Twenty-five years ago, the September 11 attacks set off a chain reaction in American law and policy that quietly redefined what surveillance means. As security researcher Bruce Schneier and EFF's Cindy Cohn recently argued in an essay first published in Lawfare, the government's approach shifted from targeted surveillance, like individual wiretaps or pen register orders aimed at specific suspects, to sweeping mass data collection that touches nearly everyone. A quarter century later, that shift is still shaping the conversation around mass surveillance and VPNs, and why so many people now treat encryption and privacy tools as basic digital hygiene rather than niche technical concerns.
How 9/11 Turned Targeted Surveillance Into Mass Data Collection
Before 2001, U.S. surveillance law generally required investigators to identify a specific target and demonstrate cause before collecting that person's communications. The Schneier and Cohn essay traces how the post-9/11 legal and institutional response abandoned that model in favor of bulk collection: gathering data first, on a massive scale, and sorting out relevance later. This wasn't a single law or a single moment. It was a gradual, government-wide reorientation that treated entire populations, not just suspected individuals, as data sources.
The justification at the time was urgency and threat detection. But the infrastructure built for that purpose didn't disappear once the immediate crisis passed. Instead, it became normalized. Agencies built systems designed to collect first and filter later, and those systems have persisted and expanded over the past 25 years, largely outliving the specific circumstances that justified their creation.
What Mass Surveillance Programs Actually Collect Today
The practical effect of this shift is that ordinary communications and metadata, records of who contacted whom, when, and often where, get swept into government systems even when no individual is suspected of wrongdoing. Metadata alone can reveal an enormous amount: patterns of association, daily routines, relationships, and behavior. The essay's central argument is that after 25 years, the case for maintaining this level of bulk collection has not held up. The programs built in the name of counterterrorism have expanded well beyond that original scope, and the accountability mechanisms meant to check them have not kept pace with the scale of collection.
This is the backdrop against which conversations about VPNs and surveillance often unfold. It's worth being clear-eyed here: a VPN encrypts and reroutes your internet traffic, which can shield browsing activity from your internet service provider and from casual observers on a network. It is not a tool designed to defeat nation-state level bulk collection programs, and no privacy tool should be marketed or understood that way. But that doesn't make encryption tools irrelevant. It just means understanding what they actually do, and don't do, matters more than ever.
Why Encryption and VPNs Became Part of the Resistance Narrative
As mass surveillance programs expanded over the past two decades, encryption became one of the few concrete, individually controllable countermeasures available to ordinary people. Where legal and legislative reform moves slowly, and often not at all, encrypting your own traffic is something you can do today, without waiting on Congress or the courts.
That's a big part of why VPNs, encrypted messaging apps, and secure browsers have become fixtures of privacy advocacy over the past 25 years. They don't solve the structural problem the Schneier and Cohn essay describes, which is a legal and institutional one that requires legal and institutional fixes. But they do give individuals a meaningful degree of control over their own data trails at the network level. A VPN can prevent your local ISP from logging every site you visit. Encrypted messaging can prevent a message's contents from being readable in transit. These are real, tangible protections, even if they operate at a different layer than the bulk collection programs the essay critiques.
What Individuals Can Still Control in an Age of Bulk Surveillance
Given that large-scale reform of mass surveillance law is a slow, political process, it's worth focusing on what individuals can actually manage day to day. Reducing your digital footprint is less about achieving perfect anonymity and more about closing off the easiest, most casual forms of data collection: ISP logging, unencrypted browsing, and unnecessary identity checks online.
One area where this plays out constantly is age verification, which has become common across many platforms and often requires users to hand over identity documents or biometric data just to access ordinary content. Understanding how online age verification works is a useful starting point for seeing how identity checks and data collection increasingly intersect with everyday browsing, and where you still have choices about what information you share and with whom.
What This Means For You
The debate over mass surveillance is ultimately a policy and legal question, one that requires legislative oversight and public pressure to resolve. No individual tool, VPN or otherwise, can substitute for that kind of structural accountability. But that doesn't mean you're powerless in the meantime. Using encrypted tools, being selective about what identity information you share with platforms, and understanding the difference between what a VPN protects against and what it doesn't are all practical steps that reduce unnecessary exposure. The goal isn't total anonymity; it's minimizing the amount of casual, low-effort data collection that happens simply because you didn't think to prevent it.
Key Takeaways
25 years after 9/11 reshaped surveillance law, mass data collection remains a live policy debate, not a settled one. Mass surveillance and VPNs are often discussed together, but it's important to understand a VPN's real, limited scope: it protects your traffic from local observers and ISPs, not from nation-state bulk collection programs. Reducing your own data footprint, whether through encrypted browsing or being thoughtful about identity verification requests, remains one of the few levers individuals can pull directly. Staying informed about how these systems work, and where their real limits lie, is the most practical form of privacy protection available right now.
