Documents pried loose by FOIA litigation showed that from Ferguson onward the movement was tracked as a security threat rather than protected speech. DHS mapped Black Lives Matter gatherings — including vigils and a funk-music festival — in real time; the FBI opened assessments on organizers; and police departments purchased social-media monitoring tools such as Geofeedia, Dataminr, and ShadowDragon that flagged hashtags like #BlackLivesMatter for intelligence units. Cell-site simulators and aerial surveillance were deployed over Baltimore and Minneapolis during the uprisings.

The surveillance mattered because it fed prosecutions: social-media posts became the basis for federal charges in 2020, and monitoring dossiers surfaced in the bail arguments used to hold protesters pretrial. Activists who had never been charged with a crime discovered they carried threat-assessment files — the infrastructure of suspicion that produced the "Black Identity Extremist" designation and, veterans of the era argued, reproduced COINTELPRO with better software.