Privacy isn’t dead. Just ask Kristi Noem.
The Department of Homeland Security secretary has spent 2025 trying to convince the American public that identifying roving bands of masked federal agents is “doxing”—and that revealing these public servants’ identities is “violence.” Noem is wrong on both fronts, legal experts say, but her claims of doxing highlight a central conflict in the current era: Surveillance now goes both ways.
Over the nearly 12 months since President Donald Trump took office for a second time, life in the United States has been torn asunder by relentless arrests and raids by officers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection, and federal, state, and local authorities deputized to carry out immigration actions. Many of these agents are hiding their identities on the administration-approved basis that they are the ones at risk. US residents, in response, have ramped up their documentation of law enforcement activity to seemingly unprecedented levels.
“ICE watch” groups have appeared across the country. Apps for tracking immigration enforcement activity have popped up on (then disappeared from) Apple and Google app stores. Social media feeds are awash in videos of unidentified agents tackling men in parking lots, throwing women to the ground, and ripping families apart. From Los Angeles to Chicago to Raleigh, North Carolina, neighbors and passersby have pulled out their phones to document members of their communities being arrested and vanishing into the Trump administration’s machinery.
That’s not to say it’s new, of course. Documenting law enforcement activity to counter the he said, he said imbalance of power between police and civilians is practically an American tradition, says Adam Schwartz, privacy litigation director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties nonprofit. “This goes back at least as far as the 1968 Democratic Convention when journalists documented police officers rioting and beating up protesters—and lying about who was responsible for this,” he says.
Jennifer Granick, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, says the practice likely goes back “centuries.” Indeed, documenting police activity is likely as old as policing itself. “The difference [today] is that technology has made it so everybody has a video recorder with them at all times,” Granick says. “And then it’s very easy to get that recording out to the public.”
Non-journalists recording police activity entered the mainstream after a bystander, George Holliday, videotaped Los Angeles Police Department officers brutally beating Rodney King, a Black man, in March 1991 and shared the footage with local media. The video would set off a national reckoning over race and policing in modern America.