Stanford University Press Blog

The Origins of the U.S. Surveillance State

In the U.S., carrying out military interventions abroad has undermined freedom at home.

by CHRISTOPHER J. COYNE and ABIGAIL R. HALL

Photo by Jonathan McIntosh. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

The Cambridge Analytica/Facebook scandal continues to be front-page news. According to current reports Cambridge Analytica obtained private Facebook data, which it used to send pro-Trump material to targeted Facebook users. These reports have been met with outrage in Washington, D.C. The Federal Trade Commission has opened an investigation and U.S. senators have called for Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook CEO, to testify in front of Congress.

Calls by Congress for increased oversight to prevent private companies from surveilling people are extremely ironic given that they themselves recently renewed a section of the 2008 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act which allows for the warrantless surveillance of Americans. Issues regarding the appropriate use of government surveillance are also at the center of Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Trump administration. These headlines provide an excellent opportunity to consider the history of the U.S. government’s surveillance state, which matters for people across the world whose liberties are at stake as government power expands.

The origins of the present-day surveillance state can be traced back to the U.S. government’s military occupation of the Philippines in the late 1890s.

The Secret Society and the Sociologist

What can the fieldwork of a plucky sociology student reveal about rural Chinese history?

by DI WANG

Today's Chongyiqiao (Hope Township). Photo by Di Wang.

In 1939, residents of Hope Township, a rural village close to Chengdu, watched Lei Mingyuan, a leader of the local chapter of a secret society called the Paoge, execute his own teenage daughter on the strength of a mere rumor that she and a young tailor who worked for his family were having an illicit affair. Despite the brutal and brazen nature of his crime, however, Lei did not face any charges; lynching was prevalent and the rule of law was problematic at the time. Six years later, in the summer of 1945, Shen Baoyuan, a female college student in the Department of Sociology at Beijing’s Yenching University, arrived in Hope Township to conduct fieldwork and research on the social organization of rural secret societies. She met Lei and his family and documented rare insights not only about the tragic murder but about the inner workings of the Paoge. This work never became published or recognized—at least, that is, until now.

I had wanted to write a book on the Paoge as early as the 1980s when I worked on a social history of Qing Sichuan. About a decade ago, a friend of mine found Shen’s report and offered me a copy. I realized that Shen’s report was useful, but as I was concentrating on another project at the time, I gave it no immediate thought, and the report languished on my shelf for years. During the spring of 2009, while teaching history at Berkeley, I poured over all “cultural and historical materials” (wenshi ziliao) from provincial and county to district administrations in Sichuan on the shelves of the C.V. Starr East Asian Library. This provided me with rich background information on the Paoge, and in 2014, with another book nearing completion, I began to give serious thought to a project on this influential and longstanding secret society. That summer, I taught a graduate seminar at East China Normal University in which I used several classic works of micro-history such as The Return of Martin Guerre by Natalie Zemon Davis and Robert Darnton’s The Great Cat Massacre. These works inspired me to attempt a micro-history of my own, based on Shen Baoyuan’s investigation.

The Dreamers’ Fight

A syllabus for understanding the challenges facing undocumented youth.

Los Angeles March for Immigrant Rights, September 2017. Photo by Molly Adams. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr. 

The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which granted provisional work permits and protection from deportation to undocumented youth, has been at the center of a maelstrom of political debate. Signed into law by President Barack Obama in 2012 and rescinded by President Donald Trump in 2017, the DACA program and those who are protected under it have been sent into a tailspin of uncertainty as Congress remains gridlocked on long-term immigration reform. This stalemate triggered a government shutdown in January, and though President Trump gave Congress a March 5th deadline to hammer out a new policy, no progress on a legislative solution has yet to be made.

In the meantime, challenges from federal courts in New York and California have issued injunctions against terminating the program, allowing those young immigrants who already have DACA permits to continue applying for renewals. This stay, however, is only temporary. If no long-term solution is reached, hundreds of thousands of young immigrants whose parents brought them to the United States as children could find themselves unable to legally work and eligible for deportation.

For a more detailed look at the recent political and cultural history that brought us to this moment, we’ve gathered below a short syllabus of books that explore the rhetoric, policies, and activism around the present US immigration debate.

