Surveillance and Social Movements: Lenses on the Repression-Mobilization Nexus

Abstract

Police monitoring of law-abiding activists at protest events. A CIA-sponsored program dedicated to investigating financial transac tions. An NSA initiative to collect data from massive numbers of domestic phone calls. The Pentagon's aborted Terrorism Informa tion and Prevention System, TIPS, and Total Information Awareness programs. The USA Patriot Act. Over the last half-decade, Ameri can citizens have been bombarded with a dizzying array of issues and controversies re lated to state surveillance initiatives. While the potential impact of surveillance activities is widespread-some claim, for instance, that the recent NSA program sought to obtain da ta from every call placed in the U.S.-its ef fects are most squarely centered on settings that pose a challenge to the institutional po litical status quo. It is clear that such efforts have enormous potential effects on the shape of political contention, and that these effects emerge in multifaceted ways. Rich historical accounts offer a window into these complexities. Take Jeremy Varon's Bringing the War Home, a compelling and nuanced chronicle of New Leftist militancy in the U.S. and Germany dur ing the 1960s and 1970s. Varon focuses on two organizations in particular: the Weather Underground (WU) in America and the West German Red Army Faction (RAF). While not a comparative study per se, he uses these two juxtaposed cases to develop a layered analysis of how activists in both countries came to embrace violent revolutionary ac tion, and how varied interactions with the state and civil society shaped their distinct trajectories. Policing agencies in both nations em ployed a variety of means to actively monitor and disrupt the WU and RAF. Surveillance through wiretaps, agent observation of pub lic events, illegal break-ins, and infiltration by informants and provocateurs-constituted the meat of the state's repressive efforts, at least in the U.S. Varon notes that, even be fore the Weatherman organization went un The Suppression of Dissent: How the State and Mass Media Squelch US American Social Movements, by Jules Boykoff. New York, NY: Routledge, 2006. 288 pp. $80.00 cloth. ISBN: 0415978106.