A Surveilled Country Is Not a Free Country

If you currently live in the United States, I regret to inform you that you no longer live in a free country. You are no longer a free person. Actually, you haven’t been for quite some time.

This may sound harsh with this being the year America celebrated her big Two-Five-Oh. But think about it. Think back to the last time you drove from your home to the grocery store. How many automatic license plate readers did you pass along the way? How many apps logged your route? What information did your car collect about you and anyone who may have accompanied you? 

When you finally arrived at the store, surely there were cameras, but were they simply there to help catch and deter shoplifters — maybe help police investigate a more serious crime on the off chance one were to occur? Or were those cameras serving other purposes? Was the grocery store implementing facial recognition to deliver you targeted ads when you checked out? Did those cameras automatically link to some local real-time crime center, enabling law enforcement to track you from one location to the next, even if you traveled on foot?

Although your routine trip to pick up eggs and milk may not have been recorded for posterity by all of these technologies, it was by no means a private affair. Nor was your most recent trip to church, a political rally, a protest, or your doctor’s office. And this doesn’t even touch any of the many items in your home that have come to serve as data collection devices.

Now, reflect on this for a moment, then ask yourself: “How much of this did I really consent to?” 

Yes, you chose to drive a car. You chose to have a cell phone. You chose to buy food. But did you choose to have countless government and corporate bodies monitor your every move? Do you really feel like you consented to an arrangement in which any entity with the financial and technological means to record and analyze every detail of your life, from the trivially mundane to the deeply intimate, holds the right to do so? If not, how much do you feel you could demand that they stop?

To return to the initial assertion, if the government and an endless number of corporations can treat the details of your life as some natural resource to be mined, assessed, and sold, and you have no meaningful way to opt out, can you really say you’re a free person? I mean, no, you’re not a slave or a prisoner. But you’re not exactly free either.

There’s no great analogy, but, at best, maybe you’re like a wild animal, chipped by some field ethologists, looking to study your natural behavior, or a teenager, whose parents gave you a fair amount of freedom after school and on weekends but insist you have the family tracking app turned on. At worst, maybe you’re more like a citizen of some alternate version of the erstwhile DDR if the Stasi were a little more hands-off and had way better tech. But again, you’re not exactly free.

Accepting Subservience

For over a decade, most Americans have sort of accepted this way of life, albeit perhaps in less bleak terms, thinking of it as inevitable or a natural consequence of modern life. Many even learned to bleat the slogans of those that have declared the intimate details of their lives, company property, and public domain: No one has a reasonable expectation of privacy in public. No one’s forcing you to carry a cell phone. The Fourth Amendment protects you from government surveillance, but not corporate surveillance. You don’t actually want the government telling private companies how they can do business, do you? You’ve already given up so much of your privacy to Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google, what does it matter if the government wants to collect some of your data too? If you’re not doing anything wrong, what do you have to worry about?

Over time, these justifications of our subservient place in the surveillance state and the Big Data economy have even assumed an air of common wisdom that preemptively silences objection and meaningful action. Yes, occasionally, you can grumble to a friend your discomfort with Google monitoring you to the extent that it does. However, you also know to refrain from suggesting Google is violating your rights in any way, given that there is a fair chance your friend, in response, will deliver one of the aforementioned maxims with a condescending tone and the tacit addition of “Did you not know this?”

The Swinging Pendulum and the Spirit of ’76

Fortunately though, there have been some signs of hope. Most notably, there has been something of a Spirit of ’76 moment around automatic license plate readers (a.k.a. ALPRs), specifically those manufactured by Flock Safety, a tech company working with law enforcement to create and maintain a searchable database containing a detailed location history of every vehicle in the country. Practically overnight, these cameras went from something of a fringe concern of libertarians and tech journalists to a mainstream source of public outrage.

By summer’s end, several prominent politicians from across the political spectrum even joined the anti-Flock fury with the likes of Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida finding themselves aligned. DeSantis, along with Governor Greg Abbott of Texas, also did their part to rein in ALPRs in their respective states, when and where they could, through executive action.

Additionally, in September, Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) held a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism hearing at which he gathered a victim of a wrongful arrest and roughly two-week detainment downstream of an ALPR placing her vehicle sort of near a crime scene, an Arizona sheriff who second-guessed his county’s use of Flock cameras, a hacker skeptical of whether Flock can secure the trove of data it collects, and reps from for both the ACLU and Institute for Justice, two organizations that have been quite vocal about their opposition to the emerging US surveillance state.

