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WASHINGTON, July 20, 2026 — By nightfall, the legal architecture that authorizes the monitoring of virtually every American’s communications remains quietly in effect, renewed by presidential order every year since September 14, 2001. For a quarter-century, the same declaration of national emergency first signed by George W. Bush has been reauthorized under Presidents Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Donald Trump, and as of this month it remains active.
The roots of that apparatus reach back further than many realize. In 1919, the U.S. Army and State Department established the Black Chamber — properly called the Cipher Bureau — under Herbert O. Yardley. Operating in peacetime, the bureau decrypted diplomatic communications until 1929 and is regarded as a direct precursor to the National Security Agency. During World War II, the Office of Censorship intercepted communications between the United States and any foreign country, handling overseas cables and telegrams and international telephone calls each week. The war ended, but the surveillance did not.
A Century of Surveillance
After 1945, mass surveillance continued through the Cold War. Project SHAMROCK and the UKUSA agreement of 1946 evolved by 1955 into the ECHELON collaboration — a five-nation intelligence-sharing arrangement among the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Domestically, federal agencies institutionalized surveillance designed to silence political dissent.
COINTELPRO projects targeted individuals and organizations from the 1950s onward. During the Civil Rights Movement, activists first labeled integrationists were later deemed subversive, and sometimes suspected of supporting the Soviet Union.
Other targets included Native American activists, African American and Chicano liberation movement activists, and anti-war protesters.
Post-9/11 Escalation
The attacks of September 11, 2001, transformed the scale and scope of domestic and international surveillance. Three days later, President George W. Bush signed the first executive order declaring a national emergency, a measure that has been annually renewed ever since.
New legal foundations followed: the USA PATRIOT Act and the FISA Amendment Act, which authorized the PRISM surveillance program. Entire new agencies were created, escalating monitoring dramatically.
A series of 2013 media reports first revealed the breadth of contemporary programs to the public. Today, advances in computer and information technology enable massive national databases. These databases have been cited for profiling Latino Americans, contributing to self-deportation techniques and physical deportations via the DHS’s ICEGang national database.
Critics and political commentators describe the resulting network of programs as institutionalizing the illegal COINTELPRO tactics used to silence dissenters and leaders. As each year’s executive order renews the national emergency, the debate over the scope of surveillance — and its alignment with constitutional protections — continues to intensify.
No sunset is in sight.
