Snowden Was 12 Years Ago; Post-9/11 Mass Surveillance Never Stopped

Schneier and Cindy Cohn argue that the surveillance regime built after 9/11 has outlived and outgrown its counterterrorism rationale. What began as a wartime shift from targeted tools—individual wiretaps, pen registers—to bulk collection of internet backbone traffic and telephone metadata is now routine domestic policing infrastructure. ICE deploys it against immigrants and protesters, facial recognition scans crowds at venues like Madison Square Garden, and Flock’s automated license plate reader networks blanket public and private roads, enabling cross-jurisdiction tracking that has reportedly been used to follow people seeking out-of-state abortions.

The engine behind all of this is the private sector. Because surveillance is the internet’s core business model, the data that Google, Facebook, telecoms, and location brokers amass for profit becomes a ready-made supply for government. Increasingly that access skips legal process entirely: FBI Director Kash Patel told Congress the bureau buys Americans’ data from brokers and plans to keep doing so. As collection scales and AI sharpens the analysis, the reach of both corporate and state surveillance compounds.

The authors stress that the intelligence community has never produced a real cost-benefit accounting—no proof these programs stopped attacks that targeted methods couldn’t, and NSA success stories tend to collapse under scrutiny. Legal pushback has trimmed the edges (the Second Circuit rejected the Section 215 phone-records theory, the USA Freedom Act ended indiscriminate bulk collection, the NSA halted Upstream content searches), but Section 702 mass collection persists—slated to run into spring 2027 even after nominal expiration—and the Fourth Amendment protections meant to keep Americans secure are eroding as the practice spreads.