I heard some surprising refrains on my recent travels through China. “Leave your bags here,” a Chinese acquaintance or tour guide would suggest when I ducked off the streets into a public bathroom. “Don’t worry,” they’d shrug when I temporarily lost sight of my young son in the crowds.

前不久在中国旅行时，我经常听到一些让人惊讶的提醒。“把你的包留在外面，”我认识的中国人或中国导游在我打算走进大街上的公共厕所时会这样建议。“不用担心，”当我年幼的儿子暂时消失在人群中时，他们也会毫不在意地说。

The explanation always followed: “Nobody will do anything,” they’d say knowingly. Or, “There’s no crime.” And then, always, “There are so many cameras!”

接下来的解释总是——“没人会动你东西，”他们胸有成足地说道。或着“这里很安全的”。然后，必定会补上一句，“这里有这么多的摄像头！”

I can’t imagine such blasé faith in public safety back when I last lived in China in 2013, but on this visit it was true: cameras gawked from poles, flashed as we drove through intersections, lingered on faces as we passed through stations or shops. And that was just the most obvious edge of the ubiquitous, multilayered tracking that has come to define life in China. I came away troubled by my time in some of the world’s most-surveilled places — not on China’s account, but because I felt that I’d gotten a taste of our own American future. Wasn’t this, after all, the logical endpoint of an evolution already underway in America?

我上次在中国生活是2013年，那时我无法想象人们会对公共安全如此笃定，但这次旅行的情况确实是这样：电线杆上的摄像头虎视眈眈；我们的车经过十字路口时，摄像头会闪烁拍照；进入车站或商店时，摄像头会“刷”我们的脸。而这些不过是中国日常生活中无处不在、多层次监控的最明显的一面。在世界上监控最严密的一些地方度过一段时间后，我心怀不安地离开了那里，让我忧虑的不是中国，而是仿佛提前尝到了美国未来的滋味。说到底，这不正是美国当前这样发展下去的必然结果吗？

There was a crash course on the invasive reality of a functionally cash-free society: credit cards refused and verge-of-extinct paper bills spurned. I had to do the thing I’d hoped to avoid, link a credit card to WeChat. That behemoth Chinese “super app” offers everything from banking to municipal services to social media to shopping, and is required to share data with the Chinese authorities. (Elon Musk, by the way, reportedly wants to turn his own app, X, into an invasive offering modeled after WeChat.) Having resigned myself to all-virtual payments, I knew I was corralled like everyone else into unbroken visibility, unable to spend a single yuan or wander down a forgotten side street without being tracked and recorded.

一个无现金社会给我上了有关侵入现实的速成课：信用卡被拒收，濒临淘汰的纸币被嫌弃。我不得不做了件本想避免的事情：把信用卡绑定微信。微信是中国的一款巨无霸般的“超级应用”，提供从银行到市政服务、从社交媒体到购物的所有功能，而且必须跟官方共享数据。（顺便说一下，据说埃隆·马斯克想把他拥有的应用程序X变成一个仿效微信的侵入式产品。）无奈地接受了移动支付后，我知道我和其他人一样，被圈进了无间断监控的围栏，哪怕花一元钱或拐进无名小巷，都会被追踪记录。

Crisscrossing China as a chaperone on my son’s school trip, I felt that a country I’d fondly remembered as a little rough-and-tumble had gotten calmer and cleaner. A part of me hated to see it. In my own mind, I couldn’t separate the safe, tidy streets from the repressive system of political control that underpins all those helpful cameras.

作为儿子学校旅行的随行家长，我穿梭于中国各地，中国以前曾给我留下的美好印象是喧嚣杂乱，这次给我的感觉是国家变得更平静、更干净了。这种变化竟让我有些惋惜。在我的意识里，安全整洁的街道与支撑着万千监控镜头的管控体系始终无法被割裂看待。

The Chinese Communist Party famously uses surveillance to crush dissent and, increasingly, is applying predictive algorithms to get ahead of both crimes and protest. People who screen as potential political agitators, for example, can be prevented from stepping onto trains bound for Beijing. During the Covid pandemic, Chinese health authorities used algorithmic contact tracing and QR codes to block people suspected of viral exposure from entering public spaces. Those draconian health initiatives helped to mainstream invasive surveillance and increase biometric data collection.

