Chapter 07: Protesting, ICE, Police and Surveillance #

They Know Who You Are. They Know You Were There.

Nicole Cleland is a 56 year old woman who lives in Richfield, Minnesota. On January 10, 2026, she was sitting in her parked car near a street where ICE agents were conducting an operation. She had been watching from a distance. She had never spoken to any federal agent. She had never been arrested, never been charged with a crime, never had so much as a speeding ticket related to any protest.

An ICE agent walked up to her car, looked at her, and called her by name.

She had never met this person. She had never introduced herself. The agent told her he had facial recognition technology on his phone and that his body camera was recording her. Days later, Nicole discovered her TSA PreCheck and Global Entry status had been revoked. A lifelong American citizen, surveilled by her own government, identified by an algorithm, and punished for doing nothing more than being present on a public street.

Nicole Cleland is not a criminal. She is not a suspect. She is an American who happened to be near a protest. And the federal government used military grade surveillance technology to identify her, catalog her, and retaliate against her.

If you think this is an isolated case, keep reading. If you think your rights protect you from this kind of treatment, keep reading. And if you think you have nothing to worry about because you have nothing to hide, you need to read every single word of this chapter.

The surveillance apparatus aimed at American protesters in 2025 and 2026 represents the most formidable threat to the freedom of assembly since the FBI ran COINTELPRO against Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement. Predator drones are circling over American cities. Facial recognition apps are scanning faces in real time. Data brokers are selling your location history to federal agencies. Police departments are running your license plate through a national database the moment you park your car near a march. And most Americans have no idea any of this is happening.

This chapter will show you exactly what surveillance tools are being used against people who exercise their constitutional right to peaceful protest. You will learn what your legal rights are when police or ICE agents approach you. You will learn whether you have to hand over your phone, answer questions, or identify yourself. And you will learn the specific, concrete steps you need to take to protect yourself and your family before you ever set foot at a demonstration.

The Surveillance Arsenal Aimed at You

Law enforcement agencies at the federal, state, and local level now operate an interlocking web of surveillance tools capable of identifying nearly anyone who attends a protest. Most of these technologies were developed for counterterrorism and border security. They migrated into protest monitoring gradually and quietly. Their use at demonstrations across the country is now routine and well documented.

Start with body cameras. Police departments introduced them as accountability tools after the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri. Every officer wearing one at a protest records the faces, conversations, associations, and movements of everyone within range. Retention policies vary from 60 days in some departments to permanent storage for anything classified as a critical incident. In December 2025, Axon, the company supplying body cameras to roughly 47 of the 69 largest police departments in America, reversed a moratorium on facial recognition and began testing face recognition directly on body cameras. Axon's own ethics board had previously concluded the technology was not reliable enough to justify its use. California's SB 1038 permanently bans facial recognition on police body cameras within the state. No federal ban exists. Every other state allows it.

Then there are the devices called Stingrays. These are portable machines that mimic cell towers and force every phone within roughly a third of a mile to connect to them. When your phone connects, the device harvests your unique identifier, telling law enforcement exactly who was carrying a phone near a protest. Advanced models force phones to downgrade to less secure connections, allowing agents to intercept calls and text messages. Police have used these devices at protests since at least 2003, when Miami police purchased one to surveil demonstrators at a Free Trade of the Americas conference. A Department of Homeland Security Inspector General report in February 2023 found that ICE and the Secret Service had violated the law in 2020 and 2021 by deploying cell site simulators without the required court orders.

In July 2025, a news outlet detected suspicious cellular anomalies during an anti ICE protest in Tukwila, Washington, using a detection tool built by the Electronic Frontier Foundation called Rayhunter. Two signals consistent with cell site simulator behavior appeared at the height of the protest and disappeared when the protest ended. ICE declined to comment.

