The rapid growth of surveillance in the United States brings new threats to our independence, right to dissent, privacy, and hopes for democracy. During the last two decades, a convergence of national security and corporate metadata harvesting has brought new technologies that make our movements, discourse, and politics easily trackable—and with developments in artificial intelligence, increasingly predictable.
Post-9/11 shifts in governmental surveillance and public acceptance of the collection of broad types of metadata continue to shape American lives more than two decades later.
Post-9/11 shifts in governmental surveillance and public acceptance of the collection of broad types of metadata continue to shape American lives more than two decades later. The history of public attitudes toward surveillance during the last century shows the American public once strongly opposed governmental wiretaps and mail-monitoring programs. These attitudes were so strong during the 1930s that polls show solid majorities opposed government wiretaps, even for kidnappers and other known criminals.
Different crises brought some short-lived changes in attitudes. World War II saw increasing acceptance of surveillance, while certain Cold War periods prompted more tolerance for “national security” concerns. But largely, Americans remained skeptical of government surveillance.
The mid-1970s saw significant efforts to limit state surveillance powers, after revelations in the 1960s and 1970s about Defense Department, CIA, and FBI surveillance abuses. These abuses included political surveillance under the FBI’s COINTELPRO program, CIA spying on anti-war Americans in Operation CHAOS, and a vast U.S. Army program that spied on anti-war protests and so-called radicals. The findings of the 1976 Senate Church Committee and the House Pike Committee led to legislation restricting the FBI’s ability to infiltrate or monitor political organizations. The CIA’s domestic activities were also curtailed, and Congress gained oversight of intelligence agencies.
These restrictions were exactly what the 132-page USA Patriot Act rapidly swept aside. Adopted forty-five days after 9/11, this radical piece of legislation capitalized on the immediate public panic after the attacks. We don’t know much about where significant parts of the Patriot Act came from, but we do know it rolled back the remaining safeguards created during the Church Committee era—safeguards that protected domestic political groups from government infiltration, surveillance, and harassment. This launched the era of the new surveillance “normal” in which we now live.
It wasn’t that the American public willingly accepted most of these developments right away; even during the years immediately following 9/11, some cautious distrust of expanded surveillance powers remained. When news of a new surveillance program designed to integrate data from various sources—email, web searches, traffic cameras, credit card purchases, and cellphones—creepily named “Total Information Awareness” (TIA) was leaked to the public in 2003, a swift backlash ended its development. It didn’t help that TIA’s proposed insignia looked like it was designed by an evil James Bond villain. TIA’s mistake was that it drew attention to what the government was developing by announcing a visible new agency, making it too easy for the public to identify this new threat to their right to be left alone.
In 2013, leaks by Edward Snowden of sensitive National Security Agency intelligence showed that the U.S. government was spying on ordinary citizens. It became apparent that while TIA as an agency was never birthed, its proposed methods lived on in other agencies, without the publicity and public outrage.
Perhaps the best measure of the numbing impacts of a dozen years of expanded corporate and government surveillance was the lack of meaningful protest, Congressional investigation, or legislative action following Snowden’s revelations surrounding the extensive monitoring of our lives. This deadening of Americans’ opposition to surveillance marked a significant break with past attitudes.
As an anthropologist, I think a lot about how we’re socialized to accept surveillance and its intrusions. Through our engagement with others, and with new technologies, changing standards of belief, and public fear campaigns, we all take on slightly new ways of thinking and behaving, often with only subtle outward shifts. Through these processes, we almost imperceptibly become new versions of the same person we have always been, and will always be, like living ships of Theseus. The processes of surveillance normalization haven’t come only from the government in top-down ways; these transitions coevolved with the spread of surveillance capitalism ushered into our lives as “conveniences.”
Many smartphone users initially resisted leaving GPS tracking turned on, but that resistance soon dissipated, and those hesitancies are now anomalies. People born after the mid-1980s rapidly accepted “smart speakers” in their homes, even with their threats to privacy barely hidden, as convenience becomes society’s gateway to dystopia.
While many Americans across the political spectrum remain concerned about government surveillance, a roaring silence surrounds the “everything, everywhere, all at once” corporate surveillance that occurs every time we use an app, surf the web, or use a credit card or customer loyalty card. With claims of convenience and savings, surveillance capitalism commodifies our identities and monetizes our electronic footprints in ways we no longer notice. Some data indicates that the older you are, the more you notice these intrusions into previously private spaces. But that’s how socialization works as new generations accept new ways as normal.
My concerns about increasing surveillance and its normalization grew from my own research on how government surveillance has historically been used in the United States to harass activists advocating for a variety of progressive causes. The tens of thousands of documents I’ve obtained under the Freedom of Information Act contain details of campaigns targeting activists, anthropologists, and others.
Anthropologists have understood since the early twentieth century that race is a dangerous social construct. Those who took this scientific finding to public venues and advocated for the racial integration of schools or opposed racist practices like redlining regularly came under FBI surveillance during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s.
These documents repeatedly show that surveillance campaigns don’t compile dossiers on lawbreakers or “extremists” equally: They have always differentially targeted those on the left more than they target rightwing extremists.
Not only is this part of the institutional culture of the FBI and other agencies, but historically, these agencies have viewed fascistic groups—whose values in many ways aligned with the basic elements of our economic system—as less threatening than leftist groups challenging basic tenants of unrestricted capitalism.
There is a deep institutional history of the FBI viewing these status quo disruptors as threats and directing surveillance to those fighting for greater equality.
There is a deep institutional history of the FBI viewing these status quo disruptors as threats and directing surveillance to those fighting for greater equality. If we consider what is known about law enforcement’s surveillance and harassment of leaders in more recent movements like Occupy or Black Lives Matter, we find this old pattern. But now we’re in a world where cellphone-carrying activists voluntarily provide tracking devices and leave digital records of their conversations; even with promises of encryption there are reasons to distrust these useful devices. And if law enforcement installs “stingray” devices—which mimic cellphone towers and capture the content of protesters’ phones—near protest sites, even worse things can happen.
New surveillance technologies, like the Pegasus spyware program, allow nefarious actors to remotely access phones, making one’s contacts, communications, and movements available to others. These surveillance developments occur so rapidly that, while we can’t keep up with them, we do know a lot about how past surveillance campaigns have worked. We know who is targeted, who isn’t, how it all worked, and why an explosive growth of surveillance threatens the freedoms that are necessary for democracy to flourish.
We can’t predict exactly which future activists will become surveillance targets, but given the history of targeting those who disrupt systems of inequity protected by powerful interests, we might guess that people who threaten unrestricted capitalism will be at the top of the list.
As climate change increasingly calls into question whether humankind can survive capitalism’s destruction of our Earth, the FBI and the CIA seem likely to increase surveillance and harassment of activists and educators who challenge the right of market forces to cook the planet.
While it is difficult to see a way out of this surveillance growth, some signs indicate American attitudes toward it are returning to long-held opposition. Surveys in 2021 showed significant declines in the number of Americans who approve of domestic phone surveillance, dropping to 14 percent from 23 percent in 2011. Given the anti-government rhetoric from the political right, when the next Snowden-like surveillance revelations occur, maybe there will be opportunities to build alliances to curtail the growing threat to democracy and dissent. But even if this does happen, without government interventions, the size and scope of corporate surveillance seem likely to continue growing.
The prospects of controlling the runaway spread of government and corporate surveillance may well depend on whether deeply held, historically rooted cultural values opposing surveillance are more powerful than the forces socializing us all to accept this new surveillance “normal.”