Eyes Everywhere, But What Do They See?

Ten years ago Edward Snowden revealed the United States government is always listening through every microphone, monitoring every computer, and peering through every camera connected to the internet. A decade on, that surveillance has only deepened as tech companies have added cameras, microphones, and other surveillance tools to our doorbells, televisions, speakers, even our cars – eyes everywhere consuming every detail they can to be added to the vast data hoards of not only the police state but marketers as well. Our every move and desire captured by the phones we always have in our hands and the technology we interact with every day, all sorted and categorized by people in the global south for pennies a day and combed through by algorithms to predict what we want to buy, who we want to date, and what crimes we might commit. 

Surveillance is baked into the technology we use. From cell phones to doorbells to the checkout line at the grocery store – the future means being watched by digital eyes everywhere we go. A study of over 20,000 computer vision research papers and downstream patents found that “the vast majority of computer vision research leads to technology that surveils human beings.”

One very common way that surveillance has been infiltrating our neighborhoods in recent years is through Ring cameras and similar video doorbells. These relatively inexpensive devices claim to make neighborhoods safer with their always online video streams but they are a privacy nightmare. Not only do police have full access to the video feeds at any time, but Ring employees can also access the video feeds whenever they want to take a peek into your life. On top of all that, this “Landlord Tech” is used by property owners to police tenants and target unhoused neighbors and racialized tenants. 

Rather than protect people, these cameras make neighbors more suspicious of each other and encourage tenants to police each other’s behavior. The “Neighbors” app that is used to monitor installed Ring cameras highlights “crime data” from police and encourages people to snitch on each other. The similar “Nextdoor” app is filled with pictures from people’s cameras telling people to “watch out for suspicious people” that are clearly door to door salespeople or just neighbors that are just going about their business. It’s incredibly common for people to use these devices to surveil and harass racialized neighbors.

It is important to note that this problem is not only with Amazon’s Ring cameras, but with these types of surveillance cameras in general. Many, if not most, of the companies who make competing versions (such as Google Nest, Eufy, Logitech, etc.) also have agreements with police to provide photos and images on demand. Police have the power to violate your privacy at will any time you’re in public and now many are inviting them right into their homes and private lives with these cameras. A huge expansion of the surveillance state, even on top of all the violations by the NSA and CIA that Edward Snowden exposed. 

Many of these cameras also offer facial recognition as “convenience” add ons. To work, these either send the facial data to the companies for processing in the cloud, or they process the data locally. While it’s obviously concerning to send your facial scans to a corporation like Google, storing the data locally is also a major concern. Whether your data is held by corporations, or locally on the camera; police can subpoena your data, hackers can gain access, and the companies can review it without your knowledge. 

Not only can the police gain access to every doorbell camera, but they also have access to the cameras on food delivery robots and are eager to access the data collected by the self driving taxis that are flooding our streets. Remotely piloted food delivery drones swarm the ASU tempe campus. These drones are piloted by underpaid people and the cameras they use to see their paths record everything. The companies that own these drones are all too happy to send the footage to cops. Serve Robotics in Los Angeles sent footage to LAPD in a case where two individuals attempted to steal one of these drones - leading to their arrest and conviction.  

Beyond robo-taxis and food delivery drones, the eyes of surveillance are used to enforce settler colonialism around the globe. Facial recognition technologies have been created and tested in the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip concentration camp where Palestinians are tracked by facial recognition to limit where they can go and flag them to be kidnapped and imprisoned by the fascist Israeli occupiers. Facial recognition, hacking, drones, spyware, and covert phone monitoring software are used to enforce apartheid rule and then sold to governments and companies around the world who use them to monitor and track activists, journalists, and dissidents among other things. 

And we must be aware that the zionist entity’s surveillance technology is exported throughout the world to monitor and oppress occupied people the world over. Here in Arizona, the Tohono O’odham Nation in occupied O’odham Jewed is divided by america’s border wall - a structure made up of not only a physical wall, but also surveillance tech like cameras and drones, used to halt the free movement of the O’odham people. 

In March 2019, the Tohono O’odham Legislative Council approved a contract with israeli weapons and surveillance manufacturer Elbit Systems to build 10 integrated fixed towers (IFTs) on tribal territory - prompting tribal member Amy Juan to say that this would make the Nation “the most militarized community in the United States of America.” These towers were developed and tested by Elbit in the occupied West Bank of Palestine to terrorize Palestinians with “constant buzzing sounds” and watch their every move as they try to live under the brutal occupation. 

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) decades long project is to recreate the zionist entity’s high tech surveillance net of towers, motion sensors, cameras, radar, aerial surveillance, and observation posts on Tribal territory and the borderlands at large. Tohono O’odham Nation Chairman Edward Manuel stated before a UN hearing that the reservation had become a “military state” between 9/11 and 2009, when he returned to the Nation after living away for 6 years. 

Border Patrol’s jurisdiction covers the entirety of their Tribal lands and have used their authority to place surveillance cameras and trucks in burial grounds and sacred saguaro forests and to build checkpoints at every exit from the reservation. Amy Juan said this causes “checkpoint trauma” as people are forced to deal with armed guards, dogs, and cameras in order to go about their daily lives, particularly terrorizing children.  Agents have been accused of pulling people out of cars during inspections, tailing cars, pepper spraying people, beating people with batons, and entering homes without warrants. Agents shot and injured two men after they accidentally sideswiped a border patrol truck and another ran over and killed a teenager. This trauma extends far beyond the checkpoints as Tribal Member Joseph Flores stated there is a feeling of being “watched all the time,” and another member, Joshua Garcia stated, “I’ve gotten flat tires, then when I come to the checkpoint the agents made comments about me having a flat earlier in the day. I felt like they were trying to intimidate me.”

Border Patrol's creation of the “virtual border wall” dates back to 2006 with an ultimately canceled contract with Boeing Company to build 80 foot surveillance towers in a project called SBInet. When this was canceled in 2011 CPB launched the 2011 Arizona Border Surveillance and Technology Plan to seek technology that already existed. This led to a contract with Elbit in 2014 to build 53 IFTs. In These Times describes them, “The IFT system has high-definition cameras with night vision and a 7.5-mile radius, along with thermal sensors and a 360-degree ground-sweeping radar. The data feeds into command centers where agents are alerted if any of thousands of motion sensors are tripped.” CPB has also contracted with General Dynamics, FLIR Systems and Telephonics, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and KBR to create surveillance technology to build their “virtual wall.” 

Another major tech surveillance company, Palantir – funded by a right wing white supremacist billionaire and funded by the CIA, creates tools for police and governments to categorize people and “predict” how likely they are to commit crimes in the future – this is nothing more than race science, a body of racist theories and ideas spanning hundreds of years claiming to use science to “prove” that white people are smarter and less likely to commit crimes than racialized people. Palantir sells technology used to track undocumented people so that ICE can round them up and put them in camps for deportation. 

We know that police and landlords go hand in hand. They collaborate to control our lives in our most intimate setting, the home. They both work tirelessly to reinforce the foundational American principle that private property is more sacred than life. We must also recognize surveillance capitalism as another form of policing encroaching ever further into our daily lives. A world without landlords, without police, and without the controlling eyes of the settler empire.