Creator Briefing | Big Brother is Watching: How America’s Expanding Mass Government Surveillance Network Undermines Our Right to Mobilize
An exclusive briefing for creators in the Social Currant Ecosystem —
The federal government has been quietly expanding a vast digital surveillance network that is being used to track our every move and assemble detailed profiles of where we go, whom we talk to, and what we do — both on and offline. The surveillance state isn’t a distant threat. It is being built right now without our knowledge and consent, and is already impacting you and the communities you speak to every day.
The same tools used for monitoring and investigating narrow national security threats are now being weaponized against broad swaths of the American public for exercising their Constitutional rights. Everything from our location data to social media activity and even our facial profiles are being harvested and sold to defense contractors, like Palantir, and federal law enforcement agencies that are building watchlists of anyone who dares to express dissent.
Government surveillance is not just a threat to our privacy — it makes every single one of us easier to monitor and control. Free expression erodes when people assume the government is tracking them. Community participation shrinks when showing up and making our voices heard carries the risk of being logged in a government database. Our right to demand more from our government weakens when surveillance becomes routine.
Protecting our rights and freedoms requires a deeper understanding of how technology-driven government surveillance is standing in our way — and how we can fight back. In this briefing, you will hear from experts working at the intersection of civil rights and technology about the technologies being used for mass domestic surveillance, what this means for the communities and the issues you care most about, and will walk away with language and framing you can use when talking about the ways mass surveillance threatens our communities, rights, and freedoms.
Speakers include:
Alejandra Montoya-Boyer, The Leadership Conference’s Center for Civil Rights and Technology
Jumana Musa, Fourth Amendment Center at the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers
Nicole Ozer, Electronic Frontier Foundation