FBI Leaked Documents Show Orwellian Level Surveillance: What Does That Mean for Abortion Rights?
Hopefully, we’re not too far to turn back
Have you seen the movie “Eagle Eye” (2008)? The movie’s premise was a giant autonomous Predator drone chasing Shia LaBeouf’s character for almost two hours. The relevance here is the Predator drone is just one part of the Eagle Eye system, which is an integrated surveillance program that combines street cameras, aerial surveillance, traffic cameras, and private property cameras to have eyes on all things at all times.
Eagle Eye is omnipresent, the same word that is used to describe God because both can be anywhere at any time. Well, the FBI and the DoD took inspiration from that movie because that level of surveillance network is literally what they created according to The Washington Post article.
On March 7th, 2023 The Washington Post released an article stating:
The FBI and the Defense Department (DOD)were actively involved in research and development of facial recognition software that they hoped could be used to identify people from video footage captured by street cameras and flying drones, according to thousands of pages of internal documents that provide new details about the government’s ambitions to build out a powerful tool for advanced surveillance.
The article later goes on to say:
IARPA program manager said the goal had been to “dramatically improve” the power and performance of facial recognition systems, with “scaling to support millions of subjects” and the ability to quickly identify faces from partially obstructed angles. One version of the system was trained for “Face ID … at target distances” of more than a half-mile.
and:
The improved facial recognition system was ultimately folded into a search tool, called Horus, and made available to the Pentagon’s Combating Terrorism Technical Support Office, which helps provide military technologies to civilian police forces, the documents show.
In summary, the FBI, the Defense Department, and a combination of other law enforcement, scientist, and private companies have secretly been developing surveillance technologies that have the power to spy on entire cities at a time. Then they shared this mass surveillance with local law enforcement.
The scariest thing about this technology is that it’s over two years old. The ACLU lawsuit that made the FBI reveal these documents is from 2019. Technology that in 2008 was the focal point of a horror sci-fi movie is now three years old technology in 2023.
Normally when having a conversation about the overreach of governmental technologies I get one of two responses:
- I am a law-abiding citizen, why does it matter to me if the government surveilled me?
- Well, wouldn’t this just be a tool to stop crime and make our community safer?
These are the same points that Americans made when Edward Snowden and other whistleblowers informed the country about the mass surveillance programs our government was secretly doing after 9/11. Not only did most Americans not care and branded Snowden and other whistleblowers as traitors, they argued that this mass invasion of privacy isn’t bad if it leads to more safety.
“Why do you care if you’re watched if you have nothing to hide?”
Edward Snowden has a quote that perfectly addresses this question:
“Privacy is the right to a free mind. Without privacy, you can’t have anything for yourself.
Saying you don’t care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is like saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.”
Privacy is the concept that allows us to separate ourselves and the things we own from others. Historically, when Americans talk about privacy it’s rooted in the concept of personal property like our homes and cars.
However, in this case, for privacy, it’s more intimate than property because facial recognition surveillance forces us to ask if we own the right to privacy of our own personal identities. Are we allowed to tell the government that we want the ability to have individual private lives separate from the government and the public?
If you wouldn’t allow the government to set up cameras in your home documenting you and your family's private lives, even if you aren’t doing anything “wrong”, why would you be ok with the government spying on you in the public space?
The issue isn’t about if you have something to hide or not. In reality, most of us do have something to hide hence we don’t talk about private issues in public like sex, drugs, family drama, and other parts of our identity. The issue is our personal identities and experiences belong to us as individuals and the government collecting those secrets and information without our explicit consent is a violation of the privacy of our bodies.
Historically, middle-class white women have not been one of the government's main targets for surveillance and over-policing, but after the overturn of Roe v. Wade, many middle-class white women have started to have meaningful conversations about privacy from the government.
State governments in anti-choice states should not be able to use facial surveillance or your phone data to know if you traveled across state lines to have an abortion. Even if the act is lawfully technically illegal, most people would argue that it’s not immoral and the person committing the act deserves privacy to make their own decisions.
