The smell of polished floors and anxiety filled the air. “My client was just a blip,” she recalled. “A face matched to a name. Due process evaporated.”⁴
“The face becomes the warrant. The algorithm becomes the judge.”
By 2020, over twenty agencies—federal and local—used facial recognition tools. Clearview AI had scraped more than three billion images from social media—profile shots, wedding albums, old vacation posts—building databases searchable by protest image. It didn’t ask what you’d done. Only who you were.
Sometimes, it got that wrong.
Robert Julian‑Borchak Williams, father of two in Detroit, was arrested before his children at home—misidentified from a store surveillance image he’d never been near. The detective admitted it: “I guess the computer got it wrong.”⁵ Williams spent 30 hours in custody. “How do I explain that to my daughters?” he wrote later.⁶
He began journaling again, something he hadn’t done since high school. His first entry read:
“I didn’t cry. My daughter looked at me like I’d lied about the world being fair.”
He sued. The city settled. The software stayed.
And the threat wasn’t only in pixels.
In San Diego, Karina, a 22-year-old nursing student, never saw herself as political. She joined a spontaneous protest with friends, clutching a sign made from a pizza box. Days later, plainclothes officers knocked on her door—not with a warrant, but with a printed image from an Instagram story: her, half-turned, mask lowered to take a sip, tagged by a friend. Facial recognition found her. “They said they were following up on property damage,” Karina remembered. “But I hadn’t thrown anything. I hadn’t even chanted. I just stood there.”
She wasn’t charged. But her ID was recorded, her phone number logged, her presence cataloged.
Over time, routines changed. She deleted her social media. At rallies, she left her phone behind or wrapped it in foil-lined snack bags. She walked away from protests driven by memory, not fear. “It felt like getting punished for proximity,” she said. “Like my existence near dissent was the crime.”
She dropped a class to avoid passing the police substation. She studied ceilings for unblinking cameras and slept with her phone in the bathroom. “My friends said I was paranoid,” she shrugged. “But paranoia is just pattern recognition. You see it once—you can’t unsee it.”
This ambient sense of being watched wasn’t isolated. In 2021, the DOJ subpoenaed Apple for metadata on Reps. Schiff and Swalwell—and their families’ emails and calls⁷. At the same time, Washington Post journalists discovered their call logs had been seized without consent⁸. “This profoundly undermines press freedom,” said The New York Times editor Dean Baquet.⁹
Inside DHS, an analyst spoke to a Senate staffer in confidence: “We weren’t targeting threats. We were building a searchable archive of dissent.”
Not all embraced that view.
“We’re not trying to profile citizens,” said Chief Alan Garber of the Dallas Police Department. “We’re trying to prevent the next Uvalde. These systems save seconds. Seconds save lives.”¹⁰