Many people know that during World War II, innocent Americans of Japanese descent were surveilled and detained in internment camps. Fewer people know that in the wake of World War I, President Woodrow Wilson openly feared that black servicemen returning from Europe would become “the greatest medium in conveying Bolshevism to America.” Around the same time, the Military Intelligence Division created a special “Negro Subversion” section devoted to spying on black Americans. Near the top of its list was W.E.B. DuBois, a “rank Socialist” whom they tracked in Paris for fear he would “attempt to introduce socialist tendencies at the Peace Conference.”
This pattern is not limited to the past. For years after Sept. 11, the New York Police Department—with significant help from the CIA—monitored bookstores, restaurants, and nightclubs in Muslim neighborhoods and placed informants, known as “mosque crawlers,” in places of worship, where they reported on sermons and recorded the license plates of innocent congregants. (The program was notoriously ineffective, and the NYPD settled two lawsuits over this conduct earlier this month.) Other reports show that the Department of Homeland Security—an agency founded to protect against terror attacks—has been tracking Black Lives Matter activists. If you name a prominent civil rights leader of the 20th or 21st centuries, chances are strong that he or she was surveilled in the name of national security.
Every day, we hear about the power and promise of pervasive surveillance. We are losing sight of its victims.
Source: Slate