The history of U.S. government surveillance has shifted from targeted “physical” spying to the modern era of automated, digital mass data collection. Over the last century, the focus has often fluctuated between foreign threats and domestic political movements. Under J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI ran the Counter-Intelligence Program. It targeted the Civil Rights Movement (including Martin Luther King Jr.), the Black Panther Party, feminist organizations, and socialist groups. Techniques included wiretapping, infiltrating groups with informants, and “psychological warfare” to disrupt organizations. Project Shamrock, the NSA’s predecessor, intercepted millions of telegrams entering or leaving the U.S. daily, sharing them with the FBI and CIA without warrants. The Patriot Act (2001) specifically allows the government, under Section 215, to collect “any tangible thing” relevant to an investigation. This was later used to justify the bulk collection of phone metadata (who you called and for how long) for millions of Americans. PRISM and Upstream: Revealed by Edward Snowden in 2013, these programs allowed the NSA to collect data directly from the servers of major tech companies (Google, Facebook, Microsoft) and to tap fiber-optic cables that carry internet traffic. Executive Order 12333 gives the intelligence community broad authority to collect data that is “incidentally” gathered on Americans while they are targeting foreigners overseas
There are loopholes now. The government is using data brokers to collect data from citizens and transfer swaths of it to databases that build citizen profiles. This includes data such as social media posts and GPS location from apps that collect precise and approximate locations. They use the names and IP addresses to match this data and include it in your profile. : Not only is this a danger to citizens, but it also represents an overhaul in how the government collects and stores data on individuals. Posing a threat to citizens and non-citizens by using private social media data sets a dangerous precedent for freedom of speech. This has historically been used during protests to track activists’ movements and build data on participants. ClearviewAI is a facial recognition database fed by every online social media platform and by street cameras in our cities. Police have been using this service to squash protests and prosecute people for using their rights to protest and freedom of speech. [Source]
Facebook is used daily by law enforcement groups to track and gather data, with or without search warrants. The Law Enforcement Portal: Facebook maintains a dedicated, semi-automated portal where police can submit requests for user data. There is still a lot to be said about the transparency of such data that META releases. According to Meta’s own reports, the U.S. government requests data on hundreds of thousands of accounts every year. Meta discloses at least some data for roughly 75-80% of those requests. Many of these requests come with “non-disclosure orders,” meaning Facebook is legally barred from telling you that the police have accessed your account.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Biden administration pressured Facebook to remove “harmful” misinformation. Mark Zuckerberg later expressed regret over this, suggesting the government’s pressure was “wrong” and that the company should have been more independent. As you have seen, many “cures” and “remedies” were not based on medical practice during the pandemic.
For activist and political organizers, Facebook’s data-sharing policies create a landscape where “public” organizing can quickly turn into a “digital paper trail” for law enforcement. Given the background in movements like the Radical Leftist Scum and advocacy for immigrant rights, understanding these specific vulnerabilities is crucial for digital safety. Millions of posts followed the format if you are Radical Leftist Scum, Abolish ICE, Anti-Trump, Fuck ICE, Impeach Noem. All of this data has been fed into a government database to track you and build your online paper trail. It is important to try to remain as anonymous as possible while still standing up for what you believe in.
Law enforcement agencies frequently use the “no expectation of privacy” legal doctrine to monitor activists without a warrant. Police and federal agencies use automated tools to scan for specific hashtags or phrases (like “protest,” “direct action,” or movement names). As of late 2025, reports showed agencies logging thousands of searches linked to specific protest movements. Organizing a “Public Event” on Facebook makes the entire guest list and “Interested” list accessible to law enforcement. Agencies use these lists to build dossiers on participants and predict crowd sizes. FBI and local police policies often allow officers to create “undercover” profiles to join private groups or “friend” organizers, bypassing privacy settings to view non-public posts. Companies like Dataminr or ShadowDragon have been known to aggregate social media data and sell it as “threat intelligence” to police departments.
When Meta complies with a legal request (which they do for roughly 80% of U.S. requests), they provide data that can be used to map out an entire movement. Law enforcement agencies will scrape photos and review tags to identify who is associated with the organizers and build trees of the people involved. Even if you don’t “check in,” the IP address used to log in or the EXIF data in an uploaded photo can reveal an organizer’s home address or frequent meeting spots. Metapho is a photo and video metadata management application for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Vision, designed to view, edit, and remove EXIF data, GPS locations, and dates. It supports formats like HEIC, DNG, and RAW, allowing users to remove sensitive personal data before sharing or correct metadata in bulk. Learn more about Metaphoto [here].
There have been documented cases where law enforcement requested that Meta deactivate an activist’s account or “kill” a live stream during a protest to disrupt the “narrative” or prevent coordination. Have you ever gone live and kept getting errors at protest? The safest way to document is to go live so there is a public archive of events taking place, but with tools from police and federal law enforcement, they can request that Meta “kill” those streams, preventing users from sharing what is happening.
Documents obtained by groups like the ACLU show that law enforcement often labels racial justice and leftist activists as “threats” or “extremists” without evidence of violence, using social media posts about simple logistics (like “pizza nights” or “study groups”) as justification for continued surveillance. For those organizing around immigrant rights, Facebook data (including “likes” of specific pages or membership in groups) has been used by ICE to identify and track individuals for enforcement actions.
