(AUTHOR NOTE: Synalosis, a term I coined from the Greek halōsis for the fall of a besieged city, names the single geometric operation by which the set of futures still open to a target contracts to a single point as many agents converge, the same shape running through the hunt, the siege, surveillance, investigation, and the cornered market.) A camera on a pole at the entrance to my town reads the plate of every car that passes, stores the number with a timestamp, and sends it to a database that other towns and other agencies can query. There are thousands of those cameras now, strung across American roads by a handful of private companies, and the most prominent of them, Flock Safety, has built a searchable record of where the country’s vehicles go. The same years that put those cameras on the poles put readers in the parking lots that log the Bluetooth and wifi signals leaking from every phone, and put data brokers in the middle of all of it, buying the location trails and selling the assembled portrait of a life to anyone with a credit card, police departments included. I have spent a good part of the last year writing about this build-out, the plate readers and the signal harvesters and the brokers, and about the thin and late defenses raised against it, like the California law that lets a resident order the brokers to delete what they hold. I went into that reporting thinking I was documenting something new. What I came out with was the conviction that I was documenting the newest body of something ancient.

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