 I'm going to hand it over to Mayesh very soon. But just wanted to say this is the last of our Media Justice Fundamentals Spring series. We've been doing a lot of 101 education workshops in the series. We had an Ecarceration 101, Media Justice 101, and a Racialized Disinfo 101. A lot of these really speak to the foundation of our work and our campaigns. And today, we are diving into Protect Black Descent 101. And with that, I will pass it to Mayeshia. Hi, everyone. Can y'all hear and see me OK? Yeah? All right, great. I'm super excited for today's MJ101. And thank you so much for joining us today. As many of you know, we lead a campaign called Protect Black Descent. And so the purpose of today's workshop is to really dig into the history of surveillance that has so much shaped that campaign and so much of the criminalization work that we do at Media Justice. So again, my name is Mayeshia Hayes. I'm the Campaign Strategies Director at Media Justice. I use she and her pronouns. And I'm also based in Brooklyn, New York. And I would love to hear or know a little bit about who else is in our virtual room today. So if you could take a moment and just share your name, your pronoun, your org affiliation, if you have one, and the city that you're in, and the chat, that would be great. And we're actually going, while folks go ahead and do that. Awesome. So cool to see new and familiar faces and old faces. I'm going to pass it to Duane to actually walk us through the icebreaker that we're going to use in a minute. Thank you, Mayeshia. So we're going to be using the platform Slido today for our icebreaker and for another activity after that. And there are two ways to participate with Slido. There is you can go to slido.com and enter this number, 685-410, or you can use your camera phone and scan this QR code that is in the top left corner. And when you do that, you'll be able to participate in our icebreaker question. Cool. Thanks so much. So our icebreaker question for today is name one word that comes to mind when you hear the word surveillance. OK, capitalism, watching. We see government here monitoring, control everywhere. OK, this is speeding up. Policing, stalker, spy. OK. Stalker 100. I see that in the chat. Cointel Pro. OK, we get ahead of ourselves. We're going to get into that in a minute. White supremacy, two words. That's fair. Criminalization. Sorry, I missed that one. Interesting. Secret. Yes, that's a big part of how surveillance works as well. A lot of it is done in secrecy. Well, has everyone had a chance to participate? Control. That's right. Data gathering. Yes, especially today, all of the different tools we use. Stealing. These are definitely concepts that we're going to get into and some of the activities that we're going to do and the presentation on the Protect Black Dissent campaign as well. Noticing no one has said safety, which is great, because that is the dominant narrative about surveillance and a narrative that we often challenge in our work at media justice. So we wanted to do this ice breaker and ask this question just to start get us thinking about how surveillance has been a part of the fabric of the United States response to our liberation movements. And we're going to get into that today. So I'm going to pass it off to Erin to get us into our first activity. Absolutely. Hi, everyone. My name is Erin. I am a national field organizer at Media Justice. She and her pronouns. I'm currently joining you from Louisville, Kentucky today. We're with my family. But I'm normally in DC. And as range is set, the word of the day today is surveillance. And during that ice breaker, I saw some folks sharing Co-Intel Pro as a touch point for surveillance in the US. And so I wanted to double click on that. We wanted to double click on that. And so what we're going to do is have a little top quiz about Co-Intel Pro called What do you know about Co-Intel Pro? Before we dive in, can anybody come off of mute and tell me what or tell all of us really? What Co-Intel Pro stands for? Does anybody know? This is a pre-quiz, not the quiz itself. What's the counterintelligence program? Counterintelligence. Can you say, tell us your name, your pronouns, and any affiliation you have? Benjamin Stone, they, them. I'm with Urbana Shed and Bahain Urbana. Excuse me, Independent Media Center. Absolutely. Co-Intel Pro was short for counterintelligence program. It was the FBI discrediting all the leftists, all the people of color. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. We're going to get into it during the pop quiz. You're a star pupil. OK, all right. All right, let's go. OK, so we're going to be using Slido for this again. I am not 1,000% familiar with Slido, so we're all going to learn together. But we can follow Doulani's instructions in the beginning. So use your camera phone and just, like, hover over that square box at the top left. Or you can type it in manually using that code at the bottom left. So first question is, when did Co-Intel Pro take place? During what time period? So here we have from 1965 to 1968, from 1956 to 1971, or from 1963 to 1969. And we're going to give folks just a minute or so to get those answers in. Oh, wow. OK, so 73% came through with 1956 to 1971. And you are correct. Wow. But that's, you know, I'm doing, like, heavy air close here. Because we were having a conversation before. Like, did it ever really end? We'll have the conversation today, actually. So I think it'll show us a leaderboard after this. Benjamin, you're our leader so far. Well, actually, everybody's leading, honestly. But I think it goes by how quickly you do it. So that's really cool as well. Let's move to question number two. Who did Co-Intel Pro target? We have Black booksellers, The Young Lords, which hopefully folks are familiar with. The American Indian Movement. Reverend Dr. MLK Jr. Anti-war groups. The Black Panthers. Or all the above. Get your answers in now. I wish we had, like, the ticking music, like, do-do-do-do. We'll give it just a few more seconds. OK, go ahead. The people not, we only have a few people. I think you need to start with the answer. Maybe. Oh, slow down. Yeah. Oh, said all the above. And if you said that, you're correct. I was a little shook for a second. I was like, wait a minute, yes. The person who said anti-war groups, you're also correct. It was just all-encompassing, right? So take a moment to let that sink in. Do folks really find this especially surprising? And we can think about, even though that's like a really long list, there are definitely people who are missing from this list. So are there folks who are missing or groups of people who are actually missing from this list that we could add? Why don't you drop that in the chat there? I know that when we were talking earlier, we said that feminist groups were missing from this. Teresa, you had mentioned the Puerto Rican Socialist Party, yes, LGBTQ movement leaders, really