A software-powered surveillance regime is rewriting the rules of privacy, borders, and citizenship.
As 2025 draws to a close, it’s time to assess how much damage Donald Trump and his minions have inflicted on our country. It’s frankly too much for one article. But there’s one aspect that stands above the rest because it reaches into our pockets, our phones, our families, our border crossings, and the quiet corners of our lives here in New England: the piercing of privacy. The federal government is now amassing an unimaginable volume of data about all of us — and using centralized databases and analytic tools to tighten its totalitarian grip. It’s not the ghost of Stalin or Hitler — it’s their logic, newly efficient. Orwell feared a state that sees everything. Huxley feared a public that feels nothing. We’re living at the intersection.
Let’s begin where this becomes visible on the ground — not in Washington, but in St. Albans, Vermont. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office sits behind a flat parking lot half-filled with Subarus and pickup trucks. Early this year, in that lobby, Mohsen Mahdawi waited for the final procedural step toward becoming an American. He never reached the interview window. Federal agents detained him in front of families rehearsing their oaths. A federal judge later ordered his release, ruling the government had failed to justify even two weeks of custody.² His life was interrupted not by crime, but by digital suspicion.
Stories like his travel through New England differently than headlines. They appear in the pauses between sentences at a café in Norwich or a church office in Lewiston. “They tell us not to go alone anymore,” one immigration lawyer in Manchester said privately. When people begin fearing daylight appointments at federal buildings, a democracy is already shifting underfoot.
To the west, the same shift is underway in California. In San Jose, where parking lots are filled with Teslas instead of Subarus, H-1B visa holders — many of them engineers running the software that now surveils others — have been told their online lives are subject to continuous social-media review.³ One engineer told a journalist, “I didn’t leave one surveillance state to live inside a digital one.” The irony lands harder when you stand beneath a billboard advertising “freedom to innovate.”
This surveillance doesn’t stop at the southern border — or even at America’s coastline. Millions of Canadians cross into the U.S. each year under the Visa Waiver Program.