Their recent evolution has been not incremental, but abrupt. The crucial advance of modern surveillance has been the development of inexpensive automation. Where before the government had to rely on human agents or informants to spy, today it spies through a proliferating network of unsleeping sensors. And where before agents had to manually review what they collected, today they use computers to make sense of their harvest. The government’s appetite for digitally collected data has grown in conjunction with its capabilities for collection and analysis. And, when law enforcement agencies cannot sate that appetite directly, they feast, instead, on data accumulated by private companies.
The result of these advances is that, for the first time in human history, the government can now engage in nearly pervasive surveillance of the public. We have seen a glimpse of that reality already, through Edward Snowden’s disclosures to the press of the breathtaking scope of surveillance by the National Security Agency and recent reports on law enforcement’s expanding use of new and invasive technologies like cell-site simulators, automated license plate readers, pervasive aerial surveillance systems, and facial-recognition databases.
The trend in technology is to reduce virtually everything we do to digital data. Our cellphones are livestreams of our locations; our internet-usage histories are unintended journals of our thoughts; our e-mails are often-permanent records of once-ephemeral conversations. Newer technologies digitize even more of our lives: smart watches, smart TVs, smart refrigerators, smart cars, and a host of other internet-connected devices have made The Wizard of Oz’s technicolor transition seem impossibly quaint.

Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, New York City, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. In each of these cities, The Intercept has identified an AT&T facility containing networking equipment that transports large quantities of internet traffic across the United States and the world. A body of evidence including classified NSA documents, public records, and interviews with several former AT&T employees indicates that the buildings are central to an NSA spying initiative that has for years monitored billions of emails, phone calls, and online chats passing across U.S. territory.