Big Brother has always been watching. That part is not new. What is new is that we stopped fighting it. We invited it in. We paid for it. We hung it on the front of our houses. We carry it in our pockets. We agreed to the terms and conditions. We pre ordered the next version. And now the government, the same government that is supposed to follow the rules and largely is not, is buying the data we generated about ourselves from private companies and using it to track, detain, and disappear people in real time. The surveillance state in 2026 is not coming. It already arrived. And we helped move it in.
Start with what is in your hand right now. Your phone is the most sophisticated tracking device ever built and you paid a thousand dollars for it. The GPS is on. The microphone is on. The camera is on. The accelerometer knows when you are walking, driving, sitting still, sleeping. Every app you opened today sent some piece of that data to a data broker. The weather app. The flashlight app. The mapping app. The free game your kid downloaded. Each one quietly selling your location, your contacts, your habits, your purchases, your search history, your relationship status, your medications, your everything, to companies that aggregate it and sell it to whoever is buying. Advertisers. Insurance companies. Hedge funds. And now, federal law enforcement.
In March of this year NPR reported what civil liberties lawyers have been screaming about for years. Federal agencies, including ICE, the FBI, the DEA, and the IRS, are circumventing the Fourth Amendment by simply purchasing the data they would otherwise need a warrant to obtain. A 2023 investigation found the government had spent at least 1.4 billion dollars buying personal data from commercial brokers. That number has only grown. The Constitution says the government cannot tap your phone without a warrant. So instead they buy your phone’s location data from a broker for a few thousand dollars and learn everything the wiretap would have told them, without a judge ever knowing. Same information. No warrant. No notification. No recourse.
Then look at your front door. Ring cameras, owned by Amazon, sit on millions of American homes. Marketed as a way to see who is at the door. Functioning as a distributed surveillance network that police departments and federal agencies tap into routinely. In 2022 Senator Ed Markey forced Amazon to admit that Ring had handed over customer footage to police 11 times that year alone without the customer’s permission, under what Amazon called emergency exceptions. In October 2025 Ring announced a partnership with Flock Safety, the AI camera and license plate reader company whose network is already used by ICE, the Secret Service, and the Navy. The partnership would have piped Ring footage from millions of American front porches directly into a database that federal immigration agents can search. After public outcry Ring canceled the Flock deal in February 2026. They kept their separate partnership with Axon, a competing surveillance vendor that does the exact same thing. The deal got walked back. The infrastructure did not.
The infrastructure is the point. Once you build the pipeline, the pipeline finds a use. License plate readers on every corner. Facial recognition cameras in every store. Doorbell cameras on every porch. Wi-Fi sniffers in every shopping mall. Stingrays simulating cell towers and scooping up phone signals from anyone within range. Drones overhead. Satellites overhead. Your car’s onboard computer sending your driving data to your insurance company who sells it to a broker who sells it to a fusion center who sells access to ICE. Your smart TV listening to what plays in your living room. Your Alexa hearing every word that happens within 20 feet of it. Your smart watch recording your heart rate, your sleep, your steps, your stress levels, your menstrual cycle. The Bluetooth in your earbuds pinging every device in your vicinity. The chip in your debit card logging every purchase. The toll transponder in your car logging every highway. The MetroCard logging every train. The ID scan at every building. The biometric at every airport. There is no offline anymore. There is barely a private anymore. There is only the data you generate constantly and the people who buy it.
And the people buying it right now are not subtle. The Department of Homeland Security under this administration has spent the last 12 months building what the Brookings Institution called an unprecedented surveillance apparatus aimed at immigrants and the people who criticize the agency hunting them. The Washington Post documented in detail the tools ICE is using as part of the mass deportation push, including facial recognition technology, automatic license plate readers, cell-site simulators, phone location databases, and digital forensic tools to hack into phones and laptops, much of it funded by the bill Trump signed in July 2025. In January 2026 two American citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, were shot and killed by DHS agents during an ICE surge in Minneapolis. In February DHS was reported to be issuing administrative subpoenas to big tech companies to identify online users who had been critical of ICE. Not criminals. Critics. People who posted opinions. Citizens exercising the most basic free speech right in the country. The agency that was supposed to be following the Constitution decided the Constitution was a guideline.
