Resisting Surveillance
In light of the history of police surveillance of our bookstore, we're offering our community some reading suggestions on digital media activism against state efforts to monitor, infiltrate, and disrupt dissent. This list includes history, theory, and how-to!
Chris Robé offers the first in-depth study of how communities and activist organizations are resisting surveillance and repression by integrating digital media activism into their actions for a better world. Abolishing Surveillance analyzes the successes and failures in the battle over the digital technology and media-making practices as civil liberties, community autonomy, and the very lives of people and other-than-human animals hang in the balance.
Shoshana Zuboff provides startling insights into the phenomenon that she has named surveillance capitalism, laying bare the threats to twenty-first century society: a controlled "hive" of total connection that seduces with promises of total certainty for maximum profit—at the expense of democracy, freedom, and our human future.
Written by actor and political activist, L.M. Bogad, this script takes viewers on a satirical journey through the declassified history of COINTELPRO, a FBI counter-intelligence program to neutralize political dissidents through infiltration, surveillance, disruption, and assassination. Bogad connects this sordid history to our post-9/11 security state.
One of the 20th century's most influential philosophical texts, this book traces the evolution of power from reliance on physical violence to "gentle" disciplinary techniques. While the text does not deal with modern surveillance technologies, it provides a theoretical foundation for understanding pervasive surveillance (the "panopticon"), the internalization of discipline, and the normalization of an "unequal gaze."
Beauchamp demonstrates how the enforcement of gender conformity is linked to state surveillance practices that identify threats based on racial, gender, national, and ableist categories of difference. Going Stealth uses instances of gender surveillance to demonstrate how disciplinary power attempts to produce conformist citizens and regulate difference through discourses of security.
In Doctorow's timely and crucial work, the internationally bestselling author of Little Brother, argues that if we're to have any hope of destroying surveillance capitalism, we're going to have to destroy the monopolies that currently comprise the commercial web as we know it.
An accessible guide that breaks down the complex issues around mass surveillance and data privacy and explores the negative consequences it can have on individual citizens and their communities.
Daniel Chard shows how America's war with domestic guerrillas on the 1970s prompted a host of new policing measures as the FBI revived illegal spy techniques previously used against communists in the name of fighting terrorism. Under Nixon, FBI and White House officials developed preemptive surveillance practices that would inform U.S. counterterrorism strategies into the twenty-first century, entrenching mass surveillance as a cornerstone of the national security state.
In the US, a network of interagency intelligence centers called “fusion centers” were ostensibly set up to prevent terrorism. Author Brendan McQuade travels inside the secret world of intelligence fusion, looks beyond the apparent failure of fusion centers, and reveals a broader shift away from mass incarceration and toward a more surveillance- and police-intensive system of social regulation.
This book shows how Palestine has become the perfect laboratory for the development of unique systems of control and surveillance technology, which Israel then exports around the world. The author also developed a documentary with Al Jazeera that would can watch for free.
An examination of the profound impact that the War on Terror had in pushing American politics and society in an authoritarian direction. What began as the persecution of Muslims and immigrants has become a normalized, paranoid feature of American politics and security, expanding the possibilities for applying similar or worse measures against other targets at home.
To enforce borders, imperialist states have constructed a new digital fortress with far-reaching and ever-evolving new technologies. This pathbreaking volume exposes these insidious means of surveillance, control, and violence established through immigrant databases, digital IDs, electronic tracking systems, facial recognition software, data fusion centers, and more.