Governments including our own have often used international borders to justify surveillance and censorship. During the Cold War, the U.S. government frequently denied visas to foreign artists, writers, and scholars whose political views the government wanted to delegitimize or suppress—a practice that was resurrected during the “war on terror.” Today, the government uses its authority over the border to justify the surveillance of social media, the interrogation of travelers about their political and religious views, the warrantless search of travelers’ laptops and cellphones, the imposition of limits on Americans’ right to engage with foreign speakers and to access foreign communications platforms, and the suspension of the constitutional rules that would ordinarily apply to the surveillance of Americans’ emails and telephone calls. Within the United States, visitors and immigrants are subject to social media surveillance throughout their stays, and immigrant activists sometimes face official retaliation for their First Amendment–protected activities.

Technologies allowing people to communicate, organize, and transmit evidence of government wrongdoing in real time around the globe have challenged our assumptions about the implications of borders for expressive activity. At the same time, the U.S. border’s value as a shield for dissent seems to have eroded dramatically. While the First Amendment and Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights have been understood at some basic level to protect the free exchange of ideas “regardless of frontiers” (to quote the ICCPR), many difficult questions about the scope and significance of this protection remain unresolved. These questions will become more pressing as the world enters a new era of international conflict in which battles are waged in the digital sphere as much as on the ground.

The Knight Institute launched this project, “Regardless of Frontiers: The First Amendment and the Exchange of Ideas Across Borders,” to explore these issues and generate new scholarship as courts and policymakers weigh questions related to the changing role of the international border. The project culminated in a photo exhibition and symposium hosted by the Knight Institute in October of 2024. Photos from the exhibition accompany the published essays.