Close All Tabs - The Surveillance Machine, Pt 1: How We Got Here

Episode Date: May 7, 2025

The tools of high tech surveillance are increasingly all around us: security cameras in public and embedded in doorbells, location data on your phone, online ad tracking. A lot of this has become normalized, utterly mundane. But in the year since nationwide student protests for Palestine, heightened scrutiny of and retaliation against activists in the U.S. have raised new concerns. Government surveillance, particularly on social media, has grown exponentially since the massive Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, but the precedent in this country stretches much further back. In this episode, Columbia University student organizer Jalsa Drinkard shares her experience protecting other students from invasive surveillance and targeting, and Don Bell, policy counsel for The Constitution Project at the Project On Government Oversight, walks us through the long history of government surveillance in American protest movements, and why today’s moment feels different. Guests: Jalsa Drinkard, Columbia University student and an organizer for Columbia University Apartheid Divest, CUAD Don Bell, policy counsel at The Constitution Project at The Project On Government Oversight, POGO Further reading: Protest Under a Surveillance State Microscope - Don Bell, Project On Government Oversight   Surveillance & Policing Bodily Autonomy - Don Bell, Project On Government Oversight ‘Discredit, disrupt, and destroy’: FBI records acquired by the Library reveal violent surveillance of Black leaders, civil rights organizations - Virgie Hoban, Berkeley Library  How Watergate Changed America’s Intelligence Laws - Barbara Maranzani, History   ‘Panic made us vulnerable’: how 9/11 made the US surveillance state – and the Americans who fought back - Ed Pilkington, The Guardian   Read the transcript here Want to give us feedback on the series? Shoot us an email at [e-mail] You can also follow us on Instagram Credits: This episode was reported and hosted by Morgan Sung. Our Producer is Maya Cueva. This episode was edited by Alan Montecillo. Chris Egusa is our Senior Editor. Additional editing by Jen Chien. Sound design by Maya Cueva. Original music by Chris Egusa, with additional music from APM. Mixing and mastering by Brendan Willard and Katherine Monahan. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad and Alana Walker. Katie Sprenger is our Podcast Operations Manager. Holly Kernan is our Chief Content Officer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support for a key QBD podcast comes from Xfinity. Thanks to the Xfinity five-year price guarantee, your guaranteed five years of reliable Wi-Fi with our best equipment, no annual contracts, and no fees. Plus, get online in minutes with same-day Wi-Fi. Lock in your price and unlock the possibilities. Xfinity, imagine that. Restrictions apply, select plans only.

Girl, winter is so last season. And now Springs got you looking at pictures of Tate. top with hungry eyes. Your algorithm is feeding you cutoffs. You're thirsty for the sun on your shoulders. That perfect hang on the patio sundress. Those sandals you can wear all day and all night. And you've had enough of shopping from your couch. Done hoping it looks anything like the picture when you tear up on that envelope. It's time for a little in-person spring treat. It's time for a trip to Ross. Work your magic. I'm KQED. You would wake up at like 8 o'clock in the morning. They would be like bagels, people like actually making food for you. It would be students helping students.

This is Jalsa Drinkard. She's a student at Columbia University and an organizer for Columbia University apartheid divest, or quad. It's a coalition of over a hundred student organizations calling for the university to cut all ties to Israel. Last year, Jalza was part of student-led protests, which culminated in a weeks-long encampment on campus. Today, Columbia University says they will not divest from Israel and have not reached an agreement with protesters as demonstrations continue. It was really like a community space. Sometimes you'd hear like a violin playing, like, to students would bring their instruments.

