Sleuthing the National Security State
In the following blog post, Marnie Ritchie shares the underlying ideas behind her article titled “Fusing Race: The Phobogenics of Racializing Surveillance,” which was recently published in the journal Surveillance & Society.
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In a Fusion Center in Texas, I sat with a data analyst as he took me through his work.
The analyst commented aloud that he did not know how much to share because there was a possibility I could “Edward Snowden” them. I had been upfront about my reason for being there: to complete my dissertation work. I had explained that my dissertation hoped to analyze how “threat anxiety” connects national security, law enforcement, the military, and private businesses in networks. So, I was taken aback by his comment. For a moment, I felt like a spy.
However, there may be some truth to what he said. I was sleuthing. I was investigating. I was following a trail of evidence.
And I was not entirely of the institution, so my investigation involved sleights of hand. I did not mention my suspiciousness of Fusion Centers based on my prior research about them. I did not disclose my political affiliation. I did not make visible the anger I felt about some aspects of their work and some of the things they told me. I made my social media accounts private. Sometimes critical surveillance studies, to be critical, demands a researcher remain “undersight,” in the words of Simone Browne in Dark Matters (2015, p. 21).
The privilege of the researcher factors in to how visible or invisible, transparent or opaque they show up in national security infrastructures.
I came to study Fusion Centers by following up on leads, like any good sleuth. In earlier work, I examined the racializing surveillance of Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) in US hotels. The civic task of “If You See Something Say Something” subtly reframes seeing something off as sensing something off. Workers are encouraged to “feel for the state” and report activity. Part of the sensory network of counterterrorism, SARs are then sent to Fusion Centers. And so, I followed the paper trail, which was also a trail of affect: Where do the fear and anxieties of racializing surveillance go?
Racial anxiety is emplaced in and on the bodies of those reported.
Phobic affects are not terribly easy to track in national security infrastructures. They are phrenetic, and you can feel a unique jumpiness to them in Texas, given the state’s security priorities (border enforcement, gang violence, human trafficking, and domestic terrorism). Indeed, Fusion Center surveillance is grounded and distributed, as Brendan McQuade has shown. Racial anxiety is emplaced in and on the bodies of those reported. It is encoded into surveillance technologies and diffused across institutional interests, state borders, and aggregated populations.
In the Introduction to Race After Technology, Ruha Benjamin writes, “In the United States, data fusion centers are one of the most pernicious sites of the New Jim Code…” (2019, p. 13). The New Jim Code is, according to Benjamin, “the employment of new technologies that reflect and reproduce existing inequities but that are promoted and perceived as more objective or progressive than the discriminatory systems of a previous era” (pp. 5–6). Benjamin chooses the word “pernicious” to describe Fusion Centers as a site of the New Jim Code. This is, in my mind, an apt word. Fusion’s harmfulness is subtle and suffusive; anxiety accumulates, one bead of sweat after another.
Frantz Fanon has theorized in detail how racialized bodies, musculature, skin get captured in anxiety’s movements. From here, we might ask: How does surveillance studies offer modes of escape from the hooks of racial phobia? What are surveillance studies’ abolitionist tools to deactivate and redirect the force of (in)security affects?
As I sit with more with these questions, I arrive at a speculative thought: our critical surveillance tools can be sleuthing tools, can be sensing tools.
