OAN Commentary by John Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead
Tuesday, December 16, 2025
The Surveillance State is making a naughty list, and we’re all on it.
Unlike Santa’s naughty list, however, the consequences of landing on the government’s “naughty list” are far more severe than a stocking full of coal. They can include heightened surveillance, loss of privacy, travel restrictions, financial scrutiny, police encounters, or being flagged as a potential threat—often without notice, explanation, or recourse.
What was once dismissed as a joke—“Santa is watching”—has morphed into a chilling reality. Instead of elves, the watchers are data brokers, intelligence agencies, predictive algorithms, and fusion centers. Instead of a naughty-or-nice list, Americans are sorted into databases, risk profiles, and threat assessments—lists that never disappear.
The shift is subtle but profound.
Innocence is no longer presumed.
Everyone is watched. Everyone is scored. Everyone is a potential suspect.
This is the surveillance state in action.
Today’s surveillance state doesn’t require suspicion, a warrant, or probable cause. It is omnipresent, omniscient, and inescapable.
Your smartphone tracks your location. Your car records your movements. License plate readers log when and where you drive. Retail purchases create detailed consumer profiles. Smart speakers listen to everything you say. Home security cameras observe not just your property, but your neighbors, delivery drivers, and anyone who passes by.
In a dramatic expansion of surveillance reach, the Transportation Security Administration now shares airline passenger lists with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, enabling ICE to identify and arrest travelers at airports based on immigration status.
What was once routine aviation security data has been transformed into an enforcement tool—merging civilian travel records with the machinery of deportation and demonstrating how ordinary movements can be weaponized by the state.
Even the most personal acts—like Christmas shopping—are now tracked in real time. Every item you buy, where you buy it, how you pay, and who you buy it for becomes part of a permanent digital record. That data does not stay confined to retailers. It is shared, sold, aggregated, and folded into sprawling surveillance ecosystems that blur the line between corporate data collection and government intelligence.
Companies like Palantir specialize in fusing these data streams into comprehensive behavioral profiles, linking financial activity, social media behavior, geolocation data, and government records into a single, searchable identity map.
The result is not merely a government that watches what you’ve done but one that claims the power to predict what you will do next.
It is a short step from surveillance to pre-crime.
While predictive policing and AI-driven risk assessments are marketed as tools of efficiency and public safety, in reality, they represent a dangerous shift from punishing criminal acts to policing potential behavior.
Algorithms—trained on historical data already shaped by over-policing, bias, and inequality—are now used to predict who might commit a crime, who might protest, or who might pose a “risk.” Even the way you drive—where you came from, where you were going and which route you took—is being analyzed by predictive intelligence programs for suspicious patterns that could get you flagged and pulled over.
Once flagged by an algorithm, individuals often have no meaningful way to challenge the designation. The criteria are secret. The data sources opaque. The decisions automated.
Accountability disappears.
This isn’t law enforcement as envisioned by the Founders. This is pre-crime enforcement—punishing people not for what they’ve done, but for what an AI machine predicts they might do.
No government initiative has done more to normalize, expand, and entrench mass surveillance than the Trump administration’s war on immigration.
The federal government has transformed immigration policy into a proving ground for authoritarian surveillance tactics—testing tools, technologies, and legal shortcuts could be deployed with minimal public resistance and quietly repurposed for use against the broader population.
Through ICE and DHS, the government fused immigration enforcement with corporate surveillance technologies—facial recognition, license-plate readers, cellphone tracking, and massive data-sharing agreements—creating a sprawling digital dragnet that now extends far beyond immigrants.
What began as a policy aimed at undocumented immigrants has now become a model for nationwide surveillance policing.
All of this adds up to an algorithmic naughty list.
Government watchlists have exploded in size and scope.
Terrorist watchlists, no-fly lists, gang databases, protester tracking systems, and “suspicious activity” registries operate with little oversight and even less transparency.
People can be added to these lists without notification and can remain there indefinitely. Errors are common. Corrections are rare.
Social media posts are mined. Associations are mapped. Speech is scrutinized. Peaceful dissent is increasingly treated as a precursor to extremism.
The government’s watchlists aren’t just opaque databases hidden from public view. They are becoming public-facing instruments of political classification. Internal Justice Department memoranda now direct the FBI to compile lists of groups and networks it categorizes as possible domestic extremists, broadening counter-terror tools to sweep in ideological opponents and organizations without clear statutory definitions.
In this system, being “good” no longer means obeying the law. It means staying under the radar, avoiding attention, and never questioning authority.
The chilling effect is the point.
Once upon a time, privacy was recognized as a fundamental liberty—an essential buffer between the individual and the state. Today, it’s a conditional privilege, granted temporarily and revoked when it suits the police state’s purposes.
What was once unthinkable has become routine.
Americans are being conditioned to accept constant monitoring as the price of safety. That resistance is suspicious. That anonymity is dangerous.
Yet history teaches us the opposite: societies that normalize surveillance do not become safer—they become more authoritarian.
A government that sees everything, everywhere, all the time, will eventually control everything.
The Founders understood this. That is why they enshrined protections against unreasonable searches and unchecked power. They knew liberty couldn’t survive under constant surveillance.
When the government knows where you go, what you buy, what you say, who you associate with, and what you believe, freedom becomes conditional.
This Christmas, we might joke about Santa watching from the North Pole, but we should be far more concerned about the watchers much closer to home.
The surveillance state doesn’t take a holiday. It doesn’t sleep. It doesn’t forget. And it doesn’t forgive easily.
So you see, the question is not whether we are being watched. We are.
The question, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, is whether we will continue to accept a system that treats every citizen as a suspect—and whether we will reclaim the constitutional limits that once stood between liberty and the all-seeing state.
(Views expressed by guest commentators may not reflect the views of OAN or its affiliates.)
Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at [email protected]. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.
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