Digital-rights lawyer Cindy Cohn and security expert Bruce Schneier take stock of what 25 years of mass surveillance has done to Americans’ rights.

It began after 9/11, when the US government stopped targeting specific suspects and started collecting everything: phone records, internet traffic, metadata on whole populations. Sold as a defence against terrorism, it never stayed there. Today number-plate cameras blanket ordinary roads, facial recognition has spread to airports and immigration agents, and the phone in your pocket logs your location constantly – data police can often get with barely a request. The FBI now simply buys personal data from brokers.

Each step has chipped away at the Fourth Amendment, which is meant to shield people from searches without individual suspicion. And the tools get misused reliably: officers have used them to track exes and, in one case, a woman suspected of seeking an abortion.

The 2026 Counterterrorism Strategy states openly that powers built for foreign threats will now be aimed at domestic activists, named by their politics. Tools justified by terrorism are being pointed at Americans for what they believe.

Their bottom line: this can’t be fixed piecemeal. They want a simple rule – a warrant required before mass-surveillance data is collected or used – and ask a plain question: can a system that watches everyone, everywhere, sit alongside a free society?

Source: https://www.lawfaremedia.org/