Went to the Protests Over the Weekend? Here’s How You Might Be Surveilled Now

If you were one of the estimated 7 million people who marched at a “No Kings†event this past weekend, the inevitable digital breadcrumb trail you left behind will most likely reflect a peaceful day of constitutionally protected self-expression. Massive protests at major cities like LA had arrest counts in the single digits, and the Black Bloc brick-throwers, provocateurs, and random drunks seem to have stayed home. The NYPD, for its part, announced that there were “zero protest-related arrests†in New York City.

But rhetoric from Republicans lately paints the ruling party’s political adversaries as extremist or even “pro-terrorist.†Speaker of the House Mike Johnson has called the No Kings protests “hate America†rallies. Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy calls the No Kings rallies “part of antifa,†and implied that they’re funded by dark money rather than arising organically from popular sentiment. That’s especially concerning given that a Trump executive order from last month aims to “identify and disrupt financial networks†linked with funding whatever the Trump Administration deems “domestic terrorism and political violence.â€

“The Trump regime would have us believe that somehow peaceful, pro-democracy protesters are terrorists for daring to defy the fascist takeover of this country,†Ryan Shapiro, executive director of Property of the People, a pro-transparency nonprofit focusing on records related to government surveillance told Gizmodo. “The real terrorists are sitting in the White House shredding the Constitution, declaring war on the American people,†Shapiro added. 

So here’s what you should keep in mind about surveillance now that you’ve done something deeply un-American by declaring publicly that you don’t support monarchy in the United States.

It’s not hard for law enforcement to figure out where you’ve been

If you drove to the protest, surveillance cameras attached to automated license plate reader systems (ALPRs) can be used to determine that your car was present near a protest. This can include both fixed cameras that you drove past on the way to your local march, or ALPR systems mounted on police cruisers, capable of sweeping for license plate data on cars parked near the rally. Public transit is safer in this regard, assuming you paid with cash or coins. If you paid with an app or card tied to your ID, it’s sometimes possible for law enforcement to track you that way too.

Your phone, however, leaves a trail of location data behind too. If you kept your phone in airplane mode during the demonstration, then good on you because your location data can be recorded and transmitted while it’s connected to the internet. But as the EFF notes in its explainer, “apps may be able to store your GPS location and transmit it once you connect to the internet again.†Even if you use a dumb phone with no GPS or other location-related functions, the rough location of any cell phone can be traced to the cell towers it connected to at a given time. 

Law enforcement may also use “stingrays†or other ISMI trackers, which mimic legitimate cell towers in order to capture people’s locations. 

Law enforcement may have photos of you now

Blurring the faces of everyone in your protests photos is an arduous extra step to take before posting on social media, but if you plan to post photos online — and you’re new to protest etiquette — you should know that it’s a must. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) notes, once something is on social media, it’s available to be used by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The EFF suggests Image Scrubber as a software tool for obscuring faces, and also stripping out the identifying metadata attached to your photos — which can include your location and sometimes even your name.

But if you weren’t wearing a mask, your face was probably just photographed by strangers, and they aren’t all going to know this face-wiping etiquette. The internet is a vast, unknowable place, and photos travel far and wide once they’re out there. There are products out there like PimEyes that will gladly find pictures of you in far-flung corners of the internet in exchange for you uploading pictures of your face to their servers. Personally, I wouldn’t trust any of those services for this purpose. Besides, police just take their own photos of No Kings demonstrators, sometimes from drone-mounted cameras. 

The EFF explainer on social media surveillance notes that law enforcement uses photos, including those on social media, to monitor asylum seekers and gather intel before other protests. Agencies can also use services like Clearview AI to scan a database of millions of photos in an attempt to identify you—assuming your rally was not in Vermont, New Jersey, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts or Montana, where the technology is banned.

And according to the New York Times, the Peter Thiel-founded data firm Palantir is working with the Trump Administration to create a single, unified database of information on seemingly all Americans (Palantir denies this, for the record). If such a powerful database existed, and were combined with photos and locations of protesters, all amid a crackdown on dissent, that could all be fine, sure. But it wouldn’t be my first choice if I were designing a healthy democracy.