anybody who was trying to challenge the US government from consolidating power and solidifying its surveillance apparatus, right? So I think it will give us another who's in the lead now. Let's move to the next slide. Still Benjamin, but Gretchen, you're in there too. All right. Next question, COINTELPRO revealed. JSK held a press conference. Malcolm X pointed out an FBI snitch at a rally who confessed or anti-war exodus leaked FBI files. Add your answer now. I'm not going to make you all suffer through that. All right. Let's go and see what people chose. OK, 100 emojis in the chat, please. Thank you. Anti-war activists leaked FBI files, all right? So in April 1971, a group of anti-war activists who are actually just like cab driver, daycare worker, and two professors broke into an FBI office in Pennsylvania. And they actually broke in the night Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, which I didn't know this, were fighting and had the nation's attention. And so the folks who broke in planned to destroy any draft record they found for the Vietnam War. But they also ended up uncovering the sort of vast surveillance program, which had yet to be revealed to the American public. And so yeah, they were shocked, really incredibly shocked to find this information. And they took every single document they found and leaked copies to five with Ziprian, three journalists and two members of Congress. So let's see. Let's go to the next one. I think we'll see the leaderboard. Benjamin still holding strong. So that first place. Next slide, please. OK. The final question is, what was the purpose of COINTELPRO? To destroy movements for self-determination and liberation for Black, Brown, Asian, and Indigenous struggles. To sow division and distrust within progressive movements. To mount an institutionalized attack against allies of these movements and other progressive organizations or all of the above. We'll give it a minute just for folks to get there. Their answers in. Let's see the response. 100's in the chat again, folks. You're all right. All of the above, OK? This was explicitly documented as the purpose and seen in how it was carried out. And so now, I think I'm turning this over potentially to my Asia, but we're going to watch a couple of short clips to learn more about this sort of history of surveillance in COINTELPRO within the US context. Benjamin, we don't have a prize for you, but you did win. All right, let's go. I think Dee is going to queue us up for those videos. Thanks, everyone, for playing with us. Thanks, Erin. And yeah, just a heads up, as Erin was saying that the leaked documents were sent to a couple journalists and Congress folks out of those five people, only one person actually took action in terms of sharing it with the public. And so one of the first clips we're going to see is from that journalist who ran the information in the post. All right. Can you all see my screen here? Can somebody say, I can't see it. We can see it. OK, great. Thank you. All right. One of the things that I remember most from those files was the truly blanket surveillance of African-American people that was described. It was in Philadelphia, but it also prescribed national programs. It was quite stunning. First, it described a surveillance. It took place in every place where people would gather, churches, classrooms, stores down the street, just everything. But it also specifically prescribed that every FBI agent was supposed to have an informer just for the purpose of coming back every two weeks and talking to them about what they had observed about black Americans. And in Washington, DC, at the time, that was six informers for every FBI agent informing on black Americans. The surveillance was so enormous that it led various people, rather sedate people in editorial offices and Congress, to compare it to the stasi, the dreaded secret police of East Germany. Three of the burglars also appeared on democracy. Back in the 1950s and the 1960s and the 1970s, the United States government had programs, some involving simple surveillance, some involving ways of getting information, some involving plots. They're basically to frame people for crimes and some involving outright murder. J. Edgar Hoover, one of the first documents that the FBI issued, that J. Edgar Hoover issues, that constitutes what could be called a corntelpro document, was really an issue against the poor weekend independence movement. In this missive that J. Edgar Hoover sends out to the San Juan office is that everything has to be done, that you should gather all personal information, including personal information on the independence leaders to expose them that will lead to divisions, that will lead to disruption and the destruction of the movement. We're going to play this one a little later, D. Sorry. No worries. Thank you so much for skewing those. Just some short excerpts, as folks saw, the first one from that former Washington Post journalist who leaked it and was just talking about this sort of mass surveillance. I mean, we know that leftists were targeted and organizers and activists were targeted, but the way that she was describing how it was just really indiscriminate surveillance of Black folks just really speaks to the racial profiling that we know so well today. And those last two clips were from a film called corntelpro 101, which is available on Vimeo. And the two clips we saw just, the first one briefly spoke to the tactics, everything from the informants to outright murder. And then the second clip we saw was just lifting up the intentional targeting of the Puerto Rican independence movement and how it was very similar tactics around selling division in distrust, mass surveillance, really keeping tabs on folks. So a lot of stuff that we discussed in the quiz, but yeah, from there, since corntelpro is one of the most well-known surveillance programs, we wanted to start there, but we're actually gonna jump into what did surveillance look like before corntelpro and after? So we're gonna do a timeline scavenger hunt, the instructions for which are in a participant guide, which I think I might have forgotten to mention that earlier, but we have a participant guide for folks. And that includes the agenda for today and the instructions for our timeline scavenger hunt. And what we're gonna do is just break up into four groups and each group has a prompt and the participant guide is a Google Doc where folks can write down their names and their discussion. And then we'll hear back from each group a one minute report back on the history you were discussing and the highlight of your conversation. Thank you for dropping that link, Teresa. So folks, the link is in the chat and D is going to break us into groups. Page one of the participant guide, like I mentioned, has our agenda. And if you scroll down to page two, it's the instructions for the scavenger hunt. Each group has a specific