I'm a Trump voter – but I'm scared by his latest mass surveillance plans

Trump is planning to use AI to monitor anti-Trump protests. As a liberty-minded conservative, I can't justify supporting mass surveillance under the guise of protecting the nation

Mass Surveillance of a population is typically discussed only in frightening movies or when referring to communist China. But the truth is that mass surveillance exists in many western nations, just not as openly.

America’s surveillance method is different from the UK’s, and is less well known. Reporting for VICE in 2018, Nafeez Ahmed exposed efforts by the Pentagon to "monitor social media to pre-empt major anti-government protests in the US." What's frightening is that the Pentagon was specifically targeting protests critical to president Donald Trump. According to Ahmed, this was "part of a wider effort by the Trump administration to consolidate the US military's role and influence on domestic intelligence."

This kind of consolidation should trouble every American, especially small-government conservatives like myself. Even though I voted for Trump in 2016, and plan to again in 2020, my principles keep me from supporting moves which increase the size and scope of the state. The accumulation of power by the federal government and its military is antithetical to the freedom this nation stands for. Ironically, conservatives are traditionally supportive of the police and military, a position that directly collides with the principles of a limited government.

Merely creating these systems and programs for surveillance of Americans is bad enough. However, the Pentagon took it a step further by outsourcing these privacy-violating projects to a private company. And what else is social media – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram – if not mass surveillance? An algorithm reads every post by every user, and if any actionable behavior is detected, the platform informs the authorities. Authoritarian governments wishing to exploit this could take the slightest infraction of the law, or social code online as cause for suppressing the population further. We can't let this happen.

Tech companies like Amazon already have unprecedented access to data, and the ability to gather much more information with their litany of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and apps. But many don't know that Amazon is one of the leading providers of facial recognition technology to US law enforcement. NBC recently reported that Amazon's software, Rekognition, is so good it can tell if someone is experiencing fear. That in itself is a terrifying prospect. What right to privacy will exist in a world where our very emotion betrays us to software?

The United States government is outsourcing its legally questionable mass surveillance to private companies. Those private companies are making a pretty penny, not only off of massive military contracts but also from the products like Amazon's Echo. We've willingly invited the surveillance into our houses and even paid them for the privilege! Never mind the fact that Alexa is always listening to you and records your commands. Also, never mind the fact that, like NSA Agents allegedly passing around nude photographs, Amazon employees reportedly pass around elicit recordings.

Although resistance towards mass surveillance is typically a conservative or libertarian position, most of the legislation protecting data privacy is coming from incredibly left-wing places. For example, San Francisco, California banned the use of facial recognition. The rest of the state may soon follow, cementing the left as the new torch-bearers of privacy. But there is room for bipartisanship. Liberty-minded conservatives cannot justify supporting mass surveillance under the guise of protecting the nation.

Congressman Warren Davidson of my home state, Ohio, is helping lead the conservative charge against mass surveillance, saying: "At the end of the day, it's your data. I don't see how it could be anyone else's." Conservatives like Davidson will find unlikely allies in the left on data privacy.

In the 2020 Presidential election, data privacy and surveillance is a topic hardly breached, despite a majority of Democratic candidates having solid track records on privacy. The left's base is too concerned with healthcare and banning firearms while the right continues to cry foul at tech censorship. The small steps to secure America's privacy and prevent the growth of government must start in the States, the laboratories of democracy. Only when people are educated on this topic locally – like in San Francisco – can the nation's attention be swayed towards privacy.

Baron de Montesquieu, the great French philosopher, once said, "There is no crueller tyranny than that which is perpetuated under the shield of law and in the name of justice." When we lose rights, when we lose our privacy, it is always under the guise of keeping us safe, of hunting down criminals, of rooting out hoodlums. Mass surveillance of any form should never be tolerated, not by government, and not by private institutions.