Episode Transcript
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Jalsa Drinkard: You would wake up at like eight o’clock in the morning. There would be like bagels, people like actually making food for you. It would be students helping students.
Morgan Sung: This is Jalsa Drinkard. She’s a student at Columbia University and an organizer for Columbia University Apartheid Divest or CUAD. It’s a coalition of over a hundred student organizations calling for the university to cut all ties to Israel.
CUAD Protester Disclose! Divest! We will not stop, we will not rest! Disclose! Divest!
Morgan Sung: Last year, Jalsa was part of student-led protests, which culminated in a weeks-long encampment on campus.
News Anchor 1: Today, Columbia University says they will not divest from Israel and have not reached an agreement with protesters as demonstrations continue.
Jalsa Drinkard: It was really like a community space. Sometimes you would hear like a violin playing, like students would bring their instruments, like kind of just like bring joy. Students would be reading like books, sometimes doing their homework at the encampment.
Morgan Sung: CUAD organized the protests to push Colombia to cut financial ties with Israel, including weapons manufacturers, partnerships with Israeli universities, and the building of a new satellite campus in Tel Aviv. As security in the encampment, Jalsa says she saw firsthand the surveillance and harassment she and her fellow students experienced from police and counter protesters.
Jalsa Drinkard: We were there to like keep an eye on them and remind them of our policies and our roles and de-escalate them and kind of like physically put our bodies in front of cameras so people who were not comfortable with those high-risk actions, they would like be protected. Also, at the time, there’s a lot of doxing going on for people who were engaging in Palestinian activism.
Morgan Sung: Doxing is the act of identifying and publicizing someone’s personal information, like the location of their home, to shame and harass them. In a content economy where virality can be weaponized to expose someone’s personal details to millions of people in a matter of seconds, doxing is increasingly used as an intimidation tactic to discourage political speech. It was Jalsa’s job to protect protesters from being doxed. Like stepping in to block hecklers from recording people’s faces.
Jalsa Drinkard: So a lot of students who were engaging in Palestinian activism were, their socials, their private information was getting like archived and sent around to these different sites and basically their stuff was being published online for people to like harass them, giving them death threats, giving them like sexual assault threats and threatening their families as well.
Morgan Sung: And we’ve seen the real consequences of this doxing and surveillance of student organizers, particularly with Mahmoud Khalil, a Syrian-born Columbia student and lead negotiator during the protest. He was the target of a months-long harassment campaign led by pro-Israel groups who have taken credit for identifying him and sending his location to immigration officials. He now faces deportation, even though he has a green card and he has not been charged with a crime.
News Anchor 2: Just the last hour, an immigration judge in Louisiana has ruled that Columbia University grad student Mahmoud Khalil can be deported.
Morgan Sung: The list of student organizers, particularly international students, who have been identified, threatened, and arrested keeps growing. These doxxing campaigns have been used to discourage participation since CUAD began organizing the protests. During the Columbia protests last year, Jalsa remembers the doxxing trucks that drove around campus and the surrounding neighborhood.
Jalsa Drinkard: And they would have like slides of people’s information being like publicized on like a blipping screen with like all the information, like their phone number, like their name, their affiliation to Columbia. It was very dystopic. Like this was an actual act of digital violence towards our students.
Morgan Sung: Jalsa says that when the trucks parked near the encampments, she and other organizers held up sheets so that others couldn’t read the information being displayed on screen. Even though they were trying to protect students from being doxxed, they weren’t allowed to touch the trucks, so they had to hover in front of them for hours on end.
Jalsa Drinkard: Even if we would like to slightly bump it, like with our shoulder, we would be told, like, you’re liable for arrest. And it’s like, um, it’s a 17-year-old girl. A minor, whose information is on a truck by a stranger. Like, no one is doing anything.
Morgan Sung: In the year since Columbia’s encampment inspired student protests for Palestine across the country, those who participated in demonstrations continue to be targeted. They’ve been identified using facial recognition software, their social media accounts have been monitored for political speech, and they’ve been subjected to intense harassment, both online and in real life. Many have faced suspension or disciplinary actions. Others have been detained and face deportation.