Under Elon Musk’s ownership, X (formerly Twitter) has maintained a paradoxical relationship with the federal government: Musk often publicly criticizes government “censorship” and surveillance, yet the company’s compliance with legal data requests has actually reached record highs. Despite the “free speech” branding, X has become significantly more compliant with government data demands than it was under its previous leadership. [source] According to X’s 2025 transparency reports, the company now complies with approximately 82% of legal requests for user data. In contrast, before the 2022 takeover, that rate often hovered between 50% and 60%.
When a federal agency (like the FBI or DHS) issues a valid subpoena or warrant, X provides:
**Direct Messages (DMs):** Unless you are using the specific “Encrypted DMs” feature (which has its own limitations), your private messages are stored in plain text on X’s servers and can be handed over.
• **IP Logs & Geolocation:** Data on where you logged in from, which can be used to track an organizer’s movements or home address.
• **Biometric Data:** X’s updated privacy policy now allows for the collection of biometric data, which critics fear could eventually be cross-referenced with government databases. [source]
For a decade, Twitter fought a major legal battle against the U.S. government to disclose exactly how many National Security Letters (NSLs) and FISA orders it had received. In early 2024, X lost this battle. The courts upheld the government’s right to “gag” X, meaning the government can force X to turn over user data while legally forbidding the company from telling the user (or the public) that it happened. [source] The platform profits off sharing data. While X fought these cases, investigative reports in 2024/2025 highlighted that the company still profits from “firehose” data access—selling massive streams of public tweet data to “threat intelligence” firms that federal agencies like the DHS then contract to monitor political movements. Because most activity on X is public, federal agents use it to build “association maps.” For activists in movements like the Radical Leftist Scum, a simple “Like” or “Retweet” can be used by federal agencies to link individuals to “persons of interest” in an investigation. There are ongoing concerns from privacy advocates about how X’s internal AI, Grok, processes user data and whether those insights (e.g., identifying sentiment or leadership structures within a movement) could be made available to state actors. [source]
X continues to work with the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force. While the “Twitter Files” release in 2023 was intended to show government overreach, the documents actually confirmed a deep, ongoing technical pipeline where the FBI regularly sends lists of “suspicious” accounts to X for review and potential removal. [source]
Signal is open-source and has been subpoenaed multiple times; each time, it could only provide the date the account was created and the last time it connected. It contains no message content or contact lists. Turn on Disappearing Messages by default (e.g., 24 hours or 1 week) so that if a teammate’s phone is confiscated, your history isn’t exposed. [Source]
Communicating securely is not enough; hardening the physical device is essential to ensuring activists remain safe. Disable Biometrics. At a protest or action, disable FaceID and Fingerprint unlock. Legally, police can often compel you to use your thumb or face, but they cannot legally force you to give up a memorized passcode (protected by the 5th Amendment). Use a Long Passphrase: Move beyond a 6-digit PIN. Use an alphanumeric passphrase (e.g., Correct-Horse-Battery-Staple). Lockdown Mode (iPhone): If you use an iPhone, enable “Lockdown Mode” in Settings. It blocks sophisticated “zero-click” spyware often used against activists.
Signal is widely considered the most “law enforcement-proof” mainstream app because it is built on a principle of zero-knowledge. If a federal agency serves Signal with a subpoena, the company literally cannot turn over your messages, your name, or your contacts because it never has access to that information in the first place. [source]. The only two things signal turns over are the Unix timestamp of account creation and the Unix timestamp of when you last used signal. For added security, you can use a VPN, but that won’t change the timestamps. Just anonymize your IP address when accessing the apps.
Entryism is huge in political movements and many people are not trained to spot it. By vetting your organizers you reduce the risk of leaked data. In August 2025, the FBI successfully monitored a Signal group chat used by immigration activists in New York. They didn’t “break” Signal’s encryption; instead, they used a “sensitive source” (an informant) who was simply a member of the group and could see all the messages. With this messaging app it was concluded the participants were labeled as violent extremist and profiles were created in a database for them. Most users do not use their names or photos when communicating on signal and use alias like “red9” “golden pea” just to name a few or a single letter with a emoji like we saw for Palestine organizing in signal groups. [source]
One thing to note is if you use iCloud backup you must turn it off for signal as governments can subpoena Apple and gain access to your backups. iCloud backups are not encrypted by default. Signal has a built in backup service for messages now and is quite affordable so I would check it out, the cost currently as of January 2026 is $1.99. This also helps further the companies goals of development for the app and your backups are encrypted on signal servers. [Source
The EFF (Electronic Fronteir Foundation) Is a great resource for learning about online safety and can help you protect yourself online. Always remember to take care of yourself when using online tools. Read more about securing yourself with an EFF guide [here]
Activist fuel the next generational changes, but the government will always try and squash those efforts. Keep yourself safe and keep your community members safe.
We will get through this
IF YOU ENJOYED THIS ARTICLE CONSIDER SIGNING UP TO RECEIVE EMAILS FROM THE PENNY TRIBUNE. ARTICLES ARE RELEASED ALMOST DAILY AND SUPPORTING INDIVIDUAL JOURNALISM HELPS KEEP THE WORLD ACCOUNTABLE AND SAFE FROM DOMESTIC AND FOREIGN THREATS. OUR GOVERNMENT HAS A DUTY TO ENSURE WE ARE SAFE AND THE PENNY TRIBUNE WILL CONTINUE EXPOSING HYPOCRISY AND KEEPING LEGISLATORS ACCOUNTABLE.