Surveillance

They couldn't beat the civil rights movement in the streets, so they built a system to make sure the next one never starts.

Executive Summary

Right now, private companies are tracking where you go, what you read, who you call, and what you believe [37] [38]. They sell that information to anyone who will pay -- including government agencies that would need a warrant to collect it themselves [30] [31]. No law stops them. No court order is needed. And nobody truly agreed to it [52] [54].

This has happened before. In the 1970s, a major congressional investigation found that the government was spying on hundreds of thousands of Americans [24]. The Supreme Court has tried to set limits, but the government found ways around them [28] [30]. Foreign governments have used the same commercial tools to mess with American elections [49] [50]. And research shows that when people know they're being watched, they stop speaking up and stop organizing [57] [58].

The MAD Act would fix this. It is the first real attempt to shut down the commercial surveillance system that threatens everyone's rights -- especially the rights of people who have always been targeted first: Black communities, labor organizers, Indigenous activists, and political dissenters [12] [24] [67] [69].

The MAD Act targets three specific dangers. First, psychological manipulation: companies build mental profiles of people and use them to target their weaknesses [46] [47]. Second, physical tracking: detailed location records can be used to follow, harass, or harm people [43] [69]. Third, mass surveillance: when a single database covers tens of millions of people, the database itself becomes a spying tool -- no matter why it was built [35] [37]. None of this is theoretical. All of it has already happened.

What Was COINTELPRO?

COINTELPRO was a secret FBI program launched in 1956 by Director J. Edgar Hoover. Its goal was to "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize" American political groups [12]. The targets were not foreign spies. They were Americans using their rights to speak, organize, and protest.

Over fifteen years, the FBI targeted the Communist Party, Puerto Rican independence groups, the Socialist Workers Party, white supremacist groups, Black civil rights organizations, and antiwar activists [12]. A 1968 memo from Hoover told agents to "prevent the rise of a 'messiah'" among Black leaders, naming Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, and Elijah Muhammad [13].

The MAD Act points to COINTELPRO as proof that without strong laws, government agencies will use surveillance to crush protected political activity.

The Attack on Dr. King

The FBI called King "the most dangerous Negro of the future in this Nation" [14]. In November 1964 -- weeks before he received the Nobel Peace Prize -- the FBI mailed him recorded tapes and a letter calling him "a colossal fraud" with language widely seen as urging him to kill himself. The full letter was not found until 2014, when historian Beverly Gage discovered it in the National Archives [15].

The Killing of Fred Hampton

On December 4, 1969, Chicago police raided the apartment of Fred Hampton, the 21-year-old deputy chairman of the Black Panthers. An FBI informant, William O'Neal, had given agents a floor plan showing exactly where Hampton slept [16]. Police fired between 82 and 99 shots. The only shot from inside came from Mark Clark's gun, likely fired as a reflex when he was fatally hit [17] [18]. Hampton was killed in his bed. Six days later, Hoover sent the informant's handler a thank-you letter and a $200 bonus [19]. A $1.85 million civil rights settlement was reached years later [20].

COINTELPRO might have stayed secret if not for eight activists who, on March 8, 1971, broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania -- timing it to the Ali-Frazier fight so no one would notice [21]. They mailed the stolen documents to reporters. No one was ever caught.

The Church Committee

The revelations led Congress to investigate. The Church Committee (1975-1976) reviewed about 110,000 documents, interviewed roughly 800 witnesses, and held over 160 meetings and hearings [22] [23].

Their conclusion was damning: "Too many people have been spied upon by too many Government agencies and too much information has been collected" [24]. Between 1960 and 1974, the FBI ran over 500,000 investigations of "subversive" people and groups. Not one led to a prosecution. The CIA secretly opened nearly 250,000 letters. The Army kept files on at least 100,000 Americans [24] [25].

Senator Frank Church warned: "I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America... That is the abyss from which there is no return" [26] [27].

The Church Committee led to real reforms -- new laws and oversight committees that worked [22] [24]. But those reforms were built for a time when the government ran its own surveillance. They did not predict a world where private companies would build the surveillance tools and sell them back to the government. The MAD Act closes that gap.

Carpenter v. United States: The Court Drew a Line, the Government Walked Around It

In 2018, the Supreme Court decided Carpenter v. United States. The FBI had tracked Timothy Carpenter's cell phone location 12,898 times over 127 days -- without a full warrant [28].

