You do not know when they started watching. That is the point. The surveillance begins before you know it and continues after you stop looking for it and the file grows in a cabinet in a building you have never been inside. You are not a criminal. You are a person who said something or went somewhere or knew someone who said something and now there is a folder with your name on it and the folder gets thicker every Tuesday.

J. Edgar Hoover ran the FBI for forty eight years and kept files on ten million Americans. Not suspects. Americans. He had a file on Einstein. He had a file on Hemingway. He had a file on Eleanor Roosevelt. He had a file on John Lennon that ran to two hundred and eighty one pages and most of it was about a concert that never happened. Hoover did not want information. Hoover wanted leverage. The file was not evidence. The file was a weapon you could hold against somebody for the rest of their life.

In nineteen fifty six the FBI launched COINTELPRO and put agents inside every civil rights meeting and every antiwar rally and every Black Panther free breakfast program. They did not just watch. They disrupted. They sent fake letters. They planted informants. They turned organizations against each other by spreading lies from the inside. Fred Hampton was twenty one years old and running a free breakfast program in Chicago and the FBI gave his floor plan to the police and the police shot him in his bed. The surveillance was the first step. The assassination was the last.

They watched Martin Luther King so closely that in nineteen sixty four the FBI mailed him an anonymous letter calling him a fraud and suggesting he kill himself. The letter arrived thirty four days before he was to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. William Sullivan of the FBI wrote it. The federal government of the United States mailed a letter to the most important civil rights leader in the country and told him the only way out was suicide. That is what surveillance becomes when nobody is watching the watchers.

In two thousand thirteen Edward Snowden copied documents from the National Security Agency and showed the world that the government was collecting the phone records of every American. Not suspects. Everyone. The metadata of every call you made and every call you received and every call you missed. They knew who you talked to and when and for how long and from where. They said it was legal. They said a secret court had approved it. The court had approved it in secret and the approval was secret and the program was secret and the only thing that was not secret was your phone bill.

You carry the device in your pocket. You pay for it monthly. It knows where you sleep and where you eat and who you call and what you search for at two in the morning when you cannot sleep. The surveillance is not hidden anymore. The surveillance is the product. You agreed to the terms of service. The terms were forty seven pages long and you scrolled to the bottom and clicked accept because you wanted to see the map. The map knows where you are. The map has always known where you are. The only difference between Hoover and your phone is that Hoover had to pay agents to follow you and your phone follows you for free.