Just like the government shouldn’t be in your uterus without your consent, the government should not be collecting information about your face without your consent.
The story the government tells us to justify its dystopian power of surveillance, abuse of personal privacy, and mass incarceration is that it makes safer communities in the long run. But we have to ask ourselves, first is that safety true, and the second question of is safety worth the trade-off of our personal privacy?
The Brenan Center for Justice published a study showing that 40% of Americans in the prison system are there with no concern for public safety.
Demonstrating that our government incarcerates many Americans not for the safety of our communities but for other alternative motivations. Just like criminalizing abortion doesn’t increase safety in communities, many other crimes that the government will be able to surveil, prosecute and incarcerate people on wouldn't lead to safer communities.
Weed and most recreational drugs don’t lead to more dangerous communities. The drug that has the most danger to others and that’s used on a regular basis is alcohol and that one is legal. Do you really want to live in a society where before you jaywalk or spit a piece of gum on the ground, you need to check the environment to see if the government is watching?
The whole argument that these massive surveillance tools are here to create safer communities is an illusion that allows people to legitimatize their privacy and consent being violated. By the same token, the government gaslit us that TSA forcing us to take our shoes off at the airports stops the next 9/11 from happening.
TSA, in reality, is really bad at preventing terrorism.
Homeland Security officials looked to evaluate the agency had a clever idea: They pretended to be terrorists and tried to smuggle guns and bombs onto planes 70 different times and 67 of those times, the Red Team succeeded. Their weapons and bombs were not confiscated, despite the TSA’s lengthy screening process. That’s a success rate of more than 95 percent.
Another 2013 report found the TSA practically doesn’t do anything to stop terrorism. One because they’re bad at their job and two because the threat isn’t there. As tragic as it was 9/11 only happened once and not because our government is so good at stopping terrorist activities but because the threat of terrorism is rare. There’s a reason why there weren’t 9/11s happening all the time before TSA.
Sure the whole security theater makes us feel warm, cozy, and protected but is it worth it? Is it worth it to have to down an entire bottle of water and have a middle-aged man scream at you to take off your shoes just for the illusion of safety? Is it worth it that women have to delete apps that help them track their periods because the government can use them to prosecute women for abortions?
Is the illusion of safety more important than the reality of freedom?
If it is, then this should terrify you. What happens when state and federal governments decide that political dissent is a criminal activity that makes “communities less safe.” We aren’t that far away from that place; state governments across the country have already been trying to pass anti-protest bills.
Tying us back to Edward Snowden’s quote — freedom of privacy is intrinsically tied to the First Amendment. You can’t exercise your freedom of speech if there’s no space to speak in private. You don’t get to petition against governmental injustices if there’s no place private to organize with others with similar ideas.
That’s the whole concept of the dystopian book “1984,” the government is everywhere is there’s no space to be an individual anywhere. That’s how the government is able to keep its authoritarian power because it violates individual privacy. There are cameras everywhere so there’s no place to hide and, more importantly, no place to dissent.
The best part about “1984” is that good revolutionaries don’t win in the end. They don’t even have an opportunity to put up a fight against the government before the surveillance infrastructure reveals them.
George Orwell’s lesson for us with that ending is: Once you give the government the power of God, there’s no going back. There’s no overthrowing the fascist system. There’s no “Hunger Games” or “Star Wars”-type rebellion. Once you allow the government to get to that power you have lost.
The only way to stop this dystopian future is never to let it become a reality because once it’s here, it’s here to stay.
Please take the chilling quote from “1984" as a parting warning:
“By comparison with that existing today, all the tyrannies of the past were half-hearted and inefficient…Part of the reason for this was that in the past no government had the power to keep its citizens under constant surveillance. The invention of print, however, made it easier to manipulate public opinion, and the film and the radio carried the process further”
