"The
United States has witnessed an explosive expansion of mass surveillance since the
9/11 attacks. This post-9/11 expansion has built on wartime population
surveillance dating back to World War I, as well as on an even deeper history
of government tracking and harassment of racial justice and labor movements,
political dissidents, immigrants, and people of color. Yet it is also markedly
different from what existed before, in both its technological capacities and
its scale and breadth. 1960s-era FBI agents, who wiretapped residential phones
and planted informants in political movements, could hardly have imagined the
government’s ability to track location and usage data on the miniature
computers nearly everyone now carries in their pocket. The public sphere, as
well as many private homes, are replete with cameras, often accessible to both
local authorities and corporations. The immigration tracking system has
ballooned as well, bringing ever more intimate aspects of immigrants’ lives
under the gaze of the government and private contractors. Intertwined factors
such as technological advancement, the rise of social media, and longstanding
racist and anti-immigrant politics have contributed profoundly to these
expansions.
However,
the pervasive fear, sanctioned Islamophobia and xenophobia, weakened civil
liberties protections, and exponentially increased funding of the post-9/11 era
undoubtedly made contemporary mass surveillance possible. These forces
amplified each other to enable the unprecedented breadth and scale of
surveillance reigning across the United States today."
