Since the start of the second Trump administration, there's been open debate about whether the United States is descending into a modern high-tech surveillance state. But is there any truth to that? And what can existing surveillance states tell us about where the U.S. might be along the path? Today WIRED takes a deep dive to determine just that.
avoidance of democratic oversight,operates in secrecy,compels the private sector to share data on peopleuses surveillance as a solution to social problems,Why would a state want to imposeand spending a lot of money to do somethingpreserves the status quoThat's what the elites always want in any country,is one of these surveillance states now too.
China has built the most technologically-advancedMany are equipped with facial recognitionfor so-called urban management.and even health and e-commerce informationand that's just talking about cameras.to be centralized in a wayChina has been developingof their regime, is the Great Firewall.all the infrastructure of the telecoms,is widespread and really obvious.developed domestically in China,to what's happening in the U.S. or other Western countries,with surveillance in mind from the very beginning.China was building an alternative versionon what people could say and do online.that actually is not digital at all for most people.Those who do, it's completely, entirely surveilled.there's a kind of analog surveillance statesnitching on each other and being incentivized to do so,of the regime of Kim Jong Un.Virtually, all aspects of lifeare subject to surveillance.making privacy virtually non-existent.So much so that human rights advocatesto find photos and videos showing banned content.Online censorship has expanded drastically,Russia is more of an example of trying to retrofitBut what's interesting to me nowto the point where that is an even lighter liftYeah, I mean, you see this in just kind of the naturethat goes through Silicon Valley companies,compared to how it might've beenTo try to whittle this down, on a scale of one to 10,I guess, Antarctica,but I start my surveillance state zoneinto surveillance state territoryI feel like we are more than halfway therebecause the switch could be flipped pretty easilythat we have never imagined would be possiblebecause the risk is so obvious in this momenta surveillance state right now?but, to me, that means that the capability existsand now I think it is starting to fully qualifywho don't feel comfortable postingwell, if somebody already knows everythingI think the U.S. is in the transition to becoming one.but I don't think it's maybe helpfulThere's a really big differenceAnd the main one to me seemsI wouldn't call the U.S. a surveillance stateWe are the world's epicenter of surveillance capitalism.by which cell towers it's connecting toBut that's not actually the NSAThe end result might be the same though.that private sector surveillancein that we are unique in just the level of surveillingand having phones and being on the internet all the time,or you can't assume that it's not.I think it really depends on who you arein a surveillance state or not.you probably don't feel like you livebecause masked agents are going to snatch youAnd that's where we're at right now.Yeah, to Andrew's point, we are already seeingFor undocumented migrants,For people who are in the margins of societythe war on drugs remains the source of the vast majoritytargeted drug operations, drug dealers.we have this luxury of maybe for now pretendinglargely through the for-profit services we use.and we are seeing an expansionpart of a terrorist organizationand the vast expansion of the actual surveillance stateAnd right now, we're seeing kind of a vast expansion,but in the political will to surveiland what he said about it even,He was warning about the capability for surveillance,and as soon as we have a tyrants in placeThe question now is, is that tyrants in the White House?that privacy has to be preservedto certain groups.the inventor of the Signal encryption appbecause that is actually how society evolves,we would never have gay marriage in this country.is how we have progress in this country.and we need to catch them,is that the surveillance never stops there.or they just think that they're gonna have more successthere are space to have underground movements.I think it's an excellent pointand I think DOGE's activitieswas a good example of evolving sentimentto that type of data sharing between agencies,is grabbing data,So what are the arguments that the U.S.dating back to at least the 1700s,Fast forward to World War I and II,which was primarily used to surveil foreign enemies.and the whole Red Scare and the Cold Warsurveillance apparatus was turned on anti-warand the surveillance of Black and Hispanic communities.the US' modern surveillance capabilities as we know them.that engage in surveillance of all types,the Defense Intelligence Agency, and many more.for combating serious crime and terrorismto the so-called radical left.that includes informationInternal memos obtained by WIREDto track immigrants in real time.In March, 2025, executive order instructed agenciesis how close many big tech executiveson pretty much everyone,So what are the reasons the U.S. isn't a surveillance state?to decide how much or how little they want to be surveilled,to surveil its own people,that limit the ability of the U.S. presidentthat makes a country a surveillance stateIn the United States, we've seen examplesTake for example, the USA FREEDOM Act,who leaked a ton of classified informationThat shows the US has the capabilityfor its own citizens, even if it has the tools to do so.to debate these issues openly.different from China or RussiaTools like Signal or the anonymity tool Tordeveloped in the U.S. government,Yeah, and I think that really is at the corethat privilege is imperiled.
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