The ongoing fight Apple is waging to protect its customer’s privacy from government overreach has reignited an important cultural debate in our country. Although privacy and surveillance are buzzwords in today’s current news headlines, for many of us from poor communities, privacy is a right that is consistently violated and surveillance is something we know too much about. We feel it when we walk home in our own neighborhoods, where dormant corners are saturated with CCTV cameras and police stay parked just waiting for one of us to do something wrong. We feel it when we walk into stores. Eyes follow us. Waiting for trouble. Waiting to ask us to leave as if we don’t belong.
Surveillance has a different meaning to me, an Afro-Latina woman from a poor neighborhood who has experienced intimidation, harassment and aggressive law enforcement since I was a young child. As a Black Puerto Rican woman, raised in one of the poorest neighborhoods in the United States, I have seen injustice firsthand as I battled through the school-to-prison pipeline and see my family and friends force to deal with extreme violence and incarceration because of the zipcode we were born into. My experience growing up in a surveillance state is by no means unique. Ask any concerned community member from neighborhoods, similar to mine in North Philadelphia, across the United States and they will tell you detailed accounts of police harassment. Fighting for the right to better education, housing, food access and employment makes you a “national security threat”. Even if you are not concerned or conscious of the injustices in communities like mine, racist concepts of Black and Brown criminality in the minds of white liberals and conservatives alike have directly led to harsh policing practices in our neighborhoods.
In order to understand the outrage and fear people of color have around privacy issues, it is important to understand the history of government surveillance in the United States and how abuses of power have severely impacted us. The Police Red Squads in the 1880s, the FBI's Counter-Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO), and the Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting Program and the Patriot Act of 2001 are direct descendants of the Fugitive Slave Laws. The surveillance-industrial complex programs that gather, store, and analyze data to determine a person’s criminality are a legacy of US history and politician’s strategy for racial and political control. By combining physical surveillance by police officers and FBI agents with innovative technologies such as cameras, shot-spotter microphones, stingrays, satellites, drones, spy software and electronic devices used to jam our cell phones, the scope of this intrusion on our freedoms is growing much more pervasive.
In Apple’s fight against government spying, the stakes are so much higher for people of color, especially those who are advocating or organizing for justice, because we have historically been targeted by the State. Activists have been and continue to be discredited, subject to character assassination, blacklisted, financially destroyed, harassed by police, incarcerated and murdered. Activists have experienced their phones tapped, texts and emails intercepted, social media accounts monitored, and whereabouts geolocated. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and members of the Black Panther Party and the Young Lords are among the many people and groups the government has pursued because of their threat to the state’s power. It happened to them. We cannot assume it’s not happening to us too.
Under the diversion of “fighting terrorism” and “national security,” the CIA, NSA, DEA, and FBI have built powerful new tools for suppressing political activities of community organizers. If the FBI succeeds in breaking the legal encryption on iPhones, it will set an extremely dangerous precedent that threatens the right of our freedom to speak at and organize for change. History provides substantial evidence to prove that the government’s claim to want Apple to break into only one phone is deeply misleading. What the government really wants is total control: an easier way to surveil, disrupt and destroy people who advocate and organize for social justice. To echo Malkia Cyril, founder and Executive Director of the Center for Media Justice, “In the context of white supremacy and police violence, Black [and Brown] people need encryption.”
We live in the Information Age, yet many communities across the nation are denied access to information and have their private information stolen by the government. My tech activism includes educating communities, especially youth from hard-to-reach populations, to learn 21st century skills such as computer programming, data security and website development as a way to enter the job market and protect themselves against mass surveillance. It is my duty as a technologist and IT consultant to speak up about the injustices I see in the technology industry and help communities understand the impact these tools have on their lives. To speak up about how police interference with our technologies perpetuates systemic racism and how watching our digital communications is just another way to keep of social control.
Today I support Apple in its fight against government overreach because it is critical that we protect everyone’s right to privacy. But as important as it is to come to Apple’s defense in this case against “opening a backdoor” for the FBI, it is of equal importance that we defend our civil rights and hold corporations accountable for abusing their power to surveil people without their permission in the name of profit. Without policies to protect people, corporations are creating and leveraging technologies to collect more and more data to recognize your face and track your behavior and strengthen their ability to sell us things we don’t need, an occurrence Shoshana Zuboff refers to as “surveillance capitalism.” Whether it is resisting the government’s abuse of power or demanding new policies to hold corporations accountable, we need more people of color to be at the forefront of this national debate so that justice is defined by our country’s most targeted communities.
