The Looming Threat of Surveillance in a Time of Nationwide Upheaval
In 1731, the Common Council of New York City passed a law mandating that black and indigenous enslaved people carry a lantern after sunset if they were not accompanied by a white person. If enslaved people failed to make themselves visible and locatable as the law required, they faced a violent punishment of up to forty lashes. This racialized form of monitoring ensured that enslaved people could be easily identified, controlled, and constricted. It also responded to the specter of insurrection which threatened to disrupt the economic status quo at that time. Fast-forward a couple of centuries, and surveillance practices are still deeply embedded within our country and deeply predicated on white supremacy.
In our country, mass upheaval has historically mobilized the apparatus of surveillance technology. When the viability of institutions is endangered, law enforcement surveillance becomes a means of suppressing dissent, especially when LGBTQ+ communities and communities of color are the ones dissenting. Though technological advancement is adulated as reflecting the modernity of our society, it is also something that may warrant trepidation. For an issue like mass surveillance that barely leaves any sort of paper trail and surreptitiously entrenches itself within our legal framework, we must open our eyes to this nefarious complex and work to uproot it.
If you’ve been going to the protests against police brutality lately, you may have been given advice on how to protect your digital privacy. Leave your phone at home if possible. Police use Stingrays to mimic cell phone towers and intercept information about their locations. Turn off the biometrics on your phone. Using Touch ID and Face ID on your phone may compromise your Fifth Amendment protections if police officers try to intimidate you into consenting to unlock your phone. Turn off location services. Even if your data is encrypted locally, the police can still access information from other apps using location services by obtaining a geofence warrant. Do not photograph or live stream with protesters’ faces visible. Although recording police transgressions is important, capturing any of the protesters’ faces and posting it to social media can lead to companies like Dataminr tipping off police. This may put your fellow protesters at risk of being arrested, charged, and further surveilled.
Surveillance itself is an indispensable mechanism of the prison-industrial complex and more broadly, of the state. Its intent is to quell rebellion and extinguish potential threats to law and order by whatever means necessary. It targets black activists dissenting against institutional racism and indigenous movement leaders fighting to protect their lands. It racializes Muslims, Arabs, Sikhs, and South Asian Americans as threats to western values and national security. It also presents a lucrative market for rapacious corporations to commodify our personal data.
Although you can take precautionary steps to protect your personal privacy if you want to take to the streets, it must be noted that surveillance is not necessarily something that can be circumvented for a couple of hours. The neoliberal focalization on personal agency neglects the quotidian omnipresence of surveillance in our society. Surveillance is everything from Google commodifying our human experience into predictive behavioral data to the FBI drones flying above our heads behind fictitious company names. With that knowledge, we must reject the neoliberal notion that the individual is the fundamental catalyst for change and redirect our energy toward the institutions, corporations, and industrial-complexes that continually endanger our privacy and exacerbate injustice.
Ironically, corporations have shared statements of solidarity with the Black Lives Matter protests using palatable language about unity and solidarity as if these entities are not directly complicit in feeding the flames of systemic racism. In an interview with Wired, Simone Brown, the author of Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, asserts that corporations are simply “marketing in this moment of black grief, black rebellion, and black insurgency and seeing it as a branding opportunity, while they’re still part and parcel of the problem of anti-black racism.” Unfortunately, these responses successfully trick people into thinking that corporations are engaging in the movement for change when in reality, these same corporations refuse to sever their police partnerships and divest from surveillance technology.
Take Amazon Rekognition, for example: the facial recognition software that once wrongly matched 28 members of Congress to a mugshot database. Though Amazon has issued a one-year moratorium on the police use of Rekognition, this is not enough to stymie valid concerns about their tight-knit partnerships with police departments. Amazon Ring, another one of their privacy-encroaching innovations, is a doorbell with a built-in security camera that effectively transforms neighborhoods into sites for increased surveillance. According to internal documents reviewed by The Intercept, Amazon Ring formulated plans to utilize facial recognition software to create neighborhood watch lists that notify users if an individual deemed “suspicious” was captured by their cameras. Mohammad Tajsar, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of South California likens this to a form of “digital redlining” that unifies police officers and homeowners in creating “lists of undesirables unworthy of entrance into well-to-do areas.” Although a representative claimed that the features are not currently in development, a corporation developing plans to entangle people in a surveillance network without due process is undoubtedly reprehensible.