The Trump administration is also using artificial intelligence to review international students’ social media accounts and revoke their visas if they express pro-Palestinian views. Even though she’s a citizen, Jalsa says she’s cut back on her social media use, and has even used a VPN to search anything related to Palestine, out of caution of ending up on a watch list.
Jalsa Drinkard: It is, like, terrifying to hear all these institutions talk about blackmailing students and like banning students. I think that like now because everyone is recording everything and everyone’s being surveilled, basically every word that you say now matters more than ever, for good and for bad.
Morgan Sung: This isn’t happening in a vacuum. The American right to privacy has been chipped away over the last 75 years. And with the help of rapidly advancing technology, surveillance has been woven into the social fabric of this country. Doxxing would not exist if not for the culture of recording, posting, and reacting to everything on social media. But how can free speech thrive under this level of scrutiny? And how did this become so normalized?
This is Close All Tabs. I’m Morgan Sung, tech journalist, and your chronically online friend, here to open as many browser tabs as it takes to help you understand how the digital world affects our real lives. Let’s get into it. So to get started on this deep dive, we have to go back to a time when the type of technology that we have today didn’t quite exist yet.
So let’s open a new tab. Surveillance before the internet.
Don Bell: The point of surveillance is not just to identify people who may be a quote-unquote threat. It’s also to ensure that the status quo remains and that the opposition to the government is suppressed.
Morgan Sung: Don Bell is policy counsel at the Project on Government Oversight, a non-profit watchdog group investigating corruption and misconduct within the federal government. His focus is on surveillance issues.
Don Bell: Surveillance, as we know, or as we kind of understand it in the modern sense, really began during the civil rights movement.
Morgan Sung: Although the United States had used surveillance on its residents before, it wasn’t until after World War II that the government had the technology for targeted covert monitoring. In the 1950s, as the Cold War ramped up and fear of communism swept the nation, the FBI launched COINTELPRO, or Counter-Intelligence Program, to undermine any perceived Communist Party activity within the United States. They operated without much oversight and used that political fear to justify violating constitutional rights to privacy and free speech.
J. Edgar Hoover, who was the director of the FBI at the time, expanded the program to surveil, discredit, and disrupt any movement that could be considered, quote unquote, subversive, to the political stability of the country. Under his leadership, the FBI illegally surveilled civil rights groups by claiming that they were infiltrated by communists.
Don Bell: So pre-technology, the way to get a sense of what organizations were doing was infiltrating the organization. So basically having someone who was within the organization attending meetings, reporting on the activities of the people, taking notes on the people who attended, and wiretaps.
Morgan Sung: An infamous case from this era is the FBI’s surveillance of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The FBI started keeping tabs on him in 1955, amid the Montgomery bus boycott. In 1963, during the march on Washington, Dr. King took the podium and called for an end to segregation in an iconic speech.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. I have dream today.
Morgan Sung: That was the moment when the FBI identified Dr. King as a leader of the civil rights movement and put a target on his back. J. Edgar Hoover claimed that Dr. King was a communist threat and launched a mass surveillance effort against him. He discussed Dr. Kings public appearances at length in recorded phone conversations with then-president Lyndon B. Johnson.
J. Edgar Hoover: I just got word that Martin Luther King will give a press conference at 11 o’clock this morning in Atlanta. Now, the statement King is to make will in a sense condone the national result from the, in human conditions that the Negroes are forced to exist in the country.
Morgan Sung: The FBI followed him as he traveled, bugging his home and his hotel rooms. They sent informants to spy on him. They tapped his phones and the phones of any known associates. The FBI also tried to discredit him to the press using information they collected in their extensive surveillance and went as far as blackmailing him.
Don Bell: There are instances that have been reported where the government or agents would send him letters encouraging to kill himself.
Morgan Sung: This surveillance extended to other civil rights leaders as well. The FBI broke into their homes and searched them without warrants, and along with the CIA, intercepted the Postal Service to read and record letters between activists.
Don Bell: If you were a prominent figure you were probably surveilled by the federal government.
Morgan Sung: They sent informants to infiltrate organizations like the Black Panther Party. To suppress the movement, the FBI even coordinated the assassination of one of its leaders. In 1969, the police raided a Chicago apartment in the middle of the night and opened fire on the Black Panther Party members who were sleeping inside.
