On April 23, 2026, at the Capitol House Triangle, three people held a press conference that most of official Washington barely noticed. What they described should have been front-page news.

There is a corner of Washington, D.C., that functions as a kind of agora for bills that the leadership would rather not schedule — the outdoor press-conference space on the House Triangle, where sunlight substitutes for floor time. On the morning of April 23, 2026, Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky, Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado, and Naomi Brockwell, founder of the Ludlow Institute, stood at a microphone and described, with methodical specificity, the machinery by which the federal government has dismantled the Fourth Amendment in the digital age. The bill they were introducing — H.R. 8470, the Surveillance Accountability Act — received polite coverage in a handful of tech-focused outlets and was largely ignored by the political press, which was busy parsing the latest episode of the ongoing FISA Section 702 reauthorization drama. This was, the three speakers argued, precisely the problem. FISA 702 is a distraction, a presentable corner of an enormous and very ugly room.

The Fourth Amendment's language has always possessed a kind of stark poetry: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause." Sixteen words of prohibition, seventeen of requirement. The founders, who had lived under the Crown's general warrants — those sweeping permission slips that allowed the King's men to rifle through anyone's belongings in search of seditious material, no specificity required — wrote those words not as aspiration but as scar tissue. Brockwell made the historical analogy explicit in her remarks: "They had things called general warrants. These basically gave the King's men a permission slip to rifle through the things of all citizens, have unfettered access to everything in their lives. And this was used to target dissent." The digital surveillance apparatus she and her colleagues described is not a metaphor for that system. In many respects, it is that system, rebuilt with server farms and machine learning in place of soldiers and ledgers.

The Doctrine That Swallowed Privacy

To understand how America arrived at this point, it helps to spend a moment with two Supreme Court cases from the 1970s that most Americans have never heard of. In United States v. Miller (1976), the Court held that bank customers had no Fourth Amendment privacy interest in the records they shared with their financial institutions. In Smith v. Maryland (1979), the Court ruled that a telephone user had no reasonable expectation of privacy in the numbers they dialed, because they had "voluntarily conveyed" that information to the phone company. From these two cases emerged what legal scholars call the "third-party doctrine": the principle that once you share information with any third party — a bank, a telephone company, a physician's office — you forfeit your constitutional protection over that information. The government may then obtain it without a warrant, without probable cause, and without your knowledge.

When Miller and Smith were decided, the practical damage was limited by the practical limits of the state. A government agency that wanted your phone records had to contact one telephone company and ask for one set of records pertaining to one investigation. Today, you share data constantly and involuntarily with dozens of third parties simply by existing in modern society. Your smartphone broadcasts your location to cell towers, advertising networks, and the operating system vendor. Your car's navigation system logs your route. Your bank records encode your religious affiliations (contributions to your church), your medical history (payments to pharmacies and clinics), your political beliefs (donations to campaigns), and your Second Amendment exercise (purchases at firearms dealers). The internet, as Brockwell noted at the press conference, "relies on third parties" in an almost totalizing sense — every website visit, every search query, every message passes through at least one intermediary whose terms of service, buried in thousands of words you never read, claims to have your consent to aggregate and sell that data. "Fast forward to 2026," she told the assembled reporters, "every single thing we do has a third-party involved, and governments have decided that when they want to search someone, they no longer have to get approval from a judge."

The Supreme Court has begun, gingerly, to reckon with this reality. In Carpenter v. United States (2018), the Court ruled, 5-4, that police must obtain a warrant to access seven days' worth of cell-site location records from a carrier. The majority opinion, written by Chief Justice Roberts, acknowledged that the third-party doctrine had become "unworkable" when applied to the "exhaustive chronicle of location information" that smartphones automatically generate. The Court invoked the concept of a "mosaic" — the idea that individually innocuous data points, assembled at scale, become a comprehensive portrait of a person's inner life. One location ping from a phone is nothing. Ten thousand such pings, covering months of movement, is a map of someone's marriage, their faith, their illnesses, their politics. That distinction, the Roberts Court said, matters constitutionally.

But Carpenter was narrow. It addressed cell tower records specifically and explicitly declined to extend its reasoning further. And around the ruling's edges, the government has continued to operate at industrial scale. The third-party doctrine remains alive and vigorously exploited, and the Surveillance Accountability Act is, in essence, a legislative attempt to finish what Carpenter started.

