In the Cold War and McCarthy era, surveillance was a matter of craft, not computation. It took people, patience and paperwork. Agents had to physically follow a suspect through crowded streets, steam open letters, or plant microphones in hotel rooms. When the government wanted a list of members of a political or civil rights organization, it had to raid the offices and rummage through the file cabinets.

Wiretaps required copper lines, warrants were often improvised, and the process was labor-intensive. “Mail covers” — recording the outside of envelopes — were slow and manual. The FBI might subpoena library records to see if citizens were reading “subversive” books or subpoena magazine subscription lists, but each act of surveillance was targeted, deliberate, and time-consuming. The very inefficiency of mid-century surveillance was what preserved liberty: Watching everyone was simply impossible.

By the start of the twenty-first century, inefficiency had died. The Information Age digitized everything. Our devices, networks, and sensors now record nearly every interaction, movement, and utterance. The rise of the “internet of things” means that information once ephemeral — the flicker of a light switch, the hum of a car engine, the turn of a key — becomes data.

Automated license plate readers record and archive vehicle movements across cities. Geofence warrants allow police to pull records of every smartphone that passed near a crime scene. Doorbell cameras, “smart” speakers, thermostats, and connected cars generate constant, cloud-stored telemetry. Wearables like fitness trackers and Meta glasses convert private experience into digital evidence. The state no longer needs to follow you; your devices do it for them.

In United States v. Jones, 565 U.S. 400 (2012), the Supreme Court found that long-term GPS tracking of a vehicle was a Fourth Amendment search because it revealed the “whole of a person’s movements.” The problem, of course, is that such tracking is now a feature, not an aberration. It is the price of living in a networked world.

The real issue today is not the gathering of data but the meaning of it. For decades, the government could collect only so much, analyze only so fast, and correlate only so far. Bureaucratic inertia — clerks, analysts, filing systems — created a natural bottleneck that served as a de facto Bill of Rights.

Artificial intelligence obliterates that bottleneck.

AI systems can ingest and analyze all the data our digital society generates — location histories, communications, transactions, social connections, health metrics, browsing habits, and facial images — and render it intelligible. Machine learning models can identify patterns invisible to human analysts, correlate disparate databases, and infer new information from fragments. What once required years of analysis can now be done in seconds.

Government inefficiency was once the greatest protector of civil liberties. Now, that inefficiency is gone — and with it, perhaps, the last natural limit on surveillance.

For more than half a century, the law of privacy has lagged behind technology. In Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347 (1967), the Supreme Court declared that “the Fourth Amendment protects people, not places,” recognizing a “reasonable expectation of privacy” in phone conversations. But Katz arose in an analog world of telephones and wiretaps, not in a universe of ambient data.

The Court’s later embrace of the “third-party doctrine” in United States v. Miller, 425 U.S. 435 (1976), and Smith v. Maryland, 442 U.S. 735 (1979), held that information voluntarily given to a third party — like a bank or phone company — is not protected by the Fourth Amendment. In an era where every message, email, or GPS ping passes through a dozen intermediaries, the doctrine swallows the rule.

The principle of associational privacy recognized in NAACP v. Alabama ex rel. Patterson, 357 U.S. 449 (1958), where the Court barred the state from demanding membership lists of civil rights organizations, has little meaning when the government can simply infer associations from metadata, social graphs, and location histories. No raid is necessary when the file cabinet updates itself in real time.

Even attempts to narrow surveillance in the name of “reasonableness” have created new loopholes. In United States v. Cabbales, 543 U.S. 405 (2005), the Court held that a drug-sniffing dog’s inspection of a car was not a “search” because it revealed only the presence or absence of contraband. At the time, I wrote an article titled “Of Dog Sniffs and Packet Sniffs,” asking what would happen if technology could “sniff” every communication in the world and flag only the “illegal” ones.

Would that, too, be outside the Fourth Amendment?

Artificial intelligence now offers something close to that capability. Automated filters scan global communications for keywords, sentiment, or content suggesting crime or extremism. The same principle that made the dog sniff permissible could make mass algorithmic scanning appear “reasonable” — even as it eliminates privacy.

The promise — and peril — of AI is that it turns raw data into insight. It can connect a license plate scan to a credit-card purchase, to a cell-tower ping, to a social-media post, to a DNA database hit. It can map not just where you are, but who you are: your routines, relationships, and weaknesses. The same computational capacity that powers targeted advertising now powers predictive policing, facial recognition, and “pattern of life” analysis. The very idea of a “reasonable expectation of privacy” collapses when the state can, without effort, know everything about everyone all the time.

For most of American history, the Constitution was enforced as much by logistics as by law. Warrants were costly, manpower was limited and files were mislaid. Human fallibility made tyranny impractical. Today, surveillance is automated, self-perpetuating, and permanent. What was once a search now looks like a software update. There is an old saying that “a gentleman is someone who knows how to play the accordion — but doesn’t.” Shakespeare put it more elegantly: “The better part of valor is discretion.” The same could be said of government power. The ability to see everything does not mean one should.

Artificial intelligence has ushered in the golden age of surveillance. Whether it becomes a golden age for justice or for control depends not on what our machines can do, but on what our institutions choose to restrain them from doing.

Because in this new world, inefficiency will no longer save us. Only discretion will.

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