Surveillance has a different meaning to me, an Afro-Latina woman from a poor neighborhood who has experienced intimidation, harassment and aggressive law enforcement since I was a young child. As a Black Puerto Rican woman, raised in one of the poorest neighborhoods in the United States, I have seen injustice firsthand as I battled through the school-to-prison pipeline and see my family and friends force to deal with extreme violence and incarceration because of the zipcode we were born into. My experience growing up in a surveillance state is by no means unique. Ask any concerned community member from neighborhoods, similar to mine in North Philadelphia, across the United States and they will tell you detailed accounts of police harassment. Fighting for the right to better education, housing, food access and employment makes you a “national security threat”. Even if you are not concerned or conscious of the injustices in communities like mine, racist concepts of Black and Brown criminality in the minds of white liberals and conservatives alike have directly led to harsh policing practices in our neighborhoods.
In order to understand the outrage and fear people of color have around privacy issues, it is important to understand the history of government surveillance in the United States and how abuses of power have severely impacted us. The Police Red Squads in the 1880s, the FBI's Counter-Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO), and the Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting Program and the Patriot Act of 2001 are direct descendants of the Fugitive Slave Laws. The surveillance-industrial complex programs that gather, store, and analyze data to determine a person’s criminality are a legacy of US history and politician’s strategy for racial and political control. By combining physical surveillance by police officers and FBI agents with innovative technologies such as cameras, shot-spotter microphones, stingrays, satellites, drones, spy software and electronic devices used to jam our cell phones, the scope of this intrusion on our freedoms is growing much more pervasive.
In Apple’s fight against government spying, the stakes are so much higher for people of color, especially those who are advocating or organizing for justice, because we have historically been targeted by the State. Activists have been and continue to be discredited, subject to character assassination, blacklisted, financially destroyed, harassed by police, incarcerated and murdered. Activists have experienced their phones tapped, texts and emails intercepted, social media accounts monitored, and whereabouts geolocated. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and members of the Black Panther Party and the Young Lords are among the many people and groups the government has pursued because of their threat to the state’s power. It happened to them. We cannot assume it’s not happening to us too.
Under the diversion of “fighting terrorism” and “national security,” the CIA, NSA, DEA, and FBI have built powerful new tools for suppressing political activities of community organizers. If the FBI succeeds in breaking the legal encryption on iPhones, it will set an extremely dangerous precedent that threatens the right of our freedom to speak at and organize for change. History provides substantial evidence to prove that the government’s claim to want Apple to break into only one phone is deeply misleading. What the government really wants is total control: an easier way to surveil, disrupt and destroy people who advocate and organize for social justice. To echo Malkia Cyril, founder and Executive Director of the Center for Media Justice, “In the context of white supremacy and police violence, Black [and Brown] people need encryption.”
We live in the Information Age, yet many communities across the nation are denied access to information and have their private information stolen by the government. My tech activism includes educating communities, especially youth from hard-to-reach populations, to learn 21st century skills such as computer programming, data security and website development as a way to enter the job market and protect themselves against mass surveillance. It is my duty as a technologist and IT consultant to speak up about the injustices I see in the technology industry and help communities understand the impact these tools have on their lives. To speak up about how police interference with our technologies perpetuates systemic racism and how watching our digital communications is just another way to keep of social control.
Today I support Apple in its fight against government overreach because it is critical that we protect everyone’s right to privacy. But as important as it is to come to Apple’s defense in this case against “opening a backdoor” for the FBI, it is of equal importance that we defend our civil rights and hold corporations accountable for abusing their power to surveil people without their permission in the name of profit. Without policies to protect people, corporations are creating and leveraging technologies to collect more and more data to recognize your face and track your behavior and strengthen their ability to sell us things we don’t need, an occurrence Shoshana Zuboff refers to as “surveillance capitalism.” Whether it is resisting the government’s abuse of power or demanding new policies to hold corporations accountable, we need more people of color to be at the forefront of this national debate so that justice is defined by our country’s most targeted communities.
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