What the Flock

In 2017, a startup called Flock Safety was founded in Atlanta with a simple pitch: automated license plate readers, marketed not just to police departments but to homeowner associations, apartment complexes, schools, and private businesses. Instead of selling hardware outright, the company built a cloud-connected network in which every camera feeds into a central database accessible, with the right subscription, by any connected law enforcement agency in the country. The model has proven extraordinarily successful. As of mid-2025, Flock was operating across more than 5,000 communities in 49 states, with an estimated 90,000 cameras performing over 20 billion vehicle scans per month. The company, valued at $7.5 billion after a $275 million funding round in September 2025, is used by more than 5,000 law enforcement agencies ranging from major metropolitan police forces to small rural sheriffs' departments.

What this means in practice is something Boebert described at the press conference with a directness that cut through the usual congressional abstraction: "Your morning commute to work — it's tracked. Dropping off your kids at their soccer practice — that's logged. Visiting a church or a gun range — recorded forever, in a government-accessible database." She was not exaggerating. A Virginia Circuit Court judge ruled in June 2024 that collecting location data from that city's network of Flock cameras constituted a search under the Fourth Amendment, likening the ALPR databases to GPS tracking devices whose use by police had previously been found unconstitutional without a warrant. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which obtained datasets representing over 12 million searches logged by more than 3,900 law enforcement agencies between December 2024 and October 2025, found patterns that should alarm anyone who believes in the constitutional right to assembly: agencies had logged hundreds of searches in connection with protest activity, including the 50501 protests of February 2025, the Hands Off protests in April, and multiple rounds of No Kings demonstrations. The Tulsa Police Department alone logged at least 38 searches linked to protest activity. In Arizona, the Tempe Police Department made searches specifically for vehicles present during protest windows — not searching for a specific plate number associated with a known suspect, but conducting a digital sweep of everyone on the road during a certain time in a certain place. The ACLU of Massachusetts documented over 450,000 searches of the nationwide Flock database in a single 30-day period. California law explicitly prohibits sharing license plate reader data with federal agencies; in 2025, reporting revealed that several state and municipal agencies had done so anyway, including for immigration enforcement.

Brockwell used a legal framework called the "mosaic theory" to articulate why this matters. "If your car is in public and I take a snapshot of it, you don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy," she said. "But what if I took 10,000 snapshots of your car while it's driving, and matched your exact location to track you? That's a different question. That's what automatic license plate readers are doing now." The Supreme Court, in both Jones (GPS tracking) and Carpenter (cell tower data), had already gestured toward this distinction. Flock Safety, operating in the interstices of those decisions, has built a private surveillance-as-a-service empire that effectively gives any subscribing police department the kind of continuous locational dossier that Jones and Carpenter notionally prohibited — while sheltering that capability behind the fiction that the cameras are merely photographing the public road.

Massie mentioned Flock by name in his opening remarks, and Boebert's riff on the cameras — "every single one of you should be saying 'What the Flock!'" — was, beneath the rhetorical flourish, a pointed identification of a phenomenon that the existing FISA debate entirely ignores. FISA Section 702 concerns the intelligence community's collection of foreign communications that incidentally sweep up Americans. Flock cameras concern the municipal police department in your town. They are different problems with a shared constitutional logic, and only one of them is presently subject to any congressional negotiation at all.

The Bank That Spied Without Being Asked

One of the more startling episodes in Massie's remarks was his account of a specific incident he attributed to FBI whistleblowers who had testified before the House Judiciary Committee: that the Department of Justice had asked Bank of America for the financial records of anyone who had transacted within a certain radius of Washington, D.C., on January 6, 2021, including records of any gun purchases. This was not, it turned out, mere assertion. The story had been corroborated in substantial detail by multiple whistleblower testimonies before the Judiciary Committee and its Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.

The relevant facts, as established by those testimonies: in the days after January 6th, Bank of America compiled a list of customers meeting the following criteria — confirmed purchases in Washington, D.C., between January 5th and 6th; hotel or Airbnb reservations in the D.C., Virginia, or Maryland area after January 6th; any weapons-related purchase, at any point, using a Bank of America product. Retired FBI Supervisory Intelligence Analyst George Hill testified that anyone who had ever purchased a firearm using a Bank of America account was elevated to the top of the resulting list — not because their gun purchase was geographically or temporally connected to the Capitol events, but simply because they were gun owners who happened to be Bank of America customers. The bank, according to Hill's testimony, provided this data without any legal process — no warrant, no subpoena, no court order. The transferred records covered people who had committed no crime and were never subsequently charged. Massie and then-Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan wrote to Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan demanding an accounting; in a subsequent oversight hearing, Massie put the question directly to FBI Director Christopher Wray, who said he could not recall the details.

