What doesn’t appear to be a major risk to your rights now can become a substantial threat later on.
By Thor Benson
Contributer
Wired Magazine
Talk of creeping authoritarianism in the United States seems to be everywhere—in the news, in books, and in conversations among neighbors around the country. The January 6 insurrection and the events that followed have Americans increasingly worried about the fate of democracy in their country.
An NPR/Ipsos poll from January found that 64 percent of Americans believe democracy is “in crisis and at risk of failing.” A Yahoo News/YouGov poll from June found that more than half of Democrats and Republicans think it’s “likely” the US will “cease to be a democracy in the future.”
The two most likely Republican presidential nominees for 2024—Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis—both exhibit an authoritarian mindset. Critics are ringing alarm bells over what could happen to American democracy should one of these men end up in the White House, but little has been said about what the current president and Congress could do right now to constrain a future autocrat.
One of the primary tools authoritarian leaders around the world use to control their citizens is mass surveillance. Neil Richards, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, says Congress needs to pass legislation that protects the privacy of Americans so existing surveillance mechanisms can no longer be abused.
“We need a robust federal privacy law, we need robust enforcement mechanisms, we need to somehow rein in the commercial surveillance apparatus because that’s a key component in authoritarian regimes. … They co-opt the existing cameras and sensors,” Richards says. “It used to be that it would be a fascist’s dream to have a camera and a speaker in every home, and of course, we did it to ourselves.”
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