Ironically, protests against police violence are being met with more police violence. Outcry against police violence has been answered with tear gas and rubber bullets. 60 years ago in Birmingham, it was fire hoses & dogs. 6 years ago in Ferguson, it was tanks and armored trucks. Today, it’s tanks, tear gas, and advanced surveillance & tracking technology: facial recognition cameras, StingRay devices that trick nearby cellphones & steal data, automated license plate readers, high-altitude spy planes and drones fitted with night vision & infrared sensors. The list of insidious tools deployed to identify, track, entrap and arrest protesters is staggering–and still growing. 

In turning tools like this against us, the FBI & local law enforcement are effectively treating us like threats to justice for refusing to accept the harm done to Black people as the status quo. Such tools fundamentally shift the balance of power; for refusing to be killed by police, we have been deemed a criminal threat and treated as such. There is no time left. Congress must step in and fulfil their duty come to our aid. 

The FBI’s 2017 intelligence assessment report warned 18,000 local law enforcement agencies that Black activism against police violence is a domestic threat, labelling us “Black Identity Extremists” in the process. In 2019, MediaJustice, ACLU and dozens of supporting organizations brought these concerns to the FBI & Congressional leadership. But rather than end the false and racist criminalization of Black-led movements, the FBI continues to lie to Congress. Feining change, the FBI now lumps Black activists with white supremacists under the “Racially Motivated Violent Extremist” designation while moving forward with COINTELPRO’s 21st century successor, code-named Iron Fist. 

Congress has so far failed to hold the FBI accountable for the extensive targeting & criminalization of our movements. Right now, the FBI is supporting & resourcing local police efforts to hunt, intimidate, and ultimately suppress protests. We look back on the FBI’s response to Black social movements of the 60’s & 70’s with scorn for good reason. If we can acknowledge attacks on Black protest of the past as a shameful part of our collective history, then we are doomed to be complicit in a new, shameful era of high-tech repression if we do nothing now. History will repeat itself unless Congress chooses to do something different. Congressional Black Caucus Chair Karen Bass (D-CA-37) should be putting pressure on her colleagues to protect constituents’ right to protest without surveillance. Join us by demanding Representative Bass & Congress resolve to #ProtectBlackDissent. 

Alongside the Detroit Community Technology Project, Greenlight Black Futures Coalition, and No New Jails NYC, MediaJustice is building a movement to keep Black & brown communities safe from surveillance. The pressure on Amazon is growing by the day, and communities across the country are taking action against the intrusion of the surveillance state into our homes and lives.

Don’t let Amazon ship police surveillance to our doors. Tell Amazon that time’s up for profiting from the criminalization of our communities! 

Everyone has a right to go about their daily lives without being surveilled and tracked by the government, but this policing proposal will especially harm Black and brown communities that are already most likely to be criminalized.

Take Action: Prevent California from expanding the surveillance state.

A new state bill — AB 1215: The Body Camera Accountability Act — would keep face recognition technology off police body cameras. This bill mirrors an emerging consensus that facial recognition is inaccurate and biased against people of color, especially Black women.₁

Recently we saw a giant immigration raid tear apart over 600 families in Mississippi. One key to enabling that level of harm and trauma is facial recognition and other surveillance technology that allows law enforcement agencies like the Department of Homeland Security to detain and deport at an unprecedented scale.

But we should be able to move in our communities in peace and without the threat of being watched and criminalized. This technology doesn’t increase safety, it makes us less safe. Join us in sending a strong message to California state lawmakers: No face surveillance on police body cameras. 

This new category combines and conflates incidents involving white supremacists and the made-up “Black Identity Extremist” designation. The latter term was created to undermine legitimate Black activist and protest movements, such as the Movement for Black Lives.

The FBI is downplaying the most violent domestic terror threat in the U.S. — white supremacy —  and obscuring the fact that it targets Black activists who protest police violence and labels them as domestic terrorists. The threat of white supremacy has been especially evident over the past few years and is a present threat to us all, having claimed lives across the country from the Charleston, South Carolina church massacre, the murders and shootings at synagogues in Pittsburgh and Poway, California, and at the deadly 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

As a result of the category change, in a recent congressional briefing, the FBI stated it could no longer identify how many white supremacist attacks have occurred this year. Because the category change will eliminate this necessary data — and because there is no connection between Black activists or organizations and organized violence — these groups should not be identified together.

Being labeled a terrorist or a national security threat has life-threatening implications. Historically, Black movement leaders have been unconstitutionally targeted, attacked, jailed, and even killed in their efforts to confront racism, police brutality, and police violence.

The FBI must end the secrecy surrounding the categorization of white supremacist threats, stop grouping white supremacist incidents with Black protests against police violence, and be transparent about the funding it uses to investigate domestic terrorist groups. 

Lining up to profit from all this are some of the nation’s largest tech companies. Last year, the ACLU of Northern CA exposed Amazon for selling their facial recognition tool to law enforcement. Microsoft markets and sells its own tool called Face API, even as it calls on the federal government to regulate facial recognition technology. Google on the other hand has announced it would not commercialize its facial recognition product today—but has not ruled out doing so in the future.

Join us in telling CEOs from Google, Microsoft and Amazon: Don’t sell facial recognition to governments.

This is not a neutral technology. Research has shown that facial recognition tools can be disproportionately inaccurate with people of color—especially Black women. And in the hands of police, this powerful surveillance technology will be used to further target and repress Black and brown communities who already face racist policing practices.

Companies selling facial recognition to governments are on the wrong side of history. Across the country, thousands are speaking up against the use of these tools, including activists, members of Congress, and even employees at these companies. Now it’s time for Google, Microsoft and Amazon to do the right thing.

Demand that these tech giants reverse course and stop helping the police build a larger and deadlier surveillance system.

Yet just as J. Edgar Hoover named the Black Power movement of the 1960s “the greatest threat to the internal security of our country,” the BIE designation is only the latest attempt to justify the surveillance and criminalization of Black people fighting for social justice. Over 50 years after Hoover’s COINTELPRO, our right to protest and organize is still under attack.

Last fall, the Center for Media Justice filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) on the FBI’s surveillance of Black activists. We know that in order to protect our right to resist, we need transparency around how this latest designation is being used to surveil our movements — both within the FBI and by local law enforcement.

The FBI never responded to our FOIA request, so we’ve joined the ACLU’s Racial Justice Program in filing a lawsuit against them —demanding the release of all documents pertaining to the wrongful surveillance of Black activists and Black-led movements. 

Now we need your help to keep the pressure on. Sign this petition now to demand that the FBI stop targeting Black people and Black-led organizations based on the unsupported “Black Identity Extremist” label.

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To: The FBI and Department of Justice

Stop targeting Black people and Black-led organizations for surveillance and investigation based on the “Black Identity Extremist” label. Your unsupported claims about this fictitious group raise concern that the FBI is racially profiling Black activists and targeting them for their First Amendment protected beliefs, speech, and associations. 

Rather than investing in resources that support individuals who are returning home after their incarceration, tech companies like the GEO Group and Securus are growing their electronic monitoring business and expanding the surveillance state. They only have one motive: making a profit off the most vulnerable, especially Black and brown folks living in poverty.

As Michelle Alexander recently wrote in the New York Times, “Digital prisons are to mass incarceration what Jim Crow was to slavery.” Which is why we’re demanding an end to the use of electronic monitoring for people released from prison in Illinois. Because when people have done their time, they should be cut loose, not made to jump through more hoops and shackled with even more barriers.