Under the Trump administration, the United States has increasingly become a digital police state—one where pervasive surveillance systems endanger all Americans' fundamental rights, while immigrants, protesters, the administration's political foes, pro-Palestinian activists, transgender individuals, and people seeking reproductive healthcare face particularly intense monitoring and repression wholly inconsistent with our nation's founding principles.

But Donald Trump isn't a king. In our system of federalism, state and local governments retain crucial power to rein in out-of-control surveillance.

Pushing them to do so in Massachusetts is a top priority for the ACLU, and we have already made critical strides at the state level this legislative session with Senate passage of strong, comprehensive data privacy legislation that would hold big tech companies accountable and prevent troves of personal data about each and every one of us from being exploited by federal authorities. The Massachusetts House is now considering similar legislation. The next few months are crucial, so read on to find out how you can help us get comprehensive data privacy legislation over the finish line, and why the ACLU’s Firewalls for Freedom legislative priorities are so important to counter mass surveillance.

Fighting for digital privacy has never been more important. The Trump administration has empowered big tech surveillance companies like Palantir and Babel Street to aggregate Americans' personal data into massive government databases. This includes the collection and sharing of precise location information that makes it easy for police and federal agencies to track people, including at protests and while peacefully observing ICE agents.

Palantir and Babel Street don't only collect and aggregate huge quantities of public and nonpublic information about ordinary Americans. They also apply machine learning algorithms to look for patterns in the information, pull out so-called "suspicious activity"— like criticism of the Trump administration—and automate profiling and surveillance.

According to recent reporting from 404 Media, Palantir’s ICE app, called ELITE, “populates a map with potential deportation targets, brings up a dossier on each person, and provides a ‘confidence score’ on the person’s current address.” The State Department is already using similar technologies as part of its "catch and revoke" program, targeting U.S. visa holders. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has extended these social media surveillance practices to visa applicants, effectively screening immigrants based on their political expression.

That's bad enough.

But it could very quickly get worse, because what the government does to foreigners is often a prelude to what it intends to do to U.S. citizens.

Indeed, in September 2025, the Trump administration issued National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, instructing the Department of Justice to investigate civil society organizations, activists, and donors, with a particular focus on the political left and pro-democracy organizations. Palantir’s and Babel Street's databases provide the infrastructure to identify, track, and act against these targets.

The Fourth Amendment and state constitutional protections, like Article 14 of the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights, guarantee individuals the right to be free from warrantless government surveillance and tracking. But these constitutional protections are being eroded right in front of our eyes.

The White House ignores the law. And the administration's reckless disregard for civil liberties is given astonishing reach by AI and machine learning technologies that automate surveillance and profiling, enabling the government to track and categorize people at a scale never before possible.

This automation means the government is no longer limited by the number of people it employs. Effortless and pervasive monitoring tracks people on sidewalks, roadways, and even into our private spheres—including the websites we visit, the ideas we express, and the places we spend and donate our money.

The ACLU and other organizations are filing lawsuits to stop Trump's assaults on our civil liberties at the federal level.

We are also hard at work in the states, to ensure state and local government resources are not being used—intentionally or not—to assist with Trump's assaults on the rule of law and our democratic freedoms.

Mirroring surveillance expansion at the federal level, AI-powered technology is enabling local and state law enforcement to erode our privacy here in Massachusetts. Nearly every part of policing is becoming automated—from warrantless tracking of all drivers on the roads through automatic license plate readers to social media surveillance.

Some of these tools have valid law enforcement purposes when implemented with proper guardrails. The problem is that there are few, if any, guardrails in place today. Even worse, as our work on Flock license plate readers has shown, when state and local police beef up their surveillance apparatus, Trump's agencies are often the beneficiaries.

Law enforcement agencies often justify expansions of surveillance by suggesting that people have no reasonable expectation of privacy in public. But that’s simply not true.

In Commonwealth v. Augustine, Massachusetts' Supreme Judicial Court was among the first courts to recognize that people retain their right to privacy even in public spaces. The Supreme Court has acknowledged this reality as well. In the landmark case Carpenter v. United States, the Supreme Court warned that privacy rights could be eroded by “ever alert” modern surveillance technologies. Both the Augustine and Carpenter cases established that police cannot track people via their cell phone location for extended periods of time without a warrant.

Yet the automation of policing continues to surge, with apparent disregard for our bedrock constitutional rights.

Surveillance technology companies like Axon, Motorola, Flock Safety, and Genetec are rolling out AI-powered predictive policing and "real-time crime center" tools that greatly increase the potential for abuse.

