The Surveillance State and You
Citizenfour is about surveillance. But its also about what surveillance does to you. How does authority's gaze change us? In a world where every keystoke is potentially watched, and every heartbeat potentially counted, does knowledge of that change how you act? Will you still allow yourself to question? How can you organize against power when you live entirely in its sight?
While Snowden's NSA revelations are most associated with the internet, "online surveillance" is a bit of a misnomer. The web long ago bled into meatspace. A CCTV camera could easily capture your face, then link that up to your Facebook profile, your purchases, your friends. You shed data like strands of hair. You're both made up of data and more than the sum of it, like DNA.
Critics sometimes chide the American anti-surveillance movement for the whiteness and maleness of its public faces. While women and people of color have done brilliant, under-recognized work against surveillance, this perception might be no coincidence: White men are the last people in America who thought they had privacy.
"Invasive spying and government surveillance in the name of fighting terrorism is hardly news for Arab and Muslim-American communities," wrote Anna Lekas Miller in the Guardian last year when Snowden's leaks went public. Since 9/11, the US government has flooded Muslim communities with informants. FBI and NYPD plants haunted mosques and bookshops, sometimes trying to pressure innocent men into making plans, or even expressing sentiments, that could get them charged with terrorism.
The history of black people in this country is one of even more intimate-and bloody-state intrusions. Think of the FBI infiltrating black power groups, of the government blackmailing MLK. America's prison system disproportionately cages the black and brown, capturing not just the incarcerated, but their families, in its nets. Those visiting loved ones at Rikers must submit to fingerprinting, lift up their tongues and shake out their bras in front of a prison guard. Outside the cages, this lack of privacy is reinforced by police who grope and question black youth just for walking-is it any wonder that young men in these communities are finely attuned to the movements and whims of the police? That they internalize a fear of authority that's proven expert at wielding fear as a tool.
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