ESSAY: How 9/11 Changed Government Surveillance of Citizens, Part Two

This essay by Amanda Watford appeared on Colorado Newsline on September 11, 2026. We are sharing it in two parts.

Read Part One

The growth of surveillance after 9/11 also coincided with a separate transformation that would make those systems far more powerful. Americans were beginning to carry smartphones, use social media and spend more of their lives online, generating enormous amounts of digital information that did not exist before.

Katie Kinsey, tech policy counsel at the Policing Project at the NYU School of Law, said that created a new dynamic for law enforcement. Agencies had expanded their ability to collect and share intelligence after 9/11, while technology was producing more information about people than ever before. Much of that information was collected by private companies for commercial purposes, but it could also become available to law enforcement, either through data purchases or when companies turned information over to authorities.

At the same time, Kinsey said, Americans have become accustomed to giving up personal information without necessarily understanding how it is collected or what can ultimately be done with it.

“There’s still a lack of awareness because there’s a lack of transparency on the part of law enforcement, but also on the part of these private tech companies about what they are actually collecting on us, and then what they’re doing with that information,” Kinsey said.

That lack of visibility extends beyond the cameras and other surveillance tools people can see. Personal data can be combined and shared behind the scenes, allowing the government to draw conclusions from pieces of information that may seem insignificant on their own.

“Never in human history has the government had more information about what we are doing, who we are doing it with, what we like to buy, and indeed what we are thinking about, than ever before,” said Gregory Nojeim, of the Center for Democracy & Technology.

Jessica Katzenstein, a cultural anthropologist and assistant professor at Arizona State University, said technological advances have also changed what Americans consider normal, making forms of live, mass surveillance that once seemed dystopian increasingly commonplace.

“The things that we would have taken for granted as forms of privacy we can all expect have just completely vanished,” she said.

That normalization can make surveillance difficult to roll back once law enforcement agencies have invested in the technology and incorporated it into their work, she said.

“Once you have a sense of both a need and access to tools, it will be very, very difficult to get you to give that up,” said Katzenstein, who also studies police in the U.S. as an ethnographer.

Communities living with the consequences
The expansion of surveillance after 9/11 also had consequences that were not felt equally. American Muslims faced heightened scrutiny in the name of national security, and advocates say the surveillance practices and assumptions that emerged in that period have since affected other communities of color.

Haris Tarin, vice president of policy and programming for the Muslim Public Affairs Council, who also spent more than a decade working in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, said many American Muslims experienced the aftermath of 9/11 as a “dual attack.”

“We were attacked twice. First by the terrorists, we were attacked for being Americans, and then we were attacked by our own government and people within our own country, where we were cast under suspicion, and that has continued for the last 25 years,” Tarin said.

Tarin said that suspicion soon extended beyond American Muslims to other communities.

“After 9/11, American Muslims were easy to go after because there was not much political consequence,” he said. “But it just didn’t stop with American Muslims. We’ve seen that now extend to immigrants. We’ve seen that now extend to anti-Semitism. We’ve seen that now extend to anti-Black hate.”

Lia Nitake, senior director of technology, telecommunications and media policy at Asian Americans Advancing Justice, said the consequences have been particularly pronounced for communities of color. She said the heightened surveillance of people based on their race, religion or other aspects of their identity has created a climate of fear.

“In a lot of ways, these surveillance measures have also eroded this idea that everyone should have an equal right to privacy,” Nitake said.

Both Tarin and Nitake said the growing use of artificial intelligence raises new concerns about how those disparities could be reproduced or amplified. Police agencies could increasingly rely on technology to monitor communities rather than invest in relationships with them, Tarin said.

“In the AI age, it will be easy for government agencies and law enforcement agencies to use technology to surveil and not do the hard work of community policing and engaging communities,” he said.

Stronger surveillance systems
Police departments nationwide are already using AI-assisted tools to analyze evidence, search databases, draft reports and translate conversations in real time.

North Carolina Central University Police Chief Robert Gaddy, who previously served as a Durham police officer for more than 25 years, sees the technology as a practical response to the growing demands on modern policing.

Information that once had to be gathered and shared manually can now flow through centralized digital systems, while AI-assisted cameras and license plate readers help officers identify suspects, gather evidence and solve crimes.

“If I can take this technology and at least give that [victim’s] security back to them by solving this crime, it’s worth every every bit of it,” Gaddy said.

Gaddy said technology can also help departments facing staffing shortages. But he said its use requires clear limits and oversight, including rules governing how officers access and share information and audits to identify potential misuse.

Still, some experts and advocates worry that newer AI-assisted systems could make existing surveillance infrastructure significantly more powerful by connecting databases that previously operated separately. Some tools allow officers to search multiple databases using natural-language prompts and generate summaries, raising questions about accuracy, missing information and how much officers may rely on the results.

Nojeim, of the Center on Democracy & Technology, said those concerns become especially serious when AI is used in decisions that can affect someone’s liberty.

“We all know from our work or our play with AI that it can make mistakes and that it hallucinates,” he said. “Now we’re in a world where an AI hallucination can be the thing that set off an investigation that landed you in jail inappropriately.”

Modern law enforcement agencies have access to more information than any human could reasonably process, said
David Viola, the adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. AI could help investigators identify connections that might otherwise be missed. But Viola said those capabilities also come with risks.

“These are very capable tools that can be used to great effect for the betterment of American society and safety,” Viola said. “They can also be used for ill effect if there is an administration who wants to use them for such activity.”

Stateline reporter Amanda Watford can be reached at awatford@stateline.org.

This story was originally produced by Stateline, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Colorado Newsline, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.