"Must be a target" in the sense that you're included in an early subset of data that is filtered on abnormal behaviors who will get additional filtering applied to them. Pretty sure the next step isn't tapping your phones and assigning you a tail but applying extra filtering. I'm not in intelligence but I've worked with psychiatry data before and it became boring and routine to identify people with previously undiagnosed mental disorders via data analysis with relatively small amounts of data compared to population-level scales. The intelligence agencies of the world surely know about slightly paranoid techies and have a behavior profile that allows false positives to be filtered out in another pass.
"Used a feature phone at odd hours for years but began leaving their phone behind to go pull large quantities of cash from the ATM according to bank records, followed by a new circuitous route around town where they don't live or work or have associated friends or family according to traffic cameras" is much more interesting.
You can easily become a target for surveillance without doing anything illegal - and that's still (potentially) not a good fate! Paranoid technies might not like the idea of langley, and fort meade listening into to all of their communications.
I don't think that they just "filter it out", I think that spying on techies/industrial spying and technical espionage has never been bigger. I also think anyone working in AI right now is for sure at serious risk of being designated for advanced targeted surveillance.
> "Used a feature phone at odd hours for years but began leaving their phone behind to go pull large quantities of cash from the ATM according to bank records, followed by a new circuitous route around town where they don't live or work or have associated friends or family according to traffic cameras" is much more interesting.
Or they're a slightly paranoid techie going to a dispensary
"Used a feature phone at odd hours for years but began leaving their phone behind to go pull large quantities of cash from the ATM according to bank records, followed by a new circuitous route around town where they don't live or work or have associated friends or family according to traffic cameras" is much more interesting.