I kind of just like bring joy. Students would be reading like books. Sometimes during our homework at the encampment. Quad organized the protests to push Columbia to cut financial ties with Israel, including weapons manufacturers, partnerships with Israeli universities, and the building of a new satellite campus in Tel Aviv. As security in the encampment, Jalso says she saw firsthand the surveillance and harassment

she and her fellow students experience from police and counter-protesters. We were there to keep an eye on them and remind them of our policies and our rules and de-escalate them and kind of like physically put our bodies in front of cameras. So people who were not comfortable with those high-risk actions, they would be protected. Also, at the time, there was a lot of doxying going on for people who were engaging in Palestine activism. Doxing is the act of identifying and publicizing someone's personal information, like the location of their home, to shame and harass them. In a content economy where virality can be weaponized to expose someone's personal details to millions of people in a

matter of seconds, doxing is increasingly used as an intimidation tactic to discourage political speech. It was Jal's job to protect protesters from being doxed, like stepping in to block hecklers from recording people's faces. So a lot of students who were engaging in Palestinian activism were their socials, their private information was getting archived and sent around to these different sites. And basically their stuff was being published online for people to harass them, getting them death threats, giving them sexual assault threats,

and fronting their families as well. And we've seen the real consequences of this doxing and surveillance of student organizers, particularly with Mahmoud Khalil, a Syrian-born Columbia student and lead negotiator during the protest. He was the target of a months-long harassment campaign led by pro-Israel groups, who have taken credit for identifying him and sending his location to immigration officials. He now faces deportation, even though he has a green card and he has not been charged with a crime. Just the last hour, an immigration judge in Louisiana has ruled that Columbia University grad student, Mahmoud Khalil, can be deported.

The list of student organizers, particularly international students, who have been identified, threatened, and arrested keeps growing. These doxing campaigns have been used to discourage participation since Quad began organizing the protests. During the Columbia protests last year, Jocelyn remembers the doxing trucks that drove around campus and the surrounding neighborhood. And they would have, like, slides of people's information being, like, publicized on, like, a blipping screen with, like, all the information. like their phone number, like their name, their affiliation to Columbia. It was very dystopic. Like, this was an actual act of digital violence towards our students. Jalso says that when the trucks parked near the encampments,

she and other organizers held up sheets so that others couldn't read the information being displayed on screen. Even though they were trying to protect students from being doxed, they weren't allowed to touch the trucks, so they had to hover in front of them for hours on end. even if we would like to slightly bump it like with our shoulder, we would be told like you're like liable for arrest. And it's like, um, it's a 17 year old girl. A minor information is like on a truck by a stranger. Like no one is doing anything. In the years since Columbia's encampment inspired student protests for Palestine across the country, those who participated in demonstrations continue to be targeted.

They've been identified using facial recognition software. Their social media accounts have been monitored. political speech, and they've been subjected to intense harassment, both online and in real life. Many have faced suspension or disciplinary actions. Others have been detained and faced deportation. The Trump administration is also using artificial intelligence to review international students' social media accounts and revoke their visas if they express pro-Palestinian views. Even though she's a citizen, Jalza says she's cut back on her social media use and has even used a VP. to search anything related to Palestine, out of caution of ending up on a watch list.

It is, like, terrifying to hear all these institutions talk about blackmailing students and, like, banning students. I think that, like, now because everyone is recording everything and everyone's being surveilled, basically everywhere that you say now matters more than ever, for good and for bad. This isn't happening in a vacuum. The American right to privacy has been chipped away over the last, 75 years, and with the help of rapidly advancing technology, surveillance has been woven into the social fabric of this country. Doxing would not exist if not for the culture of recording, posting, and reacting to everything on social media. But how can free speech thrive under

this level of scrutiny? And how did this become so normalized? This is close all tabs. I'm Morgan Sung, tech journalist, and your chronically online friend, here to open as many browser tabs as it takes to help you understand how the digital world affects our real lives. Let's get into it. So to get started on this deep dive, we have to go back to a time when the type of technology that we have today didn't quite exist yet. So let's open a new tab. Surveillance before the internet.