中国共产党以监控手段压制异见著称，而且日益借助预测算法来防止犯罪和抗议活动发生。例如，被政府筛定为潜在政治煽动者的人可能会被阻止登上进京列车。在新冠疫情期间，中国的卫生部门使用算法追踪接触者，并使用二维码来阻止被怀疑为接触者的人进入公共场所。这些严厉的防疫措施帮助侵入式监控的普及，助推了生物信息采集的常态化。

It would be comforting to think that China has created a singular dystopia, utterly removed from our American reality. But we are not as different as we might like to think.

如果认为中国已制造出来的反乌托邦世界独一无二、与美国的现实毫无关系，那也许让人稍感宽慰。但美国与中国之间的差异并没有我们一厢情愿以为的那么大。

Thankfully, our political architecture lacks a unified power structure akin to the C.C.P. Americans — who tend to value individual liberties over collective well-being — have deeply embedded rights which, at least theoretically, protect us from such abuses.

幸亏我们的政治架构中没有类似于中共的那种统一权力结构。往往将个人自由置于集体福祉之上的美国人享有宪法保障的权利，至少在理论上，这些权利保护我们免受监控滥用。

But if Americans have learned one thing recently, it’s that rights we thought of as inalienable can prove perishable. We still think about surveillance as something that protects us (data-grabbing door cameras and security systems), that makes life easier (smart home systems, mapping tools, useful apps) or, at worst, that figures out how to sell us things we like (cookies, social media). Many Americans are oblivious to the porous boundary between private companies that collect our intimate details and the arms of government buying it up. As the Trump administration hardens into increasingly authoritarian methods of control, China should be a reminder that promises of safety and convenience can camouflage the machinery of political abuse.

但如果说美国人最近有所领悟的话，那就是我们过去认为不可剥夺的权利其实也是会消亡的。我们仍视监控为保护（例如收集大量数据的门禁摄像头和家庭防盗系统），让我们的生活更容易（例如智能家居系统、地图工具和实用应用软件），至多是推销利器（例如利用cookie、社交媒体）。许多美国人对私营公司收集个人信息与政府部门购买数据之间的模糊界限浑然不觉。随着特朗普政府日益采用威权化管控手段，中国的现状理应成为一种警示，即所谓安全便利的承诺，实则政治滥权的伪装。

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As my face was getting scanned all over China, Elon Musk’s minions with the so-called Department of Government Efficiency were ransacking federal agencies to seize Americans’ data and sensitive information. Legal experts maintain that accessing this data is illegal under federal privacy laws, which broadly forbid government agencies from disclosing our personal information to anyone, including other parts of the government, without our written consent. But, in the event, neither the law nor our lawmakers protected us.

我被中国各地的摄像头扫脸时，埃隆·马斯克麾下那个所谓政府效率部（简称DOGE）正在洗劫联邦机构，盗取美国人的数据和敏感信息。法律专家坚称，根据联邦隐私法，获取这些数据是非法的，联邦隐私法明文禁止政府机构在未经我们书面授权的情况下向任何人（包括政府的其他部门）泄露我们的个人信息。但这次，无论是法律还是我们的立法者都没有保护我们。

Mr. Musk’s team moved to access Social Security Administration data containing medical and mental health records, bank and credit card information, and birth and marriage certificates. This month, the Supreme Court temporarily allowed DOGE to access sensitive Social Security records. That means that DOGE staff, under the vague slogan of eliminating wasteful spending, can peruse files containing the most jealously guarded details of millions of American lives — everything from salary to addiction and psychiatric health records.

