From the first hours of the US colonial conquest in August 1898, the Philippines served as the site of a social experiment in the use of police surveillance as an instrument of state power. During the decade of pacification that followed, the US army plunged into a crucible of counterinsurgency, forming its first field intelligence unit, the Division of Military Information, which combined voracious data gathering with rapid dissemination of tactical intelligence. At this periphery of empire, freed from the constraints of courts, constitution, and civil society, the US imperial regime fused new technologies from America’s first information revolution to fashion what was arguably the world’s first full “surveillance state.”