The point of surveillance is not just to identify people who may be a quote unquote threat. It's also to ensure that the status quo remains and that the opposition to the government is suppressed. Don Bell is Policy Council at the Project on Government Oversight, a nonprofit watchdog group investigating corruption and misconduct within the federal government. His focus is on surveillance issues. Surveillance, as we know, or as we kind of understand it, in the modern sense, really began during the Civil Rights Movement. Although the United States had used surveillance on its residents before, it wasn't until after World War II that the government had the technology for targeted covert monitoring. In the 1950s, as the Cold War ramped up and fear of communism swept the nation, the FBI launched Co-Intel Pro, or Counterintelligence Program, to undermine any perceived Communist Party activity within the United States.

They operated without much oversight and used that political. fear to justify violating constitutional rights to privacy and free speech. Jay Edgar Hoover, who was the director of the FBI at the time, expanded the program to surveil, discredit, and disrupt any movement that could be considered, quote-unquote, subversive to the political stability of the country. Under his leadership, the FBI illegally surveilled civil rights groups by claiming that they were infiltrated by communists. So free technology, the way.

to get a sense of what organizations were doing was infiltrating the organization. So basically having someone who was within the organization attending meetings, reporting on the activities of the people, taking notes on the people who attended, and wiretaps. An infamous case from this era is the FBI surveillance of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The FBI started keeping tabs on him in 1955, amid the Montgomery bus boycott. In 1963, during the march on Washington, Dr. King took the podium and called for an end to segregation in an iconic speech. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today.

That was a moment when the FBI identified Dr. King as a leader of the civil rights movement and put a target on his back. Jay Edgar Hoover claimed that Dr. King was a communist threat and launched a mass surveillance effort against him. He discussed Dr. King's public appearances at length in recorded phone conversations with then-presidents Lyndon B. Johnson. I just got word that Martin Luther King will give a press conference at 11 o'clock this morning in Atlanta. Now, the statement King is to make will, in a sense, condone the national result from the, in human conditions, that the Negroes are forced to exist in the country. The FBI followed him as he traveled, bugging his home and his hotel rooms.

They sent informants to spy on him. They tapped his phones and the phones of any known associates. The FBI also tried to discredit him to the press using information they collected in their extensive surveillance and went as far as blackmailing him. There are instances that have been reported where the government or agents would send him letters encouraging to kill himself.

This surveillance extended to other civil rights leaders as well. The FBI broke into their homes and searched them without warrants, and along with the CIA, intercepted the Postal Service to read and record letters between activists. If you are prominent figure you were probably surveilled by the federal government. They sent informants to infiltrate organizations like the Black Panther Party. To suppress the movement, the FBI even coordinated the assassination of one of its leaders. In 1969, the police raided a Chicago apartment in the middle of the night and opened fire on the Black Panther Party members who were sleeping inside.

Someone came into the room, started shaking the chair. They had chairman and chairman, wake up. I looked up, and I saw a bullet coming. I mean, looked like the front of the apartment from the kitchen area. They were just shoot. That was Akua and Jerry, from the documentary, murder of Fred Hampton. In the raid, law enforcement officers shot and killed Black Panther Party chairman Fred Hampton, who had been sedated by an FBI informant earlier that evening.

He was only 21. The general public didn't know about the existence of Co-Intel Pro Surveillance until 1971 when an activist group broke into FBI offices, stole dossiers, and anonymously mailed them to newspapers. Over the next few years, A string of investigations revealed a few ways that the government was spying on civilians. One of those investigations was prompted by the Watergate scandal, which revealed that President Richard Nixon's campaign broke into and bugged the Democratic National Committee's headquarters. It all began suddenly last July when an obscure former White House official named Alexander Butterfield

appeared as a surprise witness before the Senate Watergate Committee. Butterfield, are you aware of the installation of any listening devices in the Oval Office of the President. I was aware of listening devices. Yes, sir. The public outrage pushed Congress to figure out just how extensive government surveillance had become. So in 1975, the Senate Church Committee, an investigation led by Senator Frank Church, revealed shocking CIA, FBI, and NSA operations that were conducted without Congress's knowledge or approval. These included assassination attempts of foreign leaders, brainwashing experiments conducted on American citizens, and the extensive surveillance of civil rights leaders, anti-war protesters, and anyone associated with black liberation