point in history that they're gonna examine and then share with the groups we're all learning from each other. Right, welcome back folks. How was that? We kind of made you do a lot in a short amount of time. Did you run out of time? Apologies, I'm sure you were having great conversations. So hold on to all of the thinking that you were doing, that maybe you didn't even get a chance to share in your groups because we can go into that now. Let's start with group one. What did you, what was your prompt? And what was the highlight of your conversation? Who's in group one? The lantern moths. Sorry, y'all, don't be shy. Going here a little bit. Who was in group one? Just generally. Was anyone in group one? Was this a group that, huh? Well, maybe we should assume no one was, maybe that was the group that we didn't assign folks into. Maybe. Well, we can go into, well, yeah, we can go start with group two. I would like, oh, go ahead. Do you want me to like just briefly kind of explain what the lantern laws were since, okay. Yeah. Cool. So there's a really great book called Dark Matters on the Surveillance of Blackness by Simone Brown that I highly recommend everyone to read and check out. I think like the intro is free online. But essentially we wanted to raise that up here because these days you hear organizations like ours talk so much about the different tools that the police are using and we get kind of like bogged down in the terminology and like the tech of it all. And the purpose of starting with the lantern laws is to give folks a sense of how surveillance existed before there was even prisons and policing. So lantern laws were essentially laws during American child slavery where black and indigenous folks had to carry lanterns after sunset. And essentially the reason why folks had to do that was to make themselves visible for being watched. And Simone Brown talks about this example. She talks about branding, which like I know so many of us are familiar with as a cruel practice of punishment, but she also makes the argument that by branding the bodies of enslaved black and brown people, this was actually a way of making the body a literal marker that you can track and surveil. And she argues that this is the earliest form of what people these days call biometric data which is just body measurements, right? And she also talks about like runaway slave ads that were used, right? Like using again the markers of people's bodies to describe quote unquote stolen property at that time. And so we just wanted to uplift these examples from the 1600s as an example of how being black or brown in America, you are exposed to being profiled and that logic has pretty much consisted throughout history and just been further institutionalized through the creation of law enforcement. So, ooh, I wanna see what's in the chat. We are living Confederate markers, yeah. Any questions or thoughts or reactions to that? Cause I didn't know that before I came to media justice and that kind of like was really interesting to me. So again, the book is called Simone Brown. I mean, the book is called Dark Matters by Simone Brown on the Surveillance of Blackness. Maja, I think one thing that I think of when we've talked about this before that just kind of strikes me as interesting is like at least in DC where I live, like we're often have like in poor neighborhoods where they say that there is crime, they'll put huge spotlights up. You know, so just like you just don't have darkness. Like that is a sense of, that is a privacy, you know, that is a privacy-protecting function. That's right. So I said in New York, these gigantic, enormous, ugly police camera lights, just like I have one like over down the corner, basically. That's right. And it reminds me of how like after slavery, you have sun downtown, so Black and brown folks again after sunset can't move around freely in public space if they happen to pass by white, you know, only communities. Like we think of Jim Crow so much as like, you know, the era of segregation, but so much of segregation was a tool to actually monitor and surveil and criminalize the movement of Black and brown people in public space. So you can think of all of these strategies as, you know, the bedrock of some of the surveillance tools that we talk about later. Thanks so much, Meija. What about group two? Who was in group two? Palakka? I was in group two. Where are my other group two? Where is that? Hey, yes. So we had the Palmer, gosh, what was it called? The Palmer Raids. And I think one super interesting fact that we took away from it was that the Palmer Raids were the reason what were the spark for the ACLU's creation? Had no idea. And so it makes sense now that the ACLU takes on so much surveillance work since that was really what they grew out of. Benjamin, would you add anything to that? No, honestly, the two of us were having a great discussion back and forth as we were reading the Wikipedia article to each other and being startled by facts. I didn't have time to take many notes. The thing we were curious about is where the surveillance came in, because we were skimming and it kept mentioning the role of the media, but it didn't mention much, like it didn't go into detail about that in the Wikipedia article. So we were curious about that. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you both. And for folks who might not be familiar, the Palmer Raids happened like 100 years ago at this point, over 100 years ago, in like 1919, 1920, it was a part of the Red Scare. And actually Hoover, J. Edgar Hoover, who was an architect behind Cointel Pro was also behind the Palmer Raids. And I think, you know, when we think about who it targeted, it targeted a lot of immigrants and leftists. And so it feels like one of the earliest examples of criminalizing leftists and using federal resources to target them and justifying criminalization for national security, how that always happens in relationship to war. And this question about surveillance is one, I think the media's role in even the hyping up of the Red Scare and what there is to be afraid of was definitely a factor. And beyond that, I think I still have a lot to learn in terms of surveillance in that era. Does anyone else wanna lift anything else? No, I agree. I feel like I also have a lot to learn in that area, but from what I've read and from what I understood at the time, like they would really watch people's, like because they were a surveilling communist, socialist, labor activist, what I was reading was that a lot of these agents would follow people to their meetings. And we'll get into this a little bit more later, but sort of like the monitoring that happened around like the Palmer Raids was kind of like the training ground for what COINTELPRO became later on. They just evolved those like monitoring and like pretty much stalking strategies. Sandy, I see you often, did you wanna add to that? No, I mean, I think that's right. I was just gonna say and like mapping, I think mapping of the communities was a big part of that. Thank you folks. Let's go to group three. Chris Roxy. I was in group three, it was myself, Roxy and Jin, and our prompt was around the Watts riots. And the question was, why is the history of the formation of the SWAT team significant? So we had a short clip and a little part of an article. Learned that SWAT team while it stands for Special Weapons in Tactics was almost called the Special Weapons Attack Team, but that that was too harsh they realized. So they changed the name, not really the goal because it was a military type style response to civilian disorder and it was a way of getting around. Yeah, it was a way of them getting around the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878. So it was basically, I mean, in our group, we talked about how instead of having a response where they after the Watts riots started, after an experience of police brutality and the community rioting and protesting and standing up and speaking out about that instead of going to the community and figuring out the needs and how to like build better relationship, they decided to build a separate police force that operates on a higher level of aggression. And so basically a way of getting around this like Act of 1878, which says that we can't have like militarized forces like doing law enforcement, they just created like a second layer of policing that is allowed to be and expected to be a lot more aggressive and dangerous. Thank you so much. Yeah, Benjamin, great question. So we've been seeing so much about military tanks in places like Ferguson and all of this huge militarized response to protesters and there's a history behind that. There's a history behind the police being militarized for military type equipment and that level of sort of tactical strategy against civilians, against peaceful protesters, against Black Panthers, like that all was happening at the same time. So really we wanted to dive into all of these things when we think about surveillance from the xenophobia of the Palmer raids, connecting that to the war that was happening to the militarization of the police force and even back to the lantern laws. Yeah, so let's folks are raising their hand. Roxy, do you wanna go and then Gretchen? I was responding to Benjamin. It's really interesting because we just had an event here that brought some high-power activists down to Galveston because of the treatment of some of the visitors to our island. And what's interesting is the military-style vehicle is parked right in the park. Like it's not hidden, it's parked right out so you can see. And it's interesting how they made some adjustments because due to our natural disasters that we experienced here, they used that as an excuse to move out some of our lower income residents. And when they were rebuilding the jail, the justice center is like right as you enter the island. It's almost as if they're saying, if you're a Black or Brown, we only want you to make it through the island because the justice center is right there as soon as you cross the causeway. Intimidation, exactly, Benjamin. So it's really interesting how all of this in its different forms is still very much alive in the society that we're in now. Did anyone else wanna add anything? Awesome. Thank you for participating in this scavenger hunt. Just wanted to uplift some history. And I think from here, we have one more short... Oh, is there one more group? Yeah, we thought we, there is one more group but I thought that y'all are on a time limit. So... Oh, no, no, yes. You have to figure out if you want. Yes, please. We were a group four with Gretchen and Catherine, I believe. And it was basically talking about 1971 and 1973 which Nixon declares the war on drugs and then creates the DEA or the Drug Enforcement Administration. And we chatted really about how this aligns with some of the goals that were referred to and mentioned earlier of how it criminalizes and disrupts black communities and our leaders. And I think it was also like a really clear example which policies are used to further institutionalize but further an advanced mass incarceration and the privatization of prison industry which then spills into harsh sentencing, deportations that is really racialized or hyper-racialized. And we talked about how that disruption really devised people of rights or protections thinking of like taking away rights to votes, federal student aid, access to public housing and food stamps and so on and so forth. So that was that. Thank you for that report back. Yes, the DEA. And there's been some, as recently as a few years ago, some headlines about the DEA using NSA data and spying on protesters on George Floyd protesters. And so it's just over time, all these agencies have just grown more powerful both in terms of their surveillance power and their militarized power. And so that's something we wanted to point out today as we go into our campaign. So with that, I'm gonna pass it to my Ayesha and Sandy to talk about our Protect Black Dissent campaign. Yeah, that's super important. And I think the other thing I might add to is that some of the intention here was to show how like over, I don't know, we've covered about eight years so far but every few years is another crisis whether real or imagined where we see the FBI say there's some sort of crisis that they have to respond to and whether it's like the war on the Red Scare or the war on activists or the war on drugs, right? Like you see really similarity like in strategies and tactics to like criminalize our communities. So really appreciate that thorough report back. So I'm going to share my screen. Sorry, give me one second. So more presentation, y'all. Gonna go from the beginning. So what we wanted to cover in this part is we're gonna repeat a little bit about what we just talked about just to continue to ground us and how we got to Black Identity Extremism and why we've launched the Protect Black Dissent campaign. So I know we already talked about COINTELPRO but I wanted to touch on it again really quickly just because it's such an important part of history and so relevant to our work because creation of the FBI in 1908 really marks the beginning where we see the police go from criminalizing and monitoring just our movements and public spaces to taking on formally this role of criminalizing political movements and political dissent. And for years, as we just discussed with the infamous J. Edgar Hoover, he claimed that the United States was facing this national security threat and this rise in domestic violence from immigrants and communists and labor activists. So I just wanted to underscore again that from the beginning, really from the beginning, the inception of the FBI was really created to protect the interests of the status quo by criminalizing and destroying the political movements of its time. So resisting against capitalism, fighting for workers, your immigration status essentially made you a criminal and a national security threat. And so as we discussed before, they targeted members of the civil rights movement, the Black Power struggle, the anti-war movement, the Puerto Rican independence movement, the young lords, like the American Indian movement, anyone that they considered a part of the left got targeted underneath this program. And I just wanted to touch on a couple of strategies by no means is this really even an exhaustive list, but just some patterns that I've been noticing that really remind me of some of the work that we do today. So the first tactic is criminalizing dissent by labeling activists as, quote unquote, terrorist and threats to national security. You have a strategy around conducting psychological warfare by placing FBI agents as informants in different movements, right? In different organizations to gather information, to sow discord and distrust between activists. We have instances of folks sending anonymous letters trying to encourage violence, extortion, blackmail, like spreading rumors. I mean, the list really goes on and on. You see, as we kind of talked about what the creation of SWAT teams, right? This information sharing and collaboration between local and federal law enforcement so that local police departments can really execute the ongoing harassment of activists by conducting, you know, vehicle stops and violent raids that we all know about that resulted in the death of Fred Hampton. And of course, at the time, they would use any sort of technology that existed to monitor and surveil the movement of leaders at the time, right? So obviously there was no such thing as social media, but they would use photos to track people and their associations and they would regularly like wiretap people's phone calls. And frankly, we're still actually learning and uncovering the extent to which tech companies at the time were complicit in the government's war, against the political movements of its time. One thing I didn't learn about until I came to media justice was the fact that the night of Fred Hampton's assassination by the Chicago Police Department, people at the time told a reporter at the LA Times that they saw Illinois bell co-vans, which were essentially like AT&T back in the day, right? In the neighborhood, the night of his murder and the days leading up to his murder. And those witnesses told this reporter that they had problems receiving or making phone calls that evening. And it was such a well-known fact at the time that even Hampton's lawyer sort of suspected that the bell company had actually cut off phone access at the request of local police and the FBI and was considering legal strategies to hold the company accountable. So, you know, as we talked about earlier, COINTELPRO was exposed by a break-in by anti-war activists who really wanted proof of the government's surveillance of its movement at the time. And they stumbled across all these documents, including one on COINTELPRO. And when they leaked this to the media, all of that attention and pressure really encouraged Congress to actually take action and investigate the FBI for surveilling our movements and violating our First Amendment rights. So I'm actually gonna turn it to Sandy to dig into a little bit what the church committee was, which is, I think, also really important part of this history around surveillance. And then we're gonna, she's gonna take us through some of the reforms and laws that happened since then and kind of help contextualize where we are now. And then I'm gonna talk about the campaign. Yeah, thanks so much, Major. And everyone, media justice. I'm Sandy Fulton. I'm actually with an organization called FreePress. We work super closely with media justice, definitely one of our closest partners, doing open internet work and surveillance, and specifically surveillance of communities of color and activists, hence the connection with media justice. I personally do a lot of our congressional outreach. So right now I'm going to try to explain some of the like just legal history and like a big picture of how stuff has played out at the government level, just to kind of put a timeline around major events and how Congress has responded and basically show what politicized policing and racist policing looks like in policy. But again, I'm gonna try and keep that big picture. Sorry, I'm gonna go slower. Interpreter is talking to me. So yes, as Major explained, following Coenzo pro, the church committee was created to investigate what happened. This was considered a shock, so Congress reacted. A Senate committee, it was actually called the church committee because the head of it was Frank Church, his last name. So a Senate committee was tasked with conducting a massive investigation into the nation's most secret agencies. And this is the first and only time that this has ever been done in American history, which is sock-shocking in itself and pretty alarming. And what they found was that Hoover, who was increasingly paranoid and more than a little out of control and had been in charge for decades, was literally doing whatever he wanted with zero oversight. There was no control for anything that was happening in the Coenzo pro. There was no process. National security and terrorism had been held at the executive level. So Congress had really just kind of like that were excuse me, were just hands off. So it's a new concept that they would even engage. So after uncovering the extent of these programs, basically the committee really just tried to establish a process by which surveillance would be conducted so that protections could be put in place and that there could be some accountability because after Coenzo pro, there really was no one to hold accountable for what happened because there was no process. I don't wanna get super wonky into what they recommended to Congress, partially because I'm not a lawyer, but also because I just think, we're talking bigger picture and kind of narrative. I think that's more important. But I wanna talk about some of the big things that they did to try to establish some checks and balances over these agencies. First, they created intelligence committees in the House and in the Senate. So this is the first time the members of Congress would receive confidential briefings on the regular from the intelligence community that was to an attempt to create congressional oversight. The big thing they did was that they recommended that Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which is called FISA. This was a law specifically created to regulate government surveillance around national security and it created the FISA court. That court would create a process by which surveillance programs would need to be approved. This was considered pretty revolutionary at the time. Like I said, the intelligence community had never been investigated. Congress had never created any sort of oversight. So just creating that court was considered a big deal. And I think it was a big deal at its day in the beginning. That was meant to be a real check on the government spying on US citizens. That court did put in place strict restrictions against spying on First Amendment protected activities as well as spying on Americans in general. And I think those are really the big legacy reforms from the church committee policy-wise. I think as much of anything, it was just a cultural moment where people were shocked. I mean, we white people were shocked by massive abuse from these agencies. And there was a willingness to rein in law enforcement, which we do not see very often. At that time, folks know the FBI was in pop culture. Hoover'd become this popular icon. So just the willingness to even try to tackle this was a big deal for the time. Now, the next big moment we're gonna jump to because as Maisha said, when we only really get attention on these things, when there is a crisis or a perceived crisis and Congress wants to do a thing. So the next big moment we're gonna skip to is September 11th and the Warrantara, which is a bit of a leap. But so I wanna say that between those times, all the while law enforcement is trying to get all those tools back. They are lobbying, they are chipping away at rules, they're finding loopholes, they are adopting new technologies that are not regulated off because Congress is not doing their job because it is not popular to be critical of police and law enforcement in Congress. And most significantly, those safeguards, the intelligence committees and the court are becoming friendlier and friendlier with law enforcement and the intelligence community, which is super problematic. They're becoming co-opted by the folks they are meant to regulate. This happens across Congress. You know, we always care about this happening with companies, but it certainly happens with cops. You know, they're beating down the doors. They're like, there's gonna be a bomb. Like, do you wanna be responsible for the next bomb? Like all that stuff. And instead of being an oversight committee and reporting to Congress on what the intelligence community is becoming, they are protecting the intelligence community from Congress, which is super problematic. Today, literally the intelligence committee is the most hostile place for civil liberties or privacy, just full stop. But yeah, so moving forward, September 11th happens and law enforcement in the Hawks see an opportunity to take a sledgehammer to any remaining protections from the church committee. And the Patriot Act, excuse me, is quickly drafted. The bill is famously rushed through Congress. There is no significant debate of what it does. And as we know, the Muslim American community will bear the brunt of the abuse that comes along with the Patriot Act. That being said, the tactics are all very familiar to what we have seen during Co-Intel Pro and before. So just general dangerous racist and disruptive police work. Just this time, it is a religion instead of an ideology. We see, we are seeing spying, we are seeing mapping of communities, we are seeing infiltration. But, and again, not to get super wonky, but to a little bit go into what Patriot specifically did. What I think Patriot did that is most kind of important is they created the modern national security exception to privacy protections, which is something we deal with all the time. Every time there is a law that is supposed to be privacy protecting, there's a huge loophole that says, yeah, we'll protect your privacy unless it's a matter of national security. And they kind of created that in the modern way, in modern America. It also guts judicial review of those exceptions. So basically that that finds a court that's supposed to be this check. Now the government just has to go to them and literally say that the search or the program is a matter of national security or terrorism. And that is now the law of the land. So those first-member protections are gone. Those protections against spying on US citizens are gone. And now the FISA court is a rubber stamp for spying. You know, it kind of, not to get super wonky, but like the way it works out in policies, you know, it guts the first-member protections by using language saying that an investigation cannot take place, and I quote, solely on the basis of protected activities. Like that's the kind of legal language they're using. So we kind of see how that can be exploited. It wasn't solely based on that, but it was a big part of it, you know. Another significant thing that happens after September 11th is the repeated revision by the Bush administration of what are called attorney general guidelines. This gets a little wonky, but I'm gonna tie it real closely to what's happening right now as well. So the attorney general guidelines are guidelines that exist to advise on how an investigation should be done. One particularly dangerous thing they did after September 11th was create a new kind of investigation called an assessment, I quote, it's called an assessment, which required no factual predicate to open up this investigation. So no factual evidence that criminal behavior was happening and they could open an assessment. So an assessment is like a pre-investigation to the investigation, but the assessment can only last for so long before you actually need to find evidence to open an actual investigation. I'm sorry, I know the language is weird, but that's what it is. And these assessments can include searches through government or commercial databases, overt or covert FBI interviews, using informants to gather information about anyone or to infiltrate any lawful organization. So this is a massive loophole that swallows any first member protections. And to get a sense of just how big that is from 2009 to 2011, the FBI opened over the 2,000 assessments of individuals and organizations. Less than 3,500 of those justified a further investigation. So this is, you know, after God 9-11 going into infiltrating mosques and spying on Muslim Americans mainly. There's one like kind of like really sad, famous example, there was a mosque in LA where the head of the mosque actually called the FBI and they were like, hey, there's some guy at our mosque and he's talking about weird stuff. He's like talking about maybe violent stuff. And they like turned him in and the FBI had to admit they were like, oh, that's one of our informants. Like he was there trying to pull people into doing bad things. Like that's just heartbreaking, but that's the kind of stuff that was happening. It also authorized the FBI's Racial and Ethnic Mapping Program which allowed the FBI to collect demographic information to map American communities by race and ethnicity for intelligence purposes based on racist, this is ridiculous, based on racist