In the summer of 2020, the largest racial justice movement since the 1960s occurred in the wake of police violence. The murder of George Floyd, amid other killings of Black Americans like Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, triggered massive nationwide protests involving millions of Americans. So what was the response of federal law enforcement, as well as some state and local governments? Surveillance and reprisals.
This response to protests placed into stark relief the threat that unaccountable surveillance poses to one of our most important democratic ideals: freedom to peacefully assemble and protest. The deployment of federal law enforcement and surveillance technologies such as drones to monitor protests marked a new apogee in the power of the surveillance state to monitor us — no matter a location’s perceived politics.
The widespread activism of the summer of 2020 was met with an equally unprecedented opportunity for government surveillance, particularly on social media. Paired with the exponential growth of surveillance technology and the lack of guardrails in place to stop their overbroad use, we’ve reached a new level of surveillance. We should have seen it coming.
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Surveillance, Protest, and Repression
Protest is a cornerstone of a free society. The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, part of which enshrines the right of protest via freedom of speech, assembly, and expressing grievances with government, exists with good reason. Much of the conflict that led to the American Revolution was rooted in government repression of assembly and speech. And after the adoption of the Constitution, there were many who believed that document needed to expressly guarantee certain individual rights. The chief among them were enshrined in the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights. Over two centuries later, the central thread of American history has been ordinary people taking extraordinary steps via protest to move society closer toward the ideals of the nation.
In contrast, the government’s targeting of people and groups that hold a critical opinion of that government is by its very nature an existential threat to liberty and democracy. The most repressive regimes on the planet have used violence and surveillance as the tools of choice to maintain power. And in our own country’s history, the threat of advancing freedom and equality has led to the worst surveillance abuses.
Perhaps the most infamous example in modern history is the sprawling COINTELPRO program of the FBI, which spent years surveilling and undermining disfavored groups, particularly those led by Black, Indigenous, and people of color who were at the forefront of the civil rights movement. This included individuals like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X, as well as organizations such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which organized peaceful acts of protest in the segregated American South, and the American Indian Movement, which advocated for economic and political justice, including the reclamation of tribal lands. The targeting and surveillance activities of the FBI were profound — from surveillance of Dr. King’s intimate moments and sending him letters urging him to kill himself, to the murder of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton by Chicago police, orchestrated by an FBI informant. This was all done in tandem with suppressing protests through police violence and mass arrests.
“The government’s targeting of people and groups that hold a critical opinion of that government is by its very nature an existential threat to liberty and democracy.”
Law enforcement’s old tactics of violence and mass arrest to suppress free speech were redeployed in 2020. Arrests and police violence disproportionately punish those attending racial justice related protests, in line with the history of racialized policing.
In addition to these recurring tactics throughout the history of protests in the U.S., the government’s response to protests in 2020 demonstrated something new, too.
A Dangerous New Era of Surveillance Capabilities
Before the digital age, law enforcement would conduct surveillance through methods like wiretapping phone lines, following a target, or infiltrating an organization. Now, police surveillance can reach into the most granular aspects of our lives during everyday activities, without our consent or knowledge — and without a warrant. This poses a fundamental threat to us and to the Constitution.
Technology like automated license plate readers, drones, facial recognition, and social media monitoring added a uniquely dangerous element to the surveillance that comes with physical intimidation of law enforcement. With greater technological power in the hands of police, surveillance technology is crossing into a variety of new and alarming contexts.
We’ve also seen dragnet facial recognition technology deployed during protests. In the wake of the killing of Freddie Gray, the Baltimore Police Department used facial recognition technology to identify and arrest protesters that had outstanding warrants, even if unrelated to protesting, along with social media surveillance tools that allowed for real-time processing of images, geolocation data, and screen names, allowing police “to identify and retain data on protestors at an otherwise impossible scale.” In Florida, three law enforcement agencies quietly used facial recognition technology in 2020 to identify racial justice protesters where no crimes were committed.
Today, facial recognition technology has seen increasingly widespread use among federal and local law enforcement. POGO has written previously about the dangers of law enforcement partnerships with companies like Clearview AI, which scraped billions of images from the internet for their facial recognition database, which has been used by law enforcement agencies across the country, including within the federal government. The ways someone can be surveilled while attempting to express a political opinion are dizzying, and the government can reach deeper than ever before in monitoring people’s personal beliefs.
“The ways someone can be surveilled while attempting to express a political opinion are dizzying, and the government can reach deeper than ever before in monitoring people’s personal beliefs.”
What is the government doing with this dragnet surveillance system, containing billions of images? Rapid advancement in technologies such as data analytics tools and artificial intelligence now allow government and law enforcement agencies to compile and sift through profoundly large data sets. This was demonstrated during the racial justice movement in 2020, with immense online political pressure put on members of Congress as people called for institutional reform and changes in policing policies on social media — a platform that provides an outlet for the public to organize for change and to call out abusive government action.
The surveillance state’s raison d’être is to chill undesirable activity. There is no more conducive environment for abuse than when people speak truth to power and threaten the status quo. Too much power resides within the surveillance state, and the technological capability of surveillance tools grows each year with higher resolution cameras, better data analytics tools, and ever-expanding image databases.
When the social networking app on your phone can give police details about where you’ve been and who you’re connected to, or your browsing history can provide law enforcement with insight into your most closely held thoughts, the risks of self-censorship are great — especially in the face of oppression. When artificial intelligence tools or facial recognition technology can piece together your life in a way that was previously impossible, it gives the ones with the keys to those tools enormous power to chill opposition and maintain a repressive status quo.
In the wake of racial justice protests, we’ve seen the predictable legislative backlash to criminalize protests, which opens the door for additional surveillance.
It is unaccountable mass surveillance that threatens the rule of law.
