By ERWIN FREED

“The idea is to get all the information on the total population so that law enforcement can identify the small active minority and keep them separated from the passive majority. Then, second, to target that small minority, in order to eliminate the insurgency – and, third, at the same time, to work on the general population and win their hearts and minds. When those mechanisms begin to be used at home, they constitute a new mode of governing that works on the entire domestic population.” – Bernard E. Harcourt

All over the United States, grassroots opposition is growing against expanding mass surveillance, data center construction, and the ongoing crackdowns on immigrants and democratic rights. Technologies like Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs) face opposition in town and city halls around the country. Community members from all walks of life are organizing networks to raise awareness about ICE activities in their neighborhoods. After a year of ICE and CBP violently occupying and terrorizing working-class communities from coast to coast, the call to “abolish ICE” is being raised by even some mainstream Democratic Party politicians.

What is DHS? What is “counter-insurgency”?

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was formed in 2003 with support from virtually all politicians. Publicly, lawmakers and big business representatives argued that the 9/11 attacks were made possible due to the lack of coordination between local police, military, and intelligence agencies. In reality, the U.S. ruling class was putting in practice longstanding plans to form a national political police force under the guise of fighting “terrorism” and “criminal immigrants.” Bush declared a “state of emergency” immediately after the attacks, effectively suspending constitutional rights. Preceding presidents quietly renew this declaration annually.

As we have previously pointed out, the organizational structure of DHS and its network of “state-run” fusion centers is functionally the same as the CIA’s “Phoenix Program.” The Phoenix Program integrated local policing and U.S. military and intelligence operations from the town to country levels in occupied Vietnam. Vietnam became the testing ground for political policing techniques and repressive methods that would quickly “come home.”

In particular, U.S. imperialism’s planners shifted to “counter-insurgency” as their chosen framework for maintaining class rule and U.S. dominance around the globe. The basic idea of counter-insurgency is that political organizing by oppressed and working class communities is inherently dangerous to the social order. Police and military must identify the “radical minority” and isolate them from the otherwise passive masses. The doctrine of counter-insurgency comes from flipping Mao’s strategy of guerilla war on its head.

Reeling from the Black liberation, antiwar, American Indian, Queer, women, and other social movements, representatives of big business developed plans like the “Garden Plot” to quickly detain “minorities” and supporters of social justice in the case of a “national emergency.” In 1968, the U.S. Army laid out local conditions to identify where to prepare for shutting down democratic rights and implementing military rule domestically.

The conditions for a particular city that the Army documented included: “Population by race … percentage and distribution of the minorities population … Presence of large ‘blue collar’ neighborhoods… Presence of poor economic and sociological conditions, and their reflections in crime rates … Unemployment rate in the area, and sections of concentrated unemployment … Presence and degree of activity of militant racial, leftist (anti-war and anti-draft), and extreme right-wing groups, and an assessment of the capabilities of these groups to provoke disturbances …  Assessment of known and probable demonstrations … Existence of wide-spread sense of injustice and real or imagined lack of means of redress…”

To facilitate collecting these records, the military intelligence units, FBI, CIA, and virtually every urban police department seeded undercover agents and paid informants into community organizations of all types, with particular emphasis on grassroots groups on the left and among oppressed people. Democratic and Republican administrations used “Great Society” programs to push video surveillance and police “community centers” in public housing projects. They also utilized ARPAnet, the direct precursor to the modern-day internet, to keep and share databases of hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens and residents.

Punch-card databases had been in use by imperialist powers for decades. The Nazis famously used IBM systems to track, detain, and execute Jews, disabled people, LGBT+ people, Romanis, and other Holocaust victims. However, ARPAnet and related technological advances allowed police and intelligence agencies to utilize a qualitatively higher level of integration to maintain detailed information on large swaths of the population.

Counter-insurgency methods necessitate collecting huge amounts of information on the population in order to identify areas that may become favorable to oppositional social movements. Once identified, the goal becomes to remove potential social movement leaders by any means necessary. A nominal element of counter-insurgency is to win the “hearts and minds” of the passive parts of the community through development programs and various forms of propaganda meant to discredit political activity outside of “regular” channels. Internationally, this looks like the pallets of millions of dollars delivered to the CIA’s favored collaborators in Iraq and Afghanistan. Domestically, “oppositional” candidates within the Democratic and Republican parties make promises for “real reform” as the repressive apparatus expands in response to “terror plots” and “gang violence.”

DHS is the highest expression both ideologically and organizationally (so far) of these various trends. Despite bourgeois propaganda, there are no regulations on political policing in the United States beyond the ruling class’s strategic analysis in a given moment. The National Security Agency, FBI, CIA all have operatives in police departments around the country. Local cops kill over 1300 people every year. Prisons and jails hold hundreds of thousands with virtually no due process, not to mention ICE’s privatized system of concentration camps.

What is unique about DHS is that the agency, more than any other, directly and explicitly pushes the expansion of policing powers with no pretext of democratic rights. While the CIA and FBI operate in the shadows and local police posture as simply maintaining community order, DHS, particularly ICE and Border Patrol, is openly present in communities all around the country. Part of the propaganda role of DHS is to normalize an explicitly political and racist police force in our communities. The other side, more hidden, has been to fully centralize and restructure all policing around “total information awareness.”

Every other agency appears separate and atomized, from the NSA’s partnership with corporations known as “PRISM” to the CIA’s construction of NYPD’s Bureaus of Intelligence and Counterterrorism, creating confusion about if these programs are working together. DHS, through fusion centers and other methods of centralization, connects these disparate programs to each other and integrates them into “national emergency” planning.

