Definitely. I think that would be very hard to carry out for various reasons, though. Intelligence agencies generally want minimal oversight and more power so you'd be fighting that at every corner which includes:

1) Vague threats to leak/expose Congress members' personal matters who craft legislation against them. Chuck Schumer (a sitting US senator) admitted on live TV that the intel community has "six ways from Sunday" to get back at you.

2) Blatant disregard for the law by "just following orders", see anecdotes about Michael Hayden, a former CIA director.

3) Data storage, backup, and classified systems. Decades of collection probably means this data is scattered in many places which could give these agencies a chance to retain data "accidentally" or put up roadblocks due to high level clearances being required to work with these systems.

> so you can watch the watchers

Watch in what way? And would it matter seeing as they have the full force of the government behind them anyway?

The Stasi network was infamous because of how enormous it was, not its mere existence. And it likely had a crippling effect on their economy. They were also drowning in information, and the information was very poor because anyone with a bone to pick just made up some bullshit about the other person.

Today, tools created by US intelligence make the data collection trivial, but more importantly, the data analysis is trivial as well.

They already know you’re coming in and on which flight so that really narrows it down. I didn’t think faces were that unique and that they were matching on the subset of people they were expecting at that time. Perhaps the technology is better than I thought.

The "magic" is that they have it all joined with the database that tells them who crossed the other way recently, the flight database or the cruise ship database so it's not searching through millions of passport photos every time. They have a pretty good idea of the search space.

US requires all passenger manifests for flights are forwarded to USCBP 48 hours or more before the flight. This list is run against several databases to identify persons of interest.

Then after the flight takes off, an updated list is sent again to USCBP.

So when you walk up to USCBP, they already have a list of people they expect to see within an hour of the flight landing. The match is much easier at that point.

It all falls apart at land or sea border crossings. Requirements are quite different and travel outside continental US but with zone like the Caribbean are treated differently than travel outside that zone.

As such your immigration record can get messed up if you say exit via land border to Canada as there is no exit record to match up with entry. Many people have gotten email about overstays because of this.

Yes, that is the trend of the United States: the Executive branch listening to the Legislative.

Consider now that precedents for the Judicial being ignored are well underway.

We have an incompetent authoritarian in office right now. A mere slice of competence and we'd already be worse-than-1984.

The point of my comment was to say: you don't choose how the government uses this data against you. Yes, it's bad and should be condemned. But, to completely eliminate this "avenue" of attack then we should've stopped all this data collection in the first place.

That sounds like a perfect way to make a disastrous situation an order of magnitude more disastrous.