Overhead, the surveillance gets even more alarming. In June 2025, Customs and Border Protection confirmed flying two MQ 9 Predator drones over Los Angeles during anti ICE protests. These are the same military grade unmanned aircraft used in combat zones, equipped with infrared sensors, high definition cameras, and artificial intelligence radar capable of detecting individual human beings within a 15 nautical mile radius. CBP claimed the cameras could not identify a person, then acknowledged they could detect clothing color, backpacks, and weapons. Flights continued for days. During the 2020 protests after the killing of George Floyd, the Department of Homeland Security deployed aerial surveillance over 15 or more cities, logging more than 270 hours of footage. A Predator drone circled over Minneapolis for about 90 minutes on May 29, 2020. FOIA documents revealed that CBP intercepted encrypted messaging chats among Portland protest organizers.

Your License Plate Gives You Away

An investigation by the Electronic Frontier Foundation published in November 2025 revealed the most detailed picture yet of how Automated License Plate Readers are being used to track protesters. The EFF obtained datasets covering 12 million searches by 3,900 agencies between December 2024 and October 2025. More than 50 federal, state, and local agencies ran hundreds of searches through a company called Flock Safety connected to protest activity. Nineteen agencies conducted searches specifically tied to No Kings protests. Tulsa, Oklahoma logged at least 38 protest related searches. Arizona's Department of Public Safety logged searches for phrases like "no kings rock threat." Wichita, Kansas logged 22 license plate searches under a heading about causing harm during protests.

Flock Safety now operates cameras in 2,000 cities across 42 states, with an estimated 90,000 cameras nationwide. The system captures your license plate, your vehicle's make, model, and color, the time, and your location. Everything uploads to a searchable cloud database. Flock is expanding from still photos to video with AI powered search and is planning to integrate with commercial data brokers for what it calls people lookup functionality. If you drive to a protest, or park near one, or simply pass through the area on your way to the grocery store, your plate and your movements are captured and stored.

Shortly before the October 2025 No Kings protests, Amazon's Ring doorbell network announced integration with Flock Safety's system, allowing police to issue geofenced requests for user submitted footage. Residential neighborhoods became auxiliary surveillance grids the moment a march passed through.

The Digital Dragnet: Geofence Warrants and Tower Dumps

Geofence warrants work like this. Law enforcement sends an order to a technology company, usually Google, demanding a list of every device present within a specific geographic area during a specific time window. Google's location database, called Sensorvault, once held data on approximately 592 million accounts. By 2021, geofence warrants made up 25 percent of all warrant requests Google received in the United States. The number climbed from 982 in 2018 to 11,554 in 2020.

On August 9, 2024, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled unanimously that geofence warrants are categorically prohibited by the Fourth Amendment. The court called them modern day general warrants, the exact kind of government overreach the Founders wrote the Fourth Amendment to prevent. The ruling found that searching Google's entire 592 million account database without naming a specific suspect amounts to the kind of general exploratory rummaging the Constitution forbids.

Here is where the story takes a turn that should concern every American. The court found geofence warrants unconstitutional and then upheld the criminal conviction anyway, under something called the good faith exception. This pattern has repeated in case after case. Courts declare the surveillance illegal. The evidence collected through it stays in. The government faces no consequences.

Google moved on its own to end the practice. In December 2023, Google announced it would store location data on devices rather than in its cloud, cut auto deletion from 18 months to 3 months, and encrypt cloud backups end to end. By July 2025, Google completed this transition. The era of geofence warrants against Google is functionally over. The Supreme Court granted review of a separate geofence case, Chatrie v. United States, in January 2026. A ruling is expected by June 2026.

Tower dumps are a related threat. Police send requests to phone carriers demanding records of every device connected to a specific cell tower during a specified time. A single tower dump captures data on tens of thousands of people. In one documented case, more than 50,000 individuals. AT&T stores this data for seven years. In February 2025, a federal judge in Mississippi became the first to declare tower dumps unconstitutional. A federal judge in Nevada reached the same conclusion two months later. The Department of Justice has appealed.

