Has The U.S. Become A Surveillance State?

Since the start of the second Trump administration,

many people have wondered whether the U.S.

is becoming a surveillance state.

But is there any truth to that?

Today, we'll dig in.

This is Incognito Mode.

[suspenseful music]

What I think about is a state

where the government's tracking or recording

of people living in this state keeps them from doing things,

chills their speech.

To me, that's what a surveillance state is.

I think about this idea of a panopticon

where perhaps the government isn't watching

everything that everyone's doing,

but there's always the potential

that you could be watched and you feel watched all the time

because you never know if they're watching,

and, therefore, you have no fundamental sense of privacy.

To me, a surveillance state is a society

where the government is fundamentally hostile to privacy.

I would agree with both of those definitions.

I guess, for me, it's a state that has both the capabilities

to surveil everyone on a mass scale

and the political will to do so,

and that results in impacting people's lives

in meaningful ways.

According to Privacy International,

a surveillance state

has a number of specific characteristics.

This includes mass surveillance of residents,

avoidance of democratic oversight,

surveillance of threats to the state,

and of threats to the surveillance apparatus itself,

operates in secrecy,

and vilifies those who protest or resist the surveillance,

compels the private sector to share data on people

with the government

or even sells data on people to the private sector,

uses surveillance as a solution to social problems,

and uses its surveillance powers

beyond the original justification for them.

Why would a state want to impose

so much surveillance on its citizens?

It seems like it's creating a lot of work

and spending a lot of money to do something

that might not have a lot of benefits to anyone.

I think that, you know, a surveillance state

preserves the status quo

and makes the powerful more powerful.

That's what dictators want.

That's what the elites always want in any country,

including the U.S.,

which I think is why we're asking this question today

of whether the U.S.

is one of these surveillance states now too.

[suspenseful music]

Perhaps the three most common examples

are China, North Korea, and Russia.

China has built the most technologically-advanced

and expansive surveillance apparatus on Earth.

The country has roughly 700 million cameras.

Many are equipped with facial recognition

as well as a system called City Brain,

which uses AI and data collection

for so-called urban management.

The system fuses information from public cameras,

cell phones, financial transactions,

and even health and e-commerce information

to track citizens in real time.

The system was developed by Alibaba Group,

and that's just talking about cameras.

China's government developed the internet

and all types of telecommunications

to be centralized in a way

that it can surveil pretty much everything

everyone does online or over the phone at any time.

China has been developing

a digital surveillance state for decades.

That has sort of been a hallmark initiative

of their regime, is the Great Firewall.

Their model was to build that

into all their digital technology,

all the infrastructure of the telecoms,

everything from the ground up.

The amount of internet censorship in China

is widespread and really obvious.

Popular social media sites are banned in China.

Instead, you have to use social media

developed domestically in China,

which the government has a massive amount of control over.

A lot of this might sound similar

to what's happening in the U.S. or other Western countries,

but the reason people call China a surveillance state

is because its systems were developed

with surveillance in mind from the very beginning.

Just as the open internet was developing across the world,

China was building an alternative version

that had tight, centralized control

that really imposed a lot of limits

on what people could say and do online.

And then there's a true totalitarian state,

like North Korea,

[North Korean soldiers chanting in foreign language]

which I think of as the quintessential surveillance state

that actually is not digital at all for most people.

Most people don't even have access to the internet.

Those who do, it's completely, entirely surveilled.

Those are mostly elites and government employees.

But then for everyone else,

there's a kind of analog surveillance state

through informants,

through a whisper network of neighbors,

snitching on each other and being incentivized to do so,

so that there really is no privacy,

or at least that is the intention

of the regime of Kim Jong Un.

In North Korea, surveillance enforces loyalty,

and dissent there can mean imprisonment.

Virtually, all aspects of life

are under surveillance in North Korea.

Classrooms, workplaces, roads, even homes,

are subject to surveillance.

