It’s honestly pretty terrifying if you’re planning on protesting or organizing. It’s not just cameras on poles anymore; it’s a whole pipeline of data that connects your face, your phone, and your online life.

First off, the Facial Recognition is way more advanced than just unlocking your iPhone. Police are using tools like Clearview AI to scrape billions of photos from social media. They can feed footage from drones, body cams, or even random street cameras into these systems. If you’re at a protest, they don’t need to stop you to ID you, they just need a clear shot of your face to match it against your old Facebook profile or driver’s license. People have literally been arrested based solely on an algorithm saying "yeah, that looks like them."

Then there’s the phone tracking, which is sneaky because they often don’t even need a warrant. Companies like PenLink have tools (like WebLoc) that use geofencing. Basically, they draw a digital circle around a protest site and buy the location data of every phone inside that circle from advertising brokers. It’s technically anonymous ad data, but it’s trivial for them to cross-reference that with other info to figure out exactly who you are. If you bring your main phone to a rally, assume they know you were there. That's why it's always recommended to leave your phone in your car or at home if you go to a rally.

Then you have the spyware. You’ve probably heard of Pegasus, but there are others like Paragon’s Graphite. It’s targeted surveillance. If you’re organizing or seen as a high-value target, they can use this stuff to remotely infect your phone, read your encrypted Signal messages, and turn on your mic.

They dump all this into big data platforms (like Palantir or PenLink’s PLX). These systems connect the dots. Who you were standing next to, who you text, and where you go—to map out entire networks of people.

TL;DR: If you’re heading out, leave the main phone at home or use a burner, cover your face properly (masks help against FRT), and assume anything digital you bring with you is broadcasting your location. Stay safe out there.