Akua Njeri: Someone came into the room. Started shaking the chairman, said chairman, chairman wake up, I looked up and I saw bullets coming from what looked like the front of the apartment from the kitchen area. And the pigs were just shooting.
Morgan Sung: That was Akua Njeri from the documentary “The Murder of Fred Hampton.” In the raid, law enforcement officers shot and killed Black Panther Party chairman Fred Hampton, who had been sedated by an FBI informant earlier that evening. He was only 21.
Fred Hampton: I don’t believe I’m going to die because I’ve got a bad heart. I don’t believe I’m gonna die because of lung cancer. I believe that I’m gonna be able to die high off the people. I believe I will be able die as a revolutionary in the international revolutionary proletarian struggle. Why don’t you live for the people? Why don’t you struggle for the people? Why don’t you die for the peoples?
Morgan Sung: The general public didn’t know about the existence of COINTELPRO surveillance until 1971, when an activist group broke into FBI offices, stole dossiers, and anonymously mailed them to newspapers. Over the next few years, a string of investigations revealed a few ways that the government was spying on civilians. One of those investigations was prompted by the Watergate scandal, which revealed that President Richard Nixon’s campaign broke into and bugged the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters.
News Anchor 3: It all began suddenly last July when an obscure former White House official named Alexander Butterfield appeared as a surprise witness before the Senate Watergate Committee.
Senator: Mr. Butterfield, are you aware of the installation of any listening devices in the Oval Office of the President?
Alexander Butterfield: I was aware of listening devices. Yes, sir.
Morgan Sung: The public outrage pushed Congress to figure out just how extensive government surveillance had become. So in 1975, the Senate Church Committee, an investigation led by Senator Frank Church, revealed shocking CIA, FBI, and NSA operations that were conducted without Congress’s knowledge or approval. These included assassination attempts of foreign leaders, brainwashing experiments conducted on American citizens and the extensive surveillance of civil rights leaders, anti-war protesters, and anyone associated with Black liberation organizations. COINTELPRO even targeted actress Jane Fonda because she openly supported the Black Panther Party. After the final report about COINTELPRO was published, Frank Church went on Meet press and warns that any American could be surveilled.
Frank Church: No American would have any privacy left, such as the capability to monitor everything. Telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide.
Morgan Sung: This investigation prompted a period of surveillance reform, including the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA. It requires federal agencies to demonstrate probable cause and obtain warrants for wiretapping and other surveillance tactics. Basically, they have to show proof of why they think a crime has been committed. It’s not just a vibe check. This didn’t stop surveillance.
But the aftermath of the Senate Church Committee did establish some transparency and oversight of intelligence agencies. Remember, before then, there was no real system of checks and balances. These reforms held for a few decades and, to some extent, reigned in the abuses highlighted by the Church Committee. That all changed in 2001, when a devastating event ushered in a new era of domestic surveillance.
George W. Bush: Today our fellow citizens, our way of life, our very freedom came under attack in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist acts.
Morgan Sung: So, what did that mean for this brief period of surveillance reforms? We’ll get to that after this break.
Okay, we’re back. Let’s open a new tab. Surveillance after 9/11.
The country was shaken after 9/11. Americans were grieving and were terrified that it could happen again, especially in other large cities. Mainstream news coverage flooded TVs with racist stereotypes and stoked fears of terrorists as Muslim and brown.
News Anchor 4: Well, for many Americans, the terrorist attacks brought the Islamic faith and its followers under intense scrutiny.
Morgan Sung: Soon after 9/11, threatening letters laced with the deadly bacteria anthrax circulated in the mail. This exacerbated fears of terrorism and amplified the pressure on the government to do something to prevent another attack.
Reporter: Investigators still don’t know where it came from, but the anthrax that killed two Washington postal workers seems to have the hallmarks of a sophisticated weapon built by someone who knows how to deliver a lethal blow.
Don Bell: You think about anthrax attacks that happen afterward. You know, there’s this feeling that something needs to be done. You have, you know, the start of surveillance initially. You think it’s targeted, not really. And then over time, the mission creep expands.
Morgan Sung: So when President George W. Bush declared a war on terror, most of the public accepted the sudden increase in policing and surveillance, even if it meant giving up privacy and rolling back reforms.
George W. Bush: We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.
Morgan Sung: Congress was a willing partner in the war on terror and passed the Patriot Act just six weeks after 9/11. This law authorized the government to surveil anyone in the name of national security. It allowed the government to record phone calls and access emails and texts without a warrant or probable cause. It allowed secret searches of people’s homes and businesses. And it made it easier for government agencies to share information, which removed a lot of privacy protections.
Don Bell: After 9/11, I think a lot of people recognized that there were too many information silos. In the wake of that, Congress decided to combine almost two dozen federal agencies into the Department of Homeland Security with the idea of if we have all of these agencies working together, they will be able to share information, share intelligence, and we’ll people stop terrorist attacks. And you see at this time an ethos of “collect it all.”
Morgan Sung: Muslim Americans were disproportionately targeted. And so was anyone who looked brown.
Don Bell: Then you see the abuses, particularly among Muslim residents in America. You see the surveillance of Muslims in New York City. That’s pretty pervasive. And then you get to dragnet surveillance and abuses that happen.
Morgan Sung: Dragnet surveillance is exactly what it sounds like. It’s like casting a giant net over the ocean and dragging it through the water, catching everything in its wake. It’s a practice of collecting and analyzing information on everyone, instead of targeting individuals who are suspected of crime. You can’t opt out of it, and there’s no probable cause involved. Soon after the Patriot Act passed, all Americans were being watched. Dragnet surveillance had become the norm. But many legal experts argue that dragnet surveillance violates the Fourth Amendment guaranteed right to privacy. It protects people from unreasonable searches and seizures of their property. Under the Fourth Amendment, the government can’t search everyone’s property just because they suspect one person of a crime.
Don Bell: I think dragnet surveillance is about as anathema to the constitution as you can get. You know, if the police show up to my home and they just want to come in and search about for something, you need a warrant. You need probable cause. You need a judge to give you a warrant, give you the permission to do that. But technology is this thread that changes our relationship with the constitution and amendment itself.
Morgan Sung: This may sound familiar because we just talked about a similar cycle of surveillance in the name of national security that played out during the civil rights movement. Back then, they said it was to stop communism. And it happened again, but this time they said, it was just stop terrorism.
Don Bell: You see a recurring theme, right? You see surveillance that starts out as targeted, then you see surveillance that exceeds its mandate with mission creep over the years. Then you see abuses, then you the disclosure of the abuses and this outrage that leads to change. And then you another national event that leads the process starting all over again.
Morgan Sung: What’s different about this cycle is the dragnet. Mass surveillance has become so widespread because technology has advanced exponentially faster than laws can adapt. The constitutional right to privacy has been redefined throughout American history. It’s less clear when it comes to digital privacy.
Don Bell: So you think about, you know, you don’t have telephones, but then you have telephones. Then you have the advent of the internet. Then within the internet, email. All of these things that can collect personal information and data and would be harmful to a person if they were exposed to the government or just exposed in general.
Morgan Sung: Patriotism surged in the aftermath of 9/11. Trust in the government reached historic highs, and the president’s approval rating shot up. But this 9/11 effect was short-lived. As the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq dragged on, the government failed to uncover evidence of so-called weapons of mass destruction, and public support waned. And Americans were less thrilled when the consequences of the Patriot Act became more apparent. Under the guise of anti-terrorism efforts, federal and state intelligence agencies closely surveilled peaceful anti-war protests. The NSA tapped hundreds of Americans’ phones and monitored their international calls.
And the Patriot Act gave the FBI the authority to collect any record that could be relevant to a terrorism investigation, like papers, documents, or books. Under this part of the Patriot Act, The FBI demanded that libraries hand over their patrons’ borrowing records. That became known as the library provision, and civil liberties organizations questioned whether it would be used to suppress speech.
In the early 2000s, people were horrified at the idea of the NSA intercepting and reading emails. But a decade later, Americans were quickly adapting to smartphones and social media, which are treasure troves of personal data. We were checking in on Foursquare, using traceable hashtags on Twitter, and making all of our social connections publicly known on Facebook. We posted all about our personal lives on Instagram and Snapchat and Tumblr. You could trace someone’s entire day with one good scroll. The majority of Americans freely gave up this personal information without knowing the consequences of it.
