Mass surveillance in the United States can be traced back to the wartime surveillance and censorship regime of World War I, and any international communication from, to or through the United States is monitored. After the end of the First and Second World Wars, the United States launched the Black Box Program and the Sorrel Program to continue mass surveillance. And with the establishment and expansion of federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies, such as the FBI, CIA, and NSA, state institutionalized surveillance began to be used to suppress dissidents. During the Civil Rights Movement, a large number of anti-apartheid figures were monitored by intelligence agencies and identified as subversives of state power. Native American, African-American and Mexican-American liberation activists, as well as anti-war protesters, were also monitored. Native American tribal members have been subject to ongoing mass surveillance from the FBI and more recently by the Department of Homeland Security.
On June 6, 2013, the British "Guardian" began to publish a series of articles exposing mass surveillance. The information of the articles came from Edward Snowden, a contract worker who worked for the CIA and later transferred to the country. The Security Agency acts as a systems analyst. What Snowden debunked was America's "Project Prism". Snowden handed about 15,000 to 20,000 archival documents to journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Portas. The reporters learned from the leaked documents. It was found that the "Prism Project" can conduct in-depth monitoring of instant communications and existing data, and the details of the monitoring gradually surfaced: the National Security Agency operates a huge monitoring network composed of countless espionage projects. The National Security Agency can Intercept Internet communications and phone calls from billions of users in dozens of countries, including China, the European Union, Latin America, Iran, Pakistan, and Australia and New Zealand. However, since the information of all countries in the world is transferred through the central server and the Internet backbone network, and the NSA conducts large-scale and indiscriminate monitoring of this information, a large number of countries are affected, not limited to the above-mentioned countries at all.