The Racial Reality That Makes Online ‘Security’ Bills So Scary - COLORLINES

22.4.12

The Racial Reality That Makes Online ‘Security’ Bills So Scary - COLORLINES: Communities of color, immigrant communities and the poor suffer first and most often from government surveillance, and from surveillance on the job. Marginalized people have always relied on private social spaces where folks can vent, discuss, share ideas, and support each other, and now many of those spaces are mediated by digital technology.

Those communities are especially vulnerable if government is invited into private social spaces, because these communities are not treated as if they have inalienable rights, but instead conditional rights to housing, to raise their own children, to bodily autonomy, to life itself. Even Medic Alert surveillance, when it involved the police, ended with police shooting a Kenneth Chamberlain dead in his own home! Giving the government more rights and abilities to eavesdrop and profile simply makes that kind of thing more likely, I’m afraid. And it could lead to less dramatic but serious things like credit ratings, health insurance, access to affordable housing, all thing we can lose based on being profiled.