Surveillance

America Is Building a Surveillance State Like China's

"If there are Flock cameras in your city, they are tracking, logging and sharing your movements without a warrant," warns the ACLU.

Steven Greenhut | 8.21.2026 11:15 AM

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(Illustration: Pixinoo/Dreamstime/Midjourney Photo: Samuel Corum/Sipa USA/Newscom)

One of the most prescient lines from George Orwell's 1984 the 1949 dystopian classic about Big Brother, regards that fictional society's endless surveillance: "You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized." Modern Americans' instinct is to post their every thought and photo on social media, but we still should be wary of the way new technologies track and monitor us throughout our day.

Some of this Brave New World tech is unavoidable and mostly benign. The website cookies that require our consent via pop-up notification are designed to track our buying habits so that private companies can sell us more stuff. It's annoying, but do I really care that I get a few ads for car parts after I searched for a new trailer hitch? And some of the surveillance is self-imposed. My wife laughingly told me how fast I rode on my motorcycle and the towns I visited after my latest ride thanks to a tracking app that reassures her that I'm not lying somewhere in a ditch.

But, as........

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