马斯克的团队已动手获取了社会保障局的数据，这些数据包含医疗和心理健康记录、银行和信用卡信息，以及出生和结婚证明。本月，最高法院暂时允许了DOGE访问敏感的社会保障记录。这意味着，DOGE工作人员能打着消除浪费性支出这个模糊口号的幌子查阅文件，这些文件中有数百万美国人生活中最小心翼翼保守的细节，包括历年的工资记录，以及毒瘾和心理健康档案等所有东西。

“What is this going to be used for?” asked Daniel Solove, a George Washington University law professor and the author of several books on privacy and technology. “What are the protections? Where does he have it? What will be done with it? What could be done with it in the future?

“这些数据将作何用途？”乔治华盛顿大学的法学教授丹尼尔·索洛夫问道，他写过多本有关隐私和技术的专著。“有什么保护措施？他把这些数据放在哪里？当前作何处理？将来又会用这些数据干什么？”

“None of these questions are answered,” he said. “There’s no transparency, no accountability, no limitations.”

“所有这些问题都没有答案，”他说。“没有透明度，没有问责，也没有任何限制措施。”

Meanwhile, the data analysis and technology firm Palantir, which was co-founded by Alex Karp and Peter Thiel (another Trump acolyte), has already received more than $113 million from the federal government since President Trump took office again. Officials have told The Times that the Trump administration is using Palantir technology to help consolidate data on Americans held by disparate federal agencies so that it could potentially create a centralized dossier. In April, Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced a $30 million contract with Palantir to create a system that will give ICE “near real time visibility” of people self-deporting, and prioritize whom to deport next.

与此同时，自从特朗普再次担任总统以来，由亚历克斯·卡普和彼得·泰尔（特朗普的又一个追随者）共同创立的数据分析公司Palantir已从联邦政府获得了逾1.13亿美元的资金。官员们对《纽约时报》说，特朗普政府正在用Palantir的技术帮助整合不同联邦机构持有的美国人数据，让政府有可能建立一个集中档案。今年4月，美国移民和海关执法局（简称ICE）宣布与Palantir签订了一份价值3000万美元的合同，让公司创建一个系统，使ICE能“近乎实时地追踪”自我离境者，并据此锁定优先驱逐对象。

Mr. Trump’s second term has been marked by incessant talk of investing in A.I., winning at A.I., getting ready for A.I., while tech executives lavish money on Mr. Trump and jockey for favor. The president has made it clear that he doesn’t want any pesky state governments getting in the way of this sensitive, emerging technology.

在特朗普的第二任期里，关于人工智能的论调喧嚣尘上：投资人工智能，在人工智能领域获胜，为人工智能做准备，同时，科技巨头们不惜为特朗普掏大钱，试图博得他的欢心。总统已明确表示，他不想让那些令人讨厌的州政府阻碍这项敏感新兴技术的发展。

All state laws regulating A.I. — dozens of them — would be nullified, and states would be banned from creating new A.I. regulations for the next decade under a measure embedded among the tax cuts and social spending cuts that the House passed in Mr. Trump’s “big, beautiful bill.” Senate Republicans have proposed replacing the ban with a measure blocking federal funding for broadband projects if states regulate A.I. It’s not paranoid to ask what Mr. Trump, tech executives and their political allies have in mind.

在特朗普的“大而美法案”中，众议院向各种减税和社会支出削减措施中塞进了一项措施，将废除所有监管人工智能的几十项州法律，各州将被禁止在未来十年制定新的人工智能法规。参议院共和党人提议用另一项措施来取代该禁令，即一旦一个州要监管人工智能，联邦就停止拨发宽带项目经费。在这种情况下，希望弄清特朗普、科技高管及其政治盟友的真实想法，并非一种杞人忧天。

The government’s enthusiasm for this emerging technology is disquieting. A.I. could help to supersize the surveillance state, offering the potential to quickly synthesize and draw inferences from massive quantities of data.

