THE AUTHORITARIAN LOGIC OF SELECTIVE PRIVACY / PROJECT SYNDICATE

The Authoritarian Logic of Selective Privacy

Around the world, governments are increasingly deciding who gets privacy and who is denied it, a double standard that turns a fundamental democratic right into a privilege. US President Donald Trump’s administration is a prime example, shielding ICE agents from scrutiny while expanding surveillance of immigrants and protesters.

Danielle Keats Citron and Ari Waldman

CHARLOTTESVILLE/IRVINE—Around the world, civil rights and civil liberties are coming under profound threat, and that threat has a name: selective privacy. 

The powerful enjoy it, while vulnerable groups, protesters, and others who stand up to power do not. 

The slogan writes itself: “Privacy for me, but not for thee.”

Consider the surveillance practices of federal immigration authorities in the United States. 

Immigration and Customs Enforcement has access to a vast, interconnected surveillance system facilitated by private companies and state and local partners. 

Facial recognition apps, data brokers, DNA databases, CCTV cameras, license-plate readers, drones, risk-scoring platforms, social-media monitoring services, utility bills, and much more enable ICE to monitor, track, and arrest undocumented immigrants and protesters. 

Everything people do—whether on their phones, online, at school, or on the street—can be, and probably is, being monitored.

And this is not just agency practice; it’s presidential policy. 

On Truth Social, US President Donald Trump announced last year that “masks will not be allowed” to be worn at protests. 

By contrast, law enforcement officers enjoy more privacy than ever before. 

ICE agents wear masks, balaclavas, and other face coverings. 

They drive unmarked cars. 

Their uniforms lack markings and name tags.

In 2025, then-Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said that ensuring the anonymity of ICE officers was necessary to protect agents from violence and doxing. 

Noem also stated, without evidence, that there had been a “1,000% increase” in assaults against federal officers. 

Shortly thereafter, then-Attorney General Pam Bondi asked Apple to remove ICEBlock, an app that enables people to track ICE agents, from its App Store, claiming that “ICEBlock is designed to put ICE agents at risk just for doing their jobs.” Apple and Google complied and removed it.

The double standard should be obvious. 

Doxing and harassment are serious matters, and as members of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative and scholars of online abuse, we would denounce any such developments. 

But there is scant evidence that officers have, in fact, faced such abuse.

The Trump administration’s lack of sincerity about the threat of doxing is made clear by its lack of concern about other high-profile examples. 

For example, Expose Charlie’s Murderers gathered the names and locations of people who allegedly celebrated Charlie Kirk’s death, and the DEI Watchlist posted names and photographs of federal employees who allegedly abused diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.

The Trump administration’s insistence that ICE agents’ identities must be protected while anti-ICE protesters must be denied the same protections is more than just hypocritical. 

These illustrations of selective privacy are part of the authoritarian playbook. 

Selective privacy is designed to erode democratic norms and individual rights by turning privacy into something the government grants to allies and withholds from enemies. 

Privacy is afforded to the powerful, often shielding them from responsibility, and denied to the vulnerable, for whom it is essential to voice dissent.

Without the ability to wear masks, demonstrators may not feel safe marching, expressing themselves, and exercising their constitutionally protected right to protest. 

The ability to wear a mask may make all the difference between publicly registering concern for neighbors being arrested without explanation and staying silent and letting injustice persist. 

The Supreme Court has long recognized the right to engage in political speech anonymously. Staying home is exactly what authoritarian governments prefer.

Freedom’s Foundation

Transforming a democratic right into a privilege granted at the whim of government is not without precedent. 

A century of Jim Crow laws in the US South denied Black people basic democratic rights, including freedom of movement and participation in public life, reserving those rights for white majorities. 

In what the German-Jewish political theorist Ernst Fraenkel famously called the “dual state,” the Nazis created two legal systems: one in which rules and systems protected the lives and property of the Aryan community and powerful business interests aligned with the Nazi regime, and another in which police and party officials had almost “complete discretionary power” to engage in violence against individuals of non-Aryan descent and anti-Nazi dissidents.

