Through five episodes—featuring interviews with legal scholars, subject-matter experts, and real people living at the intersection of speech and the border—“Views on First: Speech & the Border” explores how governments have used international borders as justifications and pretexts for censorship and surveillance.
The government uses its expansive authority over the border to justify the surveillance of social media, the interrogation of travelers about their political and religious views, the 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. At the same time, technologies have reshaped what the border means, and how ideas and information travel across borders. Foreign governments have exercised their authority to reach through the U.S. border to try to influence Americans and suppress their own ex-patriots in new ways.
The Knight Institute has long fought censorship and surveillance at the U.S. border; past work has included a research symposium, a lawsuit against government surveillance of visitors’ and immigrants’ social media accounts, and briefs and opinion pieces against a TikTok ban.
A podcast season was a fitting next step to deeply explore the historical context and real-world impact of these forms of censorship and surveillance. A five-episode season allowed us to ground current events in history without losing the crucial perspective of people who work on and live these issues today.
This project came to life as part of a broader body of multimedia work the Knight Institute launched in 2024 to explore the evolving frontiers of censorship and surveillance. It is, in many ways, the culmination of a yearlong effort to think across mediums—scholarship, visual art, and audio storytelling—about the changing role of the international border as a venue, justification, or pretext for censorship or surveillance.
It all began with the conceptualization of our fall research symposium, Regardless of Frontiers: The First Amendment and the Exchange of Ideas Across Borders. The event would bring together leading legal scholars, immigration attorneys, historians, and technologists to examine the scope of the First Amendment rights of U.S. residents and foreign citizens and the right to receive information and ideas from abroad, as well as about the surveillance and intimidation of activists in the United States.
As an Institute, we often use art and visualization to distill complex legal ideas and invite broader audiences into these conversations. Our director of communications proposed opening the symposium with a visual art installation—a photo exhibit titled Infrastructures of Control, featuring the work of Colter Thomas and Dugan Meyer. The exhibit aimed to create a visual archive of surveillance and security infrastructure in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. As noted in the exhibit materials, the project sought to make visible “a sprawling network of surveillance and enforcement, a ‘system of systems’ that extends across a wide range of landscapes in the southwestern United States.”
As we collaborated throughout the summer, a new idea emerged: what if we created something that could live on beyond the symposium and the exhibit, something that could extend these questions into a broader public space? That was the seed of the podcast.
The podcast, Speech & the Border, grew from that moment of synergy. It carries forward the central inquiry of the symposium, but shifts the format from scholarly panels to narrative storytelling. Across the series, we explore how borders have been used not just to regulate immigration, but to constrain information: as venues, justifications, and pretexts for surveillance and censorship. Each show not only features, but centers, people directly impacted—journalists surveilled for their reporting, a filmmaker detained at the border, an activist at risk of being deported based on his work—adding a human element to the legal commentary and analysis framing each episode.
Bringing this project to life meant thinking across formats and disciplines—but also across time. The legal questions we’re exploring are urgent, but they’re also evolving. Our hope is that by documenting them, in images, in panels, in voices, we’ve created something that can inform and inspire long after the symposium’s closing panel.
This season’s episodes were downloaded 4,717 times and in all continents (except for Antarctica), indicating that we succeeded in making our podcast about international borders relevant to an international audience. Our fall research symposium was attended by 680 people, received over 2,800 views on YouTube, and was covered in local press outlets including the the Columbia Daily Spectator. Across the Knight Institute’s website, the project’s blog posts and event pages received over 11,843 hits. The season was also a 2025 Webby Award honoree in the News & Politics podcast category.
We measure this project’s success not only through engagement and reach, but also through the depth of engagement by panelists and audience members. Viewers asked questions which examined the distinctions between foreign and domestic speech under the law and challenged the constitutionality of a TikTok ban, while panelists authored blog posts exploring topics ranging from the impacts of transnational repression to government retaliation against activists.