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June 25, 2025 
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 | By Nick Fox Mr. Fox is an editor at large in Times Opinion. |
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The journalist Megan K. Stack lived and worked in China a dozen years ago, so she was familiar with the invasive government surveillance there. But she was shocked on a recent visit as a chaperone for her son’s school trip to see how thorough the oversight had become since she had left. Cameras everywhere capture virtually every movement of everyone. Systems collect data on every transaction and social media post. The setup provides citizens with safety, convenience — and government control that can lead to oppression.
Even more disturbing, she writes in an essay, is that what she saw in China felt familiar.
“As my face was getting scanned all over China,” she writes, “Elon Musk’s minions with the so-called Department of Government Efficiency were ransacking federal agencies to seize Americans’ data and sensitive information.”
It goes further, she writes: “The Trump administration is using Palantir technology to help consolidate data on Americans held by disparate federal agencies so that it could potentially create a centralized dossier.”
Here, too, the lure of safety and convenience can make Americans complacent about this level of surveillance.
“Many Americans are oblivious to the porous boundary between private companies that collect our intimate details and the arms of government buying it up,” she writes.
She concludes, “If we keep sleepwalking into a surveillance state, we may eventually wake up in a place we hardly recognize as our own.”
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