25 Years of Mass Surveillance Is Enough [Auth: Cindy Cohn; Bruce Schneier]
11 is the government-wide shift from targeted surveillance—such as individual wiretaps or pen register/trap and trace orders—to mass surveillance techniques—such as tapping into the internet backbone or mass collection of telephone or internet metadata. The legal and technical architecture of modern mass surveillance, initially framed as a necessary defense against terrorist threats, has grown far beyond that justification and national security in general. Mass surveillance is now a routine tool used by law enforcement.
- ▪11 is the government-wide shift from targeted surveillance—such as individual wiretaps or pen register/trap and trace orders—to mass surveillance techniques—such as tapping into the internet backbone or mass collection of telephone or inter
- ▪The legal and technical architecture of modern mass surveillance, initially framed as a necessary defense against terrorist threats, has grown far beyond that justification and national security in general.
- ▪Mass surveillance is now a routine tool used by law enforcement.
2 outlets in our directory ran this story. All of the coverage we found sits in one bucket: centre. That one-sidedness is itself worth noticing.
- ▪ 25 Years of Mass Surveillance Is Enough — Schneier on Security
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| Original publisher | Default |
| Canonical URL | https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/25-years-of-mass-surveillance-is-enough |
| Publication time | Tue, 15 Sep 2026 12:08:26 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-15T13:01:52.742Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-15T13:01:52.742Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | F1_maNkeDiwy · 2 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
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Surveillance & Privacy Terrorism & Extremism 25 Years of Mass Surveillance Is Enough Cindy Cohn, Bruce Schneier Monday, September 14, 2026, 12:00 PM Share On: Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Share on BlueSky Share on Threads Print this article Twenty-five years since 9/11, tech and political shifts have increasingly pitted mass surveillance against constitutional rights. (Wikimedia Commons, https://tinyurl.com/47drw8by; CC BY 3.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us/deed.en) Cindy Cohn Bruce Schneier Meet The Authors Subscribe to Lawfare One of the many legacies of the terrorist attacks of Sept.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Default.