The episode is worth dwelling on because it illustrates the precise mechanism by which the third-party doctrine enables what Massie called the transformation of a database into a dragnet. "Imagine instead of doing a query with one person that you turn AI loose on these databases," he said at the press conference. "There's virtually nothing the government can't know about you without a warrant." The Bank of America case was manually constructed — a human analyst apparently devised the search criteria and applied them to a customer database. An AI system, given the same access and a general directive to surface persons of interest, could conduct that analysis across every major financial institution simultaneously, at a scale and speed that no human review process could check. The Surveillance Accountability Act would require the government to obtain a warrant based on probable cause before accessing financial records in this fashion. The warrant requirement is not an obstacle to legitimate law enforcement; it is the constitutional mechanism by which we distinguish legitimate law enforcement from political targeting.

The Market for Your Movements

The Bank of America episode was notable because it involved a financial institution apparently cooperating voluntarily. But the federal government has not relied solely on corporate goodwill. Multiple agencies — including the Department of Homeland Security, Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Secret Service, and the FBI — have for years maintained contracts with commercial data brokers to purchase location data, browsing histories, and personal information on a bulk basis, thereby avoiding the warrant requirements that would apply to a direct government demand for the same information.

The ACLU obtained thousands of pages of DHS documents through a FOIA lawsuit and published findings that detailed the scope of these purchases. For a single three-day span in 2018, CBP's records contained approximately 113,654 location data points derived from people's phones in the Southwestern United States — over 26 data points per minute. The data was purchased from Venntel and Babel Street, two commercial data brokers whose products aggregate location information harvested from smartphone applications. The agencies characterized the data as "anonymized" and therefore not personally identifiable; the FTC later determined that this characterization was fiction, finalizing an order against Venntel in January 2025 after finding that the company had been illegally selling location data collected without genuine consumer consent. The DHS Inspector General, in a report published in September 2023, found that CBP, ICE, and the Secret Service had all violated federal law through their warrantless purchase and use of this location data. ICE formally ended its data-broker location program in 2023 following that investigation. By 2026, it had resumed, through a no-bid contract with a company called Penlink.

In February 2026, DHS signed a $1 billion contract with Palantir to deploy AI-powered data analytics across all its components, including CBP and ICE. The FBI signed a separate contract worth up to $27 million with Babel Street for 5,000 licenses to its "Locate X" location tracking product. When Senator Ron Wyden asked FBI Director Kash Patel in 2026 whether he would commit to not purchasing Americans' location data, Patel declined. The FBI, he said, "uses all tools." That phrase — "uses all tools" — is a useful emblem of the current legal landscape: a system in which the constitutional guarantee against unreasonable searches has been rendered into a speed bump by the simple expedient of placing a commercial transaction between the government and the data it wants. The government cannot compel your phone company to give it your location without a warrant. But it can pay a middleman who already has your location — harvested through an app you downloaded, whose terms of service you did not read, for a game you no longer play — and walk away with the same information, legally, under current doctrine.

The Surveillance Accountability Act would close this specific loophole by prohibiting warrant-free government purchase of data that would require a warrant to obtain through direct legal process. That is the key reform: not a blanket prohibition on data purchases, but a requirement that the constitutional standard travel with the data regardless of how it was acquired.

FISA and the Art of Misdirection

Both Massie and Boebert were pointed in their diagnosis of the FISA debate's strategic limitations, and it is worth taking their argument seriously on its merits. Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act authorizes the intelligence community to collect electronic communications of foreign persons located outside the United States; the incidental collection of American citizens' communications in this process — which can be substantial — has been the subject of ongoing controversy, litigation, and periodic reauthorization fights. In April 2026, Congress was in the middle of yet another such fight, debating what if any warrant requirements should attach to so-called "backdoor searches" of Americans' communications captured under 702 authority.

The debate is consequential. But Massie's argument is that focusing congressional energy exclusively on 702 creates a misleading impression that the warrant problem begins and ends with the intelligence community. The data broker loophole, the third-party doctrine, Flock cameras, facial recognition scanning of protest crowds — none of these implicate 702 at all. They involve domestic law enforcement, commercial enterprises, and municipal agencies operating entirely outside the FISA framework. "The only reason we're talking about FISA right now is it's expiring," Massie noted. "And these other bills aren't expiring. Some of them don't have expiration dates." The Surveillance Accountability Act is, in part, a device to force the framing outward — to insist that the conversation about Fourth Amendment restoration not begin and end at the intelligence community's door, while the police department two blocks from your house is blanketing the neighborhood with warrantless license plate readers.