Seven Million Americans March, and the Government Is Watching

The No Kings movement organized mass demonstrations against government overreach under the Trump administration. The first major protest day was June 14, 2025. The largest came on October 18, 2025, when an estimated seven million Americans took part at more than 2,600 locations in all 50 states. It was the largest single day protest against a sitting U.S. president in modern American history.

The organizers anticipated surveillance. The No Kings website urged participants to encrypt their devices, remove biometric locks, sign out of social media, communicate through Signal, and avoid photographing other protesters' faces. The ACLU prepared Know Your Rights materials in ten languages and distributed millions of cards.

The government response was aggressive on multiple fronts. House Speaker Mike Johnson called the protests hate America rallies. In Texas, Governor Greg Abbott activated the National Guard before marches began. And across the country, law enforcement ran license plates, monitored social media, deployed drones, and scanned faces.

Facial Recognition at Your Front Door

The New York Times documented more than half a dozen activists in Minnesota who were subjected to facial recognition scans in January 2026. ICE agents used an app called Mobile Fortify, built by NEC, that searches against more than 200 million images stored in government databases.

Remember Nicole Cleland, the woman from the opening of this chapter. She was one of at least seven American citizens told by ICE agents in and around Minneapolis that they were being recorded with facial recognition. In one video, agents told people their faces would be added to a domestic terrorism database. Mubashir Khalif Hussen, a 20 year old Somali American U.S. citizen, was grabbed by agents, refused the right to show his passport, driven seven miles to a facility, had his face scanned, and then released in a Minnesota winter and told to walk back.

ICE signed a 9.2 million dollar contract with Clearview AI in September 2025, expanding the technology's use to include assaults against law enforcement officers. The Illinois Attorney General alleged the Mobile Fortify app had been used over 100,000 times since its debut. The ACLU of Minnesota filed a class action lawsuit against ICE and CBP over forced facial scans and other practices it called illegal.

The full scope of ICE's surveillance infrastructure is staggering. Georgetown Law's Center on Privacy and Technology published a two year investigation called American Dragnet, built from hundreds of public records requests. The findings show that ICE has scanned the driver's license photos of one in three American adults using facial recognition. ICE has access to driver's license data covering three out of four adults. ICE can track vehicle movements in cities where three out of four adults live. ICE spent approximately 2.8 billion dollars between 2008 and 2021 on surveillance and data collection programs. The May 2025 foreword to the report states plainly: ICE now operates as a domestic surveillance agency.

ICE agents also tracked protest activity through social media. During the George Floyd protests, a company called Dataminr sent police departments real time alerts pinpointing protester locations, complete with social media handles, follower counts, and biographical details. The D.C. Metropolitan Police alone received roughly 160,000 Dataminr alerts between June 2020 and May 2022 tracking demonstrations. Another firm called Media Sonar, used by the Fresno Police Department, recommended that officers track hashtags related to Black Lives Matter and marketed its ability to help police avoid the warrant process entirely.

The federal government also pursued retaliation against people connected to protests. ICE arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a lawful permanent resident and Columbia University student, for pro Palestinian activism. The State Department used AI assisted social media monitoring to revoke approximately 100,000 visas by January 2026, including 8,000 student visas. Students were flagged for merely liking or resharing social media posts. The Department of Justice opened a criminal investigation of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey for their public statements criticizing ICE operations. A deputy attorney general posted on social media that he would stop them from, in his words, their terrorism by whatever means necessary.

Your Rights When Police or ICE Approach You at a Protest

Every American needs to understand these rights. They exist whether you are a citizen, a lawful permanent resident, a visa holder, or undocumented. The Constitution protects everyone on U.S. soil.

