MISSION:

Lantern Laws

Lantern laws were first enacted in New York City before other cities around the country adopted them to police people of color. These laws required Black, mixed-race and Indigenous enslaved people to carry lanterns while out after sundown if they weren’t accompanied by a white person. 

1798: Alien Enemies Act Is Signed into Law

This is a wartime authority that allows the president to detain or deport the natives and citizens of an enemy nation without a hearing. While it’s intended to prevent foreign espionage or sabotage during wartime, it has been used against immigrants who have done nothing wrong. Trump’s second administration has used this law to target immigrants it seeks to deport.

1850s: Mail Interception

Before the invention and widespread adoption of the telephone in the 20th century, mail was the most common form of communication. The U.S. Postal Service began monitoring mail for illegal or dissident materials in the mid-1800s. The Comstock Act of 1873 was used to restrict the distribution of materials that provided information about birth control or suggested that women had bodily autonomy.

1898: The United States Occupies the Philippines

Prior to his presidency, William Howard Taft served as governor-general of the Philippines. In this role, he controlled information through draconian sedition laws that severely punished anyone involved in “subversive” political activities. He also oversaw a surveillance apparatus to suppress Filipino resistance to U.S. occupation, one of the U.S. military’s early test projects to monitor minority groups.

1917–1920: World War I and the First Red Scare

The Russian Revolution and fast-growing labor and leftist political movements within the United States fueled hysteria about immigrants and Communism. During this time, German Americans and “radicals” associated with labor, pacifist, Communist and anarchist movements were put on a secret index (or list). More than 10,000 people were arrested in mass raids throughout the country; most raids involved U.S. citizens.

1940: World War II Abroad and the Creation of a Domestic Surveillance Apparatus at Home

Before the United States entered World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized the FBI to conduct wiretaps for the vague, open-ended purpose of national security. J. Edgar Hoover — who founded the FBI and became its first director — pursued an agenda in which the government targeted “subversive” individuals. This amounted to anyone who expressed sympathy toward a foreign power or opposed the war effort, including workers on strike or critics of White House policy.

1942–1945: Internment of Japanese Americans

Shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which resulted in the detention of Japanese Americans — a horrific act that the Supreme Court later overturned. The Secretary of War and military commanders were authorized to forcibly remove anyone deemed a threat from the West Coast to internment camps further inland. Prior surveillance of Japanese Americans was key to carrying out this executive order.

1956–1971: COINTELPRO

The FBI established a special counterintelligence program to neutralize political dissent as part of a Cold War strategy to suppress “communist ideology” in the United States. This program’s other purpose was to expose and disrupt the activities of Black nationalists. Through the use of illegal wiretaps, warrantless physical searches, and other illegal and invasive tactics, the FBI not only delegitimized and ostracized individuals but also shaped public perception of entire movements.

1971: The War on Drugs

President Richard Nixon exploited the moral panic that arose from increasing recreational drug use and declared a “War on Drugs,” labeling drug abuse “public enemy number one.” The Drug Enforcement Agency was created two years later. This campaign never achieved its goals of curbing drug abuse and ending drug trafficking; instead, it exacerbated inequalities in the criminal-justice system for Black and Brown individuals and communities, and has been used to justify expanded electronic and financial surveillance.

1978: Congress Passes the Foreign Intelligence Act (FISA)

This law created the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) to approve national-security wiretaps and surveillance of electronic communications. While this was intended to prevent future civil-rights abuses like those that took place under COINTELPRO, the secrecy under which the FISC has operated created a shadow Supreme Court. And FISC has delivered judicial opinions that have expanded the legal authority of intelligence agencies to violate the privacy rights of tens of millions of Americans.

2001–present: The War on Terror

After the 9/11 attacks, Congress passed the Patriot Act, which authorized sweeping surveillance of U.S. citizens and other individuals through warrantless collection of foreign intelligence and private records. Mass surveillance that was sanctioned under the War on Terror intensified the racialized criminalization of and xenophobia toward Arab, Middle Eastern, Muslim and South Asian communities.

2010s: Racial and Climate-Justice Movements

The Black Lives Matter movement sparked protests across the country involving millions of Americans. Federal and local law enforcement used technologies like drones, facial-recognition technology, location-tracking tools and wireless-messaging interceptors to surveil people exercising their First Amendment rights.

Climate justice and tribal opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline and the Line 3 oil pipeline met similar targeting by federal and local officials. This included the use of undercover FBI agents to infiltrate activist camps, the use of drone surveillance and device tapping.

2013: The Snowden Revelations

Edward Snowden, a former NSA intelligence contractor, disclosed to journalists information about the NSA’s secret, wide-ranging intelligence-gathering programs. To analyze the enormous troves of communications data it was collecting, the government had turned to Palantir Technologies to procure automated tools that could do this instantaneously. Despite intense backlash from lawmakers and the public, the NSA's aggressive data collection has continued.

2015: USA FREEDOM Act

Passed in response to Snowden’s revelations, the USA FREEDOM Act replaced the Patriot Act and limited the government’s authority to collect bulk data. However, it did not close the backdoor-search loophole, through which the government collects data about Americans by intercepting their communications with people abroad.

2025: Trump’s Immigration Crackdown

To carry out President Trump’s immigration agenda of mass illegal deportations targeted at Latino communities, the Department of Homeland Security has expanded its already sprawling surveillance web by purchasing new technologies and partnering with surveillance tech companies. To track both immigrants and U.S. citizens, DHS is also centralizing access to highly sensitive information that other government agencies collect — data that was previously siloed.

2026: AI-Powered Surveillance

ICE is using sensitive data about communities to find immigrants, leveraging bounty hunters and AI tools that locate individuals, identify and verify people’s addresses, and create timestamped dossiers of people’s whereabouts for laser-like targeting.

Failed negotiations between the AI company Anthropic and the Department of Defense exposed how the federal government is procuring artificial-intelligence tools for uses that could involve mass domestic surveillance. Federal agencies’ increasing use of AI tools — along with gaps in privacy laws that allow law-enforcement agencies to purchase bulk data — have led to growing calls for lawmakers to pass legislation to prevent the rise of an AI-powered surveillance state.