Personal Data as Surveillance

Welcome to the panopticon. Don’t panic.

If you’ve read our Prairie Fire newsletters, you know the Trump administration has been killing off research centers. But if I’ve given you the impression that federal data collection is a thing of the past, then I’ve led you terribly astray. Allow me to course correct.

Government research is shifting priorities. Originally, it was intended to support social programs, public benefits, healthcare, education, and unemployment assistance, along with the now quaint notion of “pure research,” science that advances the general knowledge base. Now it monitors citizenship status, political views, and compliance with the Trump regime. Instead of a window, our data has become a cage.

This shift can be traced to Trump’s Executive Order 14243—Stopping Waste, Fraud, and Abuse by Eliminating Information Silos—granting the executive branch unfettered access to sensitive, personal, and state-level data. Or to DOGE and its ability to compile records across agencies. Or the Post-9/11 expansion of federal surveillance. Or even all the way back to United States v. Miller (1976) and the third-party doctrine, establishing that Fourth Amendment privacy rights vanish in public places. That is, “public places” like the internet, and any website you might accidentally click open while cleaning your spam folder.

At the dirt-end of these roots is the framework of a powerful surveillance network, now in the hands of an increasingly authoritarian government.

With a centralized database of citizens’ sensitive information in the works, the president’s cozy relationship with home-surveillance operators like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Google’s Sundar Pichai, and an FBI-led task force dedicated to identifying “community organizers and protesters,” it’s clear the administration intends to aggregate our data to use against us.

Even if Congress agrees to reform Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to prevent Americans’ communications from being swept up in the surveillance of foreigners, that will only mark the beginning of a long, uphill battle for data protection.

The risks to personal liberty and privacy that have been mounting since the Patriot Act have reached a trigger point.

When it comes to carrying on research, especially in subjects the regime would rather wipe from the public’s memory, the panopticon presents a problem. Researchers will have to balance doing their jobs—representing and exploring the pressing issues of our day—with the risk of exposure.

How do you study racial disparity or LGBTQ+ populations when the FBI is on alert for “extremism on migration, race, and gender?” What do data-preservers do when sensitive information, like the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System (PRAMS) dataset, is under threat of removal? How do you keep vulnerable sources safe? How do you keep yourself safe?

These questions will be a central part of Prairie Fire moving forward. But in the meantime, I want to introduce you to some folks who were already dedicated to protecting data privacy. Here you will find advocates, data security experts, and tools to protect you and your work.

Advocates

• Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) - Fights government privacy violations through the courts

  • Catalogs and explains forms of surveillance available to law enforcement

  • Operates the Atlas of Surveillance, which documents the use of police technology throughout US cities

  • Hosts a series of articles on privacy issues

  • Creates security guides for nonprofits and individuals, such as “Surveillance Self-Defense: our expert guide to protecting you and your friends from online spying”

• Project On Government Oversight (POGO) - Watchdog that provides Reports & Analyses on government action

• MediaJustice - Creates educational resources to explain the tech industry’s “capture of our information ecosystems and government,” such as DHS Open for Business, which lays bare the corporate roots of counter-terrorism

Tools

• Tactical Tech - International research and educational institute centered around the impacts of digital technology

  • Filterable resource library of research, projects, and media, includes reports like this one, which explains how data brokers profile users based on political leanings, then sell their insights

  • Runs the Exposing the Invisible project, which creates resources for journalists and “investigators,” such as the safety kit

  • Created the Data Detox Kit to host simple, user-friendly guides to improving personal digital safety

• Privacy Badger - Free browser extension from EFF that prevents third-party tracking

• The Tor Project - Created a browser that encrypts your activity and blocks surveillance, also offers more Digital Security Guides

• OpenDP - Hosts a toolkit of differential privacy techniques to help protect your sensitive data and its sources

• Exploit Database - Maintains the Google Hacking Database, “a categorized index of Internet search engine queries designed to uncover interesting, and usually sensitive, information made publicly available on the Internet”

Experts

• Digital Defense Fund - Security support organization, originally founded to protect the abortion rights movement, expanded to all “movements for autonomy and liberation”

  • Created online privacy guides, including Foundations of Organizational Technology

  • Worked with Black & Pink National to develop security measures around sensitive survey data from LGBTQ+ prisoners

  • Available for consultations (after a two-week minimum waiting period), catered toward “organizations who aren’t sure what they need yet, and/or how they’re going to pay for it”

• Access Now - Runs the Digital Security Helpline

• Tech Impact - Provides consulting services for data security, analysis, strategy, and more

From the field—“Should the government know…?”

I recently interviewed Kenna Barnes, senior director and researcher at the prison advocacy organization Black & Pink National, about how the ban on federal sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) data collection is affecting LGBTQ+ prisoners. I went in with the assumption that missing information could only be a bad thing, but Barnes’s view of it surprised me.

“It's a curse and a blessing, in my opinion,” she said. “Ideally, the government would know nothing about anybody's sexual orientation or gender identity.”

On the other hand, Barnes acknowledged that vulnerable populations being less visible to watchdogs is a negative development. But, when weighed against the government being able to classify prisoners by sensitive, personal information, and single them out for differential treatment, they couldn’t justify SOGI surveillance. Instead of helping to protect LGBTQ+ prisoners, she posited that the data collection only enabled abuse, as in cases of prisoners being placed in solitary-confinement-like arrangements ‘for their own protection.’

After I mentioned the systematic erasure the government is enacting against transgender people, partially conducted through data erasure, Barnes went even further. She said data collection that singles-out vulnerable groups is the very thing that makes it possible for those groups to be identified, classified as cultural “others,” and targeted for destruction. Barnes drew from historical examples of the US government’s oppression of minority groups to support their case. “[A]sk black or indigenous folks, and they will tell you…[that states intent on destroying an identity group] track a lot, a lot, a lot, and then they say, ‘Oh, never mind. You don’t exist.’ But they have to track all the data first to know what they're [attacking].”

Help a data-dealer—Jailbreak their mail

As of 2026, most US prisoners are barred from receiving original physical mail directly. While the mail is still accepted by the prison system, the process has shifted to digital scanning or photocopying to prevent the introduction of contraband like drugs, according to prison officials. Sending physical mail now involves tracking down the address of a specific prison's mailing center, often located in a different state.

Kenna Barnes asks for your help on dealing with this new system: “I would love to figure out how to have automatic updates on people's addresses, and figure out how to maintain those things with software.” Reach her at kenna@blackandpink.org with your ideas for keeping loved ones, advocates, and penpals connected with their incarcerated contacts.

(Do you have an announcement, question, or call to action for our Prairie Fire community? Send your Help a Data-Dealer requests to morgan@newsjunkie.net)

I’ll leave it here

If there’s one good thing about your data being a resource coveted by the billionaires and authoritarians running this country, it’s that it’s yours. There are things you can do to your data that will make it harder to find, or even acts of sabotage to pollute data brokers’ hoards.

Learning about data poisoning techniques might be the highlight of my year so far. If you’re looking for a good dose of that fighting-the-man feeling, I can’t recommend it enough!

Until next time, data-dealers.

—Morgan