You have the right to take pictures and record video of police and federal agents in public. Every federal circuit court that has addressed this question has ruled in your favor. The key cases span from the First Circuit to the Tenth Circuit. No federal circuit court has ruled against the right to record. The Supreme Court has not taken up the question directly, and every lower court relies on First Amendment precedent to protect it. Police cannot order you to stop recording because they dislike being filmed. DHS published a statement in December 2025 suggesting that recording federal officers sounds like obstruction of justice. That statement contradicts the rulings of seven federal circuit courts and has been widely condemned by constitutional scholars. If an officer tells you to stop recording, you do not have to comply. If an officer deletes your photos or videos, that officer has violated the First, Fourth, and Fourteenth Amendments and faces personal civil rights liability.

You have the right to remain silent. Under the Fifth Amendment, you do not have to answer questions from police or ICE about your activities, your associations, or your reasons for attending a protest. State clearly, I am invoking my right to remain silent. Twenty four states have stop and identify laws that require you to give your name during a lawful stop based on reasonable suspicion of criminal activity. Attending a protest does not create reasonable suspicion.

You have the right to refuse a search of your phone. The Supreme Court ruled unanimously in Riley v. California in 2014 that police need a warrant to search the digital contents of your phone, even if you are under arrest. Officers can seize your phone for safekeeping during an arrest. They cannot open it, browse through it, or read your messages without a warrant. If an officer asks to look at your phone, say clearly, I do not consent to a search.

The question of whether police can force you to unlock your phone depends on how your phone is locked. This area of law is actively changing. At least four state supreme courts have ruled that forcing someone to reveal a passcode violates the Fifth Amendment because a passcode requires the contents of your mind. Biometric unlocking, using your fingerprint or your face, is more legally vulnerable. The Ninth Circuit ruled in 2024 that physically pressing a suspect's finger on a scanner was not a Fifth Amendment violation because it required no thinking. The D.C. Circuit reached the opposite conclusion in January 2025, ruling that instructing a suspect to unlock a phone with a fingerprint was testimonial and protected. The two courts split on this question, and the Supreme Court will likely resolve it in the coming years.

The practical lesson is clear. Before you attend any protest, disable Face ID and Touch ID on your phone. Switch to a strong alphanumeric passcode of eight to twelve characters. A passcode stored in your mind enjoys stronger constitutional protection than your fingerprint or your face.

If ICE approaches you, know this. Every person in the United States, regardless of immigration status, has the right to remain silent, the right to refuse consent to a search, and the protection of the Fourth Amendment against unreasonable searches. U.S. citizens do not have to carry proof of citizenship and have no obligation to answer ICE questions about their status. Lawful permanent residents and visa holders over 18 are required by law to carry their immigration documents. They still have the right to remain silent about other matters and the right to refuse consent to searches. ICE's prior sensitive locations policy, which designated protests, marches, and rallies as places where immigration enforcement should not happen, was rescinded under the second Trump administration.

How Your Phone Betrays You Before You Even Arrive

The most effective surveillance tool at protests is not a drone, a body camera, or a facial recognition app. Your phone does most of the work for the government without anyone ever touching it.

Here is how the pipeline operates. Weather apps, navigation apps, games, prayer apps, fitness trackers, and hundreds of other applications on your phone request access to your location. Many of those apps embed software from data brokers that continuously collect your GPS data. Companies like Venntel, Babel Street, and Fog Data Science aggregate the data from millions of phones. One company's marketing materials boasted of collecting more than 15 billion location points from over 250 million mobile devices every single day. Federal agencies then purchase access to this location data, bypassing the warrant requirements the Supreme Court established in Carpenter v. United States.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence published a declassified report in 2022 acknowledging this data could identify every person who attended a protest or rally based on their smartphone location or ad tracking records. ICE purchased tools designed to monitor specific city blocks for mobile phones. The FBI modified its contract with a location data vendor on June 9, 2020, shortly after protests erupted across the country. In March 2026, CBP acknowledged using location data sourced from the real time bidding system, the technical process behind nearly every online advertisement.

ICE's newest vendor, PenLink, offers analytics that search a specific area for mobile phones across a time period, track where those devices go, and monitor multiple locations simultaneously. At the push of a button, ICE agents can catalog everyone who marched at a protest, identify who attended multiple events, and build lists of activists based on which phones appeared at more than one location.

