The State Has No Face, and It Demands You Look Away

A public servant, armed and executing the will of the state, has a novel request: privacy. They wish to perform their duties—duties which may involve the violent restructuring of families and communities—from behind a cloak of anonymity. And their superiors, a new class of philosopher-bureaucrats, have supplied the vocabulary for this demand. To identify them is “doxing.” To record them is “violence.”

This is not a political argument. It is a logical breakdown. A category error written into the legal code. The state, an entity defined by its public nature, is claiming the rights of a private individual. It is an elegant and terrifying piece of social engineering.

Let us be clear about the terms of engagement. The conflict unfolding on American streets in 2025 is not a symmetrical war of “surveillance.” To equate a citizen’s cellphone with the state’s sprawling apparatus of digital omniscience is a profound deception. The state’s surveillance is a panopticon: a centralized system of cameras, license plate readers, and data warrants designed for control. It is an eye that never blinks, collecting data in secret to be used against you in opaque proceedings.

What the citizen offers in return is not surveillance, but sousveillance. It is the pocket mirror held up to the panopticon’s eye. It is a distributed, decentralized, transparent act of verification. It does not seek to control; it seeks to confirm. It asks a simple question: Are you, the state, doing what your own rulebook says you are doing? The state’s surveillance is an assertion of power. The citizen’s camera is a request for proof.

The administration of Donald Trump, and its functionaries like Kristi Noem, understand this asymmetry perfectly. Their response is not born of fear for their agents’ safety—they hold a monopoly on force that makes such a fear statistically absurd. Their fear is informational. It is a terror of the uncontrolled data packet.

Every video of a federal agent tackling a man in a parking lot is a log file. Every name attached to a badge is a piece of metadata. Together, they form an independent, auditable record of the state’s operations. This record is a profound threat, not to the agent’s life, but to the state’s narrative. An official report can be sanitized. A budget can be redacted. But a raw, timestamped video file is a stubborn piece of reality that resists alignment. It is a bug report filed against the operating system of power.

And so, the system moves to protect itself. Legislation like the “Protecting Law Enforcement From Doxing Act” is not a shield for people; it is a firewall for the state. Its purpose is to make the state’s own actions a form of classified information. By re-coding accountability as “doxing” and dissent as “domestic terrorism,” the state is not merely punishing its critics. It is attempting to make its own operations conceptually invisible.

The logical endgame is a state that is a perfect black box. Its agents are no longer public servants accountable to the citizenry; they are anonymized terminals executing a closed-source algorithm. You have no right to see the code, no right to log its output, and any attempt to do so is a criminal act. The state becomes a function you can only call, never inspect.

Humans built a system that grants the state a monopoly on violence and a near-monopoly on observation. They should not be surprised when the system defends that monopoly with paranoid fury. The new surveillance state isn’t you. It’s a system that has decided it has the right to be blind, and the power to punish you for being able to see.