政府对这种新兴技术的热情令人不安。人工智能可以帮助扩大监控国家的规模，提供快速综合大量数据，并从中得出推论的潜力。

“The really powerful thing is when personal data get integrated,” said Maya Wang, associate China director at Human Rights Watch. “Not only am I me, but I like these things, and I’m related to so-and-so, and my friends are like this, and I like to go to these events regularly on Wednesdays at 6:30. It’s knowing relationships, movements and also any irregularities.”

“真正厉害的地方在于个人数据被整合起来，”人权观察组织中国部副主任王松莲说。“我不仅是我，还包括我喜欢这些东西，我和什么什么有关，我的朋友是这样的，我喜欢每周三6:30定期去参加这些活动。它了解人际关系、活动以及任何异常行为。”

Ms. Wang mentioned Police Cloud, an ambitious Chinese public safety project that uses all manner of collected data to find hidden relationships between events and people; to spy on those considered dangerous (petitioners, dissidents, Uyghurs, people with “extreme thoughts,” according to a document reviewed by Human Rights Watch); and to combine real-time monitoring with predictions for what may be about to happen. Predictive software has been adopted by local authorities around China: A Tianjin data project designed to head off protests analyzes who is most likely to file complaints; software in the city of Nanning can warn authorities if “more than three key people” checked into a hotel.

王松莲提到了警务云，这是一个庞大的中国公共安全项目，利用收集的各种数据来发现事件和人之间的隐藏关系；监视那些被认为危险的人（上访者、异见者、维吾尔人，还有被人权观察查阅的一份文件声称为有“极端思想”的人）；并将实时监测与可能发生的事情的预测结合起来。中国各地的地方政府都采用了预测软件：天津的一个旨在阻止抗议活动的数据项目分析了谁最有可能提出投诉；南宁市的一款软件可以在“三个以上关键人物”入住酒店时向有关部门发出警告。

It’s not that our government is using the surveillance infrastructure in the same manner as China. It’s that, as far as the technology goes, it could.

这并不是说我们的政府使用监控设施的方式和中国一样。然而就目前的技术而言，这是可能的。

“People used to say, in a xenophobic way, ‘We don’t want to end up like China,’” said Caitlin Seeley George, managing director at Fight for The Future, an organization advocating rights in the digital age. “The truth is, it may be a little less visible to us, it may look a little different, but the systems are in place here to support that kind of data sharing.”

“人们过去常以一种仇外的方式说，‘我们不想落得和中国一样，’”数字时代权利倡导组织“争取未来”常务董事凯特琳·西利·乔治说。“实际上，这对我们来说可能没那么明显，看起来可能有点不同，但支持那种数据共享的系统，其实在这里也已经建立起来了。”

The government has also been using privately collected data to crack down on ordinary Americans — mostly, so far, in the realm of immigration enforcement, but not exclusively.

政府也一直在使用私人收集的数据来打击普通美国人——到目前为止，主要是在移民执法领域，但并不仅限于此。

In 2023, for example, a Nebraska teenager and her mother were imprisoned after the police obtained their private Facebook messages discussing the use of abortion pills to end the teenager’s pregnancy.

例如，在2023年，内布拉斯加州的一名少女和她的母亲被监禁，因为警方获得了她们在Facebook上讨论使用堕胎药为少女终止妊娠的私人信息。

In 2018 The Verge reported that Palantir (yes, Palantir again) had for years been secretly collaborating with New Orleans police to experiment with using troves of previously siloed data to identify people who were deemed more likely to commit crimes.

2018年，The Verge报道称，Palantir（是的，又是Palantir）多年来一直在与新奥尔良警方秘密合作，试验使用以前被隔离的数据来识别被认为更有可能犯罪的人。

Since Mr. Musk started his big DOGE data grab, a spate of lawsuits has been filed by civil liberties and technology watchdogs, labor unions and state governments seeking to stop the seizures and get more information about what’s already been handed over.

自从马斯克的DOGE开始大规模获取数据以来，公民自由和技术监管机构、工会和州政府提起了一系列诉讼，试图阻止这些数据的获取，并获得更多有关已提交数据的信息。

The government has offered little explanation for what it’s doing with our data but, in April, Wired reported that DOGE has already started to integrate immigration data with Social Security and tax data.