organizations. Co-IntelPro even targeted actress Jane Fonda because she openly supported the Black Panther Party. After the final report about Co-Intel Pro was published, Frank Church went on Meet the Press and warns that any American could be surveilled. No American would have any privacy left. is the capability to monitor everything, telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter. There would be no place to hide. This investigation prompted a period of surveillance reform, including the 1978 Foreign Intelligence

Surveillance Act, or FISA. It requires federal agencies to demonstrate probable cause and obtain warrants for wiretapping into other surveillance tactics. Basically, they have to show proof of why they think a crime has been committed. It's not just a vibe check. This didn't stop surveillance, but the aftermath of the Senate Church Committee did establish some transparency and oversight of intelligence agencies. Remember, before then, there was no real system of checks and balances. These reforms held for a few decades and, to some extent, reigned in the abuses highlighted by the Church Committee. That all changed in 2001, when a devastating event ushered in a new era of domestic surveillance. Today, our fellow citizens, our way of life, our very freedom came under attack in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist acts.

So what did that mean for this brief period of surveillance reforms? We'll get to that after this break. Support for a key QBD podcast comes from Xfinity. Thanks to the Xfinity five-year price guarantee, you're guaranteed five years of reliable Wi-Fi with our best equipment, no annual contracts, and no fees. Plus, get online in minutes with same-day Wi-Fi. Lock in your price and unlock the possibilities. Xfinity, imagine that. Restrictions apply, select plans only. This episode is brought to you by Prime. Obsession is in session. And this summer, Prime Originals have everything you want. Steamy romances, irresistible love stories, and the book

to screen favorites you've already read twice. Off-campus. L. Every year after, the love hypothesis, Sterling Point, and more. Slow burns, second chances, chemistry you can feel through the screen. Your next obsession is waiting. Watch only on Prime. Okay, we're back. Let's open a new tab. Surveillance after 9-11. The country was shaken after 9-11. Americans were grieving and were terrified that it could happen again, especially in other

large cities. Mainstream news coverage flooded TVs with racist stereotypes and stoked fears of terrorists as Muslim and Brown. Well, for many Americans, the terrorist attacks brought the Islamic faith and its followers under intense scrutiny. Soon after 9-11, threatening letters laced with the deadly bacteria anthrax circulated in the mail. This exacerbated fears of terrorism and amplify the pressure on the government to do something to prevent another attack. still don't know where it came from. But the anthrax that killed two Washington postal workers seems to have the hallmarks of a sophisticated weapon

built by someone who knows how to deliver a lethal blow. You think about anthrax attacks that happen afterward, you know, there's this feeling that something needs to be done. You have, you know, the start of surveillance initially. You think it's targeted. Not really. And then over time, the mission creep expands. So when President George W. Bush declared a war on terror, most of the public accepted the sudden increase in policing and surveillance, even if it meant giving up privacy and rolling back reforms. We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.

Congress was a willing partner in the war on terror and passed the Patriot Act just six weeks after 9-11. This law authorized the government to surveil anyone in the name of national security. It allowed the government to record phone calls and access emails and text without a warrant or probable cause. It allowed secret searches of people's homes and businesses. And it made it easier for government agencies to share information, which removed a lot of privacy protections. After 9-11, I think a lot of people recognized that there were. too many information silos. In the wake of that, Congress decided to combine almost two dozen federal agencies into the Department of Homeland Security with the idea of if we have all of these

agencies working together, they will be able to share information, share intelligence, and we'll be able to stop terrorist attacks. And you see at this time an ethos of a collect it all. Muslim Americans were disproportionately targeted, and so was anyone who looked brown. Then you see the abuses, particularly among Muslim residents in America. You see the surveillance of Muslims in New York City. That's pretty pervasive. And then you get to Dragnet Surveillance and abuses that happen. Dragnet surveillance is exactly what it sounds like.

