Skip to main content
The Footnote

Open Record archive

  1. The Bill for the War Comes Due at the Checkout Counter
  2. A State Spends Its Force Abroad and Its Patience at Home
  3. The Security State Turns Its Tools Inward
  4. The Iran War Keeps Exporting Its Costs
  5. Power Turns on Its Witnesses
  6. A Government That Performs Power
  7. Firing Squad Meant to Be Watched
  8. The War Is Now the Economy
  9. War Abroad Party at Home
  10. Guardrails Left a Map
  11. Who Decides Who Pays
  12. Pressure Campaign Reaches Brazil
  13. Record Caught Up
  14. Machinery Pointed Inward
  15. Bond Market Prices the Deficit
  16. Three Ways an Argument Disappears
  17. The Machinery Keeps Running
  18. The War Is Now a Domestic Story
  19. Who Counts Not Who Votes
  20. No to a Map Yes to a Database
  21. Power Was Visible Accountability Was Not
  22. Records Landed Claims Did Not Hold
  23. Projected Power Argument at Home
  24. Washington Is Rationing What the Public Sees
  25. Who Gets to See What Power Is Doing
  26. Power Moves in Days
  27. Four Institutions Four Judges
  28. The Loud Fight Ends
  29. The Bill Came Due
  30. Six Institutions Said No
  31. Saying Stop Is Not Stopping
  32. AI Slowdown Accountability Gap
  33. Cost Arriving Channel Narrowing
  34. The Question Is Who Pays
  35. Washington Offers a Check
  36. Dividend Promise Failing Election Machinery
  37. War Automated Faster Than Accounted For
  38. Nineteen Months
  39. The Election Is Now a Docket
  40. The Rule Is Not the Safeguard
  41. The Price Walked Into an Election
  42. Outrunning Review
  43. Machinery of Who Counts
  44. War's Real Bill Arrives Far From the Gulf
  45. The Legal Justification Comes Last
  46. A Price, Not a Front
  47. The Price of a War Nobody Calls a War
  48. War's Second Front Is Economic
  49. Three Instruments, One Method
  50. Fight Over the Machinery
  51. Documents Caught Up With Statements
  52. Capacity Without Checks
  53. The Machinery Is Not Failing
  54. Coercion Is the Policy
  55. You Cannot Sue a Bond Market
  56. War Washington Cannot End
  57. Blockade and Bond Market
  58. The Bill Comes Due
  59. Money Lost, Surveillance Won
  60. Government Stopped Showing Its Work
  61. Routed Around, Not Repealed
  62. Enforcement Turned Inward
  63. Past the Point It Can Hold
  64. What It Cost to Lose
  65. Who Holds the Veto
  66. Risk Moves Down
  67. The Government Rents Its Surveillance
  68. The Powers Expand, the Checks Sit Empty
  69. The Promise Was Only Worth the Pressure Behind It
  70. The Senate Traded Away Its Leverage
  71. Two Orders and a Shrinking Stockpile
  72. What Money Bought
  73. Money Lost Michigan, Won Missouri
  74. Change the Accounting
  75. Two Clocks
  76. Who Decides What Counts as a Threat
  77. The Claim Arrives First

Publication sections

The Open RecordInvestigationsCommentaryMethodAbout

Publication utilities

CorrectionsRSS 2.0

A topic. All topics.

Surveillance

A state that rents its surveillance rather than building it, and so keeps the capability outside the rules that would apply if it owned it.

What the record shows

The state mostly does not build its surveillance. It rents it, and the renting is the point: a capability the government buys access to sits outside the disclosure, procurement and oversight rules that would apply to a system it owned. ICE planned to pay LexisNexis roughly $6.7 million for continued data access, per records 404 Media obtained. A drug enforcement grant program, 404 Media documents, moves local license plate reader data into federal centers beyond the reach of local consent rules.

The record includes surveillance aimed at organized labor and at protest. A government slide labeled Conspiracy, in Minnesota court filings, named 18 organizations, among them the AFL-CIO and a bicycle repair collective. Unsealed filings reported by WIRED allege ICE built files on people filming its arrests and stored them in a Palantir-built system; the department's own motion to dismiss concedes those records were created and argues the agent acted against policy.

Most of the commercial record concerns Flock Safety. Flock says it runs more than 120,000 cameras; a researcher working from what he says is Flock's own data mapped roughly 300,000 devices. The Electronic Frontier Foundation found an Indiana deputy who searched more than 19,000 cameras with the logged justification "LMAO."

The backlash has started to bind. Knox County, Tennessee ordered every Flock camera removed within 30 days, and Florida banned the readers from state highways. In September the D.C. Circuit ruled that the IRS broke federal law by handing Homeland Security taxpayer addresses, after ICE requested 1.28 million. On 1 October Sara Hill, a federal judge in Oklahoma, ruled that a Tulsa County deputy's Flock search violated the Fourth Amendment, called the system indiscriminate mass surveillance and suppressed the evidence. The ruling binds no other court and Flock expects to win on appeal, but it is the first judicial endorsement of the argument that the harm lies in the aggregate record.

Standing summary, carried forward and rewritten as the coverage moves. Every claim is sourced either to a dated edition below or to the named body that made the finding.

20 editions