Scope of surveillance

Every struggle against capitalist surveillance is important and a potential starting-point for larger and more politically conscious mobilizations. Opposition to ALPRs is the most visible manifestation against corporate/state surveillance in our current moment. In particular, the Flock company has perhaps become a symbol for the Trump regime as a whole. Flock’s largest funders include the “PayPal Mafia”-aligned Andreessen Horowitz and Founders Fund, and the company is a regular donor to the International Association of Chiefs of Police and other powerful police associations. Dozens of cities have canceled their contracts with Flock due to organic mobilizations at town and city halls.

ALPRs are a helpful hook for organizing locally against police surveillance. Their privatized database systems expose how local police activity is inseparable from the larger system of nationwide public-private mass surveillance. ALPRs are rife with abuse by local police, in particular in stalking women, as well as a tool of skirting around regulations meant to separate immigration enforcement from local police systems. Flock’s SignalTrace program tracks not only license plates but all electronics in a given vehicle. On the whole, ALPRs function as an easily understood stand-in for the mass surveillance regime of U.S. imperialism.

At the same time, a single-minded focus on ALPRs can limit the movement’s comprehension of the whole system, as well as depoliticize the fight against surveillance. The organic tendency, in particular among white middle class activists, is to see ALPRs as a “new” authoritarian program that curtails individual privacy and freedom. In this conception, ending police and private use of ALPRs, or requiring more strict warrants to access the underlying data, would affirm the basic democratic principles of the U.S. Constitution and bring society back to an earlier period without mass surveillance.

In reality, ALPRs are just one element of the U.S. ruling class’s ongoing build-out of “total information awareness.” The NSA copies and retains virtually all information shared on the internet. Almost any device within the “internet of things,” from TVs to refrigerators, can be accessed and turned into a microphone by the CIA. Social media and apps are often directly linked in to police surveillance networks, and even when not linked in, leave trails of metadata that can easily be bought on the open market.

The NSA is said to use its massive data center in Utah to construct virtual representations of all of us using the data accumulated through all of these mechanisms, which can be used to run hyper-realistic  simulations of various catastrophic scenarios. Customs and Border Protection maintains a fleet of Reaper Drones that are accessible on loan to local police departments, who have used them to surveil Black Lives Matter protests. An unknown number of U.S.-based law enforcement entities use Wide-Area Motion Imagery technologies capable of taking high-resolution, detailed live video of entire cities.

Over 10 years ago, reporter Trevor Aaronson estimated that the FBI maintained a network of 30,000-45,000 paid informants, mostly off the books. That is just one agency among many, all of whom use informants to do their dirty work and give plausible deniability to overt racism, political policing, and criminal activity.

Informant networks of this size are made possible in part by the massive number of prisoners in the United States. In 2023, around 5.6 million people were under supervision of adult correctional systems, split by about two-thirds in supervised release (3.77 million) and one-third in prisons or jails (1.85 million). According to Department of Corrections statistical analysis, this is 2.1% of the total adult population. Prisons, jails, and post-release systems of surveillance are areas of experimentation and refinement for mass surveillance generally.

The U.S. public very rarely gets a glimpse into the full workings of all these systems, in particular the combination of (in military jargon) human, signal, and open source intelligence. Due to ruling-class disinformation efforts that range from popular television shows to mainstream news reports, mass surveillance is often understood as a necessary evil to fight criminals and terrorists. When part of the system is deemed abusive or corrupt, it is separated from the larger system and the class structure that it protects. Movements against mass surveillance, no matter the particular context, cannot fall for these traps.

The real “war on terror” is the U.S. and its allies’ war on colonized countries and peoples. The “war on drugs” is a screen for protecting certain drug production and trafficking operators and routes at the expense of others while “justifying” expanding police surveillance and coordination with intelligence agencies. A recent Associated Press investigative series detailed how the DEA allowed massive amounts of fentanyl to cross the U.S. border; so far the only person to be punished in any way is the whistleblower. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of people of color are placed in gang and terrorist databases, leading to over-policing and frame-ups.

Opposing mass surveillance means opposing U.S. imperialism!

Racism, war, and occupation are the lifeblood of mass surveillance. The current regime in the United States is due in no small part to the acceptance by sections of the working and middle classes of the capitalists’ basic justification for the “Global War on Terror.” Every step consolidating new elements of the surveillance system is given as a response to threats to “the American Way of Life.” The massive rollout of ALPRs around the country can not be separated from previous passivity in the face of FBI and other police departments round-ups of Muslims, anti-protest laws and technologies, and capitalist control of social media and the “internet of things.”

Building a movement that can really push back the all-consuming role of mass surveillance means taking every opportunity to struggle against the system. It also means that the millions currently disgusted by ALPRs and their techno-capitalist backers must understand the strategy of mass surveillance within the whole policy of the U.S. ruling class. The technologies coming into clarity here have been perfected on the battlefields of Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, and the seemingly endless number of secret wars in which the U.S. is involved.

Right now, hundreds of thousands are making their opposition to ALPRs known. It is the task of everyone pushing for better “privacy” to connect these local struggles with the whole of the U.S. prison-police-war machine. There is no political appetite for this in the pro-imperialist Republican or Democratic Parties. The logic of the fight against surveillance shows that in order to really organize against MAGA attacks, for which everyone in the Democratic Party from Zohran Mamdani to Chuck Schumer are running cover, working and oppressed people need a party of their own. A fighting labor party could use its program to not only connect mass surveillance to imperialism and racism, but to also put forward a vision of workers’ control for all technological production and use—the only real solution to the capitalist surveillance state.

The post From ALPRs to PRISM, ending mass surveillance first appeared on Workers’ Voice/La Voz de los Trabajadores.

From Workers’ Voice/La Voz de los Trabajadores via This RSS Feed.