These laws and practices, then and now, share the same premise: they encroach on the basic rights of dissidents and disfavored groups while guaranteeing the same rights to regime allies, thereby strengthening authoritarian rule.

Privacy protects democracy. 

To paraphrase Hannah Arendt, a life lived without privacy deprives people of the ability to form independent thoughts and engage in civic deliberation. 

Privacy secures both space and time for individuals to figure out what they think and what they want to say, free from majoritarian pressures to express conforming views or to fall silent. 

With privacy, individuals can test their opinions, thoughts, and ideas by themselves and with trusted others without fear of retribution or embarrassment. 

Anonymous communication also allows people to contribute to public debate. 

Simply put, privacy is essential for a democratic society.

Privacy is far more than just the “right to be let alone” or to hide from other individuals, companies, and the government. 

It is a precondition for human flourishing and justice, essential to the formation of identity and self-respect and the development of close relationships. 

The goal of privacy law should be to protect those who need it most and have the fewest means to secure it on their own. 

By looking to anti-subordination principles of need and means, the law could take privacy out of the authoritarian arsenal while protecting opportunities for personal growth, love, and dignity, especially for those most vulnerable to public and private surveillance and manipulation.

Putting this principle into practice requires three related shifts. 

First, when privacy conflicts with other rights and interests, such as speech, public order, and other privacy rights, the law should determine how much weight to give privacy by considering the needs of the most vulnerable and marginalized. 

If those needs outweigh more diffuse or conflicting interests, privacy should be protected.

Take protesters’ privacy and law enforcement’s interest in public safety. 

Without the ability to wear masks, protesters might stay home for fear that their protected expression would land them on government watch lists, as happened to Oregon residents (including a government lawyer) protesting George Floyd’s murder in 2020. 

Law enforcement’s interest in public safety would hardly be imperiled by allowing protesters to wear masks. 

On-scene officers can arrest individuals who engage in criminal activity; their access to surveillance technologies to track down criminals is breathtaking as it is.

Second, if one group’s privacy conflicts with another’s, the law should consider each group’s need for privacy and capacity to protect its rights. 

The interests of the most vulnerable should take precedence.

Let’s return to the doxing risks faced by everyday individuals and ICE agents. 

The individuals included on the DEI Watchlist were mostly Black federal workers whose inclusion on the website imperiled their “safety, the safety of [their] family, and [their] ability to return to work or find other employment.” 

These workers faced threats and online abuse, lost job opportunities, and suffered emotional distress, but law enforcement did nothing to help. 

By contrast, despite having no evidence that ICE agents had been doxed and harassed, 

Trump officials promised to pursue those imaginary harassers with the harshest criminal penalties on hand. 

Those most in need of protection from online abuse—the Black federal workers included in the DEI Watchlist—received none, while ICE agents enjoyed the full backing of the Department of Justice.

Lastly, when the privacy implications are unclear, the law should account for systemic inequalities when determining whose privacy interests are at stake.

Instead of entrenching existing power hierarchies, privacy law should always challenge them. 

Protecting the privacy of the Black federal workers who faced threats and lost their jobs should take precedence over the privacy of ICE officers.

The Trump administration has weaponized both the concept and mechanisms of privacy to suit its authoritarian ends. 

It is up to the public to reclaim privacy. 

Democracy depends on it.

Danielle Keats Citron is Professor of Law and Director of the LawTech Center at the University of Virginia School of Law. She is the author of The Fight for Privacy: Protecting Dignity, Identity, and Love in the Digital Age (W. W. Norton, 2022), a 2019 MacArthur Fellow, and a member of the Board of Directors and Vice President of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative.

Ari Waldman, Professor of Law at the University of California, Irvine, is the author of Industry Unbound: The Inside Story of Privacy, Data, and Corporate Power (Cambridge University Press, 2021) and a member of the Board of Directors of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative.