9/11 Generation Chapter Five

What really stood out to me in the fifth chapter of the 9/11 Generation is the fact that Muslim Americans feared for their livelihood for good reason. They feared going to school, to the mosque, to the airport; they feared going anywhere that would allow them to be surveilled. However, they had good reason. There is proof of the FBI actually wiretapping phones and stalking Facebook and infiltrating protests to spy on Muslim Americans. The Muslim Americans who were usually surveilled are ones who were outspoken about any issue. They were in organizations like CAIR or they were in protests. The one man had a listening device attached to his car and then the FBI forced him to give it back. Despite the fact that this spying is a clear violation of the fundamental right to privacy, obtaining evidence this way is a violation of due process. It took until 2012 for the Supreme Court to decide “in United States v. Jones that the placement of a GPS device was a violation of reasonable expectations of privacy and the Fourth Amendment” (209). This ruling overturned a lower court holding. Therefore, all three branches supported the actions of the FBI because Circuit Courts ruled in favor of the FBI, Congress helped perpetuate the actions, and the executive encouraged the actions to stop terrorism in its tracks.

                Stopping terrorism in its tracks does not have to utilize an overreach of power and racial profiling. For people to fear going to do their daily activities because of the government illustrates how the government created a second class of citizen. When you fear your daily routine, you are forced to change it and self-regulate your actions. The FBI could have wiretapped a Muslim American’s phone or could not have, but not knowing and assuming to be safe, she would have to change her activities and put on the image of a “good” Muslim American.  When “there was a reshaping of social life and social networks due to these surveillance effects,” Muslim Americans had to experience a change in lifestyle that no other group had to endure after 9/11 (206). On social networks, watching what they posted or even increasing the amount they post of media representing that “good” Muslim image, they had to self-regulate their image. Michel Foucault had his panopticon, but with the prevalence of social media in our everyday lives, the superpanopticon which is “the new form of electronic surveillance made possible by technologies that produce new forms of power” comes to the forefront. The amount of surveillance can be increased, so the amount of self-regulation has to be increased like a quid pro quo for the use of social media. Self-regulation is important to the people who could be being surveilled because through self-regulation, fear is diminished, the FBI (if they are watching) would stop watching because they proved their “good” Muslim image, and they could keep the FBI from surveilling. However, self-regulation should not be needed if there was not this overreach of power and racial profiling.