October 18, 2015

"Targeted Surveillance, Civil Rights, and the Fight for Democracy"

On October 13th 2015, Center for Media Justice Director Malkia Cyril gave a keynote address at the Computers, Freedom and Privacy Conference.

"Today mass incarceration and mass surveillance walk hand in hand. Mass deportation and mass surveillance walk hand in hand.  Economic inequality and mass surveillance walk hand in hand. Yet, the movements built to solve these problems do not. They remain fractured."...

From a speech by Malkia Cyril, www.centerformediajustice.org
October 17th, 2015, posted on popularresistance.org

Excerpt:
..."Will we be a nation that uses the Internet to bypass existing legal protections and facilitate mass deportation? That uses sound technology to clear protestors from the streets? Uses federally funded drones to spy on Muslim American communities with neither their consent nor probable cause? Will our right to record police officers in the commission of their duties be consistently violated with threats, arrests, and illegal searches, and by the law itself in places like Texas? How much longer will the communities I speak for here today live scanned, tracked, and traced?

Cause that’s how we live today. That’s what migrant and Muslim communities are living with. That’s what Black people and all those disadvantaged by mass incarceration are living with. That’s what those working at or below the minimum wage are living with. That’s what the movement for Black lives is living with. That’s how I grew up. It’s why I am here today.  Because the Internet and the movement for civil rights and racial justice have grown up together—and privacy is not the fight we’ve been called to.

The fourth amendment, for us, is not and has never been about privacy, per se. It’s about sovereignty. It’s about power. It’s about democracy. It’s about the historic and present day overreach of governments and corporations into our lives, in order to facilitate discrimination and disadvantage for the purposes of control; for profit. Privacy, per se, is not the fight we are called to. We are called to this question of defending real democracy, not to this distinction between mass surveillance and targeted surveillance. I  know people like to claim a difference, but that’s a distinction being made for us by those who would seek to continue this notion that there are those less than human, whose rights should not prevail in a court of law, for whom the constitution should not equally apply.

But there is no true distinction.  When all or part of a society is surveilled, outside of the scope of a specific investigation and with neither transparency nor legal parameters, without protections of any kind, that is mass surveillance.  Spying on Black people who live in Bed-Stuy because we are Black and live in Bed-Stuy, Muslim communities in New York is mass surveillance. Spying on entire neighborhoods in Los Angeles because gangs exist there, is mass surveillance.  Spying on migrants in New Mexico or Arizona or Louisiana is mass surveillance. Spying on low-wage workers at McDonalds and Wal-Mart, is mass surveillance.  The time for distinction between the systems that watch you and those that watch me has long passed.

Today mass incarceration and mass surveillance walk hand in hand. Mass deportation and mass surveillance walk hand in hand.  Economic inequality and mass surveillance walk hand in hand. Yet, the movements built to solve these problems do not. They remain fractured.

Family, we have some tough decisions to make. Will the Internet and its digital derivatives be the most democratic communications system the world has ever known? Or will it be the greatest legal facilitator of inequity in the 21st century? Whether the Internet disrupts the status quo or reinforces it depends on us."...

read full speech text here