The Costs of War project released a new paper titled "Total Information Awareness: The High Costs of Post-9/11 U.S. Mass Surveillance," authored by postdoctoral fellow Jessica Katzenstein, which highlights the explosive expansion of mass surveillance in the United States since the 9/11 attacks.
The introduction to the paper states: "The United States has witnessed an explosive expansion of mass surveillance since the 9/11 attacks. This post-9/11 expansion has built on wartime population surveillance dating back to World War I, as well as on an even deeper history of government tracking and harassment of racial justice and labor movements, political dissidents, immigrants, and people of color. Yet it is also markedly different from what existed before, in both its technological capacities and its scale and breadth. 1960s-era FBI agents, who wiretapped residential phones and planted informants in political movements, could hardly have imagined the government’s ability to track location and usage data on the miniature computers nearly everyone now carries in their pocket. The public sphere, as well as many private homes, are replete with cameras, often accessible to both local authorities and corporations. The immigration tracking system has ballooned as well, bringing ever more intimate aspects of immigrants’ lives under the gaze of the government and private contractors. Intertwined factors such as technological advancement, the rise of social media, and longstanding racist and anti-immigrant politics have contributed profoundly to these expansions."