Privacy is not over. Just ask Kristi Noem.
The Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security has spent 2025 trying to convince the American public that identifying roving groups of masked federal agents is “doxxing” — and revealing the identities of these public servants is “violence.” Legal experts say Noem is wrong on both fronts, but her claims of doxxing highlight a central conflict in the current era: Surveillance now goes both ways.
In the nearly 12 months since President Donald Trump took office for the second time, life in the United States has been disrupted by a sustained wave of arrests and raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection officials, and federal, state and local officials deputed to carry out immigration operations. Many of these agents are hiding their identities on the grounds that they are at risk, as approved by the administration. In response, American residents have increased their documentation of law enforcement activity to unprecedented levels.
“ICE Watch” groups have emerged across the country. Apps to track immigration enforcement activity have popped up (then disappeared) on the Apple and Google app stores. Social media feeds are filled with videos of unidentified agents tackling men in parking lots, throwing women to the ground, and breaking up families. From Los Angeles to Chicago to Raleigh, North Carolina, neighbors and passersby have taken out their phones to document members of their community being arrested and disappeared into the machinery of the Trump administration.
Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s new. Documenting law enforcement activity to combat he said, he said The imbalance of power between police and citizens is practically an American tradition, says Adam Schwartz, director of privacy litigation at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties nonprofit. He says, “It goes back at least to the 1968 Democratic convention when journalists documented police officers rioting and beating protesters and lying about who was responsible.”
Jennifer Granik, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, says the practice has been around for “centuries.” In fact, the documentation of police activity is probably as old as policing itself. “difference of [today] “Technology has made it so that everyone has a video recorder on them at all times. And then it’s very easy to disseminate that recording to the public,” Granik says.
Non-journalists recording police activity became mainstream after a bystander named George Holliday filmed Los Angeles Police Department officers brutally beating Rodney King, a black man, in March 1991 and shared the footage with local media. This video will create a national spotlight on race and policing in modern America.
