Schneier and Cohn: 25 years of mass surveillance is enough

Twenty-five years after the September 11 attacks, Bruce Schneier and Cindy Cohn argue in a new essay that the mass surveillance built in their aftermath has outgrown its justification. Written for Lawfare, it traces the shift from targeted wiretaps to programs that tap internet backbones and collect telephone and internet metadata in bulk.

From terrorism to routine policing

The machinery, first framed as a defence against terrorism, now extends far beyond national security. Immigration and Customs Enforcement uses it in immigration actions and against protesters; facial recognition runs at venues such as Madison Square Garden, and networked licence plate readers cover roads and parking lots. Most of that data reaches government through private companies, and FBI Director Kash Patel has confirmed in congressional testimony that the bureau buys information on Americans from data brokers.

After 9/11, the fear that the enemy could be anyone anywhere produced a doctrine of watching everyone everywhere — an internal NSA presentation released in the 2013 Snowden disclosures put it as collect it all, process it all, sniff it all and ultimately know it all. The authors write that no full accounting of the costs and benefits has ever been published, and that the successes cited tend to fall apart under scrutiny.

Costs and misuses

Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act allowed bulk collection of communications; Congress let it expire in 2026, though previously approved collection continues until at least spring 2027. Representative Zoe Lofgren has said backdoor searches were misused for protesters, 19,000 campaign donors, members of Congress, journalists and a state judge who had complained about police misconduct. The NSA coined the term LOVEINT for agents spying on partners and exes, and a Texas officer misused plate readers to track a woman suspected of seeking an abortion.

The essay points to the 2026 U.S. Counterterrorism Strategy, which says the government will prioritise neutralising anti-American, radically pro-transgender and anarchist groups and will use all constitutionally available tools to map their membership and ties abroad — powers built for foreign intelligence, turned on domestic activists.

What a fix would look like

The proposal is broad rather than piecemeal: a warrant should be required before mass surveillance data is collected, accessed or used, regardless of its form or holder, with a private right of action and an automatic exclusionary remedy in criminal cases. They back the bipartisan Fourth Amendment Is Not for Sale Act, want Section 702 to stay expired, and note that the Supreme Court has begun narrowing the third-party doctrine, most recently by rejecting mass geofence warrants in Chatrie v. United States.