Trump’s imminent surveillance powers pose a threat to Americans’ privacy

In just a few weeks, Donald Trump is set to return to the White House, and his administration will wield the awesome power of the U.S. surveillance apparatus. Come January, an aspiring authoritarian who’s promised to persecute his opponents will have a major say over how some of the world’s most intrusive technologies and spy tactics are used. 

Understandably, this has many people — from activists to security experts to congresspeople — concerned about what this power could mean in the hands of a man with an enemies list and a record of abusing the government to partisan ends. So let’s take a look at some of their concerns and how a Trump administration could police and pester its political opponents. 

Project 2025 calls for increasing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s surveillance of reproductive health data. 

The Kaiser Family Foundation explained what this might look like:

In particular, the report calls for CDC research on the risks of abortion, abortion survivors, and requiring reporting on the number of abortions from every state (currently voluntary) as a condition of receiving federal Medicaid funds. The plan details the need to collect data on abortion rates across various demographic groups, monitor the number of cases of infants born alive after abortions (which does not happen), abortion harms, and withhold HHS funds from states where abortion remains legal if they do not comply with these requirements.

Last year, surveillance expert Albert Fox Cahn explained to me how repressive governments can use people’s internet search histories to find out whether they have researched “unauthorized” abortions and can even use geolocation data to track whether they have approached or entered facilities where abortions are provided. (You can watch our discussion here.) I also wrote about this more at length in 2022.

Civil rights leaders have raised concerns about the privacy implications of Trump’s vow to carry out mass deportations.

Wired reported that following Trump’s election win, Immigration and Customs Enforcement sent out a notice “asking companies to submit plans for how they would expand ICE’s system of ankle monitors, GPS trackers, biometric check-in technology, and human agents monitoring ‘non-citizens’ awaiting immigration court hearings or deportation.” As the American Civil Liberties Union explained this year, some of these surveillance tools, like ankle monitors, are known to be physically painful in addition to being demeaning.

Beyond that, Trump has proposed deputizing police to help with immigration enforcement, a tactic that’s been widely condemned for its reliance on racial profiling.

There’s also little reason to assume the consequences of such policies would remain confined to undocumented immigrants, either, considering that Trump has talked about potentially deporting American citizens.

The Justice Department’s inspector general revealed in early December that Trump’s Justice Department violated its own rules about spying on journalists as it sought to expose leakers, defying a review process that had been put in place to authorize such probes.

Journalists have raised concerns about the potential for repressive attacks on the media, pointing to Trump’s personal attacks on the free press and his selection of Kash Patel, a loyalist who has repeatedly threatened journalists, to nominate for FBI director to replace Christopher Wray.