by Ursula Curiousa
“Do you think you’re being watched?” This question is as loaded as a gun, but commonly pops up in mental health screening protocols. So what if I do think multiple law enforcement agencies have access to the cameras I sit in front of on the bus or train? So what if I think that tech lords in Silicon Valley mine my data to find marketable weaknesses? What if I’m correct? Does that make me paranoid or well-informed?
As an anti-surveillance activist, knowing that multiple agencies routinely monitor the reality I exist in bothers me like the swollen flesh around splintered wood. Sometimes I relax and let my guard down, for example by using Google to search even though I know my queries go into an indelible, inscrutable, timeless database to be used later on to sell me back my own fears and dreams.
But then I remember that I’m being watched and switch back to a search engine like DuckDuckGo via the TOR browser, which offers a modicum of privacy that Google will never offer, given its very nature and business plan.
My experience in Oakland Privacy fortifies me to propose that I am in fact being watched—not simply irrationally concerned about surveillance. And OP is making great strides to force disinfectant daylight into the collective psychic wound that might otherwise fester by pressuring politicians to pass legislation which puts a spotlight on surveillance practices.
A parallel phenomenon is that collective psychosis of law enforcement officers that tricks them into believing that they could oppress and regulate a restless civilian population by means of a Panopticon, or all-encompassing surveillance apparatus. They are incorrect. As they collect and stockpile putatively innocuous data on your and my quotidian activities, the more likely they are to pathologize and criminalize us just from sheer boredom. If anti-terrorism and “security” concerns come before human rights, the obviously correct way to go (from the oppressor’s point of view) is to use surveillance data to preemptively identify and neutralize those who would stray from the straight and narrow path.
Neutralize this.