As the Twin Towers fell on September 11th of 2001, so fell the U.S. domestic citizenry’s Fourth Amendment right to search, seizure, and general privacy. Beyond the Fourth Amendment, various legal barriers put up to protect citizens’ rights through the advancement of surveillance technology throughout the twentieth century would also fall, succumbing to just one piece of legislation and its subsequent restructuring of government powers: the USA PATRIOT Act. This expansion was explained through the lens of state-of-emergency during war time. The precedence of states-of-emergency as a period when legal and bureaucratic boundaries can be crossed to serve the greater good allowed for the execution of drastic surveillance measures which would previously be confined by the boundaries of law, and to a grieving public and a government scrambling for some sense of national security, this seemed to be the appropriate course of action. But simple state-of-emergency or war-time operations cannot serve to explain the existing capacity for conducting surveillance that the U.S. government seemed to already have within their arsenal, ready to employ on a wide scale. The analysis of domestic surveillance history to follow raises a particular kind of state-of-emergency, a racial state-of-emergency. This notion involves domestic, racial groups and organizations, disenfranchised from legality through perceptions of race, that may serve as playgrounds for surveillance development outside of public scrutiny. It is through these instances, when the existence of racial hierarchies allows for the framing of the political nonconformity of certain racial groups as a valid threat to national safety, that surveillance capacity may be expanded; it is the culmination of instances which allow for surveillance institutions to possess the capability to enact a full-force surveillance state without delay or barrier.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/46884 |
| Date | 13 September 2023 |
| Creators | El-mejjasy, Taima |
| Contributors | Walton, Marcus, Palmer, Maxwell |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
| Rights | Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ |
Page generated in 0.002 seconds