By Tactical Tech and Safa
Surveillance, monitoring, and control have been used historically and continue to be used currently under the guise of protection and security, but, as professor Hannah Zeavin explained, “[C]are is a mode that accommodates and justifies surveillance as a practice, framing it as an ethical ‘good’ or security necessity instead of a political choice.”
Tactical Tech is based in Berlin, the former capital city of international espionage. The Ministry for State Security (also referred to as the Stasi) was the state security and secret police of the former East Germany (German Democratic Republic or GDR) from 1950 until 1990. They are known as one of the most repressive police organizations to have existed. Upon the dissolution of the Stasi, thousands of protesters occupied their Berlin headquarters and prevented them from destroying their records. What survives includes nearly two million photos and so many files that if they were laid out flat, they would be more than 111 kilometers (70 miles) long.
The Stasi also conducted international operations that had lasting effects abroad. They extensively trained the former Syrian Mukhabarat (secret police) of the now fallen Assad regime, under Hafez al-Assad, “[in] methods of interrogation, infiltration, disinformation and brutal extraction of confessions were meticulously hammered into the minds of Syrian intelligence officials by senior Stasi agents.” With the fall of the GDR and the Berlin Wall, the Stasi was dissolved and East and West Germany reunified.
While Germany has taken some steps to reckon with its past, surveillance is still ever-present. German states have been using Palantir software to support population surveillance efforts since 2017. In 2021, Human Rights Watch raised concerns over two laws that were amended, which granted more surveillance powers to the federal police and intelligence services. While Germans have experienced a long and persistent history of surveillance and have gained a reputation for taking privacy issues very seriously, this perspective has changed over time. A 2017 study that surveyed over 5,000 Germans on various privacy-related topics found that “Germans consider privacy to be valuable, but at the same time, almost half of the population thinks that it is becoming less and less important in our society.”
Although the Stasi are world-famous for their surveillance and data collection, today’s law enforcement landscape is a smorgasbord of data. The Stasi versus NSA visualization, developed in 2013, shows how data collected from the two entities compares, projecting that “the NSA can store almost 1 billion times more data than the Stasi.” Using modern technologies like algorithms and access to all of the digitized data from health conditions to search queries and private chats, it is easier than ever to get not just a glimpse but a full picture into the lives of nearly anyone.
As Amnesty International reported, “[T]he Stasi archive is a timely warning of the potential consequences of unchecked surveillance. It shows how quickly a system for identifying threats evolves into a desire to know everything about everyone.” Tactical Tech’s project “The Glass Room” has explored this topic through the years, describing: “There is a growing market for technologies that promise increased control, security, and protection from harm. At the same time, they can normalize surveillance at a macro and micro level— from the shape of a child’s ear to satellite images of acres of farmland. Often, those who need the most support may have the least control over how or when their data is being used.”
The Glass Room’s “Big Mother” exhibit adapts the Big Brother imagery to a more nurturing figure — a mother — exemplifying how people can easily let their guards down when data tracking is framed as helpful and caring. This can be seen in the advertisements for tech products such as devices that help people monitor elderly relatives via an app, fertility tracking apps, and refugee and asylum-seeker biometrics registries. The US and Israel are among the world’s biggest suppliers of surveillance tech, including the US-based Palantir and Israel’s NSO group and Elbit Systems, used by governments in places like the US-Mexico border, Central America, and Europe.
The so-called ed-tech industry has been gaining traction for years, even before the COVID-19 pandemic. “Ed-tech” describes the numerous technological innovations that are marketed to schools that are purported to benefit students, teachers, and school administrators. Not all ed-tech is the same, and there are efforts to bring digitization to schools to reduce the digital divide, especially experienced in more rural and low-income areas. With that said, some of the digital tools used by school administrators have the potential to act equally as tools of surveillance. These include recording children at daycare, using AI to analyze body and eye movements during exams, and monitoring student social media.
So much monitoring is not without consequence, especially for traditionally marginalized groups. One study reported that student surveillance technologies put Black, Indigenous, Latine/x, LGBTQ+, undocumented, and low-income students, as well as students with disabilities, at higher risk. In 2023, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) interviewed teens aged 14–18 to capture the experiences of surveillance in schools. One participant reflected: “…[W]e treat kids like monsters and like criminals, then … it’s kinda like a self-fulfilling prophecy.” In 2017, the Electronic Frontier Foundation warned: “Ed tech unchecked threatens to normalize the next generation to a digital world in which users hand over data without question in return for free services, a world that is less private not just by default, but by design.” Some students and parents have pushed back, and in some cases successfully blocked certain technologies from being used in schools.
Workers are also feeling watched. From 2020 to 2022, the number of large employers who used employee monitoring tools doubled. And it isn’t only the well-known control mechanisms Amazon uses on their warehouse workers — the average office worker may also be affected. A 2023 study of 2,000 employers found that over three-quarters of them were using some form of remote work surveillance on their workers. Employers are keeping track of their employees using methods such as internet monitoring, fingerprint scanners, eye movement tracking, social media scraping, and voice analysis, among others. “We are in the midst of a shift in work and workplace relationships as significant as the Second Industrial Revolution of the late 19th and early 20th centuries,” according to the MIT Technology Review. “And new policies and protections may be necessary to correct the balance of power.”
Even cars can be turned into tools of surveillance. Getting to work and dropping off the kids at school may be taking place in a data mining automobile. In 2023, 84 percent of car brands were found to sell or share personal data with data brokers and businesses. That same year, news broke that Tesla employees had been sharing among themselves in chat rooms private camera recordings captured in customers’ cars. This didn’t happen only once or twice but many times from 2019 to 2022. The videos included nudity, crashes, and road-rage incidents; some were even “made into memes by embellishing them with amusing captions or commentary, before posting them in private group chats.” In 2024, Volkswagen was responsible for a data breach that left the precise location of hundreds of thousands of vehicles across Europe exposed online for months. In the US, researchers found that some license plate reader cameras were live-streaming video and car data online.
In early 2025, Tesla executives handed over dashcam footage to Las Vegas police to help find the person responsible (who used ChatGPT to plan the attack) for the Tesla Cybertruck that exploded outside the Trump International Hotel. While this particular case and the actions of Tesla executives were generally applauded in the media, it does raise questions about the broader issue of surveillance, the application of the law, and the limits of privacy.
Researchers noted about data tracking more broadly that “tactics and tools already used by law enforcement and immigration authorities could be adapted to track anyone seeking or even considering an abortion.” Finding more ways to document and track people can also translate into ever more menacing ways under different political administrations and in contexts that have even fewer protections for marginalized groups.
(GlobalVoices/NS)
This article is republished from GlobalVoices under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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