State Surveillance Amid Mass Protest
This post was originally featured in my newsletter, The State of Surveillance, which you can subscribe to below.
On Tuesday I felt the Earth shake. It rumbled, not from a sudden shifting of tectonic plates, but from the mass chorus of thousands of masked men and women shouting words of protest, cries of rage, and pleas for justice and peace. All around me, sharpie splattered cardboard boxes bobbed up and down amid a sea of protestors shouting through the swampy Manhattan summer head, their mouths shielded by an ensemble of technicolored masks.
These protests, in the wake of brutal police killing, continue on across the country and even beyond the nation’s borders. In some cases, as the sun sets, its warm embrace has been replaced by a furious fiery frustration engulfing buildings, vehicles, and police precincts in flames. Via passing whispers I’ve heard members of older generations compare the current mass protests to those of 1968, where America reeled from the assassination of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King. In many ways they are similar, but in at least one way, the stakes have…