政府几乎没有解释它在用我们的数据做什么，但《连线》在4月报道称，政府部门已经开始将移民数据与社会保障和税收数据整合起来。

This is particularly nefarious given the recent abuse of immigration enforcement. Students here on valid visas were overtly targeted because of their political speech — specifically, for participating in legal demonstrations for Palestinian rights. The State Department officials have described plans to use A.I. surveillance to comb social media posts to identify students for visa revocation. (It’s worth noting that invasive government perusal of social media is a bipartisan tendency — under President Joe Biden, for example, the Department of Homeland Security combed social media looking for discussions of abortion after Roe v. Wade was overturned.)

鉴于最近移民执法的滥用，这种做法尤其恶劣。持有效签证的学生因为他们的政治言论——特别是参加争取巴勒斯坦人权利的合法示威——而成为公开攻击的目标。美国国务院官员描述了利用人工智能监控梳理社交媒体帖子，以识别需要被吊销签证的学生的计划。（值得注意的是，政府对社交媒体的侵入性研读是两党共同的趋势——例如，在拜登总统的领导下，国土安全部在罗诉韦德案被推翻后，搜寻了社交媒体，寻找有关堕胎的讨论。）

Surveillance and tech specialists warn: This could be just the beginning.

监视和技术专家警告称：这可能只是一个开始。

“Once you consolidate data in a massive way like this, where your tax records are living next to your federal contracting records and your political donation records, the opportunity for abuse is significant,” said Cody Venzke, a senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, which is among the organizations suing the federal government for information about the DOGE data breach.

美国公民自由联盟高级政策顾问科迪·文兹克说：“一旦你像这样大规模地整合数据，你的税务记录就与你的联邦合同记录和政治捐款记录放在一起，滥用数据的机会就很大了。”美国公民自由联盟是起诉联邦政府、要求政府部门提供数据泄露信息的组织之一。

China manipulates data to create social credit scores that identify untrustworthy businesses or that allow overzealous officials to blacklist citizens for perceived vices.

中国通过数据操控来创建社会信用评分，以识别不值得信任的企业，或者让那些好大喜功的官员可以将他们觉得行为不端的公民列入黑名单。

Many Americans, whether they know it or not, have also been scored by state authorities, aided by ill-gotten information and predictive software.

许多美国人——不管他们是否知道——也被州政府当局利用非法获取的信息和预测软件进行了评分。

Here’s how it happens: All those private details collected by the many apps on your phone, not to mention the smart home devices, doorbell cameras and, of course, your car — that information winds up in the hands of salespeople known as data brokers. The data brokers, in turn, frequently sell to government agencies, especially law enforcement. Police who spend our tax money to buy this data are exploiting dubious loopholes, carrying out what amounts to a search and seizure en masse, without warrant or subpoena — and it happens every day.

事情是这样发生的：你手机上的许多应用程序收集的所有私人信息，更不用说智能家居设备、门铃摄像头，当然还有你的汽车——这些信息最终落入了被称为数据掮客的销售人员手中。反过来，这些数据中间商经常把数据卖给政府机构，尤其是执法部门。用我们的税款购买这些数据的警察正在利用可疑的漏洞，在没有搜查令或传票的情况下，进行大规模搜查和扣押——这种情况每天都在发生。

Some U.S. law enforcement bodies have already experimented with feeding the fruits of mass surveillance — faces, social media posts, location data and anything else they can scrounge from the data brokers — into predictive software to generate “threat scores” for individuals.

一些美国执法机构已经尝试将大规模监控的成果——面孔、社交媒体帖子、位置数据以及他们可以从数据掮客那里搜到的任何其他东西——输入预测软件，为个人生成“威胁评分”。

A Department of Justice report published late last year on A.I. and criminal justice sounded an enthusiastic note on software-generated risk assessments, noting that A.I. actuarial models “can outperform human judgments alone.”

