Surveillance and the Price of Privacy#

I spent years protecting the President. That meant intelligence work — monitoring communications, tracking movements, reading patterns before threats took shape. I believed in it then. I still believe targeted, lawful surveillance is necessary to keep people safe.

But something’s been eating at me. The same tools we used to guard the most powerful person on the planet? They’re now aimed at everybody. And somewhere between “protect the commander-in-chief” and “catalog every American’s digital life,” we crossed a line. Most people never even noticed it happening.

The Cost Inversion#

There’s a simple equation that explains what went wrong, and it all comes down to money.

A generation ago, surveillance cost real money. Tailing someone meant agents, cars, coordination, and time. Tapping a phone meant a warrant, a technician, and specialized gear. Reading someone’s mail meant physically intercepting envelopes. Every single act of surveillance ate resources — which meant it had to be targeted. The cost was the constraint, and the constraint was the freedom. You couldn’t watch everyone because you couldn’t pay for it. The expense itself was a kind of guardrail.

Now flip the ledger. One server processes millions of communications at once. Facial recognition scans thousands of faces in seconds. Cell phone location data gets bought and sold on the open market — not by spy agencies, but by ad companies, data brokers, and anyone with a credit card. Adding one more person to the surveillance net costs essentially nothing.

Meanwhile, the cost of staying private has skyrocketed. Encryption tools. VPN subscriptions. Burner phones. Privacy-focused browsers. Faraday bags. Digital security consultants. All of it costs money, demands technical know-how, and offers spotty protection at best. You can pour thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours into protecting your privacy — and a single data breach at some company you’ve never heard of can wipe it all out overnight.

The equation has completely inverted:

Surveillance used to be expensive and privacy was free. Now surveillance is free and privacy is expensive.

Sit with that for a moment.

From Right to Privilege to Product#

This inversion is driving a shift that should alarm every American, no matter where they sit politically. Privacy is morphing — from a natural right into a luxury good.

Phase one: Privacy as a natural right. For most of human history, this was just the way things were. Your conversations were private because nobody was listening. Your movements were private because nobody was tracking. You didn’t have to fight for privacy any more than you had to fight for oxygen. It was simply the default.

Phase two: Privacy as a contested right. This is where we are now, though most people haven’t caught on. Privacy still exists, but it’s no longer automatic. You have to actively work at it. Choose the right messaging app. Read those impossibly long privacy policies that nobody reads. Navigate opt-out processes that are deliberately designed to be confusing, tedious, and incomplete. Privacy has shifted from something you have to something you do. And doing it takes awareness, effort, and increasingly, cash.

Phase three: Privacy as a luxury product. This is where the road leads — and in some ways, we’re already there. Wealthy people hire privacy consultants, use secure communications, live behind gates with controlled surveillance, and retain legal teams to enforce their privacy rights. The rest of us get the default settings — which is to say, the default surveillance. Your phone tracks you. Your smart TV listens. Your search engine profiles you. Your social media platform sells you. Opting out of all of it would require a level of technical savvy and financial investment that’s simply out of reach for ordinary people.

When a fundamental right becomes something only the wealthy can afford, it stops being a right. It becomes a product. And products serve the market, not the citizen.

The Autoimmune Paradox#

Here’s where my security background gives me a different lens than most commentators.

Every immune system — biological or institutional — has to be calibrated. Too weak, and threats slip through. Too strong, and it starts attacking its own body. Doctors call that autoimmune disease. The immune system gets so aggressive it can’t tell the difference between invaders and healthy tissue. It destroys the very thing it was built to protect.

Mass surveillance is the autoimmune disease of national security.

I’ve watched targeted surveillance work up close. When you have solid intelligence on a real threat, surveillance is a scalpel — precise, proportional, effective. You monitor the suspect. You track the communications. You build the case. The focus is narrow. The justification is clear.

Mass surveillance isn’t a scalpel. It’s chemotherapy. It floods the whole system with something toxic, killing threats and healthy cells together. Sure, it catches some bad actors. But along the way, it treats every citizen like a potential enemy. It vacuums up data on millions of innocent people on the off chance one of them might someday do something wrong. And it creates a permanent record of everyone’s behavior — one that can be accessed, misused, leaked, hacked, or weaponized at any point down the road.

The cure is becoming worse than the disease. We’re building an immune system so powerful it’s crushing the body it was designed to defend.

The Surveillance Ratchet#

Just like government expansion — and this is no coincidence — surveillance only turns in one direction.

Every terrorist attack justifies broader surveillance powers. Every mass shooting justifies more data collection. Every cyber attack justifies deeper monitoring. And after each expansion, the new baseline becomes permanent. The emergency power becomes routine. The temporary authority becomes standard practice.

Has any surveillance program ever been scaled back? Has any data collection authority ever been reduced? Has any monitoring capability, once switched on, ever been voluntarily shut down?

You already know the answer.

The surveillance state grows the same way the administrative state grows: crisis by crisis, each one providing cover for a permanent expansion that never gets reversed. And each expansion makes the next crisis more likely — because a surveilled population is a resentful population, and resentful populations create the very instability that surveillance was supposed to prevent.

What Balance Actually Looks Like#

I’m not an absolutist here. I’ve been on the protection side. I know surveillance saves lives. I’ve seen intelligence stop attacks the public never heard about — because they never happened. Tearing down our surveillance capabilities would be reckless in a world where the threats are real, persistent, and constantly evolving.

But the current trajectory can’t hold. Not because surveillance is inherently wrong, but because surveillance without limits is inherently dangerous. The healthiest immune system isn’t the most powerful one — it’s the most balanced one. Strong enough to fight real threats. Restrained enough not to devour its own host.

The Supreme Court is grappling with this right now. In April 2026, CNN reported the justices agreed to hear a landmark case on “geofence warrants” — the practice where police ask Google to hand over location data on every person near a crime scene, parsing millions of users’ movements to find a suspect. The technology can pinpoint someone’s location within three meters, every two minutes. The defendant’s lawyer argued it was the digital equivalent of the “general warrants” the Founders explicitly banned in the Fourth Amendment. Privacy experts called the case “huge” — because its outcome will define whether the government can treat an entire population’s digital footprint as a searchable database, or whether probable cause still means something when surveillance costs nothing and privacy costs everything.

What does balance look like in practice? Sunset clauses on surveillance authorities — real ones, with teeth, that actually expire and demand fresh justification for renewal. Genuine oversight, not the rubber-stamp variety that passes for accountability in most classified programs. Transparency about what data is being collected, by whom, and how long it’s kept. And a legal framework that treats privacy not as an obstacle to security but as a component of it — because a society that doesn’t trust its own government is a society that can’t cooperate with its own government, and a society that can’t cooperate is a society that’s fundamentally vulnerable.

The question isn’t whether we need surveillance. We do.

The question is whether we can build a surveillance system that protects us from threats without becoming the biggest threat of all.

Right now, I’m not sure we can. But I know we have to try. Because the alternative — a world where privacy exists only for those who can afford it and surveillance is the default condition of citizenship — isn’t a world worth defending.