From Public Data to Surveillance

In his latest Prairie Fire newsletter, Newsjunkie staff reporter Morgan Kriesel explores how public data systems are being reshaped—less as tools for public service and more as instruments of surveillance. Managing editor Peter Landau sat down with Kriesel to unpack the origins of this shift, what it means for journalists, and how readers can respond.

Your most recent newsletter is on surveillance, and you frame what you write about a shift from public data serving the people, to surveilling them. And you’re convinced that this shift is structural—it’s not just a blip. How did you came to that conclusion.

This is a beyond-Trump thing. Part of that is because what Trump has done with data and with the structure of our federal government is profoundly damaging—it just can’t be contained to his administration.

When you’re doing things like destroying entire branches of the federal government—the Education Department, what they’re trying to do—when you are laying off thousands of government employees, shutting down over 50 research stations like they’re doing at the Forestry Department, these kinds of things took decades and decades to build up and to maintain. And just taking a hammer to them willy-nilly—it’s just not going to be a contained thing. It will probably take decades to build back up to what we had.

And then on the data surveillance side, the surveillance state has been building up along with the rest of the government data. It’s been decades and decades of building as well. Trump didn’t start the Department of Homeland Security operations and the measures that were in place. That extended before Trump, and it’s not just his thing, but he is given the reins of this structure that was already in place and is just going crazy.

But you argue that data collection isn’t disappearing, right? It’s being repurposed. So what is the clearest real-world example of that shift?

Certain parts of it are disappearing, I would say. For example, certain collections have been removed. The USDA’s Food Security Survey was removed. That’s an example of a real-world thing being gone. And we have stuff like vaccine databases from the CDC that haven’t been updated or were paused.

Government data collection on the whole isn’t gone because not everything has been taken away. What’s untouched is the surveillance. It’s the stuff that wasn’t helping anybody.

It wasn’t publicly accessible. It’s just for national security.

Your argument in the newsletter basically is that what was being collected to facilitate various programs and help people in the United States is now basically being used to cage them—that’s the analogy that you used. How do you think most readers are misunderstanding how their data is being used? Probably most people don’t know the extent of this slow, decades-long shift.

I think people probably don’t understand how serious your phone spying on you is. I feel like people make a lot of jokes about, “Oh, the FBI agent on my phone is watching me watch YouTube videos while I fall asleep,” or “My Alexa always knows what I want—isn’t that funny?”

It’s not funny. It’s serious, because the data collection that comes from stuff like Alexa, stuff like what you do on Instagram, your Amazon purchases—these metrics are available for the government to buy.

Data brokers collect this stuff. Amazon will sell what you have looked at to a data broker like Experian, who will then collect it. These data brokers will brag about being able to sort people into different profiles. They can sort you by your political preference, for example.

So when you have an administration that’s interested in suppressing certain political opinions, going after leftist organizers and things like that, your phone knowing that you are into leftist organizing is a danger, and that can be used against you.

Regardless of who’s in charge—the left or the right—you’re being profiled, and that can be used against you. But I don’t believe you’re arguing for no government data. So how do you distinguish between what’s legitimate and what is crossing the line into our right to privacy?

I think that’s the question, right? I think that legitimate government data use needs to be tied to a service, and it needs to be for the people, and it needs to have transparency and accountability measures in place to make sure that’s happening.

When you have these government black boxes where there’s no oversight—we don’t know what the collection is precisely, who has it, or the parameters of it—that is a huge red flag. That can be used for anything.

The thing that will keep it from being used as a weapon is making sure that it’s being used for the public good.

And like you said, you’ve traced back the genesis of where we are today in terms of data collection back decades. There was the post-9/11 surveillance, third-party doctrine, etc. Which of these do you think is the most responsible for where we are now? Or is there one that you can pinpoint?

The boring, nuanced answer is that they all play a part, right? If I had to pick one, I would probably say the third-party doctrine. It’s the oldest of the things that I mentioned in the newsletter.

That is what established that your right to privacy ends as soon as you’ve given a third party has access to it, which now that we live most of our lives through the internet, a third party is always involved.

Do you see the current moment as a legal failure, technological inevitability, or a political choice?

I definitely see it as a legal failure. I think it’s also a very intentional choice by the administration.

I don’t see it as a technological inevitability. I think this is a very unnatural way for technology to progress. The early days of the internet had a spirit of cooperation and community that I think has been exploited and driven out in a way.

There’s a term—“enshittification”—where something starts as a useful tool and becomes monetized and degraded over time. 

Nobody sets out to make technology worse, but that’s what social media and surveillance tools have become. I think this is the result of technology evolving under capitalism.

What does the surveillance infrastructure actually look like in practice? Who’s building it, and how connected is it?

We have government surveillance, law enforcement surveillance coming from the Patriot Act and the Department of Homeland Security, and then recent FBI surveillance, like NSPM 7  [National Security Presidential Memorandum-7, titled "Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence," was issued by President Trump on September 25, 2025—ed.]. That’s what I’ve been referencing, where the FBI is under orders to search out what the Trump administration deems political extremism as a way of counteracting domestic terrorism. So that’s one branch of it—the government side.

The other is private companies. So we talked about social media companies selling your data to data brokers.

And we also have existing government data from things like the IRS, Medicaid, and Social Security.

The thing that’s scary is that they are trying to connect a lot of that now. The Intercept broke the story, with Freedom of the Press Foundation, that the government is consolidating all of their information on us into one giant database. So we used to have data firewalls between agencies, like the IRS and Homeland Security, for example.

But those are being broken down. They are consolidating them into a large database that they can then use AI models to sort through quickly. And just having it all in one place makes it more vulnerable to hacking and attacks.

It’s private and government data—new and preexisting—all becoming more connected.

How does this shift affect you as a journalist, especially when working with sensitive data?

For journalists, this is a problem. As we’re seeing with the FBI and domestic terrorism monitoring, if you are going against the narratives of the administration, they are watching you.

They want to know what you’re saying, how you said it, where you are when you said it, and who you’re talking to. That’s very scary for journalists.

Working with sensitive communities, like immigrant communities, becomes especially risky. That added pressure absolutely affects how journalists operate.

Are we entering a period where journalists will have less access to data while the government has more?

I think that’s what they want, definitely. But there is a lot of independent data collecting happening.

There are other places you can turn to that aren’t government sources, and that’s what Prairie Fire is about—collecting them and facilitating their work so we’re not left without data.

Is there a version of centralized data collection that isn’t harmful?

When you’re centralizing anything—information, power, whatever—it opens it up to being taken over by a bad actor. You need strong safeguards and accountability measures. There are benefits, but do they outweigh the risks? I don’t know.

At the very least, we need alternative sources—independent research and data collection—because that’s what keeps the system healthy.

How should journalists approach collecting sensitive data in this environment?

Protecting your sources is top priority. You need to be as cautious as possible while still getting the work done.

We’re in this for the long game. Protect yourself, protect your sources, but keep going.

If you had to distill your newsletter into one takeaway—what should readers do differently starting tomorrow?

Turn off or get rid of devices like Alexa and Google Home. Disable things like Siri.

Limit tracking and data sharing wherever you can. Adjust your social media settings. Use tools like Privacy Badger.

Stay aware. This is also a safety issue. Be proactive about protecting your data.

Subscribe to the Prairie Fire newsletter

View all the Newsjunkie newsletters