The FTC has started pushing back. In January 2024, it ordered a major location data company to stop selling sensitive location data. That order specifically required protections ensuring data is not associated with locations of public gatherings at political or social demonstrations or protests. In December 2024, the FTC barred another company from selling sensitive location data except in limited national security circumstances. Montana became the first state to close the data broker loophole entirely in 2025, prohibiting law enforcement from purchasing data that would require a warrant to obtain. The federal Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act passed the House in April 2024. It stalled in the Senate.

Protect Yourself: What to Do Before, During, and After a Protest

Disable biometrics before you leave the house. Switch from Face ID or Touch ID to a strong alphanumeric passcode of eight to twelve characters. This gives you stronger legal standing against forced unlocking.

Turn on airplane mode and then separately disable location services, Wi Fi, and Bluetooth. Airplane mode alone does not disable GPS. Your phone still receives satellite signals and logs your location for later transmission when you reconnect. The safest option is to turn the phone off completely. Be aware that even powered off iPhones are sometimes locatable through Apple's Find My network.

Carry a Faraday bag if you want physical, not software based, protection. A Faraday bag blocks all electromagnetic signals based on physics. Your phone is completely unreachable while inside, so plan your communications around this limitation.

Use Signal for all protest related communications. When law enforcement has subpoenaed Signal, the company has only been able to provide the date of registration and the date of last connection. Signal also includes a built in face blurring tool for photos. If you'd like to learn more about Signal and how to use it, I recommend, "Everybody Has Something To Hide" by Guy Kawasaki and Madisun Nuismer (I was a consulting expert on the book).

If you want the highest level of protection, leave your phone at home. This eliminates your ability to document what happens or communicate during an emergency. It also eliminates the single most effective surveillance tool the government has.

If you bring a secondary phone, never carry it alongside your primary phone. Location correlation between two devices moving together compromises anonymity. Turn the secondary phone off before you return home to prevent linking it to your residence.

Disable 2G connectivity. This protects against cell site simulators that force phones onto older, less secure networks. On Android, go to Settings, then Network, then SIMs, and disable Allow 2G. On iPhone, enable Lockdown Mode under iOS 17 or later.

Scrub photo metadata before you share anything. Use Signal to strip location data from images, or take screenshots of your photos before posting them. Blur the faces of other protesters. Use cash for public transit to avoid traceable payment records.

Understand that VPNs do not protect you against most protest surveillance. VPNs do not hide your phone's presence from Stingray devices or cell towers. They do not prevent GPS tracking. They do not block tracking through advertising identifiers. The EFF has warned that VPN advertising vastly oversells what the technology actually does.

I share additional smartphone privacy tips weekly in my free LinkedIn newsletter, Smartphone Lock Down.

The Through Line from COINTELPRO to Clearview AI

Everything described in this chapter has a direct historical ancestor. The FBI's COINTELPRO program ran from 1956 to 1971, targeting civil rights leaders, anti war activists, the Black Panther Party, and anyone the government considered subversive. The FBI sent an anonymous letter to Martin Luther King Jr. with surveillance recordings that King and his advisors interpreted as a suicide threat, timed to arrive before his Nobel Prize acceptance. Between 1960 and 1974, the FBI opened more than 500,000 separate investigations of so called subversive persons and groups. Not a single one resulted in a prosecution.

The Church Committee investigated this program over 16 months, interviewing 800 witnesses across 126 meetings. Their conclusion still echoes: too many people have been spied upon by too many government agencies and too much information has been illegally collected.

At Standing Rock in 2016 and 2017, Energy Transfer Partners hired a private military firm that spent 17 million dollars on social media monitoring, aerial surveillance, radio eavesdropping, and infiltration. Leaked reports revealed the firm described water protectors as insurgencies using counterterrorism language. During the 2020 protests after the killing of George Floyd, six federal agencies used facial recognition technology. Nearly 2,000 public agencies used Clearview AI. In February 2026, the Tenth Circuit ruled that police warrants searching all photos, videos, emails, texts, and location data on a protester's devices, including keyword searches for the words protest, human, rights, and cop, were unconstitutional. The court called them wide ranging exploratory searches that the Fourth Amendment was designed to prohibit.

