The Surveillance State Is Here — Congress Must Fight Back

(Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

It should shock every American that the United States now ranks among the world’s most heavily surveilled nations — keeping dangerous company with authoritarian regimes like China, Russia, and Iran. How did the land of the free become one of the most watched societies on Earth?

Our Founders designed the Bill of Rights as a fortress against government intrusion. Free speech, freedom of assembly, and protection from warrantless searches were meant to prevent exactly what is now unfolding in the United States: a government that is constantly watching its citizens.

Since 9/11, mass surveillance has been normalized. Cameras are everywhere. Data collection is constant. And few people stop to ask who’s watching, why, and for how long.

There are currently four main pillars of the surveillance state, and Congress has a duty to act to dismantle each of them.

FISA: From Foreign Spying to Domestic Abuse

Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) was originally created to track foreign threats abroad. Today, it has been twisted into a tool for spying on Americans.

Under the Biden administration, the FBI conducted over 3 million queries into a database of information gathered without a warrant in 2021. In 2023, around 278,000 queries spanning multiple years were found to have violated database use rules, according to FISA Court records. Agents batch-searched 19,000 political donors. A National Security Agency (NSA) analyst allegedly........

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