You Are Being Watched—All the Time

Did you know 260 million Americans have their facial profiles inside the FBI’s Next Generation Identification System (NGI)? Worse, did you know that number is growing? If your face isn’t already in their records, it may be soon.

Tellingly, both criminals and civilians are in the database, containing far more info about you than you might suspect. Categories includes biometrics, data about where you work, plus info connecting you to your birth city—even your relationship to family members. It also holds data on characteristics distinguishing you from others, like your iris, facial features, or birthmarks.

How is this at all constitutional, you may ask?

It’s not. Americans are suddenly the new John Anderton in Philip Dick’s thriller Minority Report. If we are not careful, we may one day be deemed guilty of pre-crimes—all based on our data.

Now, you may think, “I have nothing to hide.” But that’s not the point. Our founding fathers never intended wholesale dragnets of the population.

Curious as to how much info an app might steal from you in a period? Judge Herbert Dixon, Jr. of The American Bar Association writes: “Indeed, some phone apps will share as many as 200 individually time-stamped location data points within a 12-hour interval. These data are sent in real time to multiple companies.”

Our phones can store data on us 24 hours a day if we let them. Plus, in recent years, emerging surveillance tech has grown so sophisticated, it’s now possible to be identified from afar just by our outward physical features. No fingerprint needed. Ditto for an iris scan.

Of course, all this is happening all the time without our awareness. Without our permission. Moreover, no current regulations exist for NGI. Jennifer Lynch of Electronic Frontier Foundation, offers, “Without restrictive limits in place, it could be relatively easy for the government and private companies to build databases of images of the vast majority of people living in the United States and use those databases to identify and track people in real time as they move from place to place throughout their daily lives.”

We’re safe so long as the right people use our info the right way—or at least that’s how the (limited) thinking goes. But what about data breeches?

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security recently disclosed that they gave private info away—on a test! In his report, the Inspector General admitted that during the pilot run of their NGI system, a subcontractor stole 184,000 traveler images and placed them on his personal network system.

Now imagine if a future subcontractor was a known sex offender. Or a terrorist. Or a cyber-thief. What if all that personal, identifying data were to fall into the wrong hands?

Naturally, a certain level of anonymity and privacy lends the “perception” of safety, but NGI tech can remove anonymity within seconds. Now there is no place to hide, even for a former president:

[Researchers] were able to track federal employees in almost every major government building in Washington, D.C. This included congressional advisors, department of defense officials, and Supreme Court judicial staff.…[They] were even able to track a secret service agent assigned to President Trump. By proxy, the researchers were able to track the location of the president himself, capturing movements to within a few feet of accuracy.”

The inescapable takeaway? This is an abuse of power promising more deleterious consequences. Consider this: In 2021 alone, the government performed 3.1 million warrantless telephone searches. They may have tapped you and you’d never know.

Again, the police state we find ourselves in is not at all what our founders imagined. It was forced on us largely due to emergency powers granted by the Patriot Act that get renewed yearly. (This has occurred in both Republican and Democratic administrations.)

For years, dystopian films like Minority Report presented us with fictional characters suffering from technological tyranny. Whether these movies were meant to be predictive programming or not, the fact is, that dystopia is here.

Like it or not, we are all John Andertons in 2023.

The question is: What are we going to do about it?