A new tool called ELITE is being used by ICE to flag vehicles for stops without traditional warrants. In Oregon, where state law prohibits local police from cooperating with ICE, federal agents used ELITE to identify a Mexican farmworker’s vehicle as she drove her son and nephew to work in the fields before dawn. They pulled her over. They detained her. They did it without a warrant. According to reporting on the program, roughly 80 percent of ICE detentions in Oregon last year were warrantless at-large arrests of people with no criminal records. The system does not need a warrant because the system is built to make warrants optional. The data was already there. The pipeline was already built. Some of it by the government. Most of it by us.
This is the part that hits hardest for Black America. We have been the test population for every surveillance technology this country has ever rolled out. Cointelpro on civil rights leaders. Cameras on every corner in every Black neighborhood while the suburbs got privacy. Stop and frisk. Gang databases that quietly added the names of teenagers based on what neighborhood they grew up in. Facial recognition trained on data sets that misidentify Black faces at rates several times higher than white faces, leading to wrongful arrests of Black people who happened to look like somebody else in a grainy photo. Predictive policing software that sent more cops to the same Black blocks year after year, generating more arrests, which fed back into the algorithm to justify sending more cops. The tools that are being used on immigrants today were tested on us first. The pipeline that is being aimed at ICE critics today was aimed at Black activists for 50 years before that. The surveillance state did not appear in 2025. It just got new targets and a louder press release.
What changed is the speed and the scale. AI is now reading every license plate on every road. Algorithms are now flagging social media posts in real time. Voice recognition is now identifying people on phone calls automatically. Facial recognition is now matching faces in crowds against federal databases in seconds. The Brennan Center, the ACLU, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and roughly 130 civil society organizations are warning that the next phase, AI powered mass surveillance trained on the data we have been giving away for 20 years, is what makes this moment fundamentally different from anything that came before. Big Brother used to need an army of agents to listen to a phone call. Now he needs a server farm and a contract with a data broker.
There are bills sitting in Congress right now that would close some of these holes. The Government Surveillance Reform Act would require the government to get a warrant before buying American data from brokers. The Surveillance Accountability Act, introduced in April by Republicans Thomas Massie and Lauren Boebert, would treat data held by third parties the same as data held in your home, which would shut down the warrantless data purchase loophole entirely. Senator Ron Wyden has been asking the FBI director on the record to commit to not buying Americans’ location data and has gotten no commitment. The bills will get watered down. The reform will get delayed. The next reauthorization fight is coming. The companies making billions selling our data will fight every line. The agencies using that data to hit their deportation quotas will fight every line. The technology will keep accelerating. The infrastructure will keep growing.
So what do you actually do. Lock your phone settings down. Turn off location services for every app that does not need it. Turn off ad tracking. Use a password manager. Use end to end encrypted messaging like Signal. Use a VPN. Use a browser with real privacy protections. If you have Ring or any other smart doorbell, store the footage locally and use end to end encryption. Read the terms before you agree. Know what you are signing up for. Vote in every election like your civil liberties depend on it because they do. Support the organizations actually fighting this, the ACLU, the EFF, the Brennan Center, the Center for Democracy and Technology. Donate. Show up. Make noise.
But understand the bigger truth. We cannot opt our way out of a surveillance state we already agreed to. Individual privacy hygiene matters. It also does not stop a 1.4 billion dollar government data buying program. It does not stop a federal agency from subpoenaing a tech company for your information. It does not stop AI from reading the license plate on your car as you drive to work. The fix is structural. The fix is legal. The fix is constitutional. The fix is making the government follow the rules it was always supposed to follow, and making the companies that built this infrastructure liable for what it does to people. The fix is collective. The fix is political. The fix is loud.
Big Brother has always been watching. The difference now is that we built the camera, we paid for the camera, we mounted the camera on our own house, and we agreed to share the footage with anyone who asks. The good news is that what we built, we can also dismantle. The harder news is that nobody is coming to do it for us.
Stay aware. Stay loud. And check your settings.
