Lighthouse Mosque Protests Proposed Building of Oakland Spy Center
From Oakland to New York City the Muslim community has been spied on whole scale, we have had infiltrators and informants in our mosques, we have been singled out at political protests and we have even had people in our community entrapped by the FBI. Tuesday’s vote on the “Domain Awareness Center” in Oakland has serious ramifications for all residents of Oakland, but it has even graver meaning for the large Muslim population and the fifteen mosques in the area.
Imam Zaid Shakir, the Imam of the Lighthouse Mosque, stated recently in protest of the proposed Oakland spy center that
“One of the greatest societal checks in Islam is the protection of and freedom of movement. The prosed city-wide surveillance center to combat violent crime is clearly a pretext for a deeper and more pernicious agenda, as violent crime is not city-wide. If we lose our privacy and freedom of movement and assembly, grassroots community organizing will become impossible. This concerns everyone in Oakland and Muslims should be in the lead in voicing opposition.”
It is also stated clearly in the Qur’an “do not spy on one another” (49:12).
The vote on the proposed $10.9 Million dollar Department of Homeland Security Funded ‘Domain Awareness Center’ (DAC) beyond having meaning just for Oakland is the testing ground for an expanding and entrenching surveillance state which has clear national and global implications. For an overview of the DAC see Susie Cagel’s infographic/ comic “The Testing Ground for the New Surveillance.”
According to Adam Hudson, this Spy center would “will aggregate and monitor video feeds and real-time data from nearly 1,000 cameras and sensors aimed at anyone, including those not suspected of any wrongdoing, throughout Oakland. This includes cameras and sensors at the Oakland port, on the highway, in schools, and other locations. Additionally, the DAC will analyze the aggregate data with other software, such as license plate recognition, thermal imaging, social media feeds, gunshot detectors, and other information along with 24/7 monitoring and geospatial security mapping. It will also store and allow sharing of data.”
While your average Oakland resident may be concerned about this surveillance center, what is the Muslim community in Oakland to expect? When over the last thirteen years the American Muslim community has faced an unprecedented level of spying in our communities with at least 15,000 paid FBI informants and 45,000 unpaid informants, more than ten times the size of any counter intelligence program (COINTELPRO) in the history of the United States (Mother Jones — The Informants). The Domain Awareness Center would take this type of spying to a whole new level for all people in Oakland, especially for Muslims and political dissidents as was recently reported by the ACLU of Northern California that shows how the Oakland Police Department explicitly targets political activists during protests by using information gathered through spying . We have seen a number of these cases at the Lighthouse Mosque where our members have been racially, religiously, and politically profiled and targeted during protests such as the case of the Trayvon 2 and Harun Arsalai who was pulled out of a crowded street at Occupy Oakland when he was wearing a headband with Arabic writing on it.
This type of whole scale spying has been proven by the NYPD to be totally ineffective as the ACLU of Northern California has pointed out stating that,
“At the January 28, 2014 Public Safety Committee, the Port presented on the DAC and explained that its purpose was to enhance Port security by giving the City’s first responders access to Port surveillance and sensor feeds. But if the mission of the DAC is to ensure Port security, then why the need for cameras trained at Oakland residents? In addition, the draft privacy policy states that one of the “missions” of the DAC is to “improve readiness to prevent, respond to, and recover from major emergencies at the Port and in the greater Oakland region and.” See Draft Framework, Section II. It is unclear how the DAC would “prevent” a major emergency, unless it operates as a comprehensive surveillance center aimed at identifying suspicious activities that might be precursors to terrorism. Does “preventing” a major emergency mean that the DAC will be used to surveil mosques suspected of harboring potential terrorists? Cf. Adam Goldman & Matt Apuzzo, “With Cameras, Informants, NYPD Eyed Mosques.” In light of OPD’s selective enforcement of even mundane vehicle code violations in connection with political protests, the potential for abuse of a powerful surveillance tool is troubling.”
Of course the larger issue here is this issue of ‘terrorism’ itself, an issue that is driving the surveillance state and that Muslims must be kept at the center of discursively in any way possible for the military industrial complex to continue expanding its infrastructure and making its money. Examples of this being the Lodi case, and the more recent case of Matthew Llaneza a formerly incarcerated, mentally disabled convert to Islam who was entrapped by the FBI. This is one of the many reasons why we believe it is so important that the Muslim community who has condemned all acts of terrorism/ indiscriminate killing whether it is by a government (like the US military) or a non-government actor like Al-Qaeda, to be able to actively organize and play a powerful role in American civil society. The building of a surveillance center like the DAC in Oakland only leads to greater fear and isolation for the large Muslim population in Oakland and in the Bay Area at large, while also playing a destructive role that acts against a civil and just society for all people. The case of the NYPD is instructive in what a surveillance state means for the spied upon population as one 20 year old Muslim from Queens stated after growing up with spies all around him,
It is also instructive in the type of grassroots organizing it took, led by African American’s, Latino’s, and Muslim’s working together to end stop and frisk, spying on Muslim communities in New York and to vote in a new progressive mayor.
