Privacy’s Not an Abstraction
An experiment in privacy — and the discussion that ensued—offer unexpected lessons in who gets watched, and how
By Chris Gilliard
And so STRESS [Stop the Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets] was born. With the help of computer data, [Detroit police commissioner John] Nichols planned to flood the streets with undercover cops disguised as drunks and priests, hippies and elderly women. When robbers tried to hold up these “decoys,” backup officers would swoop in and make an arrest. As Nichols explained to the congressional committee, his department hoped to “perfectly blend men into the environment” on a scale never before attempted. “With STRESS,” he testified, “the criminal must fear the potential victim.”
— Mark Binelli, The Fire Last Time
From lantern laws to sundown towns, from COINTELPRO and STRESS to stop and frisk and all the way up to the current regimes of technologically aided surveillance, the tracking of Blackness in this country has a long and sordid history.
Being surveilled has been, and continues to be, the de-facto state of existence for marginalized populations in America, and not coincidentally, in private is often where movements within those communities start and where they gain momentum and power. This was…