These technology suites gather data from various surveillance devices and sources into a central database bolstered with AI capabilities, including facial recognition. The result: police can follow your every move — tracking where you live, work, worship, protest, get healthcare, and more.

And they can do this not just to one of us, but to all of us, with the mere click of a button.

In Massachusetts, this shift toward AI-driven surveillance is already underway. Here are some of the tools deployed by state and local law enforcement agencies:

Police departments across Massachusetts are deploying AI-powered automatic license plate readers (LPRs) that transform routine traffic monitoring into comprehensive location tracking tools.

Companies like Flock Safety and Vigilant Solutions provide law enforcement agencies nationwide with access to vast networks of cameras that capture and store license plate data, creating detailed records of people's movements over time. These technologies don't just track people suspected of serious crimes—they monitor everyone on the roads, building massive databases of where ordinary people go about their daily lives.

Today, unrestricted sharing of license plate reader data through Flock and Vigilant's national databases is facilitating ongoing civil immigration enforcement by federal and state authorities, and even helping cops in Texas investigate a woman for terminating her pregnancy.

When combined with cell-site simulators that can track the location of mobile devices, police gain unprecedented ability to follow individuals without a warrant, even though the Supreme Court raised concerns about this practice in Carpenter.

According to documents obtained by the ACLU of Massachusetts in response to public records requests and other publicly available sources, more than 80 police departments across the state have adopted automatic license plate reader systems. No state laws regulate the use of this location tracking technology.

The proliferation of surveillance cameras across Massachusetts cities and towns has created a foundation for AI-powered monitoring that extends far beyond what was previously possible.

The ACLU of Massachusetts obtained the user guide of one common video analytics software, BriefCam. It reveals extensive reliance on facial recognition technology and machine learning to automatically identify and follow individuals across multiple camera feeds. This technology transforms scattered surveillance cameras into an integrated tracking network that can follow the daily movements of countless surveillance targets with minimal human labor.

Facial recognition technology is far from perfect. It has well-documented misidentification issues — including the recent misidentification (twice!) of a woman who was taken into ICE custody. Even famous athletes have been misidentified. The technology’s high error rates reflect a persistent and insidious racial bias that disproportionately harms people of color.

Yet police departments continue to use it.

The Springfield Police Department is among the Massachusetts law enforcement agencies using BriefCam, despite a local ordinance prohibiting City agencies from using face surveillance. The Boston Police Department also has a contract for BriefCam but says it is not currently using the software.

We need immediate action at both the state and local level to ensure that law enforcement can continue to use technology to protect the public from true threats — without creating a digital dragnet that sweeps up the data of millions of people suspected of no crime.

The ACLU of Massachusetts’ top priority this legislative session is data privacy protection.

The Senate has passed a strong data privacy bill. The House is now considering similar legislation. This bill will limit the amount of information companies can collect and process about us, and will completely forbid them from selling especially sensitive data like precise geolocation information.

We know ICE is purchasing cellphone location data and using it to hunt down our friends, family, and neighbors. Massachusetts must prohibit the sale of these sensitive data, to ensure agencies like ICE cannot skirt Fourth Amendment warrant requirements simply by cutting a check to a data broker.

We are also supporting other important legislation. With your help, they will gain momentum in the coming months. These include:

• H.3755 would prohibit the accumulation and sharing of license plate reader data on millions of people not suspected of any wrongdoing, while still allowing law enforcement to use these tools in legitimate criminal investigations, subject to judicial oversight.
• H.1946 and S.1053 would establish critical guardrails on the use of facial recognition technology and advanced video analytics software that threaten our privacy and disproportionately harm communities of color.

In addition, you can encourage your municipality to adopt a Community Control Over Police Surveillance (CCOPS) ordinance, which gives local leaders and residents democratic oversight of surveillance tools such as license place readers and facial recognition before they're deployed. CCOPS has already been enacted in Boston, Cambridge, Lawrence, Medford, Northampton, and Somerville.

If your community doesn't yet have a CCOPS ordinance, now is the time to organize and advocate for one—visit the ACLU of Massachusetts CCOPS resources page to learn more.

AI can multiply the power of individual surveillance tools exponentially, transforming them from limited investigative resources into an omnipresent digital dragnet that monitors everyone, not just people suspected of serious crimes.

The automated nature of these systems means that traditional limitations on police resources—once a vital check on government overreach—have been effectively eliminated, replaced by AI-powered surveillance that never sleeps, never forgets, and constantly watches our every move.

But we can push back and protect our privacy—without compromising public safety. Please join the ACLU of Massachusetts as we continue to fight for strong guardrails and defend our constitutional rights.

by Gideon Epstein, Technology for Liberty Policy Counsel