Image by Lianhao Qu.
Structures of surveillance have their roots within the infrastructure of our commercial sector and government. This is not new, but the government’s audacity has grown monstrous with the recent example of Mahmoud Khalil and the blatant disregard for the most basic rights of habeas corpus.
Back in 2013, Snowden told us that the capabilities of state government actors were far beyond anything we ever imagined. He warned us that cellular phones are essentially surveillance windows into our lives. So much so that he manually extracted the microphones and cameras from his cellular phones. Furthermore, MSM and normal text messages are not encrypted, which enables the government to access our conversations via phone record providers. The N.S.A. has been collecting petabytes worth of information on every U.S. citizen.
But why is privacy important? A common cynical view is that if you have not done anything wrong, you should have nothing to fear. Deliberately or not, this implies that people who object to invasions of privacy are criminals. Furthermore, the key word “wrong” is defined entirely by the state, whose mandate to serve its people is increasingly fragilized. What happens when, in the name of security, the state deems legitimate dissent to be wrong? Privacy allows us to organize and protect ourselves from the state’s tentacular reach, and as such it is the right on which are founded all the other rights that must be available to the citizens of a healthy democracy.
How, then, did these United States of Surveillance that we live in today come to be? An autopsy is required, and an accelerated timeline must be laid out. When the Cold War ended in 1993, the defense budget was reduced, to the displeasure of defense executives, and the cutting edge of technology was no longer in the hands of Lockheed Martin, whose C.E.O. was then Norman Augustine, following a merger with Marietta Controls. Government officials realized that the commercial sector, Silicon Valley was developing the next generation of technological innovations. The internet was being built, computers and operating systems, including Linux, were being developed, and a renaissance of hand-held electronics was soon to follow.
Shortly before 9/11, Norman Augustine and Gilman Louie founded In-Q-Tel, a C.I.A. backed hedge fund, under the behest of C.I.A. director George Tenet. The purpose of In-Q-Tel is simply stated by Augustine himself in a 2015 Senate hearing before the Committee On Armed Services:
“Today, the leading edge of the state of the art and innovation is often to be found in … Silicon Valley… This led to the establishment of an organization that we called In-Q-Tel, the concept of which was very simple: conduct business on behalf of the government with Silicon Valley and others as they would deal with any other commercial firms. I believe that it is fair to say that this has been an immensely successful endeavor from virtually every perspective.”
This V.C. activity was funded with tax-payer dollars. With this goal in mind, In-Q-Tel invested in Google, Keyhole [later to become Google Earth] and Palantir. These investments gave them access to software licenses and allowed them to establish industry-government relations.
After 9/11, the United States was reeling from the shock of such a challenge to the empire’s worldwide hegemony, which had longed seemed inviolable due to the brutal foreign policies enacted throughout South America, Africa, the Middle East and Asia. The injury of physical destruction was exceeded only by the insult of its suddenness, which moved Government officials in the Bush administration to pass an onslaught of policies enabling law enforcement to deploy surveillance tools on an unprecedented scale, in order to ensure that such an outrage would never happen again.
As a result, data collection began to accelerate, naturally accompanied by the rapidly expanding use of the internet and electronic financial transactions. The former N.S.A. technical director, Brian Snow, told the Telegraph that the N.S.A.’s mass data collection program known as P.R.I.S.M. ramped up enormously under pressure after the 9/11 attacks. Today, the Israeli SIGINT National Unit collaborates and shares intelligence with the N.S.A.. Notably, the communications of Palestinian-Americans in the U.S. are shared without restriction with Israeli intelligence.
When the 2008 economic crash occurred, many companies bought back up their own stocks with Obama’s stimulus package, whereas tech companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon largely expanded their ability to project growth post-2008. Today, without Nvidia, Meta, Amazon, Oracle, Alphabet, Apple, Microsoft and Tesla, the American economy would be doing very poorly, though Tesla stock has been in free fall since Trump’s inauguration. This post-2008 situation the direct result of Obama’s economic policies. The tech sector, boosted by the financial sector, became the bulwark of the American economy, and tech C.E.O.s including Eric Schmidt, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos became increasingly prominent public figures. Their ties to the government, initially something of an open secret, appear now to be a matter of course for decision-makers, who question none of these relationships.
The Cambridge Analytica scandal that happened during the 2016 election of Donald Trump, whereby Facebook users were exposed to data collection and targeted political ads that often contained false information. This scandal revealed the potential of social media platforms for mass manipulation, through their incredible capacity for data collection and surveillance. In 2017, Eric Schmidt, who remained as a technical adviser to Alphabet, took on a role at the D.o.D. He chaired the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence with Raytheon’s Bob Work, In-Q-Tel’s Gilman Louie and S.R.I. International’s William Mark, among others. The N.S.C.A.I. produced a 750-page report that advocates for more mass data collection:
“The basic purpose of the American government is to protect the security and liberty of the American people. Americans have a long tradition of debating how best to achieve these twin goals when tensions arise between them. The two decades following 9/11 saw intensive efforts to calibrate the government’s powers to stop another terrorist attack with its obligations to respect individual rights and liberties. A.I. is ushering in the next era of this debate because new technologies offer government agencies more powerful ways to collect and process information, track individuals’ behavior and movements, and act on the basis of computer-generated analyses.”
An additional screenshot below reveals a plan with action items on how to operationalize A.I. in combination with data collection.
