Twenty-five years ago, my family prepared to move out of the West Ridge home where I had grown up. We hadn’t yet closed on our new house, so we had plans to stay put and rent our old place for six months from the new owners.
But after Sept. 11, 2001, the buyers informed my Pakistani American Muslim family that we needed to vacate the home by the end of the month. With my brother and me out of town for college, my parents were forced to pack up our lives by themselves and move into my uncle’s basement.
In the mad rush to empty the house, my parents started throwing out personal belongings they couldn’t take. Some suspicious neighbors scrutinized their activities and started digging through our trash.
After stumbling upon the flight logs from dad’s flying lessons from the mid-1970s, a neighbor called the FBI. On the day my parents handed the keys to the new homeowners, my dad was forced to make a trip Downtown to the Rock ‘n’ Roll McDonald’s where he explained to FBI agents that flying was a hobby he took up during his early years in Chicago.
My mom, on her way to my uncle’s, was terrified that my dad would be disappeared, like so many other Muslim men in the aftermath of 9/11.
My dad, who had previously worked as an engineer for Pakistan International Airlines, was free to go once the FBI agents realized he wasn’t a threat. The nosy neighbors never apologized. Neither did the FBI.
That was my family’s first taste of the emerging surveillance state, which enveloped our country after 9/11 and has been normalized ever since. As the so-called global war on terrorism expanded, surveillance became more sophisticated. Busybody neighbors have been replaced by Big Tech conglomerates digging through our online data instead.
And yet, very few bat an eye.
From the USA Patriot Act to the National Security Agency’s illegal wiretapping of activists, most Americans have grown accustomed to our government spying on them.
While the initial focus was on Muslims and Arabs, the surveillance regime has also targeted the Movement for Black Lives, water protectors at the Standing Rock reservation fighting to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline and Occupy Wall Street activists. In recent years, the surveillance industry has also been weaponized against student activists organizing against the genocide in Gaza and the masses protesting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity.
The surveillance culture is now driven by a set of Silicon Valley corporations that have seen their profits soar as our rights are curtailed. Unsurprisingly, their executives have become key partners in advancing President Donald Trump’s fascist agenda.
Palantir, the data-mining firm founded in 2003, received critical initial funding from the CIA as part of the war on terrorism. The company now has extensive contracts with military and law enforcement agencies around the world, including ICE, which uses Palantir data to target immigrants.
Peter Thiel, Palantir’s co-founder and chairman, wrote in a 2009 essay, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”
In more recent times, according to Bloomberg, the billionaire tech entrepreneur “used his wealth and influence in Silicon Valley” to help Trump win the presidency and “has deep connections to the new administration’s efforts to remake the government.”
Thiel was also Vice President JD Vance’s mentor and an early financial backer of his political career.
Thiel isn’t alone.
Sophisticated spying
Google, which went public in 2004, has grown to become a major federal law enforcement and military contractor.
Amazon Web Services, Amazon’s cloud computing arm, became a federal contractor with a $600 million intelligence contract with the CIA in 2013.
Microsoft has contracts with the Israeli military and only cut its access to some cloud computing and artificial intelligence after The Guardian revealed Microsoft Azure was being used to conduct mass surveillance of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.
OpenAI, Anthropic and other AI firms are all vying for federal contracts. The data centers that suck up water and wreak havoc on energy grids in many communities of color and lower-income neighborhoods exist to support this surveillance regime.
There is a direct line from the Sept. 11 attacks to the crisis in democracy we are facing today, and it runs through Silicon Valley. The neighbors who dug through our trash in 2001 were a low-tech harbinger for the powered surveillance infrastructure that is being used to suppress peaceful protest and stifle dissent today.
On the 25th anniversary of Sept. 11, we must reckon with the shameful surveillance-industrial complex it spawned. Americans were told that constant surveillance was the cost of freedom. As Silicon Valley’s grip on our society becomes ironclad, it is clear that sacrificing our freedoms only leads to the further erosion of freedom.
We must stop Big Tech firms from spying on us and selling our data to repressive state actors trying to take away our freedoms. The only way to ensure democracy for future generations is to rein in the unchecked power of Silicon Valley.
Saqib Bhatti is the executive director of the Action Center on Race and the Economy