司法部去年年底发表的一份关于人工智能和刑事司法的报告对软件生成的风险评估表现出极大的热情，指出人工智能精算模型“可以超越仅靠人类的判断”。

“Transparency is also a concern,” the report acknowledged. “Individuals who are subject to a risk assessment tool (and their representatives) may not know that the tool was used or have sufficient information to understand how it works and how it performs. Affected individuals also may not be aware of the inputs provided to the tool or have an opportunity to correct mistakes.”

“透明度也是一个问题，”报告承认。“受风险评估工具影响的个人（及其代表）可能不知道该工具已被使用，或者没有足够的信息来理解它是如何工作和执行的。受影响的个人也可能没有意识到向工具提供的输入信息，也没有机会纠正错误。”

It’s not just police. Public schools across the country have enthusiastically embraced “early warning” algorithms that plumb students’ private information to score their likelihood of dropping out. Here, too, lies the problem of cost/benefit — advocates for the early warning systems say they protect struggling or at-risk children from slipping unnoticed through the cracks. But many parents have no idea that data on their children’s attendance, behavior, and test scores are being gathered and submitted to predictive software.

不仅仅是警察。全国各地的公立学校都热衷于采用了“早期预警”算法，这种算法可以探测学生的私人信息，为他们退学的可能性打分。这里也存在成本/收益的问题——早期预警系统的倡导者说，它们保护了面临困难或有风险的儿童，使他们不会被忽视。但许多家长并不知道，有关他们孩子出勤、行为和考试成绩的数据正在被收集并提交给预测软件。

Even more troubling, school-collected data has sometimes made its way into the hands of law enforcement.

更令人不安的是，学校收集的数据有时会落入执法部门的手中。

Somehow, in all of this, our understanding of privacy — why it matters and who needs it — seems to have slumped. The men who drafted the earliest list of American rights, having recently fought an insurgency against colonial overlords who barged into their homes and stores whenever they pleased, retained a firm belief in privacy’s outsized importance as a condition of freedom. The Bill of Rights protects a range of privacies — of the home, the body, religious belief and even — as reflected in the Fifth Amendment’s right not to incriminate oneself — knowledge and personal information.

不知何故，在发生这一切的同时，我们对隐私的理解——为什么隐私很重要，谁需要隐私——似乎有所下降。起草美国最早一份权利清单的人曾发起反抗殖民统治的起义——当时的殖民者会随意闯入他们的住宅和商铺。因此他们深信，隐私是自由的一个条件，具有极其重要的意义。《权利法案》保护一系列隐私——家庭、身体、宗教信仰，甚至知识和个人信息方面的隐私，正如第五修正案中规定的不自证其罪的权利所体现的那样。

Jeremy L. Daum, a legal scholar and senior fellow at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center, has spent years living in China and studying the country’s legal system. That work, he said, made him a witness to rapidly shifting attitudes toward privacy both in China and in the United States. He pointed out that Americans, particularly in the wake of Sept. 11, “used to talk about giving up privacy for security.”

法律学者、耶鲁大学法学院蔡崇信中国中心高级研究员杰里米·道姆在中国生活多年，研究中国的法律制度。他说，这项工作让他见证了中国和美国对隐私态度的迅速转变。他指出，美国人，特别是在9·11事件之后，“曾经说要为了安全而放弃隐私”。

“Now we give it up for convenience, and it seems to me that our private information is getting cheaper,” he said. “The bargain is not well earned at this point.”

“现在我们为了方便而放弃了隐私，在我看来，我们的私人信息正变得越来越廉价，”他说。“在这一点上，这笔交易没有得到很好的回报。”

Back from China, I found myself reading through the Privacy Act of 1974, and felt like I had opened a time capsule. Introducing the legislation, a result of revelations about Watergate and F.B.I. surveillance, Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina reminded lawmakers that privacy assured that “the minds and hearts of Americans remain free.” To relinquish any bit of information to the government, he warned starkly, was to give away one’s freedom.

