Post-9/11 surveillance has made the U.S. less free. Reversing it won’t be easy, advocates say

This story was originally published by Prism. 

The surveillance apparatus created after 9/11 has expanded substantially during the second Trump administration, advocates say, engulfing more individuals, derailing the lives of immigrants, activists, and peaceful protesters, and seriously curtailing freedom of association and freedom of speech.

The U.S. is measurably less free than it was when the government launched its war on terror 25 years ago, according to the most comprehensive global index of civil liberties. 

The most worrisome aspect of this backsliding, advocates and scholars warn, is that reversing the continued expansion of the surveillance apparatus will likely be very difficult.

“I’ve been skeptical about how we can roll these things back and how to push back, because for 25 years, people have accepted [the surveillance state] or even asked for it,” said Fatema Ahmed, the executive director of the Muslim Justice League. “Now it’s impacting every community.”

In response to 9/11, the U.S. created the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in 2002 with the purported goal of identifying “specific” threats from specific terrorists. That is far from the case today.

Islamophobia remains at the core of the surveillance apparatus, Ahmed said. But the terrorist profile is widening.

The Trump administration pledged last year to investigate “violent and terroristic activities” under the umbrella of “anti-fascism,” listing “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity” as well as “extremism on migration, race, and gender” as potential indicators that a person or group will commit an act of violence. Stephen Miller, the administration’s top political adviser, has portrayed anti-government protests as “domestic terrorism and seditious insurrection,” and described the Democratic Party as “a domestic extremist organization.”

“They have been blunt about it: Anyone who opposes their agenda is a terrorist,” Ahmed said.

In August, the administration also designated the anti-genocide groups Palestine Action and Masar Badil, as well as A/I Collective, which provides free digital tools to leftist activists worldwide, as “transnational terrorist organizations.”

“The legacy of 9/11 and everything that has happened since then has created something approximating a surveillance panopticon, certainly for people here in the United States, that is all but inescapable in many ways,” said Patrick Eddington, senior fellow in homeland security and civil liberties at the Cato Institute and author of “The Triumph of Fear: Domestic Surveillance and Political Repression from McKinley through Eisenhower.”

DHS has amassed an arsenal of drones, video surveillance, biometric data collection (including DNA), real-time/detailed location tracking, tools for accessing phone content, data analytics technologies, social media monitoring, license-plate readers and vehicle trackers, and purchases from data brokers, according to the Brennan Center.

Often equipped with AI, these tools have created an enormous dragnet capable of building a detailed dossier on practically every resident in the U.S.  

As a result, “there’s really no question” that U.S. citizens have become less free in terms of speech and association, Eddington said. “There’s a body of academic research … that does indicate population-level effects in terms of speech being chilled,” he said.

According to the Freedom in the World Index, which rates countries by people’s access to political rights and civil liberties, the U.S. has fallen 12 points over the past 20 years, to 81/100—“far behind long-standing democratic nations.” Canada, for example, scores 97/100.

Crisis as population control

The DHS budget ballooned from $19.5 billion in 2002 to $118.39 billion in fiscal year 2027, supplemented by the $190.6 billion approved in 2025 as a four-year lump sum in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. DHS committed more than $2.9 billion to surveillance, data collection, and data analytics tools from 2021 to the first half of 2026, according to the Brennan Center.

Despite enormous spending, scant evidence shows that surveillance and threat assessments have made the U.S. safer. The Government Accountability Office twice concluded that DHS lacks sufficient internal controls, privacy enforcement mechanisms, and oversight over its surveillance technologies. A bipartisan Senate report found that DHS-led fusion centers—involving local authorities—have “not produced useful intelligence” to support counterterrorism efforts.

“Surveillance technology acquired by DHS over the past several years and anti-democratic data-sharing practices have supercharged the agency’s ability to trample civil rights and civil liberties,” according to a February letter sent to the Senate by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, which represents more than 240 national rights organizations.  

The buildup of surveillance technology occurred after a real crisis, when “people are scared, and they call on policymakers to do something to abate or fix the crisis,” said Abigail R. Hall, a University of Tampa professor and co-author of “The Political Economy of Terrorism, Counterterrorism, and the War on Terror.”

“Once these kinds of government expansions occur, it is remarkably difficult for us to see a complete reduction or what we might call a retrenchment in the use of these types of technologies,” Hall said. “When government adopts technologies, they tend to have lock-in effects.”

After 9/11, people were sold the idea that surveillance would prevent external attacks from happening again, said Munira Lokhandwala, co-executive director of LittleSis, a nonprofit focused on government accountability. 

“In reality, what it did is open the kind of regime of surveillance that we now exist under, where the government partnered with private enterprise, with tech corporations, to build the surveillance infrastructure that we have today”, she said. This growth, with no significant regulation, has produced “a chilling effect on people’s ability to talk openly and publicly about their dissent.”

Still, pushback is spreading. In 2026, Fast Company reported that public pressure led more than 50 agencies and jurisdictions to cancel contracts or deactivate Flock cameras, which form a network of AI-powered license-plate readers used by police departments across the country. Advocates have expressed concerns that these cameras’ data can be accessed for immigration enforcement or used for unauthorized tracking.

“We’re seeing resistance to [surveillance] happening at a pretty wide-scale,” Lokhandwala said, from neighborhood ICE watch groups to community-driven efforts to pressure state and local governments to block funding for surveillance technologies.

People in at least 36 states have disrupted Flock’s surveillance network by vandalizing cameras, according to NPR. Flock CEO Garrett Langley has referred to protesters as “domestic terrorists.” He later walked back his comments. 

“The past month is one of the first big moments where I’ve seen so many people across the country push back against the surveillance state,” Ahmed said. “Maybe we’re actually at a turning point now.”