Chief Justice Roberts ruled this was a "search" under the Fourth Amendment and required a warrant. He wrote that tracking a cell phone is like attaching "an ankle monitor" and reveals a person's "familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations" [28]. The ACLU called it "a groundbreaking victory for Americans' privacy rights" [33].

But federal agencies found a loophole. Instead of getting location data from phone companies (which now needs a warrant), they simply buy the same data from private data brokers [30] [31].

The Defense Intelligence Agency said it did not think Carpenter required a warrant for purchased data [30]. The Columbia Law Review called this "laundering data" through a middleman [31]. The Texas Law Review concluded that Carpenter will not save Americans from data brokers [32]. The Brennan Center documented how agencies make "an end run around this warrant requirement" [34].

The MAD Act would close this loophole. If the government cannot collect this data without a warrant, it should not be able to buy it without one either.

Data Brokers: A Surveillance System Built by Corporations

Data brokers collect personal information from phone apps, web browsing, public records, store loyalty cards, social media, and many other sources -- then sell it to anyone who pays. Most people have never heard of these companies, but those companies know a shocking amount about them.

The FTC found in 2014 that one data broker held information on over 1.4 billion consumer transactions and 700 billion data points. Another was adding 3 billion new data points every month. FTC Chairwoman Ramirez said data brokers "often know as much -- or even more -- about us than our family and friends" [35]. Industry revenue estimates range from $280 to $400 billion, though exact figures depend on definitions [36].

In June 2023, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) confirmed that U.S. spy agencies buy commercial data on Americans. The report warned this data can "identify every person who attended a protest or rally." Remarkably, the intelligence community admitted it "did not know" how much data it was buying [37] [38].

The list of agencies buying this data is long: ICE, Customs and Border Protection, the IRS, and the NSA have all purchased commercial surveillance data [39] [40] [41]. Georgetown Law found that ICE gained access to driver's license photos covering a large portion of American adults [42]. A DHS Inspector General report found that CBP, ICE, and the Secret Service all failed to do legally required privacy reviews before buying location data. One CBP employee even used the data to track coworkers. It was reportedly the first time any customer had ever been audited [43].

The bipartisan Fourth Amendment Is Not for Sale Act passed the House in 2024 but still awaits Senate action [44].

The MAD Act recognizes that a private database covering tens of millions of Americans is not just a business product -- it is surveillance infrastructure.

"Consent" Is a Fiction

One defense of data collection is that people "consent" by clicking "I agree." The evidence says otherwise.

The FTC's 2012 report found that privacy policies are too long and too confusing for anyone to actually read, and that industry self-regulation had failed [52].

A 2008 study calculated that reading every privacy policy you encounter in a year would cost the nation $781 billion in lost time. The average policy takes 10 minutes to read and requires a college reading level [53].

A 2020 study called "The Biggest Lie on the Internet" found that 74% of people skipped privacy policies entirely. Those who looked spent about 73 seconds on documents that would take 30 minutes to read. And 97% agreed -- even though the researchers had hidden a clause requiring users to give up their first-born child [54].

In December 2024, the FTC acted against data broker Gravy Analytics for selling location data tracking people to sensitive places. An FTC official said: "Surreptitious surveillance by data brokers undermines our civil liberties" [55].

The MAD Act makes an important distinction: ordinary business data collection is fine. The target is "the transformation of consumer behavioral data into instruments of psychological manipulation, operational persecution, and population-scale surveillance."

Surveillance Changes How People Act -- and That Kills Democracy

Why does surveillance matter if you have "nothing to hide"? Because being watched changes how people behave -- even people doing nothing wrong. They stop going to protests. They do not join unions. They avoid controversial topics. Scholars call this a chilling effect [57] [58].

Philosopher Michel Foucault described this using the idea of the Panopticon -- a prison where guards can see every prisoner, but prisoners never know when they are being watched. His key insight: "visibility is a trap." People police themselves when they think someone might be watching [56].

Research proves this is real. After Edward Snowden revealed the NSA's spying programs in 2013, traffic to sensitive Wikipedia articles dropped nearly 30% [57]. Just knowing the government might be watching changed what millions of people were willing to read.

