Surveillance requires a racialized threatening body to justify its existence

Evidence

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. — Saher Selod, Forever Suspect_ Racialized…, 26

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines surveillance as observation of ‘deemed suspicious’ behavior — the working definition underpinning the whole book.
• XREF: The ‘surveillance has become big business’ point connects to the reading list items on COINTELPRO and the surveillance-industrial complex (Beydoun, Sian, Bazian).