Category: Ethics

On October 18, seven million Americans poured into streets and public squares across the nation to take part in what became the largest protest ever of a sitting U.S. president. The No Kings protests spanned more than 2,600 locations in all fifty states, billed as a collective declaration that no president should rule unchecked.

But as citizens exercised their right to assemble, many worried that they were being quietly observed – watched by drones, tracked by algorithms, or profiled in digital dossiers built far from the streets they marched upon.

Three months earlier, a group of Democratic senators led by Massachusetts’s Ed Markey had written to Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem demanding transparency about the department’s use of surveillance technologies at public demonstrations.

The lawmakers sought details about drones, cellphone-exploitation tools, facial recognition systems, and DHS’s increasingly routine monitoring of social media activity around protests.

The senators never received a reply.

“Donald Trump has shown he’ll aggressively weaponize government powers to squelch dissent,” Markey said in a statement ahead of the protests. “At this weekend’s No Kings demonstrations, the administration must refrain from surveilling Americans who are exercising their constitutional rights.”

The warning echoed years of unease about DHS and its intelligence branch, the Office of Intelligence and Analysis (I&A). Civil liberties advocates and journalists have accused I&A of blurring the line between situational awareness and political surveillance.

Internal records released in recent years show that I&A analysts have monitored social-media posts, hashtags, and livestreams related to protest movements and forwarded summaries to law-enforcement partners through the nation’s network of “fusion centers.”

DHS maintains that its collection is limited to “publicly available information,” what is called open source intelligence, but critics say that widespread social-media scraping of protest content can still chill free expression and association.

Those concerns deepened when Property of the People, a government-transparency organization, obtained a bulletin from the Central California Intelligence Center – one of seventy-nine federally supported fusion centers – flagging No Kings rallies as subjects of ongoing intelligence reports.

The memo identified Sacramento, Fresno, and Stockton among dozens of protest sites nationwide. While acknowledging that the events were billed as “non-violent,” analysts wrote that “additional intelligence products” were being prepared. The center did not respond to questions about the bulletin.

When asked about October 18 monitoring, the National Fusion Center Association declined to comment directly, instead pointing reporters to a 2011 federal guidance document titled, Recommendations for First Amendment-Protected Events.

The document outlines how agencies may gather and share data about protests while “respecting constitutional protections,” language civil liberties lawyers say is so vague that it effectively authorizes continuous data collection under the banner of public safety.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has warned that fusion centers, originally built after 9/11 to coordinate counterterrorism, have evolved into domestic intelligence pipelines that treat political activism as potential threat intelligence.

“Under previous administrations, law enforcement surveillance of peaceful demonstrations was already commonplace and corrosive of free expression … [now] such surveillance poses an existential threat to what remains of American democracy,” said Ryan Shapiro, executive director of Property of the People told Reuters. “Given Trump’s open hostility to even minor dissent, such surveillance now poses an existential threat to what remains of American democracy and only underscores the need for mass protest.”

Don Bell of The Constitution Project at POGO added, “There are virtually no legal guardrails in place to prevent mass surveillance, and what did exist has been bulldozed.”

In Chicago, where one of the largest gatherings drew roughly 100,000 people to Grant Park, journalists found their aerial coverage restricted.

For roughly ten days leading up to the protest, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) imposed a Temporary Flight Restriction at DHS’s request, grounding all non-government drones while leaving government aircraft exempt.

The order, which expired less than a week before the demonstration, cited “security concerns.”

Though the restriction was lifted before October 18, its effects lingered. Independent pilots and media outlets remained uncertain of their legal standing, while DHS and local police retained aerial access. Press freedom advocates called the situation a one-sided visibility regime.

Aerial precedent also fed public unease. Earlier in the summer, Customs and Border Protection had acknowledged deploying Predator-class drones over Los Angeles in support of federal operations near protest zones.

DHS said the flights were not directed at demonstrators, but released video later included close-range footage of protest marches. Civil rights attorneys warn that such aircraft and their sophisticated imaging payloads could easily be retasked for domestic crowd observation elsewhere in the country.

In Portland, reporters from Oregon Public Broadcasting documented official videographers and drones filming crowds near the federal immigration complex.

In Austin, Governor Greg Abbott ordered a “multi-agency posture” that activated Texas National Guard and Department of Public Safety assets before the marches began, a move state officials described as precautionary but that protesters saw as intimidation.

Just before the demonstrations, Amazon’s Ring doorbell network announced an integration with Flock Safety’s automated license-plate reader system, enabling police to issue geofenced “Community Requests” for user-submitted footage. Shared videos are routed into Axon’s digital-evidence cloud, linking neighborhood cameras directly to police databases.

Privacy groups warn that the arrangement effectively transforms residential areas into auxiliary surveillance grids, especially when marches pass through business districts or streets blanketed with Ring devices.

The legal terrain governing protest surveillance remains unsettled. In 2024, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that “geofence warrants” – court orders demanding data on every mobile device within a geographic area – violate the Fourth Amendment.

Other circuits have upheld narrower versions, creating a patchwork of standards that means a protester’s phone might be swept into a dragnet in one jurisdiction but protected in another.

Drone-surveillance statutes differ just as sharply. The Illinois Freedom from Drone Surveillance Act bars most police deployments absent warrants or emergencies, while Oregon requires judicial authorization for sustained observation.

Yet those state limits stop at the edge of federal authority. When DHS, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, or the FAA invoke national-security powers, local restrictions fall away, leaving protesters unsure which laws apply and who, if anyone, can be held accountable.

DHS’s continued social-media monitoring adds another layer of uncertainty. The department’s intelligence analysts conduct “open-source situational awareness” by scanning protest-related posts across major platforms, compiling keyword and geotag summaries shared with partner agencies.

Officials defend the practice as necessary for public safety, but civil liberties groups argue it edges into political profiling. For protesters organizing under the No Kings banner, the line between publicity and exposure blurred the moment a hashtag could summon a federal analyst’s attention.

Whether or not specific technologies were deployed against marchers on October 18, the perception of surveillance changed behavior. Many participants left smartphones at home, used encrypted messaging, or wore hats and masks to foil facial-recognition algorithms.

For organizers, the uncertainty itself became a form of control. The government no longer needs to announce observation; the suspicion of it is deterrent enough.

The No Kings demonstrations ended peacefully, but they revealed how thoroughly digital surveillance now shadows civic life. Protest in the United States increasingly unfolds in two spaces – physical and informational – where every chant and banner can generate a data point stored in systems the public rarely sees.

Drones, fusion centers, social-media monitoring, and smart-camera networks together form a distributed observatory whose reach dwarfs anything imagined in earlier protest eras.

The No Kings movement sought to affirm that no leader stands above the people. Yet its participants confronted the sobering truth that in the age of pervasive surveillance, even dissent itself has become an object of observation.