in the United States in the past 24 years.
10:31And right now we're seeing kind of a vast expansion, not just of the technical capabilities, which continue in the background all the time, but in the political will to surveil an increasing number of Americans.
10:41Exactly. If you looked at what Edward Snowden revealed in 2013 and what he said about it, even he was in many cases not actually trying to point to contemporaneous surveillance.
10:51He was warning about the capability for surveillance and he talked about this idea of turnkey tyranny, the capability is there.
10:58And as soon as we have a tyrant in place who wants to exploit those capabilities, we will be in a surveillance state.
11:04The question now is, is that tyrant in the White House?
11:07Well, and part of the definition of privacy protections relates to the idea that privacy has to be preserved, even for people who are doing bad things, but privacy as a right can't be applied selectively to certain groups, it has to be applied to all in order to exist for all.
11:34I think that's true. Moxie Marlinspike, the inventor of the signal encryption app, used to say, yes, the idea of privacy tools is to enable people to break the law in some cases, because that is actually how society evolves.
11:45If people didn't have the privacy to have LGBT relationships when that was illegal in the US, we would never have gay marriage in this country.
11:52So this freedom to push the boundaries of what is not just accepted, but legal is how we have progress in this country.
12:00I think in terms of surveillance being applied because there's bad guys doing bad things and we need to catch them.
12:06That is always the justification initially for surveillance.
12:09But what is also true is that the surveillance never stops there.
12:13It increasingly expands because the authorities can see blind spots or they just think that they're going to have more success in doing whatever their job is if they surveil more and more people.
12:22In prior generations, there was space to have underground movements. Now those spaces are online where they are by default in a panopticon.
12:30I think it's an excellent point that digital technology puts communication into a platform that can easily be surveilled.
12:38And I think Doge's activities and the centralization of all that data in a very quick, casual way without very much oversight was a good example of evolving sentiment or views on privacy.
12:52Historically, the U.S. would have been allergic to that type of data sharing between agencies, state and federal data has always been very separated.
13:03And so the fact that now this administration is grabbing data, combining data from different sources so readily indicates a big shift.
13:15So what are the arguments that the U.S. is a surveillance state or at least becoming one?
13:19The U.S. has a long history of surveillance dating back to at least the 1700s and the creation of slave patrols, which would quash uprisings and track down escaped slaves.
13:28Fast forward to World War one and two, where we saw the beginning of the modern surveillance state, which was primarily used to surveil foreign enemies.
13:34Then we get into the 1950s and the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover monitoring for communists and the whole red scare in the Cold War and the establishment of the NSA.
13:43And then in the 1960s, the surveillance apparatus was turned on anti-war and anti-establishment protesters and other dissident groups.
13:50In the 1980s, we saw the rise of the war on drugs and the surveillance of black and Hispanic communities.
13:55And then there's 9-11 and the passage of the U.S. Patriot Act, which really established the U.S.'s modern surveillance capabilities as we know them.
14:02The culmination of hundreds of years of surveillance are a wide swath of intelligence agencies that engage in surveillance of all types.
14:08The NSA, the CIA, the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, the National Reconnaissance Office, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and many more.
14:16Now, under the second Trump administration, we're seeing surveillance tools historically used for combating serious crime and terrorism used against a widening group of people from undocumented immigrants to the so-called radical left.
14:28The Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, has created a master database that includes information from the Social Security Administration, the IRS, DHS, and even voting records.
14:38Internal memos obtained by Wired show DOGE officials cross-referencing Social Security and IRS data against immigration data to track immigrants in real time.
14:47Oversight offices meant to protect civil rights have been gutted.
14:50The March 2025 executive order instructed agencies to share and consolidate all unclassified data across departments.
14:57One of the big red flags is how close many big tech executives have become with the Trump administration.
15:02These companies have massive amounts of data on pretty much everyone, and we don't know exactly how they're sharing that data with the administration.
15:08So what are the reasons the U.S. isn't a surveillance state?
15:11The first big one is that the U.S. is a democracy.
15:13That gives people the power to decide how much or how little they want to be surveilled, at least in theory.
15:19The U.S. also has laws that limit the government's ability to surveillance own people.
15:23And as powerful as the U.S. presidency is, there are checks and balances in place that limit the ability of the U.S. president to abuse surveillance powers like you might see in North Korea or China.
15:32One of the core elements that makes a country a surveillance state is its political will to use surveillance against its own people.
15:39In the United States, we've seen examples of surveillance powers even being pulled back, which is really rare.
15:44Take, for example, the USA Freedom Act, which was passed in 2015 in response to revelations by Edward Snowden,
15:50who leaked a ton of classified information about the National Security Agency's surveillance of Americans and the world.
15:55That shows the U.S. has the capability of stopping surveillance that might be harmful for its own citizens, even if it has the tools to do so.
16:02And unlike under the regimes in China, Russia and North Korea, Americans still have the ability to debate these issues openly.
16:08This episode is an example of that.
16:10I think, though, that what makes the U.S. different from China or Russia is in part that we have the option to turn on privacy, to seek it.
16:18Tools like Signal or the anonymity tool Tor are legal in the U.S. and available and free.
16:23And Tor, in fact, came from ideas developed in the U.S. government and Signal was initially funded by a U.S. government agency.
16:30That's really different.
16:31Yeah, and I think that really is at the core of why we're having this conversation is that maybe there is a feeling that privilege is imperiled.
16:42This has been Incognito Mode. Until next time.
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