It's like casting a giant net over the ocean and dragging it through. the water, catching everything in its wake. It's a practice of collecting and analyzing information on everyone instead of targeting individuals who are suspected of crime. You can't opt out of it, and there's no probable cause involved. Soon after the Patriot Act passed, all Americans were being watched. Dragnet surveillance had become the norm. But many legal experts argue that Dragnet Surveillance violates the Fourth Amendment guaranteed right to privacy. It protects people from unreasonable searches and seizures of their property. Under the Fourth Amendment, the government can't search everyone's property just because they

suspect one person of a crime. I think Dragnet Surveillance is about as anathema to the Constitution as you can get. You know, if the police show up to my home and they just want to come in and search about for something, you need a warrant. You need probable caution. You need a judge to give you a warrant, give you the permission to do that. But technology is this thread that changes our relationship with the Constitution and the amendment itself. This may sound familiar because we just talked about a similar cycle of surveillance in the name of national security that played out during the civil rights movement. Back then, they said it was to stop communism. And it happened

again, but this time they said it was to stop terrorism. You see a recurring theme, right? You see surveillance that starts out as targeted. Then you see surveillance that exceeds its mandate with mission creep over the years. Then you see abuses. Then you see the disclosure of the abuses and this outrage that leads to change. And then you see another national event that leads to the process starting. all over again. What's different about this cycle is the dragnet. Mass surveillance has become so widespread because technology has advanced exponentially faster than laws can adapt. The constitutional right to privacy has been redefined throughout American history. It's less clear when it comes to digital

privacy. So you think about, you know, you don't have telephones, but then you have telephones. Then you have the advent of the internet. Then within the internet, then within the internet, email, all of these things that can collect personal information and data and would be harmful to a person if they were exposed to the government or just exposed in general. Patriotism surged in the aftermath of 9-11. Trust in the government reached historic highs and the president's approval rating shot up. But this 9-11 effect was short-lived. As the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq dragged on, the government

failed to uncover evidence of so-called weapons of mass destruction, and public support waned. And Americans were less thrilled when the consequences of the Patriot Act became more apparent. Under the guise of anti-terrorism efforts, federal and state intelligence agencies closely surveilled peaceful anti-war protests. The NSA tapped hundreds of Americans' phones and monitored their international calls. And the Patriot Act gave the FBI the authority to collect any record that could be relevant to a terrorism investigation, like papers, documents, or books. Under this part of the Patriot Act, the FBI demanded that libraries hand over their patrons borrowing records.

That became known as the library provision, and Civil Liberties organizations questioned whether it would be used to suppress speech. In the early 2000s, people were horrified at the idea of the NSA intercepting and reading emails. But a decade later, Americans were quickly adapting to smart. smartphones and social media, which are treasure troves of personal data. We were checking it on Foursquare, using traceable hashtags on Twitter, and making all of our social connections publicly known on Facebook. We posted all about our personal lives on Instagram and Snapchat and Tumblr. You could trace someone's entire day with one good scroll.

The majority of Americans freely gave up this personal information, without knowing the consequences of it. Back in the day, the FBI had to be a lot of the FBI had to be. to hire informants to bug Dr. King's phone, figure out who his associates were and where they were located. With social media and smartphones, we were doing the work for them. But the full extent of post-911 Dragnet surveillance wasn't publicly known until 2013, when 29-year-old defense contractor Edward Snowden leaked proof of the NSA's activities. Just one day after we learned at the National Security Agency has been secretly collecting telephone records from millions of Americans, it's been revealed that the agency is also running a massive internet surveillance program.