stereotypes about the crimes each group would commit. For example, the FBI mapped Chinese and Russian communities in San Francisco for organized crime purposes, Latinx communities in New Jersey and Alabama because they are in street gangs and black people in Georgia to find black separatists and Middle Eastern communities in Detroit for terrorism. So they were mapping communities in this way. I think my Asia is probably gonna talk about Iron Fist, which was an infiltration program related to the black identity extremist assessment. I think that Iron Fist was likely an assessment that came out of these weekend attorney general guidelines. So next slide, yeah, okay. So these are the weekend productions that have largely been the wall of the land since Patriot until Snowden. Again, these like big moments have to happen before anything can happen, like the Patriot Act was kind of revisited, but no one knew anything. It's all secrets, no one knew anything. You literally, for anything to happen, someone needs to put their wife on the line and be a whistleblower for anything to happen in the international security world. I think the biggest revelation from Snowden was adoption of secret laws on how the intelligence community and the court were interpreting the law to conduct mass surveillance. And that really launched the most recent fight in the surveillance world. So that big one was Snowden release that where basically that the FISA court had approved in one warrant collection of all of the call detail records of basically everyone in America. So the metadata of every phone call that was happening in America. And that was a moment again, where we decided to revisit the surveillance fight. And that's kind of where we are now. That kicked off the most recent debate. Actually, like some good news that the parts of the Patriot Act that sunset every number of years and sunset means that Congress needs to vote again to reauthorize them. We're not reauthorized over a year ago. So there has been movement. That was a big fight in Congress and with the help of folks like the squad and other champions, the conversation around surveillance has felt more grounded, I would say, in the past year or two, which has been helpful. I don't, I think Trump helped having, like an outright bigot in the White House, like helped kind of ground foot like racist policing. Yeah, so I think that's probably where we are. Yeah, totally. And I'm so sorry, y'all. We only have about 10 minutes. So I'm gonna try and cover as much as I can about some of the other details that lead up to the Protect Black Descend campaign. And if folks have questions, please feel free to like drop them in the chat and we'll try to get to them too and open it up for conversation as well. But just wanted to offer that since I don't wanna keep people too much over. But yeah, so basically what we really wanted everyone to kind of take away from today's presentation is that, again, groups like ours, so many folks are talking about all of these different surveillance tools and carceral tools, but the logic behind this stuff is really the same, right? If you're black or brown or belonging to any marginalized group of people, you've been profiled and criminalized because that is the logic of living in a white supremacist society. And so I'm gonna just dive right in and talk about what happened in 2017, which is when the foreign policy basically, and I appreciate, Senator, that you talked about assessments because I actually didn't know that either, that foreign policy basically leaks an FBI intelligence assessment on a new domestic terrorism category called Black Identity Extremists. And they basically conclude that because of a perceived notion of racism and police brutality, marking since the uprisings in Ferguson, there's this rise of violent ideology within the black community. And so these black identity extremists pose a violent threat to our public safety and especially law enforcement. And these intelligence assessment reports get shared to literally every single local law enforcement agency in the country. So when this becomes exposed in 2017, media justice partners with the ACLU, the Racial Justice Program of the ACLU to file a FOIA request to better understand the scope of the government's surveillance and criminalization of our movements. Ooh, sorry. And surprise, surprise, the FBI does not respond to our FOIA request. So we decide to escalate and launch an actual lawsuit to get more documents around the scope of the FBI surveillance of our movements. But we also officially launched our Protect Black Descent Campaign with a petition that many folks in our network helped host with us to basically garner much more broader support for these three really basic but broad and important demands that we were making of congressional leaders at the time. First demand meaning or including, excuse me, requiring the FBI to officially revoke the Black Identity Extremist designation. We also wanted Congress to fully investigate the FBI and make all of the documents on Black Identity Extremism public. The same way that they in the church committee made those co-intell documents public and we know the extent of their surveillance then, we have a right to know what's going on right now. The third demand was forcing the FBI to testify in public hearings so we can actually understand who they're tagging as Black Identity Extremists. What happens after that? How are they training every local police department agency in the country to monitor the supposed violent threat coming from our communities? And after we launched this petition, we actually brought a group of activists from around the country engaged in abolition work, engaged in ending closing jails and ending mass incarceration with us to talk about their experience with police surveillance in their own communities. And we delivered these petitions to Congress. We had over 100,000 petition signatures and literally just a few days after we left DC, another leak comes out. And it's important to say at this point that the FBI has publicly said in the hearing that they are no longer using this Black Identity Extremist designation. This was in the spring. And everyone was like, media justice, you won. It was like, not really. Cause history has shown, right? I know, right? I was like, y'all think we won? I'm more suspicious. Cause that was really quick, right? We know that these terms evolved. Sandy talked about Black separatists. Well, there's Black nationalists. They have so many different categories for calling us violent extremists and terrorists and all of that, right? So, days after we leave DC with our allies and comrades delivering these petitions, we hear of another leak by the Young Turks exposing more FBI surveillance of our movements. And not only do we see BIE still in these intelligence assessment documents, but we also see now a new category called racially motivated