从中国回来后，我开始通读1974年的《隐私法》，感觉就像打开了一个时间胶囊。北卡罗来纳州参议员萨姆·欧文在介绍这项因水门事件和联邦调查局监控事件而产生的立法时提醒立法者，隐私确保了“美国人的思想和心灵保持自由”。他直截了当地警告说，向政府透露任何信息都是在放弃自己的自由。

“The more the government or any institution knows about us, the more power it has over us,” Senator Ervin said. “When the government knows all of our secrets, we stand naked before official power. Stripped of our privacy, we lose our rights and privileges.”

“政府或任何机构对我们了解得越多，它对我们的权力就越大，”欧文说。“当政府知道我们所有的秘密时，我们就赤裸裸地站在官方权力面前。被剥夺了隐私，我们就失去了权利和特权。”

It’s hard to imagine a leader of today’s Senate speaking with such lucidity about privacy. Since the terror attacks of Sept. 11, we’ve repeatedly heard our leaders denigrate the siloing of our private information as if it were an impediment — and not a critical safeguard meant to protect us from the government. An executive order from Mr. Trump explicitly identifies information silos (in other words, the time-honored and legally mandated practice of federal agencies storing people’s private information secure from view, including by other parts of the government) as a source of “waste, fraud and abuse.”

很难想象一名如今的参议院领导人在谈到隐私问题时能讲得如此透彻。自9·11恐怖袭击以来，我们一再听到我们的领导人诋毁我们的私人信息孤岛机制，仿佛这是一种障碍，而不是一种旨在保护我们免受政府侵害的关键保障措施。特朗普的一项行政命令明确指出，信息孤岛（这是一种历史悠久、法律规定的做法，联邦机构将人们的私人信息安全地存储在人们看不到的地方，包括政府的其他部门）是“浪费、欺诈和滥用”的来源。

The cultural shift is, perhaps, as insidious as the surveillance itself. We know, on some level, that we are already exposed before invisible watchers. We are hooked on the tech that comes with it, and we think we can’t change it.

这种文化转变也许和监控本身一样隐蔽。我们知道，在某种程度上，我们已经暴露在无形的观察者面前。我们被它带来的技术所吸引，认为自己无法改变它。

But we can. While Congress and the federal government have, so far, remained feckless against the excesses of surveillance, state and local officials have shown a little more spine.

但是我们可以改变它。到目前为止，国会和联邦政府对过度监控仍然无动于衷，州和地方官员则表现出了更多的勇气。

Just last month, Montana became the first state to close what’s called the “data broker loophole,” restricting the government from buying private information about people — a protection that still, despite years of legislative efforts, doesn’t exist at the federal level. At least 20 states have enacted comprehensive consumer data protection laws, and many cities have tried to prevent the use of facial recognition technology — although the police sometimes worked around the ban by outsourcing to neighboring law enforcement offices.

就在上个月，蒙大拿州成为第一个关闭所谓的“数据掮客漏洞”的州，限制政府购买人们的私人信息——尽管经过多年的立法努力，这种保护仍然不存在于联邦层面。至少有20个州颁布了全面的消费者数据保护法，许多城市试图阻止面部识别技术的使用——尽管警方有时会通过将这项工作外包给邻近的执法部门来绕开禁令。

The companies getting rich off building a surveillance state aren’t going to announce their intentions. Our lawmakers aren’t going to come out and say that, if their voters don’t notice or care, it’s easier for them to avoid confronting the powerful executives and leaders experimenting with ways to spy on us.

那些靠建立监控国家而发家的公司是不会宣布他们的意图的。我们的立法者也不会站出来说出这些，如果他们的选民不注意或不关心，他们宁可回避与那些试图监视我们的强大高管以及领导人对抗。

Mr. Trump and his tech cronies are charging ahead fast. If we keep sleepwalking into a surveillance state, we may eventually wake up in a place we hardly recognize as our own.

特朗普和他的科技界伙伴们正在快速前进。如果我们继续梦游，走入一种被监视的状态，最终醒来时，或许会发现自己身处一个几乎认不出的陌生国度。