Mass state surveillance laws target white citizens and Muslims with unequal public scrutiny

Evidence

In 2014, journalists Glenn Greenwald and Murtaza Hussain showed that the specific targets of National Security Agency surveillance were prominent Muslim Americans who had been put under surveillance despite there being no reasonable grounds for suspicion about criminal activity. Investigative journalists Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Devereaux demonstrated that the number of people on the National Counterterrorism Center’s no-fly list had increased tenfold to 47,000 in the Obama era. The leaked documents revealed that the center maintained a database of terrorism suspects worldwide, the “Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment.” In 2013, it had a million names, twice the number from four years prior. The database included more than 20,000 people within the United States who were disproportionately concentrated in Dearborn, Michigan, with its significant Arab American population. These stories about the targeting of Muslims and Arab Americans did not get the same attention as the initial Snowden revelations. This flows from a perception that while it is correct to object to the US government collecting private data on “ordinary” (read white) people, the racialized Muslim is a legitimate target of surveillance. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 570

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The asymmetry of moral outrage over the same surveillance practice, keyed entirely to who the target is (white citizen vs racialized Muslim), is a strikingly dense observation about how civil-liberties norms are themselves racialized.
• XREF: Feeds the reader’s MOC thread: the same apparatus (NSA mass surveillance) is read differently depending on the standing apparatus’s target — a datum for the content-agnosticism question. — connects to: Mass surveillance of whites provoked outrage that surveillance of Muslims did not; State policies and individual citizen actions jointly maintain Muslims’ racialized surveillance — Saher Selod, Forever Suspect_ Racialized…, 63; State surveillance jointly documents citizens and is justified by racialized religious identity — Saher Selod, Forever Suspect_ Racialized…, 344 (+15 more)

Broader Connections

• Mass surveillance of whites provoked outrage that surveillance of Muslims did not #complicates (0.95)
• State policies and individual citizen actions jointly maintain Muslims’ racialized surveillance #expands (0.90) — Saher Selod, Forever Suspect_ Racialized…, 63
• State surveillance jointly documents citizens and is justified by racialized religious identity #expands (0.85) — Saher Selod, Forever Suspect_ Racialized…, 344
• Racialized surveillance itself strips Muslims of substantive citizenship #expands (0.85) — , Selod, Saher - Forever Suspect_…, 658
• Racializing Muslims as threats sustains a surveillance state with gendered effects #expands (0.85)
• Racialized religious signifiers trigger hostile surveillance interactions with state and citizens #expands (0.85) — , Selod, Saher - Forever Suspect_…, 650
• Unequal media coverage of surveillance stems from public legitimacy granted to Muslim targeting #corroborates (0.85)
• Surveillance justified by religious identity constitutes racialization of Muslims #expands (0.85)
• State surveillance escalates with how visibly Muslim a person is #expands (0.85) — Khaled A. Beydoun, American Islamophobia_ Understanding…, 380
• Orthodox Muslim practice and dissenting politics trigger government surveillance red flags #expands (0.85) — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 948
• Surveillance targets a Muslim name, not religious belief, making it racial discrimination #expands (0.85)
• Racialized group surveillance weakens democracy and expands state power #expands (0.85) — Saher Selod, Forever Suspect_ Racialized…, 485
• Surveillance registration programs racialize Arabs and Muslims by codifying essentialized categories #expands (0.85) — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 552
• Surveillance targets Muslims while ignoring white supremacist militias #contradicts (0.80) — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 487
• The surveillance industry’s need for targets drives the racialization of Muslim bodies #expands (0.80) — Saher Selod, Forever Suspect_ Racialized…, 458