Meanwhile, Thiel’s Palantir, headed by C.E.O. Alex Karp, was helping I.C.E. to violate the individuals’ privacy in order to track the undocumented community. Undocumented migrants have always been the domestic guinea pigs on whom surveillance measures are tested before being deployed in wider society, As has been consistently reported, the Trump administration’s treatment of human beings who sought a future in the USA was generally detrimental and often inhumane. These reports, however, when they reached mainstream news, were repackaged in a way that conditioned the American people to normalize witnessing the regular violation of human rights.
The violation of rights by companies founded or funded by In-Q-Tel does not stop there. Today, In-Q-Tel’s investment in Niantic has enabled it to scrape data off every Pokemon Go player’s phone and extract photos to create a global 3-D geospatial A.I. for the C.I.A. In addition, Palantir, Google, Microsoft and Amazon provide cloud computing and A.I. services to the Pentagon as part of the Joint War Cloud Capability. The former 3 have all received funding from In-Q-Tel and Amazon acquired companies funded by In-Q-Tel.
And furthermore, Palantir, Google, Amazon and Microsoft are also helping the I.D.F. in their genocidal campaign. Palestinians have been the subjects of tests for the most advanced software-hardware platforms that use these A.I. programs to automate the kind of slaughter exposed by Assange and Manning in 2010. By either providing American A.I. programs [such as Google DeepMind A.I.] or Google/Amazon/Microsoft servers for I.D.F. A.I. to run on, decision making is being accelerated to drive up casualty rates. We have only now witnessed in an unfiltered way the extreme impunity with which aggressors have detached themselves from the violence they commit.
Back home, Skydio, another In-Q-Tel funded drone company has been used to surveil Yale students. Originally founded by members of the Roy group at M.I.T., Skydio is deployed by the I.D.F. in Palestine and it received huge contracts post October 7th, 2023. Social Sentinel, founded by the former head of D.P.S. at Princeton helps scrape students’ social media for purposes of surveillance. Local police and I.C.E. are using automatic license plate readers to create data bases of protesters, Mosque goers and undocumented migrants. These are merely a few examples in a vast array of companies that participate in the surveillance industry.
And we have not even touched upon the trend of ex C.I.A. officers and ex Israeli intelligence embedding themselves within the tech sector and academia. The dean at Columbia who green lit Khalil’s abduction was a former Israeli intelligence officer.
So where does this leave us today?
Let’s go back to June of 2001 and explore the story of Palestinian activist Amer Jubran in Brookline Massachusetts. Jubran was a prominent leader who helped organize a peaceful rally protesting the Israel Day of Celebration and was arrested and accused of “assault with a deadly weapon”. However, the charge was dismissed by a judge who found no grounds for the accusation. Instead, it was revealed during the trial that Brookline police had been collaborating with and were paid by the Israel Day of Celebration organizers to arrest Jubran.
Shortly after 9/11, in November of 2002, Jubran led a pro-Palestinian march in Boston, and was arrested jointly by the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the F.B.I. just a few days later. He was taken from his home in Rhode Island and he was held at a correctional facility for 17 days without bail without any cited charges.. Documents obtained through the Freedom Of Information Act revealed patterns of surveillance in which law enforcement were engaging. The contrast between Jubran’s unjust detainment before and after 9/11 is striking. Ultimately, he was put through a sham 2.5 year trial without due process or charges, which proved too onerous. Jubran “voluntarily left” the United States where he had lived for 15 years. But the injustice for Jubran did not stop there. As Jacobin reported, even after Jubran left for Jordan, because he never stayed silent as an activist, under U.S. colonial power, “the [Jordanian] government charged him with planning attacks on US soldiers in a period during which it was officially denying the presence of US soldiers on its territory.”. The aggression by the U.S. government in Jubran’s case was only the first hint not of an intensification in the country’s hardening grip on its history colonialism.
Jubran’s story is emblematic of the fact that the state has been testing the repeal of rights for many years, as well as experimenting with new technologies and applying legal tricks to oppressed communities and the Global South. Mahmoud Khalil’s recent abduction should come as no surprise; the shock it has caused may be instead a byproduct of the surprise that this was audaciously enacted on a Columbia student and legal resident.
As citizens of the United States of Surveillance, it is necessary to recognize that what we have seen done to Khalil has been done in foreign countries by the US government countless times before this. The rage and anger that is justly felt over Khalil’s abduction is not enough. Jubran is proof that Palestinians, like undocumented migrants, were a testing ground for surveillance and legal tricks. The U.S. government has not changed, was never better than this. The weight of its colonial project has borne down upon the innocent civilians in countless lands for the entirety of the country’s existence. The difference rests with us: we are being progressively othered by the U.S. government, just as it has othered so many peoples abroad in order to justify war, and ultimately profit. The recent wave of pro-Palestinian protests in the heart of the surveillance state provoked its ruling capitalist elites, such that they have now turned the head of colonialism nakedly inward. If you think you are safe, you are wrong.
So we must change our circumstances by simultaneously tackling U.S. foreign and domestic policy. We must organize to pass legislation that prohibits the kind of surveillance we are being subjected to and restore privacy as a right. For without privacy, there is no way to resist.
But in the meantime, as you organize, defend yourself. Here are a few privacy resources:
The Electronic Frontier Foundation Surveillance Self Defense
Privacy Guides On Software And Applications
