Though the violent birth of the U.S. produced racially-biased government monitoring from its very start, it wasn’t until 1956 that the counterintelligence program of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was created. Through that program, federal and local law enforcement used wiretaps and other methods to unlawfully harass, defame, detain, and even frame Black activists. While the FBI claimed to have ended the program in 1971, the extrajudicial targeting of Black activists by federal and local law enforcement continues to this day.

Despite the reemergence of violent white nationalism as the nation’s number one threat to domestic security, federal and local government surveillance continues to target Black communities. Recent FBI leaks revealed that the FBI continues to target Black activists through the fabricated designation of “Black Identity Extremist,” now renamed as “Violent Racial Extremism.” Documents also showed that the Bureau implemented a program, dubbed `”Iron Fist”, to focus resources on spying, surveilling, and investigating Black activists, including through undercover agents. We understand this to be part of a larger set of federal countering violent extremism (CVE) programs that have largely focused on the Muslim community, including the almost 40% of American Muslims who are Black.

Digital Policing and Prisons

Today, technology invades every aspect of Black life, in some cases improving it, but in most cases exacerbating existing inequalities. The ubiquitousness of digital technologies creates multiple points of entry into the criminal punishment system, and facilitates the speed, scale, and secrecy with which governments profile, police, and punish.  

Policing has also evolved to use data, devices, and algorithms to create mechanisms for total information awareness for law enforcement at multiple levels of operation. Street cameras, license plate readers, domestic drones, Cell Site Simulators or “Stingray” devices, widespread face recognition, social media monitoring tools, and other technologies are used to unequally target Black people, without the knowledge or consent of local communities or of the people being monitored.

Over the past 10 years, social media monitoring has emerged as a major threat to Black activists and people organizing for racial justice, providing unprecedented power to law enforcement to monitor our movements and the people we represent.

Additionally, artificial intelligence and machine learning have evolved to power “predictive policing,” which uses search tools, scores, heat maps, and other methods that frequently draw on racially biased crime data to predict the occurrence and location of future crimes, replicating racial bias.

Additionally, “gang databases” maintained by city, county, state, and federal law enforcement agencies collect extensive information on thousands of people, designating them as “known” or “suspected”  gang members. Once designated a “gang member,” individuals are subject to increased profiling, surveillance, and restrictions on activities through civil gang injunctions. They are also often subject to greater use of force during police interactions, and are at risk of being subjected to increased penalties if convicted of an offense under “gang enhancements.”

Membership in any organization, whether formal or informal, including a group that may call itself or be described as a “gang,” is not itself illegal, and thus does not justify the maintenance of intelligence information, surveillance, or enhanced restrictions or punishment. Additionally, evidence cited by officers to justify inclusion in gang databases can be as little as wearing a particular color, or drawing a particular symbol in a school notebook, or being in a familial or other relationship with an actual or suspected gang member. As a result, gang databases can be wildly inaccurate and offer no mechanism to contest the designation.

For instance, in Cook County, IL, almost half of people listed in the gang database are there in part because they have a tattoo an officer believes is associated with gang membership. Over half are there because they frequent or live in an area associated with a particular gang, “affect their style of dress,” or “maintain an ongoing relationship with known criminal gang members.” As a result of profiling and targeted policing of Black communities, people listed in gang databases are disproportionately Black. In Chicago, for example, 75% of people whose information is contained in the city’s gang database are Black.
For immigrants, including Legal Permanent Residents, recipients of Temporary Protective Status (TPS) and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), as well as undocumented immigrants, being listed as suspected gang members has led to being targeted by immigration enforcement for immigration raids, detention, and deportation.

Black immigrants are three times more likely to be deported for a criminal offense;  gang affiliation is often cited as a justification. Immigrants who are alleged to be involved with gangs are top immigration enforcement priorities for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), even if they have no criminal convictions and DHS is targeting them based on allegations alone. Gang involvement is also one of the criteria used to deny appeals for stays of deportation through Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, a federal process that allows undocumented immigrants to remain in the United States. As a result, undocumented people designated as “gang members” can be deported even if they have no criminal history, and if they return to the U.S., they would be charged with a felony for unlawful re-entry.

Consequences of inclusion in a gang database also include increased police harassment, especially through traffic and other police stops. This can result in barriers to employment and housing, and can also affect bail decisions and result in sentencing enhancements and harsher conditions of probation and parole.

In addition to gang databases, the increasing use of biometric technologies such as smart doorbells and facial recognition at the top 20 US airports, in schools, and by U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) and local police departments alike create outsized danger and harm to Black lives. Facial recognition technology identifies people by matching facial features to existing photo and video databases. With the rise of machine learning and artificial intelligence, the threat to civil and human rights posed by facial recognition technology is expanding. Meanwhile, facial recognition tools remain inaccurate—particularly for darker-skinned, female, and young faces, for which the error rate is consistently higher—and continue to create an unreasonable investigative haystack in which to find a needle—obfuscating its original purpose.

The discriminatory collection and use of Black data isn’t exclusive to law enforcement.

From applying for public health care and housing, or receiving other government social programs, Black people accessing public services are frequently required to provide their most intimate data, thereby furthering the criminalization of Black people in the 21st century.

Private tech companies contracted by the state and social media platforms are freely facilitating surveillance and data sharing used to target migrants and other criminalized populations.

Substitute Private Surveillance

Governments aren’t the only ones targeting Black communities for surveillance—wealth is being created for the ruling class from the data and DNA of Black bodies. Artificial intelligence in the form of algorithms increasingly powers decisions that are fundamental to our economic lives: decisions about who gets credit, a job, healthcare, or housing. Incorrectly framed as a neutralizing tool, AI can perpetuate discriminatory outcomes through faulty inputs, faulty conclusions, testing failures, and proxy discrimination. These are primary contributors to the mounting cases of algorithmic injustice—instances where people are excluded from benefits and opportunities, or subjected to unfair pricing, where they would otherwise be protected from intentional discrimination. As disproportionate users of social media and mobile devices, Internet users of color are frequently required to turn our information over to social media sites and mobile apps as a precondition of use. Sites and apps like Facebook and Twitter often capture a great deal of data about our location, contacts, messages, search histories, and more.

Though Black users represent one of their most engaged audiences, these data mining sites fail to protect Black users from censorship, hate speech and third party or law enforcement monitoring on the platform.

 Social media companies, among others, store our personal data for commercial purposes and, increasingly, share this information with law enforcement agencies, biometric companies, and the companies responsible for electronic monitors, and the increasingly pervasive trove of surveillance equipment. sexual violence by law enforcement and penal officers, in foster care, and in locked facilities and group homes; 

Violating Constitutional Protections and Human Rights

All of these surveillance practices disproportionately impact Black communities, including migrants. They violate the First, Fourth, and Fourteenth Amendment rights of Black, Latinx, Arab, and Muslim people and migrants in the U.S. Without guiding policies, practices, principles, or regulatory parameters that restrain, ban, or place a moratorium on their public and private use, these surveillance technologies supersize the potential for discriminatory policing and criminalization and further erode due process protections under the law. These practices expand the police state and facilitate big profits for a growing surveillance industry—and they use the Internet, potentially the most democratic communications platform the world has ever known, to do it. At the same time, the few technological tools available to protect an individual’s information, like encryption, are under constant attack.