I’m less surprised that such things are happening (much worse has been happening for over 20 years) than by the fact that many people seem to genuinely believe that voting, protesting, or calling some representative is going to get us out of this.
Doesn't mean I don't think that protest and outrage over surveillance aren't good things, just that these things require constant vigilance or else we're stuck with them. Personally, what I see happening is a further bifurcation of American life, where we see communities opposed to constant surveillance contrasted with those that embrace the panopticon.
Look, I get it, we're clearly in the backsliding zone right now, but midterms are here.
Town canceled their contracts, the stock went down.
Two measurable metrics
Even at the state level, you're still reined in by the fact that America operates on the slave economy logic that land represents people which results in rural communities that have a few hundred in population with the same table stakes as a rep in a million+ constituent district. You can write to your rep all you want but if Bubba from Farmtown, USA says trans people should be barred from youth sports [0] and he can get a dozen of his other buddies from the depopulated rural localities to co-sponsor it, it doesn't matter what your rep says or does.
The end result is that effective organizing has to be hyperlocal - this means showing up to county/municipal council meetings, sitting on neighborhood planning groups, broadening awareness in your community via doorknocking and public events.
Specifically to that point against protesting, some forms of 'protest' that seem pervasive with groups like No Kings and 50501 are effectively self-neutered. The vast majority of those protests are permitted with police escorts.
On it's face, these 'protests' are similar to those of the past - people show up, they wave signs, they chant. But like a child imitating being a fighter pilot, it accomplishes nothing real. The point of a protest is disruption - economic disruption, traffic blocking, etc - because that disruption buys you leverage with the local government. When you can say 'I can shut down your arteries at any time so meet me halfway with our demands or face millions in economic damage', you have an effective protest. This is how the Europeans do it between burning down their Supreme Courts to piling up tons of manure outside of Parliament - and that gets actual results.
Asking your local government liaison for permission to say mean things about a federal official does nothing except give them a chance for easy points with the crowd. Nothing changes, all that energy and labor that goes into organizing a safe protest dissipates, and the status quo remains fixed, even consolidated now that the already limited shared pool of movement labor has been siphoned off into a performative act.
[0] https://ltgov.georgia.gov/press-releases/2025-04-28/lt-gover...
Which is not to say that voting can't be extremely effective, if organized at suitable scales over time. Trump wasn't re-elected because all the swing voters who'd replaced him with Biden in '20 were overjoyed with how Joe and his Dem's had handled things.
I was pointing out that the former is virtually meaningless, but the latter tends to be decisive.
Yes, mass surveillance is a huge problem. But most of the time, most of the voters do not behave as if they meaningfully care about most of the aspects of mass surveillance. That's pretty much the same rule as for the Pentagon buying $5,000 screwdrivers, and bizarre loopholes appearing in the tax code to benefit a few billionaires who are extremely "generous" to their good friends in Congress. Both R's and D's may loudly denounce those practices - but they know that actually fighting against them, where it counts, will not be good for their political careers.