It's been reported that as many as one in 20 North Koreans

participate in the surveillance network,

making privacy virtually non-existent.

In Russia, the surveillance state

is really geared toward shutting down dissent.

So much so that human rights advocates

call this a cyber gulag.

Authorities scan the internet every day

to find photos and videos showing banned content.

They use cameras equipped with facial recognition

to identify and track protestors.

Online censorship has expanded drastically,

with hundreds of thousands of webpages blocked annually.

Russia is more of an example of trying to retrofit

and come to that digital surveillance later

and invest the time and the energy retroactively.

But what's interesting to me now

is that I think digital technology has potentially evolved

to the point where that is an even lighter lift

than ever for a state

because of the private sector capabilities

that are already in place.

Yeah, I mean, you see this in just kind of the nature

of the internet where things are so centralized now.

We have so much internet traffic

that goes through Silicon Valley companies,

the cloud giants, like Amazon and Google.

Retrofitting the surveillance is relatively easy

compared to how it might've been

in the earlier days of the internet

where everything was much more decentralized.

[suspenseful music]

So there are a lot of elements

that make a surveillance state a surveillance state or not.

To try to whittle this down, on a scale of one to 10,

with 10 being North Korea,

one being a place that no longer exists in the world,

I guess, Antarctica,

where would you place the United States

as a surveillance state or not?

Like a seven,

but I start my surveillance state zone

at, like, a five or a six.

I was gonna say a kind of creeping six,

but that already puts the U.S.

into surveillance state territory

by your definition. We can have

different scales. I think a five or a six.

I feel like we are more than halfway there

and creeping up all the time.

I 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,

all the data that's being collected to be used in a way

that we have never imagined would be possible

in the United States.

I 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.

[dramatic music]

Lily, do you consider the U.S.

a surveillance state right now?

I think the U.S. has been moving

toward becoming a surveillance state for a while,

but, to me, that means that the capability exists

for it to be classified that way

if there was the political will,

and now I think it is starting to fully qualify

for that title.

There are lots of groups of people around the U.S.

who don't feel comfortable posting

what they really think about things on social media anymore.

People talk about,

well, if somebody already knows everything

that's on my phone anyway, or things like that.

So to me, yes,

I think the U.S. is in the transition to becoming one.

Well, I don't wanna sound like an apologist

for the U.S. government,

but I don't think it's maybe helpful

to call the U.S. a surveillance state yet,

maybe it is becoming one.

There's a really big difference

between the U.S. and a country like China or Russia,

or God forbid, North Korea.

And the main one to me seems

that the U.S. has outsourced surveillance

to the private sector in many ways.

I wouldn't call the U.S. a surveillance state

so much as maybe a surveillance economy at this point.

We are the world's epicenter of surveillance capitalism.

We practically invented it.

So 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.

But that's not actually the NSA

listening to your phone calls in the way

that the Ministry of State Security might in China.

The end result might be the same though.

And there are ways in which I think to your point, Lily,

U.S. government is completely co-opting

that private sector surveillance

and using it and also dialing up its own surveillance too.

I guess I agree with both of you

in that we are 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,

and we've normalized being tracked, being monitored,

that everything we post is public,

or you can't assume that it's not.

I think we are a surveillance state

if you are a vulnerable person.

I think it really depends on who you are

and what your vulnerabilities are,

and that is gonna determine whether you feel like you live

in a surveillance state or not.

And 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.

If 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.

And that's where we're at right now.

There's a class system within the level of surveillance

that we have in the United States.

Yeah, to Andrew's point, we are already seeing

what a U.S. surveillance state looks like for the have-nots.

We are a have and have-nots society.

For undocumented migrants,

their 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,

the war on drugs remains the source of the vast majority

of U.S. government surveillance.

Last year, 80% of court-authorized wire taps

targeted drug operations, drug dealers.

So that is who is actually in a surveillance state today.

I would say that the rest of us,

we 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.

