Today brings us one of the most important surveillance debates in years, but it won’t take place in Washington. The fulcrum point in the national surveillance fight has moved outside of the beltway to a secluded New York City Council hearing room. A seemingly obscure NYPD reform bill called the POST Act will have national consequences, not just because of the changes it enacts, but because of what it could mean for decades of accelerating local surveillance.

In the beginning, when the CCTV cameras multiplied throughout our cities, police and lawmakers told us it was for our own good. And, for a time, the public believed them. We desperately wanted to think that we could find an easy fix for the omnipresent specter of crime in the late ’80s and ’90s. Rather than look at the role of poverty and discrimination, many wanted technology and policing to be the answer.

So many hoped that the ever-watching state would fend off the nightmarish crimes that politicians invoked. And so the cameras expanded. And when the towers fell in New York, and we faced down this new, mortal terror, we turned again to the same surveillance.

We embraced policies inspired by the narratives of 24 and other TV shows that promised if we just knew enough information, if we just had enough leads, we could prevent the next attack. Life imitated art, as police departments aggregated alarming new databases, such as the NYPD’s sprawling Domain Awareness System, which integrates a constant data stream from thousands of cameras, sensors, and other tracking systems.

The backlash started as a whisper, a barely audible murmur of discontent. But over time the voices grew louder and more numerous. A privacy scandal would come, one after another, and with each violation of the public trust a new surge in dissent. With each new threat to our communities, people found a new willingness to speak out against the transformation of our once-open society into the visage of Huxley’s authoritarianism.

Today, the cameras almost seem quaint compared to emerging tracking tools. But they now contain something new. Artificial intelligence that targets biometric data, like facial recognition, gait detection, and iris scans, is turning CCTV into something more powerful than we ever imagined. Powerful algorithms now transpose our bodies into mathematical constructs that can be automatically tracked. Our every movement logged, our every decision judged, our every choice subject to algorithmic analysis.

Powerful algorithms now transpose our bodies into mathematical constructs that can be automatically tracked.

And this latest iteration of the surveillance state, the biometric tracking state, has become the tipping point; the moment when the protests became just too loud to ignore—at least outside of Washington. Federal lawmakers promptly responded to the threat by bravely . . . holding hearings. They listened to both sides. They took in the evidence. And then they did what Congress does best: absolutely nothing.