There is, it should be noted, a genuine bipartisan coalition assembling around this broader project. Brockwell mentioned that the Surveillance Accountability Act had drawn interest from members of both parties, and that she saw it as complementary to the Wyden-Lee-Davidson effort to reform 702 — a coalition that includes Senator Ron Wyden on the left, and Representatives Warren Davidson and Senator Mike Lee on the right. That alignment is, as she noted, genuinely rare. Civil liberties has historically been one of the few policy areas where libertarian conservatives and civil-libertarian progressives find common ground, and the sheer breadth of the surveillance apparatus — touching immigration enforcement, protest monitoring, financial surveillance, biometric tracking — creates a coalition of concern that maps poorly onto the standard partisan grid. A progressive activist worried about ICE using Flock data to surveil protest organizers and a conservative gun owner worried about his bank reporting his firearms purchases to the FBI are describing the same legal problem from opposite sides of the political spectrum.

The Private Right of Action: Why It Matters

The structural innovation in the Surveillance Accountability Act that distinguished it, in legal terms, from prior reform proposals was its creation of a private right of action — the ability for individual Americans to sue federal government employees personally for Fourth Amendment violations. "You can sue state employees of the government," Massie explained, "but it's almost impossible to sue federal government employees if they infringe on your constitutional rights." This is not a minor procedural detail. The doctrine of qualified immunity has, over decades of judicial refinement, made it extraordinarily difficult to hold federal law enforcement personally liable for constitutional violations, effectively removing the deterrent that liability ordinarily provides. An agent who knows that no adverse consequence will attach to warrantless surveillance has no individual incentive to seek a warrant. The private right of action provision is an attempt to reinstate that incentive structure at the level of the individual officer.

Brockwell emphasized this point with some heat: "The most important part of this, as Congressman Massie already said, is the private right of action. If you don't get a warrant and people can hold you accountable, I think this is tremendously potent." The argument is structurally sound. Legal systems generally deter conduct through consequence. A rule without enforcement is a wish. The history of surveillance reform in the United States is substantially a history of legislative prohibitions that were ignored, reinterpreted, or simply disregarded by agencies that understood they would face no meaningful accountability. The Church Committee's 1975 revelations about COINTELPRO, NSA mass collection, and FBI infiltration of civil rights organizations led to significant legislative reforms — the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act itself, along with the Privacy Act and various executive orders. Those reforms were then progressively hollowed out through the mechanisms Massie described at the press conference: secret court rulings, expansive statutory interpretation, and the quiet development of commercial surveillance markets that operated outside the legislative framework entirely. A private right of action is not a magic solution to this cycle, but it is a serious structural attempt to break it.

The Tipping Point Problem

The most urgent passage in the press conference was Brockwell's articulation of what might be called the tipping point problem — the argument that surveillance infrastructure, once built to a certain scale, becomes structurally irreversible. "We have a very small window of opportunity because tech is advancing so quickly," she said. "If we get to a state where we no longer have privacy, we will no longer have the self-correcting mechanisms in our society that protect our freedom. We will no longer be able to have investigative journalists. We will no longer be able to have opposition parties. We will no longer be able to have a protest movement."

This is not a novel argument — scholars from Michel Foucault to Shoshana Zuboff have elaborated versions of it — but Brockwell was making a specific and concrete claim: that the infrastructure currently being built is not merely surveillance but the precondition for the elimination of surveillance's targets. A government that can track every journalist's source by cross-referencing Flock data with call records and financial transactions has de facto ended confidential sourcing. A government that can identify every attendee at a protest by combining facial recognition data, license plate records, and cell tower pings has de facto constrained the right of assembly. Brockwell pointed across the world at what she described as "panopticon" states — where the theoretical right to protest has been rendered meaningless by the practical certainty of identification and consequence — and argued that the difference between those societies and the United States was now a matter of political will rather than technical capacity. "We cannot lose privacy in the name of safety," she said, "because otherwise come tomorrow, none of us are going to have safety anymore."

