In the GOP's New Surveillance State, Everyone's a Snitch
In the GOP’s New Surveillance State, Everyone’s a SnitchFrom abortion to schools, conservatives are depending on everyday citizens to spy on one another.
It was a cold, blustery weekend in February when Neesha Davé opened the door to her Austin, Texas, home and found a process server standing on her front step. She felt sympathy for the woman waiting in the morning wind and rain, even after she awkwardly handed Davé a 30-page document they both knew was bad news. For months, Davé had prepared for the possibility that this day might come. She read through the document, then scanned each page with her phone, and sent it to her lawyers.
The document was a request to depose Davé because, as the deputy director of Lilith Fund, she helps pregnant people in Texas obtain abortions. Beginning on September 1, 2021, abortions after about six weeks of pregnancy were banned in Texas under a law known as Senate Bill 8, or SB8. At the time, abortions in roughly the first half of pregnancy were a constitutionally protected right under Roe v. Wade. SB8 sought to outflank Roe by placing the task of enforcing its ban on individuals rather than the state of Texas. Under the new law, any individual can sue anyone they suspect of helping a pregnant person get an abortion in Texas after six weeks, for a minimum of $10,000 in damages. This vigilante scheme was meant to stop SB8 from being overturned by courts, despite its blatant violation of Roe; if the state can’t enforce its abortion ban, the law’s proponents argue, then a court can’t order them not to enforce it, either.
As Davé stared down at the document she’d just been handed, she got angry. This stranger who had just appeared on her doorstep was a warning that the other side had done their research on her—and they wanted her to know it. “The only reason that they would hire a process server to serve me at my home is because they wanted to use fear and intimidation as a tactic,” she says. They could have sent the packet to her lawyers. But they didn’t. This is part of the menace of Senate Bill 8: It is not only an end-run around the right to abortion, but also a weapon of fear and surveillance. Everyone must be on their guard. Everyone is being watched.
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Texas’s Jonathan Mitchell devised SB8’s surveillance mechanism to push through an abortion ban that would evade the courts. But that does not explain why vigilante enforcement quickly metastasized to bills that do not target abortion. SB8 was foremost a strategy to run around Roe v. Wade. So then why apply this model to target LGBTQ children, trans athletes, or teachers trying to inform their students about the legacy of slavery? These communities have never had a Roe v. Wade equivalent: a ruling that explicitly protects their freedoms. Republican lawmakers do not need to bypass the courts in order to enact their agenda against these groups.
The fact that lawmakers have repeatedly chosen to include this mechanism anyway points to vigilante laws’ more sweeping purpose. In a forthcoming Cornell Law Review article, Michaels and Noll argue that by deputizing the faithful of the conservative movement to attack the communities they dislike, these laws not only control and marginalize, but also realign power in American society. Rather than protect minority rights, the courts become a tool of mob rule, the sheltering protection of the law shrinks, and the social fabric of democracy gives way to surveillance and fear. These laws “draw upon and reinforce anti-democratic and authoritarian tendencies that are central to Trumpist politics,” they write.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/07/in-the-gops-new-surveillance-state-everyones-a-snitch/
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After WWII East Germany set up a State Security Service (Stasi) modeled after the SSR’s KGB.
“One of the Stasi's main tasks was spying on the population, primarily through a vast network of citizens-turned-informants, and fighting any opposition by overt and covert measures, including hidden psychological destruction of dissidents (Zersetzung, literally meaning "decomposition"
. It arrested 250,000 people as political prisoners during its existence.[9] Its Main Directorate for Reconnaissance (Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung) was responsible both for espionage and for conducting covert operations in foreign countries. Under its long-time head Markus Wolf, this directorate gained a reputation as one of the most effective intelligence agencies of the Cold War. The Stasi also maintained contacts, and occasionally cooperated, with West German terrorists.” From Wikipedia
The only way Republicans can enforce the abortion and LGBTQ laws they’re passing is with a similar police state where private citizens snitch on women and LGBTQ. For example, the people who work at the extremist Christian crisis pregnancy centers already share with government officials the private information on unsuspecting women who go there looking for abortion information. Because they are not a medical facility, they are not subject to HIPAA laws.
Given freedom of travel in this country, the only way a state can prevent pregnant women from traveling to another state for an abortion is through surveillance or through fear of prosecution if a friend or co-worker r crisis pregnancy center employee reports them to the state. The mainstream media needs to be doing their job and reporting on how this surveillance is a feature of police states, not a democracy.