Part of a state being a surveillance state

is the political will to make it such,

and 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

hearkens 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.

And 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.

Exactly.

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.

He was warning about the capability for surveillance,

and he talked about this idea of turnkey tyranny.

The capability is there,

and as soon as we have a tyrants in place

who wants to exploit those capabilities,

we will be in a surveillance state.

The question now is, is that tyrants in the White House?

Well, 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,

that 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.

I 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,

and people didn't have the privacy

to have LGBT relationships.

When that was illegal in the U.S.,

we would never have gay marriage in this country.

So this freedom to push the boundaries

of what is not just accepted but legal

is how we have progress in this country.

I think in terms of surveillance being applied

because there's bad guys doing bad things

and we need to catch them,

that is always the justification initially for surveillance.

But what is also true

is that the surveillance never stops there.

It increasingly expands

because the authorities can see blind spots

or they just think that they're gonna have more success

in doing whatever their job is

if they surveil more and more people.

In prior generations,

there are space to have underground movements.

Now those spaces are online

where they are, by default, in a panopticon.

I think it's an excellent point

that digital technology puts communication into a platform

that can easily be surveilled,

and I think DOGE's activities

in 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.

Historically, the U.S. would've been allergic

to that type of data sharing between agencies,

state and federal data has always been very separated,

and so the fact that now this administration

is grabbing data,

combining data from different sources so readily

indicates a big shift.

So what are the arguments that the U.S.

is a surveillance state, or at least becoming one?

The 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.

Fast forward to World War I and II,

where we saw the beginning of the modern surveillance state,

which was primarily used to surveil foreign enemies.

Then we get into the 1950s

and the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover monitoring for communists

and the whole Red Scare and the Cold War

and the establishment of the NSA.

And then in the 1960s,

surveillance apparatus was turned on anti-war

and anti-establishment protestors

and other dissident groups.

In the 1980s, we saw the rise of the war on drugs

and the surveillance of Black and Hispanic communities.

And then there's 9/11

and the passage of the U.S. PATRIOT Act,

which really established

the US' modern surveillance capabilities as we know them.

The culmination of hundreds of years of surveillance

are a wide swath of intelligence agencies

that engage in surveillance of all types,

the NSA, the CIA, the FBI, Department of Homeland Security,

the National Reconnaissance Office,

the Defense Intelligence Agency, and many more.

Now 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.

The 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.

Internal memos obtained by WIRED

showed DOGE officials cross-referencing Social Security

and IRS data against immigration data

to track immigrants in real time.

Oversight offices meant to protect civil rights

have been gutted.

In March, 2025, executive order instructed agencies

to share and consolidate

all unclassified data across departments.

One of the big red flags

is how close many big tech executives

have become with the Trump administration.

These 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.

So what are the reasons the U.S. isn't a surveillance state?

The first big one is that the U.S. is a democracy.

That gives people the power

to decide how much or how little they want to be surveilled,

at least in theory.

The U.S. also has laws that limit the government's ability

to surveil its own people,

and 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.

One of the core elements

that makes a country a surveillance state

is its political will to use surveillance

against its own people.

In the United States, we've seen examples

of surveillance powers even being pulled back,

which is really rare.

Take for example, the USA FREEDOM Act,

which was passed in 2015

in response to revelations by Edward Snowden,

who leaked a ton of classified information

about the National Security Agency's surveillance

of Americans and the world.

That shows the US has the capability

of stopping surveillance that might be harmful

for its own citizens, even if it has the tools to do so.

And unlike under the regimes in China, Russia,

and North Korea, Americans still have the ability

to debate these issues openly.

This episode is an example of that.

I think 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.

Tools like Signal or the anonymity tool Tor

are legal in the U.S. and available and free.

Then Tor, in fact, came from ideas

developed in the U.S. government,

and Signal was initially funded

by a U.S. government agency.

That's really different.

Yeah, 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.

This has been Incognito Mode. Until next time.

[bright music]