The scale has changed. The FBI needed 500,000 individual case files over 14 years to surveil the civil rights movement. Today, the technology to identify, track, and catalog every person at a protest fits inside an app on a federal agent's phone.

Recording at Protests: What the Law Actually Says

One question comes up again and again. If I record police at a protest, can I get in trouble for recording the audio of someone without their knowledge? The answer depends on where you live. The federal Wiretap Act follows a one party consent standard, meaning you only need your own consent to record a conversation you are part of. Approximately 11 to 13 states require all party consent for recordings, including California, Florida, Maryland, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Washington. The remaining states follow one party consent rules.

Here is the critical point most people miss. Wiretapping statutes apply when someone has a reasonable expectation of privacy. Courts have consistently held that police officers performing their duties in public have no reasonable expectation of privacy. Even in two party consent states, recording police on a public street is generally protected. Video only recording, without capturing audio, falls almost entirely outside wiretapping laws, because those statutes target the interception of oral communications. Your phone records both video and audio, which makes the audio component the main legal consideration in two party consent states. In practice, the First Amendment right to record public officials performing public duties has been upheld by every federal circuit to consider it, regardless of the state's wiretapping classification.

If you attend a protest and want to obtain body camera footage from police afterward, be prepared for resistance. South Carolina exempts all body camera data from public records requests. California, Illinois, and Florida impose conditions and exemptions. The most common reason agencies give for denying requests is an ongoing investigation. Some departments classify all body camera video as evidence, effectively placing it beyond public access. One Florida agency quoted a price of 18,000 dollars for 84 hours of footage. The barriers are real. The right to request the footage is also real.

Where the Law Stands Right Now

The Government Surveillance Reform Act, reintroduced in March 2026, would require warrants for searches of Americans' communications, ban government purchase of data broker records without a warrant, and regulate cell site simulators. It has been described as the most sweeping reform of surveillance laws in nearly half a century. The ICE Out of Our Faces Act, introduced in February 2026, would ban all ICE and CBP use of facial recognition technology. Section 702 of FISA is set to expire in April 2026.

The Supreme Court's decision in Chatrie v. United States, expected by June 2026, will define whether geofence warrants violate the Fourth Amendment. The ACLU's class action lawsuit in Minnesota against ICE and CBP over forced facial scans is proceeding with more than 30 sworn statements. State consumer privacy laws enacted in 2024 and 2025 are starting to reshape how data brokers operate.

The central problem remains. Courts keep recognizing that mass surveillance tools violate the Fourth Amendment. Then the good faith exception allows the evidence to stay in anyway. The government keeps purchasing from commercial data brokers what the Supreme Court says it needs a warrant to collect directly. Senator Wyden has called this an end run around the Constitution. Until Congress closes the data broker loophole or the Supreme Court extends Carpenter to cover purchased data, the constitutional rights that exist on paper will remain incomplete on the ground.

This Is About Democracy

The right to peaceful protest is not a luxury. It is the mechanism through which every other right in the Constitution has been won, defended, and expanded. The civil rights movement, the labor movement, the women's suffrage movement, the movement to end the war in Vietnam. Every generation of Americans has stood in public, spoken their minds, and demanded accountability from their government.

When the government deploys Predator drones over American cities, scans faces with military technology, tracks phones through invisible data pipelines, and builds databases of people who attend rallies, the message is clear. We are watching you. We know who you are. And there will be consequences.

That message is designed to make you stay home. It is designed to make you think twice before showing up. It is designed to chill the one right that makes all the other rights possible.

Do not let it work.

Know your rights. Protect your phone. Show up. And bring this chapter with you.