Tribalism in the Classroom

How British educational policy exacerbated social fragmentation in Palestine.

by SUZANNE SCHNEIDER

Inside a classroom in what was then British-ruled Palestine, circa 1925. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

In April 1946 the Director of Education for the Government of Palestine, Jerome Farrell, penned a lengthy memorandum about the state of Jewish and Arab education. Directed to the Colonial Office in London and written during the waning days of the British Empire, Farrell’s memo came in the wake of two commissions (the McNair Commission and Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry) that examined the role of education in producing Palestine’s impending political crisis. One of the recurring themes in both commissions’ reports was the improper politicization of Palestine’s school for nationalist ends, a matter about which Farrell found himself in total agreement. What he could not agree with was the recommendation—found in both reports—that the government should grant both Jewish and Arab communities increased educational autonomy going forward. As he wrote,

if unselfishness, peace and goodwill are principal aims of education it will be difficult to reconcile the two relevant recommendations which each Report in effect makes and which, bluntly stated, are (a) that a ‘fiery nationalism’ shall be eradicated from the schools, (b) that control of education shall be vested in fiery nationalist politicians.

The attempt to keep politics out of the classroom did in fact represent a very real form of colonial power, one which labored for the preservation of British rule.

Caught in the Political Churn

DACA beneficiaries stand on unstable ground as March 5th deadline passes without action.

by ALEXIS M. SILVER

Demonstrators protest the recission of DACA in Los Angeles, September 5th, 2017. Photo by Molly Adams. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

On September 5th, 2017, the Trump administration announced the rescission of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and set a date of March 5th, 2018 to begin phasing out the program. DACA, implemented under President Obama as an action of prosecutorial discretion in 2012, offers protection from deportation and work permits to approximately 700,000 young immigrants, often referred to as the DREAMers, who were brought to the United States as children. No new applicants were accepted after the September 5th announcement, and beneficiaries began to lose their protections as Congress failed to reach a bipartisan agreement offering a legislative replacement for DACA. However, in January and February of 2018, two separate federal courts in San Francisco and Brooklyn blocked the termination of the program, allowing beneficiaries to renew their protected status under DACA.

Despite widespread public support for DACA beneficiaries across the political spectrum, a legislative fix seems unlikely in the immediate future.

The protections provided by the court decisions offer beneficiaries some breathing room, but they are hardly a long-term solution. When the Supreme Court declined the Trump administration's request to take up the case directly from the lower courts, it ensured that the March 5th expiration date would not mark the definitive end of the policy, but it also foreshadowed a continuing battle over the ultimate fate of DACA. In the meantime, beneficiaries remain in a state of uncertainty as to what their futures may hold: a career and a sense of membership or civic disenfranchisement and the threat of deportation. Depending on where they reside, moreover, beneficiaries already have access to dramatically different opportunities.

The Dead Negev Doctrine

By manipulating law and geography Israel is dispossessing the Bedouins of their historic lands.

by OREN YIFTACHEL, AHMAD AMARA, and ALEXANDRE KEDAR

Photo by Physicians for Human Rights. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

"When will the state understand that we are here to stay? These are our lands for hundreds of years; everybody knew this—the Ottomans, the British and the Israelis. These lands are our soul, our life, our identity. Even if they demolish Araqib 100 more times, we shall return". (Sayach Altouri, Shaikh of 'Araqib, January 4, 2018).

These words were spoken at a special event convened in the small village of ’Araqib following the release of the shaikh from a short period of custody for "trespassing" on his ancestors land. It also followed the 124th demolition of their village by the authorities, and the reconstruction of its modest homes by the Bedouin residents.

’Araqib is but one of many flashpoints in the protracted conflict over land in the Negev, where dozens of indigenous Bedouin communities, numbering 110,000 people, are still living in localities that are not recognized or planned, with their residents subject to more than 1,000 house demolitions per year (that’s four times the number of demolitions that occur in the occupied West Bank). The indigenous communities, who have lived in the area for hundreds of years, are denied basic services such as water, electricity, roads or schools.