violent extremism, which basically conflates the real threat, right? The real ongoing threat coming from white supremacists. You know, it's important to say at this time, El Paso just happened. We are a year after Charlottesville. So we are continuing to see the legacy of white supremacist violence in our country. Conflating that violence with the supposed threat coming from Black identity extremists and other left radical groups like Antifa, right? And we also know from these documents that they developed a program called Iron Fist to quote unquote counter the threat coming from Black identity extremists. So these documents basically show us that the FBI is lying, right? Because not only are these terms still in existence, right? But when they are publicly saying that they're most concerned about white supremacist violence, documents show like this, that Black identity extremists was their top counter-terrorism priority. And I'm sorry that I have to use the state's language in this presentation. I just wanna be consistent with what has been shared, right? So from there, we continue our advocacy. We continue meeting with different members on the Hill. Sandy's been a great partner in that work with just talking to different staffers and offices that sit on the relevant committees that actually have the authority and oversight over the FBI. So this would be the household land security committee, the oversight committee and the judiciary committee. And we've continued to raise our concerns and our demands. We've also continued to get documents from our lawsuit. I posted one on this slide. If you go to the ACLU's website, you can see every single batch that we've received from our litigation. As you can see, they're heavily redacted, but you find little like interesting information, like they were at the million man march or like they did a vehicle stop, you know, like weird stuff like that, really low ball kind of like information. But one thing that we did discover before the pandemic was that of the one million potential responsive documents to our FOIA request on, you know, Black identity extremism and all these designations, up to one third of those pages are on open investigations of Black folks that have been labeled as domestic terrorists. So like this is a really serious like priority program within the FBI, like full stop, right? So now we find ourselves in the pandemic, right? And we also find ourselves in the largest mass mobilization against police violence, state violence. And in the midst of those uprisings, we launch another petition, but we also expand our demands to really tackle the sort of surveillance tools and all of these powers that the government has that we know will be inevitably used to further criminalize people who have a right to be out on the street. So our demands included ceasing state and local grants for surveillance tools, limiting surveillance authorities of border patrol, ICE, DEA. This is why we brought in the war on drugs, because one thing that was surprising to me is when we started to see articles of, you know, ICE and CBP over Minneapolis with facial recognition drones and all of this equipment, I had no idea that the DEA would be called for protest, right? Rolling back on warranted surveillance through the Patriot Act and closing any loopholes that Sandy was just talking about within national security laws that can be used to surveil and criminalize protesters. There was a lot of energy and to responding to the way that the police were responding to the uprisings around the police, right? Like we saw the police double down with more violence, with more surveillance to largely peaceful, although it doesn't really matter, protest, right? And what has happened since then is the crisis that we saw on January 6th and this is why we've maybe redundantly so talked so much about moments of crisis because just as we've seen this year, the attack at the nation's capital has been used to justify policing, to justify surveillance and justify the police use of all sorts of tools to combat the rise of violent extremism, which is just the old like issue of white supremacist violence in this country, right? And so we've been out, you know, organizing, you know, continuing to having meetings, had an advocacy day, had a briefing back in February to push back on this narrative that surveillance can deliver a safety. We know it wasn't the lack of resources, we know it wasn't training that led up to the attack, right? It's the racist, violent and corrupt history of law enforcement that allowed that to happen and no amount of technology is gonna take the bias out of policing, the racist amount of policing and the police can't keep us safe anyways, right? So this was sort of the demands that we've been making lately, but I just wanted to also touch on the fact that at Media Justice we also drive campaigns that disrupt the use of surveillance tools and carceral tools and other spaces, right? So we consistently, you know, support bands against the police use of facial recognition. We take on companies like Amazon, this week we just launched Eyes on Amazon because in the middle of the uprisings last summer, everyone making their pledges, saying they're standing in defense of black lives. Jeff Bezos is happy to lose customers, except the police, right? And, you know, they made this announcement of temporarily banning the police use of their facial recognition tool and we've launched a campaign to basically demand that they keep that ban. And then there's, you know, other carceral tools like electronic monitoring that just shifts the site of incarceration away from prisons and jails and in our homes and our communities. And there was a one-on-one on EM a few weeks ago. So I know we're out of time. I'm sorry, I'm not going further, further into these details, but I'm definitely down to stay on and answer any questions you have. But some of the main key takeaways I wanted to just share with folks is that surveillance is rooted and shaped by power, right? Like who has the power to watch? Who has the power to own its infrastructure? Who has the power to even own that information or the data in this case? And it's important to acknowledge that in today's society, right? So much of the tech that we're using isn't necessarily built with our interests or hopes and dreams in mind, right? The data produced from these tools is property that we don't own. The way that we were talking about biometric data during slavery, like that was stuff that, you know, enslaved folks did not own. And then, you know, my last point here is that we're continuing to fight, you know, the racist system of the policing system and the carceral system, but now we're fighting against this new iteration of policing that has been partially fueled by tech companies who are trading in our privacy and safety for profit. So I'm gonna stop there and see if folks have any questions.