PANOPTICON mass surveillance in the united states
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When the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI published stolen FBI documents revealing abuse of intelligence programs in 1971, Senator Frank Church began an investigation into the programs that become known as the Church Committee. The committee sought to investigate intelligence abuses throughout the 1970s. Following a report provided by the committee outlining egregious abuse, in 1976 Congress established the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. It would later be joined by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in 1978. The institutions worked to limit the power of the agencies, ensuring that surveillance activities remained within the rule of law.
Following the attacks of September 11, 2001, Congress passed the Patriot Act to strengthen security and intelligence efforts. The act granted the President broad powers on the war against terror, including the power to bypass the FISA Court for surveillance orders in cases of national security. Additionally, mass surveillance activities were conducted alongside various other surveillance programs under the head of President's Surveillance Program. Under pressure from the public, the warrantless wiretapping program was allegedly ended in January 2007.
Many details about the surveillance activities conducted in the United States were revealed in the disclosure by Edward Snowden in June 2013. Regarded as one of the biggest media leaks in the United States, it presented extensive details about the surveillance programs of the NSA, that involved interception of Internet data and telephonic calls from over a billion users, across various countries.
The 2020s are seeing even more surveillance on Americans by utilizing a loophole left in the Fourth Amendment in tandem with increased artificial intelligence or AI capabilities. The increasing utilization of AI in surveillance applications is best illustrated by reports such as Anthropic's AI model Claude being used in the raid on Venezuela. Shortly after the raid, CEO of Anthropic Dario Amodei warned their technologies could be used on American citizens as permitted by the Fourth Amendment's loophole to produce a comprehensive profile on Americans "automatically and at massive scale." Additionally, organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group, have already spoken out against companies such as Flock Safety, a surveillance company, for their utilization of these same AI surveillance technologies. The organization notably takes issue with how Flock's policing tools are often utilized, such as when their tracing tools were deployed against protestors during the No Kings Protests.
== National Security Agency (NSA) ==
1947: The National Security Act was signed by President Truman, establishing a National Security Council.
1949: The Armed Forces Security Agency was established to coordinate signal operations between military branches.
1952: The National Security Agency (NSA) was officially established by President Truman by way of a National Security Council Intelligence Directive 9, dated Oct. 24, while the NSA officially came into existence days later on Nov. 4. According to The New York Times, the NSA was created in "absolute secrecy" by President Truman, whose surveillance-minded administration ordered, only six weeks after President Truman took office, wiretaps on the telephones of Thomas Gardiner Corcoran, a close advisor of Franklin D. Roosevelt. The recorded conversations are currently kept at the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum, along with other documents considered sensitive (≈233,600 pages).
== Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) ==
Institutional domestic surveillance was founded in 1896 with the National Bureau of Criminal Identification, which evolved by 1908 into the Bureau of Investigation, operated under the authority of the Department of Justice. In 1935, the FBI had grown into an independent agency under the direction of J. Edgar Hoover whose staff, through the use of wire taps, cable taps, mail tampering, garbage filtering and infiltrators, prepared secret FBI Index Lists on more than 10 million people by 1939.
Purported to be chasing 'communists' and other alleged subversives, the FBI used public and private pressure to destroy the lives of those it targeted during McCarthyism, including those lives of the Hollywood 10 with the Hollywood blacklist. The FBI's surveillance and investigation roles expanded in the 1950s while using the collected information to facilitate political assassinations, including the murders of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in 1969. FBI is also directly connected to the bombings, assassinations, and deaths of other people including Malcolm X in 1963, Viola Liuzzo in 1965, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, Anna Mae Pictou Aquash in 1976, and Judi Bari in 1990.
As the extent of the FBI's domestic surveillance continued to grow, many celebrities were also secretly investigated by the bureau, including:
First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt – A vocal critic of Hoover who likened the FBI to an 'American Gestapo' for its Index lists. Roosevelt also spoke out against anti-Japanese prejudice during the second world war, and was later a delegate to the United Nations and instrumental in creating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The 3,000-page FBI dossier on Eleanor Roosevelt reveals Hoover's close monitoring of her activities and writings, and contains retaliatory charges against her for suspected Communist activities.