Back in the day, the FBI had to hire informants to bug Dr. King’s phone figure out who his associates were and where they were located. With social media and smartphones, we were doing the work for them. But the full extent of post-9/11 dragnet surveillance wasn’t publicly known until 2013, when 29-year-old defense contractor Edward Snowden leaked proof of the NSA’s activities.
Linda Wertheimer: Just one day after we learned that the National Security Agency has been secretly collecting telephone records from millions of Americans, it’s been revealed that the agency is also running a massive internet surveillance program.
Morgan Sung: Snowden’s leaks not only confirmed the existence and scale of the government’s mass surveillance programs, but also proved that surveillance under the Obama administration had actually expanded. The leaks revealed that the government wasn’t just spying on suspects, it was spying on everyone, even working with foreign intelligence agencies to do so. Here’s Edward Snowden speaking to The Guardian days after the leak.
Edward Snowden: Originally, we saw that focus very narrowly tailored as foreign intelligence gathered overseas. Now, increasingly, we see that it’s happening domestically. And to do that, they, the NSA specifically, targets the communications of everyone.
Morgan Sung: Don Bell was a law student at the time, and he says that he was absolutely horrified learning this information.
Don Bell: I don’t think Americans were aware of what was happening at the time, but I think that’s partly because technology was changing so quickly that the law hadn’t kept up in ensuring that Fourth Amendment protections were going to be followed by intelligence agencies that were pushing the boundaries of the law because they were working with technologies that previously weren’t even feasible.
Morgan Sung: The cycle that Dawn mentioned earlier, it played out again following the NSA leaks. Disclosure led to outrage and outrage led to change. In 2015, the USA Freedom Act was signed into law by President Barack Obama, revising the Patriot Act and curbing the NSA’s data collection.
Barack Obama: The USA Freedom Act also accomplishes something I called for a year and a half ago. It ends the bulk metadata program, the bulk collection of phone records, as it currently exists, and puts in place new reforms. The government will no longer hold these records.
Morgan Sung: Three years later, the Supreme Court ruled that the government had violated Fourth Amendment rights by obtaining cell phone location data without a warrant. The court’s ruling on the case, Carpenter v. United States, established that people still have the right to privacy when it comes to their data, even if they voluntarily share that data with a third party, like their cell phone provider. The government can’t go to a phone company and demand a person’s location data without a warrant now. That was seven years ago. Clearly, that decision did not stop digital policing. Intelligence and law enforcement agencies are still collecting unprecedented amounts of data on Americans. And these days, it’s basically impossible to opt out.
Don Bell: And today I think we’re in an even more dangerous era because there are so many technological devices that collect information on us that is highly sensitive, highly personal, and in an increasingly technology-based world, it’s necessary for us to use those devices to fully function in society.
Morgan Sung: It seems like dragnet surveillance is actually more pervasive than ever before. So what happened, or didn’t happen, to get to this point? And how is this new era of surveillance different from previous ones throughout history?
That’s a new tab, which we’ll get into in our next episode, where we’ll dive into cutting edge surveillance tactics and how they’re used to target political speech. So we’re actually leaving these tabs open for now.
On the next episode of Close All Tabs:
Nicol Turner Lee: My mother used to say this all the time, “If you’re not in the kitchen, you’re on the menu.” So we are all on the menu, even though we think we live in a society where there’s some level of privacy maybe in the context of our living rooms. In actuality, when you leave your home and you walk out that door, you are actually in a surveillance capitalist society.
Morgan Sung: Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios and is reported and hosted by me, Morgan Sung. Our producer is Maya Cueva. Chris Egusa is our senior editor. Jen Chien is KQED’s director of podcasts and helps edit the show. Alan Montecillo edited this episode. Sound design by Maya Cueva. Original music by Chris Egusa. Additional music by APM. Mixing and mastering by Brendan Willard and Katherine Monahan.
Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad and Alana Walker. Katie Sprenger is our podcast operations manager and Holly Kernan is our chief content officer. Support for this program comes from Birong Hu and supporters of the KQED Studios Fund. Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco, Northern California Local.
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