Surveillance machinery built for the Cold War was repurposed against Muslim activists

Evidence

The upshot of this propaganda is that few in the media challenged the King hearings, giving credence to the notion that Muslims are in fact being “radicalized” and need to be questioned and monitored in ways similar to the “reds” in the Cold War era. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 559 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Scholars have dubbed this policing that envelops Xinjiang as “preventive repression,” and even “Big Brother” would be a severe understatement. The gaze of the state, on the daily routine of Uyghur Muslims in Kashgar, Urumqi, and cities and villages throughout Xinjiang, is ubiquitous and incessant. It exists in the form of facial recognition cameras affixed to street poles or mobile cameras in the form of “spy doves,” algorithmic vetting linked to smart cards carried by Uyghur residents, and perpetual mining and tracking of data from the very smartphones they carry everywhere they go. This digital state of subjugation “bring[s] a desperate and ferocious loneliness into everyday life, tearing apart communities, turning children against their parents. It is the engineers of these systems—the algorithm tinkerers, the face recognition designers, the DNA mappers, the ‘smart’ pedagogists” who design the dystopian laboratory of life, or what remains of it, in Xinjiang. In the camps and beyond them, Islamophobia in China is brutally engineered to destroy the Uyghur Muslim people and remove them from a land the government seeks to absorb, and remake, in the image of an atheist, Communist, and Han China. — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 625 (#complicates, via linked claim)

In the decade after 9/11, the approach to law and order in the United States changed drastically with surveillance being a necessary and supported tactic in a society hyperconcerned with preventing another terrorist attack. Surveillance is the observation and monitoring of behaviors and actions that are deemed suspicious. The domestic and international War on Terror legitimizes the political and economic need for increased surveillance, resulting in the corporatization and federalization of surveillance. In other words, surveillance has become big business in the United States, where companies profit from surveillance technologies and tools, such as maintaining databases of information on the general public and then selling them to the government for purposes of security. A surveillance society can only survive as long as there is a need to monitor and observe bodies that threaten security. The War on Terror created conditions where Muslim bodies are racialized, justifying the need for their surveillance. But surveillance does not impact Muslim men and women in the same way; rather, surveillance is gendered, highlighting how racialization is also gendered. — , Selod, Saher - Forever Suspect_…, 29 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: The internet was built by US Cold War counterinsurgency agencies — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 287; Anti-communist legal machinery was adapted wholesale to target Muslims; COINTELPRO surveillance methods were redeployed to racialize Arab Americans as terrorists — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 249 (+16 more)

Broader Connections

• Unchallenged propaganda legitimized monitoring Muslims like Cold War reds #corroborates (0.95) — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 559
• China’s surveillance apparatus envelops Uyghur Muslims through engineered digital subjugation #complicates (0.85) — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 625
• The War on Terror racialized Muslim bodies to justify their surveillance #complicates (0.80) — , Selod, Saher - Forever Suspect_…, 29
• Surveillance is reproduced horizontally as Muslims police one another too #complicates (0.75)
• Orthodox Muslim practice and dissenting politics trigger government surveillance red flags #complicates (0.75) — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 948
• Soviet promises of Muslim freedom concealed campaigns of suppression #complicates (0.75) — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 417
• The surveillance industry’s need for targets drives the racialization of Muslim bodies #complicates (0.75) — Saher Selod, Forever Suspect_ Racialized…, 458
• Anti-Muslim images were deployed against unrelated domestic targets #complicates (0.75) — Peter Gottschalk and Gabriel Greenberg, Common Heritage, Uncommon Fear, 29
• State surveillance and propaganda work in concert to produce systemic anti-Muslim racism #complicates (0.75)
• Surveillance and stigma prompted Detroit Muslims to build institutional infrastructure simultaneously #complicates (0.75)
• An unchallenged false mosque statistic legitimized McCarthy-style Muslim monitoring #complicates (0.75)
• Colonial observers repurposed Islamic architecture for surveillance purposes. #complicates (0.70) — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 109