The AI dimension amplifies this concern considerably. As Brockwell noted in a separate interview with Decrypt: "Now that we have AI, the idea of limitation is completely out the window. AI can sort people, rank them, adjust credit scores, and use all of this data to paint intimate profiles and preemptively conduct law enforcement." The pre-digital surveillance state was limited, in practice, by the cost of human analysis. Collecting data is cheap; sorting through it for patterns is expensive. Machine learning has collapsed that cost. A system that could once surveil a list of known suspects can now, at negligible marginal expense, surveil a city. A system designed to track visa overstays can be repurposed, with a software change, to monitor protest organizers or political opponents. The infrastructure's function is determined not by its technical design but by the political will of whoever controls it — and that political will changes with elections. Building the surveillance infrastructure of an authoritarian state while living in a democracy is a bet on the permanence of the democracy.

The Bill's Prospects and the Politics of Light

Whether the Surveillance Accountability Act can pass is a question that its sponsors seemed to approach with clear-eyed realism. Massie, who has been in Congress since 2012 and has spent much of that time forcing votes that leadership would rather avoid, spoke about the possibility of a discharge petition — the procedural mechanism that allows a bill to bypass committee leadership and reach the House floor if it gathers signatures from a majority of members. He and Boebert had previously used a discharge petition to force a vote on the release of the Epstein files. "I think we might be able to form the same sort of coalition and force this to a vote," Massie said.

The optimistic case for the bill rests on its genuine ideological flexibility. The specific grievances it addresses — financial surveillance, biometric tracking, location data purchases, warrantless use of AI on bulk datasets — are not partisan in their impact. The same tools that ICE uses to track undocumented immigrants can be used by future administrations to track political dissidents; the same tools that the FBI used to surveil January 6th participants can be used to surveil participants in any protest, from any direction. Boebert made the constitutional framing explicit: "You can't have a Second Amendment if you don't have a Fourth Amendment and a First Amendment. All of these rights go hand in hand." That argument — that constitutional rights form a mutually supporting structure rather than a cafeteria menu — is the argument most likely to build a durable coalition across the predictable partisan fractures.

The pessimistic case is structural. The national security bureaucracy is extraordinarily effective at protecting its equities, and the intelligence community's use of classified briefings — what Massie called "the skiff" — to shape legislative behavior is a well-documented and consistently effective technique. Massie described the dynamic with a bitter precision: "They bring you into these skiffs, and they try to pretend they're giving you new information that's not already public. And then after you go in this skiff, they say, well, now you're smarter than your constituents. And so you're empowered to vote against their rights." He noted that, in years of pressing agency heads in classified settings on the national security value of warrantless domestic surveillance, he had never once received a specific, documented example of a crime or terrorist attack that was prevented by going after American citizens without a warrant. Not once. This is a remarkable fact, given the frequency with which such powers are described as essential to national security.

It is also worth noting that the political calendar is not favorable. With midterm elections approaching, members of Congress have competing incentives, and surveillance reform has historically been an issue that generates more constituent enthusiasm than legislative momentum. The surveillance state is diffuse; its victims are often unaware they are being surveilled; and its defenders have access to classified information that forecloses public debate. The Surveillance Accountability Act is a well-constructed, constitutionally coherent piece of legislation. That does not mean it will pass.

But Massie, Boebert, and Brockwell standing in the sunlight and describing, in specific and verifiable detail, the mechanisms by which the Fourth Amendment has been dismantled is not nothing. The history of civil liberties reform is largely a history of sunlight: the Church Committee hearings, the Snowden disclosures, the FOIA litigation that extracted the DHS location-data documents — each was a moment at which the machinery of surveillance became briefly visible to the people who nominally governed it. "They hate daylight," Boebert said, in a line that was more diagnostic than rhetorical. "So that's what this bill is about." The press conference may not produce a law. But it has entered into the record, precisely and at length, the shape of the thing that needs to be constrained — the general warrant, rebuilt for the twenty-first century, running at a scale the King's men could not have imagined, and waiting, as all such tools wait, for the next administration to decide who the dissenters are.

The Surveillance Accountability Act (H.R. 8470) was introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives on April 23, 2026, by Representatives Thomas Massie (R-KY) and Lauren Boebert (R-CO). Naomi Brockwell, founder of the Ludlow Institute, co-drafted the legislation. The text of the bill and supporting materials are available at surveillanceaccountability.com. The speeches and press conference summarized and analyzed in this article are the sole basis for direct quotation attributed to the speakers; all research and evidentiary claims are independently sourced.

Jonathan Brown writes about cybersecurity infrastructure, privacy systems, the politics of AI development and many other topics at bordercybergroup.com and aetheriumarcana.org. Border Cyber Group maintains a cybersecurity resource portal at borderelliptic.com

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