The Supreme Court recognized this back in 1958. In NAACP v. Alabama, the state tried to force the NAACP to hand over its membership list. The Court said no -- because exposing members had led to job loss, threats, and violence [58]. This ruling, born from the Black freedom struggle, remains a cornerstone of the right to organize without surveillance.

Shoshana Zuboff argues in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019) that commercial data collection has created a new kind of power -- the ability to shape human behavior for someone else's profit, not your own benefit [59]. Bruce Schneier points out that if every law had always been perfectly enforced through surveillance, unjust laws might never have changed -- because the rule-breaking that builds support for change would have been caught first [60]. Think about the civil rights movement, labor organizing, the fight for marriage equality -- all involved challenging unjust laws before they were changed. Daniel Solove adds that privacy is not about hiding wrongdoing; surveillance stops lawful activities that democracy depends on: free speech, free association, and political organizing [61].

The Stasi: What Total Surveillance Looks Like

East Germany's Stasi secret police (1950-1989) shows what happens when surveillance becomes total. The Stasi had about 91,000 employees and 173,000 informants -- roughly one spy for every 63 citizens [62] [63]. They kept files on 5.6 million people (one-third of the population), filling 69 miles of shelving [64].

Instead of arresting dissidents, the Stasi used a program called Zersetzung ("decomposition") -- spreading rumors, faking evidence of affairs, ruining careers. The parallels to COINTELPRO are obvious [65]. Amnesty International noted that modern governments can gather far more data than the Stasi with far less effort [66].

It Is Still Happening

During the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, police and federal agencies shared social media surveillance of racial justice protesters [67]. The NLRB found Starbucks committed "egregious and widespread misconduct" against workers trying to form unions [68]. During the Standing Rock protests in 2016-2017, a private military contractor called TigerSwan ran counterterrorism-style surveillance against Indigenous water protectors [69].

The pattern holds across decades: civil rights workers, antiwar protesters, labor unions, Indigenous activists -- all have been surveilled by those who saw their organizing as a threat. The data broker industry makes this cheaper and easier than ever, and available to anyone willing to pay.

The MAD Act recognizes that the chilling effect is not a side effect of surveillance -- it is the way surveillance kills democracy.

Conclusion: Pass the MAD Act

Every section of this report tells the same story.

The Fourth Amendment was built to stop unchecked searches -- and every justice movement since has depended on it. The FBI used surveillance to try to destroy the civil rights movement and kill a 21-year-old organizer in his bed [14] [15] [17]. The Church Committee exposed these abuses and proved that when Congress acts, the protections work [22] [24]. The Supreme Court ruled in Carpenter that tracking your phone requires a warrant [28]. Then the government just started buying the same data from brokers [30] [31].

Cambridge Analytica showed that commercial data can rig elections [45] [46]. Russian operatives used the same tools to target 126 million Americans, hitting Black communities hardest [49] [50] [51]. The FTC confirmed that "consent" for data collection is meaningless [52] [54]. And research proves that surveillance makes people stop speaking, stop organizing, and stop participating [57] [58].

The surveillance system is built. It covers hundreds of millions of Americans. It is for sale. And nothing in federal law stops it from being used for psychological manipulation, tracking individuals, or mass surveillance.

Every time surveillance tools have existed without strict legal limits, they have been turned against the people -- and against the most vulnerable first. The British used writs of assistance against colonists. The FBI used COINTELPRO against the civil rights movement. The Stasi used informants to destroy anyone who spoke out. Today, data brokers have built something bigger than all of these -- and put it on the open market.

Senator Church warned in 1975 about "the abyss from which there is no return" [26] -- a world where surveillance is so complete that resistance becomes impossible. The commercial surveillance system described here brings that world closer every day.

Congress has acted before and it worked. Now it is time to act again. Pass the MAD Act.

Sources
Here are our sources. If you found an error in our references or logic, please let us know!

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[2] National Constitution Center, "Against Writs of Assistance (1761)": https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/historic-document-library/detail/james-otis-against-writs-of-assistance-february-24-1761

[3] John Adams to William Tudor Sr., March 29, 1817, Founders Online, National Archives: https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-6735

[4] The Daily Economy, "A 'Flame of Fire' for Every Age: James Otis and the Writs of Assistance": https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/a-flame-of-fire-for-every-age-james-otis-and-the-writs-of-assistance/

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