Needless to say, those testifying had some rather unfavorable things to say about Flock Safety. What seemed more significant, though, was that none of the senators present exhibited much volition to come to Flock’s defense. As I wrote previously for the Washington Examiner, both the Democrats and Republicans present understood that tools that could be used to track a woman traveling across state lines to obtain an abortion could just as easily be used to keep tabs on those attending gun shows (and vice versa). They understood something about never-ending government surveillance just doesn’t sit well with the intentions of our Founders.

The only real disagreement between those present, if it could be called a disagreement at all, seemed to be a respectful difference in opinion between the reps from the Institute for Justice and the ACLU regarding whether the use of ALPRs is tolerable as long as policy dictates relatively short data retention periods and a warrant requirement for accessing data or whether the mere existence of the cameras inherently creates opportunities for abuse and ineluctably chills constitutionally protected behaviors.

As Chad Marlow of the ACLU pointed out, “When the public sees a Flock camera, they drive by their third Flock camera in a day, they may not have a copy of the applicable statutory law in their pocket and go, ‘Oh, shoo [the] data retention and data sharing limitations are better.’ Even if they have it, they may not have the confidence [the statutes are] being followed.”

However, perhaps the greatest sign of hope that day, or greatest sign of some kind of attitudinal change or swinging of the pendulum in how our society and its leaders view our relationship with mass surveillance of any sort, was that some Senators made broad declarations about privacy rights that generally would be seen as more consistent with a blog post from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (or maybe ACLU or Institute for Justice) than what most would expect from a prominent, mainstream politician in 2026. 

“If you’re a constitutional scholar, please tell me where the word privacy is in this constitution,” said Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL). “You won’t find it. And yet the courts have found the inference of privacy [in] determinations of things as basic as reproductive choices by couples. So we know that there is some privacy protection.”

Hawley went even further, stating, “This is still the United States of America, and it shouldn’t be that when you walk out your door in the morning, you just have to agree and ascent and accept the fact that you’re going to be on camera morning, noon, and night. You’ll be tracked by anybody and everybody in the world. You’ll have no privacy whatsoever. You’ll be tracked when you take your kids to school and tracked when you go to church and tracked when you go to the grocery store.” 

“My gosh,” he added, “that isn’t the free society that we’ve known. That’s not what the Constitution guarantees.”

Admittedly, I could be wrong or naive, but something about Hawley’s comments suggest they pertained to more than just Flock or ALPRs. There was almost an unspoken recognition that maybe you do — or at least should — have some reasonable expectation of privacy when you go out in public.

A couple weeks earlier, at a press conference concerning ALPRs, DeSantis was even more explicit about his thoughts on society’s current relationship with surveillance and Big Data. Not only did he call for legislation to provide Floridians with greater protections from ALPRs, but also reiterated his call for a broader AI Bill of Rights before criticizing commonplace forms of corporate surveillance through cellphones and apps. (He didn’t quite make it to cars, TVs, and large home appliances, and his AI Bill of Rights does unfortunately create some surveillance issues of its own through likely age-gating requirements to access certain digital technologies, but this is still way better than being lectured, “If you’re not doing anything wrong, what do you have to worry about?”) 

At one point, DeSantis even rebuked the pseudosophisticated maxim that people can just choose to not use a smartphone if they don’t like their apps spying on them, citing some of the difficulties he’s run into following his decision to not have one, then adding, “the notion that somehow you can just totally opt out of where society has gone, that’s really not realistic for most people who are engaged in society.”

Later, DeSantis actually warned how technologies like ALPRs could be used for more general civilian management, noting, “If we had all this around the country when Covid happened, you absolutely would have saw those turned on people who were outside of lockdown orders in California.”

Again, not exactly what you would expect from a mainstream politician in 2026. But here we are: Ron DeSantis suggesting that maybe it is okay for the government to tell a private corporation how it can do business when doing so would allow individuals to maintain some level of privacy in their lives and continue their participation in modern society while also intimating that maybe privacy and freedom are inextricably linked.

Once more, admittedly, I could be wrong or naive, and of course there is a long road ahead to reclaiming the level of privacy that we enjoyed just a decade or two ago, but perhaps cracks are forming in our relationship with surveillance, Big Tech, and Big Data. Perhaps people are second-guessing the bits of common wisdom everyone just sort of accepted for the past decade or more to rationalize our subjugation and cudgel those who question it. Perhaps there is something of a Spirit of ’76 moment going on right now that can extend beyond Flock and ALPRs — and maybe our politicians are taking notice. 

Furthermore, maybe, even if we do not live in a free country today, if we can make the most of this moment, we could someday live in a free country again.