Surveillance Intermediaries

Apple’s high-profile 2016 fight with the FBI, in which the company challenged a court order commanding it to help unlock the iPhone of one of the San Bernardino terrorists, exemplifies how central the question of regulating government surveillance has become in U.S. politics and law. But scholarly attempts to answer this question have suffered from a serious omission. Scholars have ignored how government surveillance is checked by surveillance intermediaries: companies like Apple, Google, and Facebook that dominate digital communications and data storage and on whose cooperation government surveillance relies. This Article fills this gap in the scholarly literature, providing the first comprehensive analysis of how surveillance intermediaries constrain the surveillance executive: the law enforcement and foreign-intelligence agencies that conduct surveillance. In so doing, it enhances our conceptual understanding of, and thus our ability to improve, the institutional design of government surveillance.