Peep Show
When you catch the subway, many of your personal details, including banking information and location, are collected and entered into a database. Walk around the city and you’re being recorded by thousands of cameras. Drive into the city “and traffic cameras will automatically photograph your car, capturing your vehicle’s license plate, make, model, color, distinctive markings and even passengers.” Post on social media and your views, friends, thoughts, and plans can be scraped. This isn’t some far of place. This is in New York City (and other cities and towns across America). So, what’s the problem? As long as I don’t commit a crime, isn’t all this surveillance just protecting me? Well, that depends who you are: “Take a teenager living in the Marcy Houses, a public housing complex in Brooklyn. Simply because of where he lives, if he posts photos with certain classmates or if he tries out certain hashtags, he might be added to the N.Y.P.D.’s gang database, which contains active entries for more than 13,000 people, 99 percent of whom are people of color…Even if there is no suspicion that this particular young man has engaged in any crime, his presence on that database exposes him to a level of monitoring previously reserved for intensive undercover operations targeting organized crime.” OK, but I’m not a teen living in public housing, so do I really need to worry? Elizabeth Daniel Vasquez explains why this kind of surveillance is a big deal for everyone. The N.Y.P.D. Is Teaching America How to Track Everyone Every Day Forever. Here’s one example you may not have considered. “Today, abortion is legal in New York. But in many states it is not, and some of them are actively considering whether to criminalize out-of-state travel for abortion-related care. No current laws would prevent the federal government from demanding access to the N.Y.P.D.’s data or stop the department from granting it. The system could quickly identify out-of-state cars and people who visit or have visited Planned Parenthood. Dossiers could easily be generated for each person and then expanded to include information about their travel, social networks, habits and beliefs. From there, it would be easy to create a watch list targeting suspects for further monitoring, stops, questioning and property seizures. That may seem improbable today. Will it seem that way tomorrow?” (A few days ago, it seemed improbable that a US administration would target individuals and groups that may have different political opinions about a recently killed activist. Today, it’s all but certain.)
