The Surveillance Shadow of the 2026 World Cup: A Threat to Civil Liberties

The 2026 FIFA World Cup is the largest sporting event in history. It’s also the most surveilled World Cup ever. If you’re visiting or traveling around host cities, then you and your face, behavior, movement and devices are being monitored by governments and private companies.

The U.S. government funneled more than US$1 billion to World Cup security to protect transit hubs, stadiums and surrounding areas; improve tactical operations such as bomb squads and SWAT teams; and add and upgrade equipment. It’s been a bonanza for the private sector.

Many states, like New York, are using federal funding for World Cup security to increase the number, capabilities and use of drones by law enforcement. Drones are remarkably capable and powerful surveillance tools easy to load with cameras, microphones, advanced sensors and weapons.

AI-driven surveillance is playing a major role across the World Cup. The stadiums in host cities are equipped with facial recognition cameras that can collect and analyze facial biometrics of people in and around the stadiums. That data can be retained and used in future ways, unknown and uncontrolled by those whose biometric data has been collected.

Cameras are proliferating on the ground, as well. Robot dogs equipped with cameras are prowling in Dallas and New Jersey. And Seattle’s mayor decided to turn on and expand a major closed-circuit television system that had been previously shut down because of biometric privacy concerns.

While Seattle’s mayor said that the city is refining its policies to protect the surveillance data, numerous states and cities – with the aid of federal funding related to World Cup security — are rapidly expanding CCTV systems. Some CCTV systems were installed decades ago in major urban, high-tourism areas, like New York’s Times Square and the National Mall in Washington D.C.

Today, CCTV systems cover much greater areas, and with advances in artificial intelligence software, data analytics and increased technical capabilities, like thermal imaging, far more information can be gleaned from the captured data. CCTV systems can now detect, identify and classify objects, people and even people’s behavior. Government data fusion centers can merge that rich data with other intelligence and analyze it to identify individuals and reveal and predict patterns and behavior.

Surveillance traveling into and around the US

Proliferating government use of advanced AI surveillance tools is just one element of the privacy risk. The absence of comprehensive data privacy laws and changes in U.S. law and executive policies around immigration and gender make traveling into and around the United States a security, safety and privacy risk.

On Sept. 8, 2025, the Supreme Court issued a ruling that critics say permits racial profiling in immigration enforcement efforts.

Also, President Donald Trump issued an executive order around gender on Jan. 20, 2025, that mandates federal agencies only recognize male and female sex markers on IDs. European nations, including Germany, have warned their transgender and nonbinary citizens that they may be denied entry to the U.S. because of the directive.

Collectively, these changes affect travel logistics, documentation requirements and border crossings.

What happens after the games?

The real test is what happens after the World Cup ends and visitors go home. There is little oversight or governance around these federally funded, public-private surveillance tech partnerships. It’s difficult for the public to determine what data is being collected, how that data is being used, shared and analyzed, and what will happen to these systems, partnerships and data when the final match concludes.

Federal, state and local legislators have an opportunity to address much of this by creating data privacy and AI systems compliance safeguards and requiring transparency, but in my view, governance efforts to date don’t bode well.

Anne Toomey McKenna is Affiliated Faculty Member at the Institute for Computational and Data Sciences, Penn State