25 Years of Mass Surveillance Is Enough
An essay co-authored by Cindy Cohn, published in Lawfare, argues that the mass surveillance architecture built after the September 11 attacks has expanded well beyond its original national security justification and that 25 years is long enough to sustain it.
Why this matters: The argument here is simple and worth taking seriously. The government built mass surveillance tools for a specific emergency. That emergency is now a quarter-century old. The tools did not shrink when the threat did. They grew. Collecting metadata on millions of people is not the same as targeting a suspect. It sweeps up everyone. If the legal framework that permits this was always meant to be temporary, the question now is who in power actually wants to change it, and why so few do.
Who should care: Privacy officers · Cybersecurity · General readers · Policy
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