have been told their online lives are subject to continuous social-media review.³ One engineer told a journalist, “I didn’t leave one surveillance state to live inside a digital one.” The irony lands harder when you stand beneath a billboard advertising “freedom to innovate.”
This surveillance doesn’t stop at the southern border — or even at America’s coastline. Millions of Canadians cross into the U.S. each year under the Visa Waiver Program. That program is now under discussion to be folded into the same continuous-vetting system that currently monitors 55 million people.⁹ A Canadian posting criticism of Trump on Facebook in Fredericton could, in theory, be flagged before crossing into Maine — because computers don’t respect sovereignty.
The border, in 2025, isn’t a fence. It’s whatever screen you’re holding at the moment your number is pulled.
In June, the State Department issued a policy requiring all international students and exchange-visitor visa applicants to undergo a “comprehensive and thorough online presence review.”³ Applicants must make accounts public. Posts must be open. Silence is the safest choice. A Stop AAPI Hate briefing advised students that private accounts may themselves be interpreted as evasive.⁴ A nineteen-year-old in Delhi deletes a protest photo before applying to Bowdoin — not because she regrets it, but because she believes America now interprets curiosity as danger.
And here in Boston — in the dorms of Northeastern, where hallways smell like pepperoni and winter jackets drying on radiators — a Saudi freshman put it into a sentence his American roommates didn’t laugh at: “I keep two Instagrams now: one for immigration and one for life.” That line tells us more about 2025 than any federal register entry.
The Brennan Center — which avoids incendiary language — described the government’s new capability as a “dragnet” that fuses scraped social-media data with biometrics, academic records, and commercial broker files.⁵ A dragnet isn’t a metaphor. It’s a system that catches everyone connected to someone it wants. And because data is relational, privacy can evaporate because someone you love applied for a visa. A U.S. citizen in Portland, texting her cousin in Jordan who attends UNH, can have her number pulled into a government graph without ever crossing a border.
Perhaps the clearest signal of how executive power now works came in December — far from New England — when Imran Ahmed, CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a lawful U.S. permanent resident, was barred from re-entering the country.⁷ The State Department accused him of “extraterritorial censorship” — their term for his advocacy for European online-safety regulation.⁷ A federal judge issued an injunction preventing his detention or deportation.⁷ Freedom shouldn’t require a lawsuit. His infant child didn’t understand why fatherhood must be litigated.
Far from Boston or San Jose, in Johannesburg, a South African music executive learned his visa had been revoked because he posted celebratory comments about Charlie Kirk’s death. TIME reported that six foreigners lost visas because they “celebrated” online.⁸ There’s no moral defense for celebrating death. But the legal question remains: since when did an emoji become evidence?
And finally — because even a minimalist version of this story needs its New England cadence — a last image. A man steps out of detention into a Brooklyn street, steam from a halal truck rising around him like breath in winter. A reporter asks what changed most. “You start to speak less. Even when you’re free.”¹ Silence isn’t a neutral state. It’s a scar. And it’s spreading.