Mass Surveillance (Digital Tracking)

The expansion of state and corporate surveillance technologies since the 2010s has fueled a sustained moral panic about privacy and civil liberties. In June 2013, Edward Snowden, a US National Security Agency contractor turned whistleblower, leaked documents showing that the NSA was secretly harvesting billions of phone and internet records from ordinary Americans and foreigners. The revelations provoked cross-partisan outrage: Senator Rand Paul called it "an outrageous abuse of power" and "an astounding assault on the Constitution," and Representative Steve King said the programmes were "beyond the imagination of George Orwell." Meanwhile, China's expanding CCTV and facial-recognition systems were widely described in Western media as a unified "social credit" score — the idea that every citizen gets a single number rating their trustworthiness, Black Mirror-style. Specialists like Jeremy Daum (of the China Law Translate project) and Shazeda Ahmed have since corrected that picture. What actually exists is a patchwork of administrative blacklists (for example, debtors barred from high-speed rail), local government pilots and corporate credit records. There is no single universal ranking. Shoshana Zuboff, a Harvard Business School professor, reframed the debate in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019) around corporate rather than state data extraction, arguing that Google, Facebook and their peers had quietly built a new economic order out of human behavioural data.

Policy has followed. In 2021 Chile amended its constitution to protect mental integrity and neurodata. In February 2024 the US issued Executive Order 14117, restricting data-broker sales of sensitive American data to "countries of concern" such as China and Russia. The TikTok divest-or-ban law (April 2024), which would force ByteDance to sell the app or lose US access, was upheld by the Supreme Court in January 2025 and partially deferred by President Trump in April 2025. And EU "Chat Control" debates — over whether messaging apps must scan users' encrypted messages on-device for child-abuse material before they are sent — remain active into 2026.

The panic's real gift was conceptual. Privacy, once taken for granted, became an explicit right to be defended in courts, parliaments and constitutions, even as the technologies of observation keep outrunning them.