Facial recognition technology is often touted as having promising potential. However, this burgeoning development in surveillance capitalism is inherently dangerous. In an article for The Atlantic, Malkia Devich-Cyril, the lead founder of Media Justice, articulates that automated facial-recognition software is “rooted in discredited pseudoscience and racist eugenics theories that claim to use facial structure and head shape to assess mental capacity and character.” Moreover, the National Institute of Standards and Technology reported that facial-recognition algorithms are more likely to misidentify people of color than white people, and that women were more likely to be misidentified than men. Evidently, facial recognition is an inequitable technology reflective of human bias that can be misused in egregious ways, effectively supercharging police abuse of power in this country.
In the emerging debate over whether the police should be defunded, reformers believe that the reach of police departments can be curbed in a manner that leaves the institution of policing intact. On the other hand, abolitionists like myself are more concerned with materially dismantling the mechanisms that operate the complex of police surveillance. We fear that the #DefundThePolice movement will be co-opted and contorted into measures of “e-carceration” and new forms of policing that deviate from the intended goals of decarceration and excarceration.
Reformers might argue for body cameras, neglecting the possibility that body cameras can be morphed into devices of surveillance that target the communities they claim to protect. Wolfcom, for example, is the first major police body camera vendor in the United States to embrace facial recognition software in its latest “Halo” camera. In spite of unanswered questions and growing apprehension over its accuracy, the company is apparently moving forward with this frightening technology. Reformers may also see a benefit in investing in electronic monitoring devices that use GPS tracking to monitor people’s locations. Electronic monitoring, however, is simply incarceration behind different walls.
Camden, New Jersey is often hailed as a shining example of a city that has successfully disbanded its police department. But instead of being a model for structural change, Camden is an impediment to that change. The new Camden County Police Department uses license plate reading cameras, ShotSpotter gunshot detectors, aerial surveillance, thermal imaging equipment, a mobile observation tower, and widespread CCTV cameras to pacify its population. Increasing the technical capacities of the police to that extent feels like a nightmarishly dystopian form of social control and as such, Camden should not be considered a paradigm for structural change. Any allocation of funding toward surveillance technology that simply alters the authoritarian aesthetic betrays the foundational objectives of defunding the police.
Locally, the movement is blooming and flourishing. The Metro Detroit chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America has been tirelessly organizing to end an invasive surveillance program called Project Green Light and end facial recognition software usage by the Detroit Police Department. Several weeks ago, a facial technology algorithm mismatch led to the wrongful arrest of Robert Williams. Despite this appalling news, the program was left unscathed.
In a report released by the Detroit Community Technology Project, researchers concluded that “surveillance and data collection was deeply connected to diversion of public benefits, insecure housing, loss of employment opportunities, and the policing and subsequent criminalization of the community members that come into contact with these surveillance systems.” Clearly, mass surveillance is not a means to ensure public safety. It is a praxis that marginalizes already marginalized communities and diverts funding away from the public services that they desperately need.
The just course of action is to forgo these harmful surveillance programs and forgo this reliance on dangerously problematic big data. In the ongoing discourse of how we can end police brutality, we must reject the neoliberal establishment’s attempts to dilute bold demands into easily digestible chunks of “reformed” carceral structures that continue to perpetuate the surveillance state. We must be vigilant about technocratically lustrous programs that are framed as “community partnerships” or “counterterrorism measures” to mask deleterious actions at the hands of law enforcement officials. We must oppose surveillance programs that encourage neighbors to surveil one another, thereby fracturing trust within the community.
We are at a point in our history where we can demand more than we have ever imagined before. We can pressure our elected officials into protecting us from harmful technology that interferes with our privacy. We can advocate for initiatives that truly put community safety at the forefront. We can take strides toward sustainable ways of living and thriving. In the fight to transform our society, we must ensure that divesting from police departments does not precipitate an investment in insidious surveillance technologies that will further imperil our livelihoods. We cannot let ourselves be confined to the very injustices that we are trying to escape.