Snowden's leaks not only confirmed the existence and scale of the government's mass surveillance programs, but also proved that surveillance under the Obama administration had actually expanded. The leaks revealed that the government wasn't just spying on suspects. It was spying on everyone, even working with foreign institutions. intelligence agencies to do so. Here's Edward Snowden speaking to the Guardian, days after the leak. Originally, we saw that focus very narrowly tailored as foreign intelligence gathered overseas. Now increasingly, we see that it's happening domestically.

And to do that, they, DNSA specifically, targets the communications of everyone. Don Bell was a law student at the time, and he says that he was absolutely horrified learning this information. I don't think Americans were aware of what was happening at the time, but I think that's partly because technology was changing so quickly that the law hadn't kept up in ensuring that Fourth Amendment protections were going to be followed by intelligence agencies that were pushing the boundaries of the law because they were working with technologies that previously weren't even feasible. The cycle that Dawn mentioned earlier,

it played out again following the NSA leaks. Disclosure led to outrage, and outrage led to change. In 2015, the USA Freedom Act was signed into law by President Barack Obama, revising the Patriot Act and curbing the NSA's data collection. The USA Freedom Act also accomplishes something I called for a year and a half ago.

It ends the bulk metadata program, the bulk collection of phone records, as it currently exists and puts in place new reforms. The government will no longer hold these records. Three years later, the Supreme Court ruled that the government had violated Fourth Amendment rights by obtaining cell phone location data without a warrant. The court's ruling on the case, Carpenter v. United States, established that people still have the right to privacy when it comes to their data, even if they voluntarily share that data with a third party, like their cell phone provider.

The government can't go to a phone company and demand a person's location data without a warrant now. That was seven years ago. Clearly, that decision did not stop digital policing. Intelligence and law enforcement agencies are still collecting unprecedented amounts of data on Americans. And these days, it's basically impossible to opt out. And today, I think we're in an even more dangerous era because there are so many technological devices that collect information on us that is highly sensitive, highly personal. And in an increasingly technology-based world, it's necessary for us to use those devices

to fully function in society. It seems like Dragnet Surveillance is actually more pervasive than ever before. So what happened, or didn't happen, to get to this point? And how is this new era of surveillance different from previous ones throughout history. That's a new tab, which we'll get into in our next episode where we'll dive into cutting-edge surveillance tactics and how they're used to target political speech. So we're actually leaving these tabs open for now. On the next episode of Close All Tabs. My mother used to say this all the time. If you're not in the kitchen, you're on the

menu. So we are all on the menu, even though we think we live in a society where there's some level of privacy, maybe in the context of our living rooms, in actuality, when you leave your home and you walk out that door, you are actually in a surveillance capitalist society. Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios and is reported and hosted by me, Morgan Sung. Our producer is Maya Kueva. Chris Aguza is our senior editor. Jen Sheen is KQED's director of podcasts and helps edit this show. Alan Monteciliio edited this episode. Sound design by Maya Kueva.

Original music by Chris Agusa. Additional music by APM. Mixing and mastering by Brendan Willard and Catherine Monaghan. Audience engagement support from Mahasana Sanan and Alana Walker. Katie Springer is our podcast operations manager. And Holly Kernan is our chief content officer. Support for this program comes from B-Rong-Hu and supporters of the KQED Studios Fund. Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild,

American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco, Northern California, local. Keyboard sounds were recorded on my purple and pink dust silver K-84 wired mechanical keyboard with Gatoron red switches. If you have feedback or a topic you think we should cover, hit us up at close all tabs at kQED.org. Follow us on Instagram at close all tabs pod or drop it on Discord. We're in the close all tabs channel at discord.g slash KQED. And if you're in enjoying the show, give us a rating on Apple Podcasts or whatever platform you use. Thanks for listening. Support for a Key QBD Podcasts comes from Xfinity. Thanks to the Xfinity five-year price guarantee, your guaranteed five years of reliable Wi-Fi with our best equipment, no annual contracts,

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