President Donald Trump has vowed to target his political enemies, and specialists have warned that he might weaponize U.S. intelligence agencies to conduct mass surveillance on his targets.
Mass surveillance is the widespread monitoring of civilians. Governments usually goal particular teams – corresponding to non secular minorities, sure races or ethnicities, or migrants – for surveillance and use the data gathered to “contain” these populations, for instance by arresting and imprisoning folks.
We’re experts in social control, or how governments coerce compliance, and we specialize in surveillance. Primarily based on our experience and years of analysis, we anticipate Trump’s second White Home time period could usher in a wave of spying towards folks of shade and immigrants.
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Spreading ethical panic
Trump is already actively deploying a key tactic in increasing mass surveillance: inflicting moral panics. Ethical panics are created when politicians exaggerate a public concern to govern actual fears folks could have.
Take Trump on crime, for instance. Regardless of FBI information displaying that crime has been dropping across the U.S. for many years, Trump has repeatedly claimed that “crime is out of control.” Stoking concern makes folks extra prone to again harsh measures purportedly concentrating on crime.
Trump has additionally labored to create an ethical panic about immigration.
He has mentioned, for instance, that “illegal” migrants are taking American jobs. In reality, solely 5% of the 30 million immigrants within the workforce as of 2022 were unauthorized to work. And in his Jan. 25, 2025, presidential proclamation on immigration, Trump likened immigration on the southern border to an “invasion,” evoking the language of war to explain a inhabitants that features many asylum-seeking women and children.
The second step in inflicting ethical panics is to label racial, ethnic and religious minorities as villains to justify increasing mass surveillance.
Constructing on his rhetoric about crime and immigration, Trump incessantly connects the 2 points. He has mentioned that migrants homicide as a result of they’ve “bad genes,” echoing beliefs expressed by white supremacists. Throughout the 2016 marketing campaign, Trump’s coinage “bad hombre” invoked stereotypes of harmful migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border to steal jobs and promote medication.
The president has equally linked Black communities with crime. At an August 2024 rally in Atlanta, Georgia, Trump referred to as the majority-Black metropolis “a killing field.” The month prior, he mentioned the same thing about Washington, D.C.
Major targets
Historical past reveals that within the U.S. ethical panics are probably to focus on Latino, Indigenous and Black communities as a precursor to surveillance and subjugation.
Within the 18th century, Colonial politicians handed laws likening the Indigenous folks of the American colonies to “savages” and passed laws figuring out Indigenous tribes as political enemies to be assimilated. If “killing the Indian” out of individuals didn’t work, they had been to be tracked down and removed from the population through imprisonment or death.
One other early type of ethical panics escalating to spying and mass surveillance had been southern slave patrols, which emerged within the early 1700s after pro-slavery politicians proclaimed that Black escapees would terrorize white communities. Slave patrols tracked down and captured not solely Black escapees but in addition free Black folks, whom they offered into bondage. Additionally they imprisoned any particular person, enslaved or not, suspected of sheltering escapees.
As soon as a gaggle of individuals turns into the topic of ethical panics and focused for presidency surveillance, our analysis reveals, the consequences are felt for generations.
Black and Indigenous communities are nonetheless arrested and incarcerated at disproportionately high rates in contrast with their percentage in the U.S. population. This even affects children, with Indigenous women imprisoned at 4 instances the speed of white women, and Black women at greater than twice the speed of white women.
Low-tech strategies
These Twenty first-century numbers mirror many years of focused surveillance.
Within the Nineteen Fifties, the FBI below Director J. Edgar Hoover created the counter-intelligence packages COINTELPRO, allegedly for investigating communists and radical political teams, and the Ghetto Informant Program. In apply, each packages broadly focused folks of shade. From Martin Luther King Jr. to U.S. Rep. John Lewis, Black activists had been recognized as a risk, spied on, investigated and typically jailed.
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President Lyndon Johnson’s “war on crime,” a sweeping set of federal modifications that militarized native police in urban communities, continued this mass surveillance within the Sixties. Later got here the “war on drugs,” which an aide to President Richard Nixon later mentioned was designed explicitly to target Black people.
In subsequent many years, politicians would fire up new ethical panics about Black communities – remember the “crack babies” who by no means actually existed? – and use concern to justify police surveillance, arrests and mass incarceration.
These early examples of mass surveillance lacked the expertise that allows spying in the present day, corresponding to CCTV and hacked laptop computer cameras. Nonetheless, previous U.S. administrations have been remarkably efficient at attaining social management by creating ethical panics then deploying mass surveillance to include the “risk.” They enlisted droves of cops, recruited informants to infiltrate teams and locked folks away.
These textbook surveillance strategies are nonetheless routinely used now.
Police fusion facilities
For a lot of Individuals, the time period “mass surveillance” evokes the Division of Homeland Safety, which was based after the 9/11 terrorist assaults. This nationwide company, which kinds a part of a federal intelligence apparatus of greater than 20 companies centered on surveillance, has performed a key position in mass surveillance since 2001, particularly of Muslim Individuals.
But it surely has native assist in the type of police items referred to as fusion centers. These items feed identification info and bodily proof corresponding to video footage to federal companies such because the FBI and CIA, based on a 2023 whistleblower report from Rutgers Regulation Faculty.
The New Jersey Regional Operations Intelligence Center, for instance, is a police fusion heart overseeing New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. It employs superior army expertise to assemble huge quantities of non-public information on folks perceived as potential safety threats. Based on the Rutgers report, these “threats” are extremely concentrated in Black, Latino and Arab communities, in addition to areas with a excessive focus of political organizing, corresponding to Black Lives Matter teams and immigrant support organizations.
The New Jersey police fusion method results in increased arrest rates, based on the report, however there’s no actual proof that it prevents crime or terrorism.
Guantanamo and black websites
Given Trump’s pledges to further militarize border enforcement and expand U.S. jails and prisons, we anticipate an increase in spending on fusion facilities and different instruments of mass surveillance below Trump. The ethical panics he’s been stirring up since 2015 recommend that the targets of presidency surveillance will embrace immigrants and Black folks.
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Generally, victims of mass surveillance go missing.
The Guardian reported in 2015 that Chicago police had been quickly “disappearing” folks at native and federal police “black sites” since a minimum of 2009. At these clandestine jails, below the guise of national security, officers questioned detainees with out attorneys and held them for as much as 24 hours with none outdoors contact. Most of the victims had been Black.
One other notorious black web site was housed at the Guantanamo Bay military base in Cuba, the place the CIA detained and secretly interrogated suspected terrorists following the Sept. 11 terrorist assaults.
Trump appears to be reviving the Guantanamo black web site, flying about 150 Venezuelan migrants to the bottom since January 2025. It’s unclear whether the U.S. government can lawfully detain migrants there overseas, but deportation flights proceed.
The administration has not shared the identities of many of the people imprisoned there.
